Air Pollution in Canada and the Tragedy of the Commons

Air Pollution in Canada and the Tragedy of the Commons
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Air Pollution in Canada and the Tragedy of the Commons
Air pollution in Canada is associated with approximately 15,300 deaths per year (Health Canada, 2021). Exposure to harmful air like nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxide irritates the lungs and impairs their functions, which can cause chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases and eventually death. The main cause of air pollution is direct and indirect activities caused by humans.
The Causes of Air Pollution in Canada
Like in any other country, air pollution in Canada is caused by industrial, vehicle emissions, energy production, agriculture, and construction. These causes are all human sources, where all the above human activities depend on Carbon-based fuel emission (Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2020). Industrial processes like oil and gas production heavily emit harmful air that causes pollution. Other natural causes of air pollution include volcanoes and forest fires. Canada’s population has been growing steadily over the years. The increase in population means an increase in the economy, which translates to an increase in the production of goods and services, transportation, and high housing demands. However, the energy required to meet all these high demands has to come from fossil fuels. The increase in the use of fossil fuels affects the quality of air that people breathe. Additionally, the economic growth has also increased the demand for Canadian exports, mainly from the oil and gas industry, which hugely contributes to the release of air pollutants.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Garret Hardin, an American Ecologist, first used the tragedy of the commons approach. The approach refers to the exhaustion of a shared resource by people who act independently and rationally as per their self-interest, despite being aware that the abuse of the common resource is contrary to other people’s long-term interests (Griffiths & Kickul, 2013). The approach tries to illustrate a situation where people will use public resources continuously until there is no benefit of it left. Instead, it leads to huge damage to everyone involved. Hardin first used the concept to describe the situation of European farmers who would use a common land where they would graze their cattle. However, it was in the interests of an individual farmer who would keep every cattle they acquired on the land, knowing the adverse effects of overgrazing would cause to the other farmers (Griffiths & Kickul, 2013).
Today, the approach is regularly used to describe environmental problems such as over-fishing, over-irrigation, traffic congestions, and even habitat destruction. Our topic of air pollution highly conforms to the model. Because the significant determinants of air pollution are the economic forces that highly encourage the use of the atmosphere as a shared resource, but it’s slowly being depleted off its benefits to other individuals because of the activities of other people. If we look at air pollution on a broader scale, we will agree that it leads to the tragedy of the commons. First, air pollution refers to the direct...