Bloomington Community Orchard Prosperity for the Commons

Photos courtesy Bloomington Community Orchard

Picture a pasture open to all. A group of shepherds stocks the pasture, each introducing a single sheep from their herd. A bit of time goes on, and one of the shepherds notices that while they keep all the income after selling their animal, any costs associated with damages to the field are shared among their fellow shepherds. They go ahead and add another sheep, then another, and another. Their neighbors naturally do the same, until the pasture is munched to a moribund mud pit.

Reading like a fable, the shepherds’ tale illustrates one of contemporary economics’ most entrenched beliefs: The collective management of a resource by self-interested co-owners ultimately leads to the demise of their shared asset. This “tragedy of the commons,” to use the phrase coined in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin, portends that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Five decades later, in ways more practical than philosophical, a single acre of land tucked into an Indiana college town is demonstrating that a shared resource can, in fact, avoid tragedy — and it’s doing so with fruit trees, rather than sheep.

Blooming in Bloomington

Bloomington Community Orchard is one of the first community orchards in the United States. A doughnut hole at the center of a ring of residential neighborhoods, the orchard occupies one of 30 wooded acres of city parkland, 2½ miles southeast of downtown.