Monday, April 28, 2008

Tragedy Of The Anticline

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is halting development of new wells in order to preserve a source of wealth for future generations. The king of the United States is ravaging Wyoming as quickly as possible.

Casper Star Tribune - Too many wells on the Anticline?

For background see Wikipedia's Tragedy Of The Commons entry.
The metaphor illustrates how free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation.