In economics and in an ecological context, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures, formal rules, charges, fees, or taxes that regulate access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in the case that there are too many users related to the available resources. Central element of the concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land, also known as "the commons" (in Anglo-Saxon law) in Great Britain and Ireland. In embryonic form the idea can also be found at Aristotle: "That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common." The theory became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" after an essay with this title was published in Science written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. It became one of the most cited academic papers ever published and also one of the most heavily criticized, particularly by anthropologists and historians. Hardin, who wrote a total of 350 articles and 27 books, describes in this early essay that common use will only work reasonably satisfactorily as long as the number of man and beast stay well below the carrying capacity of the land. The availability of resources and the amount of people depending on it should therefore be kept in balance. As a punch-line in the article he writes that a freedom to breed is intolerable. As a result of discussions carried out in the decade after publication, Hardin in a talk in the early 80s suggested a better wording of the central idea: "Under conditions of overpopulation, freedom in an unmanaged commons brings ruin to all." In 1991, faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin retracted his original thesis and wrote "The Tragedy of the 'Unmanaged' Commons". Critical scholars note that although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating