‘The tragedy of the commons’ is the situation where individuals acting for themselves and only considering their own self-interest will eventually use up a shared and limited resource, even when it’s clear that then no-one will be able to benefit from using it.

An example would be individuals having the right to graze a cow on common land without accepting that if too many do so, all the grass will be eaten and then no-one will be able to benefit.

In the same way, we take representative democracy for granted, giving it scarcely a thought.

We consider it the finished article, with its one-person-one-vote system and the expectation that it can sort out all our problems, meeting all our unlimited demands, irrespective of whether it is physically possible in the long-term.

Democracy has had a number of guises in the past, and it is not so long back that our parliamentary system comfortably accommodated slavery and restrictions on who could vote, ignoring the female half of the population.

More recently, large Western democracies have even adjusted the rule of law to allow torture in the interests of national security, and, while nodding in the direction of free trade, have protected national industries with tariff barriers and quotas.

The development of Western democracy in the last century or so has been dependent on the free market, the abundance of cheap energy in the form of coal and oil, with advances in science, medicine and education all leading to a population explosion and a steeply-rising standard of living. The success has been staggering and historically unique, but it has been at the price of a couple of in-built weaknesses.

The first is the inability to reduce the rate of growth and say no to the demands of the electorate – few political manifestos will have ‘enough is enough and for some too much’ as the priority when seeking re-election – and so our governments are unwilling to address the excesses of banking bonuses, or litter on the streets, or insist that we lower the speed limit, or limit and dispose of our waste environmentally or the need for many wind turbines on the skyline.

It follows from the fact that we don’t like being told what to do or to limit our demands, so we are going to ignore the needs of the generations to come – those who will endure the damage from our carbon dioxide-producing fling with fossil fuels.

Democracy will need to adjust to the approaching tragedy by recognising that the planet is the commons, and it is finite and limited.