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158 ANDRÁS TAKÁCS-SÁNTA The downside to this approach is probably that it only really works in communities with small populations. Above a certain size (one or two thousand people at most) the members cant know each other personally, which entails the weakening of trust among the members. Trust is indispensable for cooperation. When there is a lack of trust, members of a collective tend to choose rivalry instead of collaboration and the interest of an individual (or a smaller group) will override the common interest. In parallel with the growth of the size of the group, the feeling of coherence within the group will slacken, not independently of the factors mentioned above. The group affected by the global environmental problems (that is, the whole population of the Earth) can hardly have any feeling of coherence, because we hardly feel any sense of belonging with people who are personally unknown to us. Moreover, the sense of cohesion is weakening even in a small group affected by small-scale environmental problems. Owing in part to people’s growing mobility and the increasing atomisation of society, there are fewer and fewer stable and coherent human communities in the world. And even if the sense of coherence is still intact, this approach only works if the group mainly uses the natural resources of the territory they live on (but for the growing globalization of the economy, this situation is ever rarer) and the costs of resource use (e.g. pollution and waste) also weigh primarily on the group members, which is not generally the case. In addition, the creation of rules can be aggravated, or prevented when mutual communication and regulating activity demands too much time and energy from the members of the community — and with the growth of group size, this is more and more probable (Ostrom 2008; 2—9). Education (changing attitudes and spreading information on the possibilities of action) Noticing the deterioration of the quality of the pasture, one of the herdsmen launched an education campaign among his fellows. He demonstrated the problem of overgrazing and warned them that if they did not introduce radical changes, they would all meet a tragic fate. He not only outlined the problem, but also offered a possible solution: if they kept only two cows per person, they would in all probability avoid the disaster. He persuaded two of his fellows quickly, so now they joined forces to influence the others. Though a few materialistically minded herdsmen could not be persuaded that two heads of cattle were enough, they could make everyone understand that they should not increase the number of their cows, which was enough for preventing the tragedy. The material welfare of nearly all of them decreased considerably, yet the farmers and their families lived happily ever after for generations. Education consists basically of two parts: First, the presentation of the nature and graveness of the ecological problem. People must be convinced that the problem is grave and important and requires immediate action on their part (that is, one Székely country put down several municipal laws which testify to ecological awareness. They created binding rules in protection of collective goods — e.g. forests — and introduced bans (Imreh 1973; 1993. — See also Gellény — Margéczi 2016).
