An Uncommon Scholar of the Commons

Lin was a pioneer in many ways and was incredibly impressive in breaking through many barriers on her way to a remarkable set of life achievements. A true pioneer in interdisciplinary science for sustainability, she worked in a robust and systematic fashion with a deep and burning commitment for progressing knowledge and understanding. One major lesson from Lin was that complex problems require complex solutions, and that people can solve such conundrums. Moreover, those solutions are attainable. She used grounded scholarship that required lots of hard work to show why simple models such as overblown bureaucracies or moral prescriptions were not solutions to resource issues such as a tragedy of the commons.