Aquifer

a commons with no visible surface. which is exactly why it dies.

pump your borewell — the table drops under the whole village, not just your field

Six wells share one water table, and a table has no fence around it — pump anywhere and every well gets a little shallower, including the ones nobody is touching. Each well was drilled by someone acting entirely reasonably: draw water when the crop needs it. The shortage that follows is not a failure of any one decision, only the sum of all of them arriving at the same invisible surface at once, which is why India now pumps more groundwater than the United States and China combined.

Concepts: cooperation, fairness.

An interactive you play with one thumb, on Wundr.