Reclaiming and Redefining America's Hopes
The commons worldview can helps us accomplish great things together--really
- See more at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/reclaiming-and-redefining-americas-hopes#sthash.lJhCyDoJ.dpuf
Reclaiming and Redefining America's Hopes
The commons worldview can helps us accomplish great things together--really
- See more at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/reclaiming-and-redefining-americas-hopes#sthash.lJhCyDoJ.dpuf
Welcome to a new kind of movement—one that reshapes how we think about ownership and cooperation.
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posted Dec 20, 2010
Welcome to the commons. The term may be unfamiliar, but the idea has
been around for centuries. The commons is a new use of an old word,
meaning “what we share”—and it offers fresh hope for a saner, safer,
more enjoyable future. The commons refers to a wealth of valuable assets
that belong to everyone. These range from clean air to wildlife
preserves; from the judicial system to the Internet. Some are bestowed
to us by nature; others are the product of cooperative human creativity.
Certain elements of the commons are
entirely new—think
of Wikipedia. Others are centuries old—like colorful words and phrases
from all the world’s languages. Anyone can use the commons, so long as
there is enough left for everyone else. This is why finite commons, such
as natural resources, must be sustainably and equitably managed. But
many other forms of the commons can be freely tapped. Today’s hip-hop
and rock stars, for instance, “appropriate” (quote) the work of soul
singers, jazz swingers, blues wailers, gospel shouters, hillbilly
pickers, and balladeers going back a long time—and we are all richer for
it. That’s the greatest strength of the commons. It’s an inheritance
shared by all humans, which increases in value as people draw upon its
riches.
That’s the greatest strength of the commons. It’s an inheritance shared
by all humans, which increases in value as people draw upon its riches.
At least that’s
how the commons has worked throughout history,
fostering democratic, cultural, technological, medical, economic, and
humanitarian advances. But this natural cycle of sharing is now under
assault. As the market economy becomes the yardstick for measuring the
worth of everything, more people are grabbing portions of the commons as
their private property. Many essential elements of society—from
ecosystems to scientific knowledge to public services—are slipping
through our hands and into the pockets of the rich and powerful.
The Wealth We Lost
One example of what we’re losing comes right out of today’s headlines
about spiraling health care costs. The creation of many widely
prescribed drugs, which millions of people depend upon, was funded in
large part by government grants. But the exclusive right to sell
pharmaceuticals developed with public money was handed over to drug
companies with almost nothing asked in return. That means we pay
exorbitant prices for medicine developed with our tax dollars, and many
poor people are denied access to treatments that might save their lives.
Another even more absurd example concerns a subject that you would
think stirs no controversy—yoga. Through centuries of evolution as a
spiritual practice, any new yoga poses or techniques were automatically
incorporated into the tradition for everyone to use. But beginning in
1978 an Indian named Bikram Choudhury, now based in Beverly Hills,
copyrighted certain long-used hatha yoga poses and sequences as his own
invention, Bikram Yoga, and he now threatens other yoga studios teaching
these techniques with lawsuits.
The good news is that people all around us are beginning to take back the commons.
Neighbors rising up to keep their library open, improve their park, or find new funding for public schools. Greens
fighting the draining of wetlands
and the dumping of toxic waste in inner-city neighborhoods. Digital
activists providing access to the Internet in poor communities and
challenging corporate plans to limit access to information. Indigenous
people instilling their children with a sense of tradition and hope.
Young social entrepreneurs and software engineers seeking new mechanisms
for people to share ideas.
The sky, the earth, parklands, scientific knowledge, and even the Internet belong to all of us.
Not all of these people think of themselves as commons activists.
Some may not even be familiar with the term. Vel Wiley, the longtime
director of Milwaukee’s public access TV channels, stood up at a commons
event and declared, “When I was asked to be a part of this conference, I
thought the commons was for people like Greenpeace, an environmental
cause. But I understand now that I have been advocating for the commons
over the last twenty years. I realize we’re not just a small group
advocating that the people have a voice in the broadcasting media. We’re
all a part of something so much bigger, and that helps us to keep
going.”
It’s not necessary that everyone adopt the word commons. What matters
is that people understand that what we share together (and how we share
it) is as important as what we possess individually.
Parallels to the Origins of Environmentalism
Growing interest in the commons today resembles the origins of the
environmental movement in the 1960s. At that time, there was little talk
about ecology or the greening of anything. There was, however, a lot of
concern about air pollution, pesticides, litter, the loss of
wilderness, declining wildlife populations, the death of Lake Erie,
toxic substances oozing into rivers,
oil spills fouling the oceans, lead paint poisoning inner-city kids,
suburbia swallowing up the countryside, mountains of trash piling up in
landfills, and unsustainable farming practices ravaging the land. Yet
the word environment did not become a household word until the first
Earth Day—April 22, 1970. Bringing an assortment of issues together
under the banner of environmentalism highlighted the connections between
what until then had been seen as separate causes and fueled the
unexpected growth of the environmental movement over the next few years.
The commons offers the same promise of uniting people concerned about
the common good in many forms into a new kind of movement that reshapes
how people think about the nature of ownership and the importance of
collaboration in modern society.
A New Way of Thinking and Living
More than just a philosophical and political framework for
understanding what’s gone wrong, the commons furnishes us a toolkit for
fixing problems. Local activists eager to revitalize their community and
protect open space are setting up land trusts—a form of community
ownership distinct from both private property and government management.
Savvy Web users use the
cooperative properties of the Internet
to challenge corporations who want to undermine this shared resource by
fencing it off for private gain. Villagers and city dwellers around the
world
assert that water is a commons, which cannot be sold, depleted, or controlled by anyone.
To deliver us from current economic and
ecological calamities will require more than administering a few tweaks
to the operating system that runs our society.
These kinds of efforts extend the meaning of the commons beyond
something you own to a bigger idea: how we live together. Peter
Linebaugh, a preeminent historian of the commons, has coined the word
“commoning” to describe the growing efforts he sees to protect and
strengthen the things we share. “I want to stress the point that the
commons is an activity rather than just a material resource,” he
says. “That brings in the essential social element of the commons.”
Why Should We Care About the Commons Today?
Yes, it’s history. But also our best hope for the future. Both the idea and the reality of the
commons have been declining since at least the eighteenth century. Why
now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, should we struggle to
revive them? The simple answer is that we have to. Despite the many
benefits it brings us, the economic market operates like a runaway
truck. It has no internal mechanism telling it when to stop—stop
depleting the commons that sustain it. To put it another way, we’ve been
living off a fat commons bank account for centuries, and now it’s
running low. We must start making some deposits so we’ll have something
for tomorrow. If our old Manifest Destiny was to carve up the commons,
our new task is to rebuild it. We must do this to protect the planet,
enhance our quality of life, reduce inequality, and leave a better world
for our children.
—Peter Barnes
David Bollier, one of the leading
theorists of the commons on the international stage, has defined the
term as a social dynamic. “A commons arises whenever a given community
decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with
special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability. It is a
social form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture,
and now is on the rise, ” he wrote in the British political journal Renewal.
Julie Ristau and Alexa Bradley,
community organizers with extensive experience, find that many people
have internalized the competitive ethos of the market mentality so fully
that they believe any cooperative action is doomed to fail. They’re
losing the ability to even think of working together. Yet at the same
time, Ristau and Bradley detect in others “a broad yearning for hope,
connection, and restoration. We see a remarkable array of efforts to
reconstitute community, to relocalize food, to move toward cooperative economics,
to better harmonize our lives with the health of our planet. These
efforts spring from a deep human need and desire for different ways of
interacting and organizing resources that will help us reconstitute our
capacity for shared ownership, collaboration, and stewardship.”
Growing numbers of people are taking
steps that move us, gradually, in the direction of a commons-based
society—a world in which the fundamental focus on competition that
characterizes life today would be balanced with new attitudes and social
structures that foster cooperation. This vision is emerging at
precisely the point we need it most. Deeply held myths of the last
thirty years about the magic of the market have been shattered by the
implosion of the global financial bubble, creating both an opening and an acute need for different ways of living.
To deliver us from current economic and ecological calamities will
require more than administering a few tweaks to the operating system
that runs our society. A complete retooling is needed—a paradigm shift
that revises the core principles that guide our culture top to bottom.
At this historical moment, the commons vision of a society where “we”
matters as much as “me” shines as a beacon of hope for a better world.
This article is excerpted for
YES! Magazine from
All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons by Jay Walljasper and
On the Commons. Jay Walljasper, editor of
OnTheCommons.org and author of
The Great Neighborhood Book, writes widely about cities, community, sustainability and travel.
On The Commons is a commons movement strategy center.
Interested?