David Bollier: Recent Episodes

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Why is the commons a useful perspective for thinking about urban design and architecture?

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues.

"The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets."

Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly." Much of Gruber's work has therefore focused on urban zones where the struggle between capitalism and commons is playing out, with an eye toward learning how commons can prevail, sometimes through commons/public partnerships.

Professor Stefan Gruber Gruber explores these themes in a course that he teaches, "Commoning in the City," which examines how transitions towards just, regenerative, and self-determined communities in the city might develop, beyond the paradigms of the market and state.

With six co-curators, he has also helped launch a traveling exhibit called An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production,which showcases notable urban commons projects. The Atlas, now on a ten-year international tour, is part of an ongoing visual archive of initiatives that use participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public collaborations to reinvent city life. The Atlas is a collaboration with the German cultural organization ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+, a German magazine for architecture and urbanism.

In a few days, the exhibition will have a major opening in Tbilisi, Georgia, a place where "the notion of commons is intertwined with the historical legacies of Soviet collectivism and traditional community practices," and then by rapid urbanization and privatization of public spaces following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary grassroots initiatives have therefore focused on reclaiming shared (non-state) stewardship of communal spaces, cultural heritage, social practices, and the environment.

The ambitious goal of the Atlas of Commoning is "to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of 'us' as a concept." As the book's preface explains:

As human beings, we are both individuals and members of a community at once; we are interconnected, and that interconnection needs to be given expression—we need places that are dedicated to communal life and that we shape together, conscious of our shared responsibility for them, places where community becomes a lived reality.

The author of the preface, Elke aus dem Moore, cites a Hamburg, Germany, project in the 1990s, "Park Fiction," which invited citizens to articulate their wishes for a future park in pictures or words. The initiative became a participatory art project and then a political vehicle for asserting the needs and desires of residents, eventually defeating the plans of privileged commercial interests.

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #55), I talk with Stefan Gruber about the Atlas of Commoning, special challenges of stewarding commons in cities around the world, and his philosophical approach to the topic.

Gruber said he's "long been intrigued by this this notion that we shape our buildings and they in turn shape us. There's a general understanding that our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities are expressions our of our values. But at the same time, these spaces themselves affect our well-being and our social relations, and also, obviously, the planetary well-being."

"If we accept this reciprocal relationship," he continued, "the question really becomes, Who is we? Is it predominantly the landlords, the developers, and the privileged class that shape our cities? Or can architecture play another role, not merely in reproducing existing power structures, but in renegotiating our social relationships?"

"How do we begin to democratize planning and design," he asks, "and how do we bring in citizens who, as [the late commons scholar] Elinor Ostrom often said, are best at solving problems on the ground, because they understand them?"

Gruber has spent a lot of time looking at novel forms of public housing developed in collaboration with social movements. Having spent time as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, Gruber is quite familiar with the Red Vienna period of that city's life after World War I, when large numbers of people migrated to the outskirts of the city to squat on land, grow food, and build their own informal housing. It was an entirely self-organized, alternative economy based on self-produced building materials and sweat-equity labor.

Perceiving a political threat to its authority, "The Vienna municipal government began to develop its own municipal housing as an alternative," Gruber noted. "It argued that it could create more affordable and efficient housing through economies of scale."

And so the homegrown commoning, outside of state power, came to exert political pressure on politicians. The self-organized migrant housing ended up prodding the city to taking aggressive action that it would not have otherwise taken.

From 1923 to 1934, when the ruling Social Democratic Party governed, the City of Vienna built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks. About one-tenth of the population, or 200,000 people, lived in this highly affordable "social housing." Today, a remarkable 35 percent of Vienna's overall housing stock is quality-built public housing. (A New York Times Magazine profile of Vienna's housing in 2023 was entitled, "Imagine a Renter's Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.")

Another impressive commons-inspired housing initiative profiled in An Atlas of Commoning is the cooperative housing of Montevideo, Uruguay, which has combined government support with sweat-equity construction by residents.

The state's idea was to find strike a workable compromise between massive, modernist public housing projects and ramshackle, informal settlements. The state provided land to cooperatives, but also financing so people could buy units in housing cooperatives. But people were allowed to make downpayments by doing construction labor for 21 hours a week, Gruber noted, "This has allowed Montevideo to build thousands of cooperative housing projects over the past thirty years," said Gruber, while giving people a greater sense of ownership and commitment. It's social housing, not public housing.

Earlier in his career, Gruber had worked on the design of The High Line, the elevated pedestrian park on the west side of New York City that is now a hot tourist destination. While it's been a huge success as a public space, said Gruber, "The High Line became a catalyst for gentrification of the Chelsea neighborhood."

"This became a red flag for me about questions of community engagement and participation," he said, "but it also raised questions about what role or measures the city could have taken strategically to avoid displacement and to create a much stronger sense of ownership."

The experience contributed to Gruber's leaving his job at a renowned architectural practice and moving to academia to "think more fundamentally about the role of architecture" in cities. The commons is clearly a big part of this ongoing investigation and reflection. In one of Gruber's classes, a session is dedicated to The High Line project is entitled, "Does Good Design Inevitably Lead to Gentrification?"

In his experiments with neighborhood engagement and commons/public partnerships, Gruber clearly sees great potential in the commons. One strategy for advancing this vision is to knit together the many lesser, little-known experiments that are dismissed as too small and marginal to matter. "The Atlas of Commoning is beginning to put these many initiatives from around the world in relationship to one another, to actually outline the possibility of this alternative city of future."

You can listen to my interview with Stefan Gruber here. The print version of An Atlas of Commoning, published in 2018, is sold out, but an online version can be found here.

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One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication.

A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California. The area encompasses more than 750,000 square miles of old growth rain forests, volcanoes, and wild habitats for salmon, wolves, bear, whale and orca – and 16 million people.

Brandon Letsinger, Cascadia Department of Bioregion Cascadia activism is part of a larger global movement that wants to reinvent markets, cultures and identities to sync with regional ecosystems. It's a bold, long-term effort to persuade modern societies to honor their ecological gifts and mindfully inhabit the distinctive places in which they live. It’s also about trying to transcend arbitrary political boundaries and global markets, building instead a world that revolves around a region's particular hydrology, weather, plants, and wildlife, and to develop economies, cultures, and ways of being that complement that landscape.

As the renaissance of bioregionalism gains momentum, I wanted to learn more, especially about the most promising strategies and challenges. I turned to Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer who was founding director of CascadiaNow! – an incubator of grassroots, community-centered projects – and more recently, cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion. Our conversation is featured in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #54).

Letsinger explained that his work seeks to "place bioregionalism into mainstream thought as a viable alternative to capitalism and the nation state." Practically speaking, this means increasing the ecological self-reliance of Cascadia by rethinking the regional economy and developing new ways to steward water, land, wildlife, and other living forces. It also means promoting more accountable, democratic government, and fostering Indigenous sovereignty, citizen/tribal partnerships, and the Land Back movement.

“As long as our frameworks are based on lines on maps that don’t represent the people, the place, or the ecosystem, we're going to always have a level of division,” said Letsinger. “The American political structure is built on gerrymandering and redefining lines to take away representation. Bioregionalism reinterprets that to a whole systems lens.”

It's dysfunctional to assign authority over the Columbia River [which flows through Cascadia] to diverse, arbitrary jurisdictions on a map, Letsinger said. “By starting fresh and looking at the whole river, and making sure that every voice is included,” he noted, “you can start to shift the framework to one that’s positive and collaborative.

What exactly is a bioregion and why is that framing important?

Letsinger explained: “A bioregion is a way to talk about a place as defined through its physical, cultural, and ecological realities, starting from the ground up.” Instead of seeing everything through the lens of the political economy and civilization, as if they were somehow divorced from earthly systems, bioregionalism proposes that ecological systems be treated as the foundational substrate for everything.

In this sense, said Letsinger, “bioregionaism is about connecting people back to place. It starts with the geology.” In Cascadia’s case, this means the massive “Cascadia subduction zone” of tectonic plates of earth and volcanoes that have shaped the territory over eons, including watersheds, soils, plants, animals, and marine biology.

Bioregionalism is also about determining “how humans can best live within place,” said Letsinger. It makes a lot of sense of explore how Indigenous peoples have lived in sustainable harmony with a landscape for thousands of years. This holistic, longer-term perspective helps us think about how we might adapt modern systems of food production, electricity generation, transportation, and urban design as well as appropriate technology, economic practices, and cultural norms.

I've explored bioregional activism in an earlier podcast with Joe Brewer (Episode #33), who works in the Barichara region of Colombia and has recently started a series of bioregional consultations and co-learning sessions in North America. Another key bioregional activist and educator is Isabel Carlisle of the Bioregional Learning Centre UK. Her organization has convened major online numerous online events and produced educational materials while tackling challenges in its own bioregion, South Devon, England.

Brandon Letsinger believes that one of the most important things that bioregionalists can do is to create new types of maps. “Maps are not neutral,” said Letsinger. “They are created with agenda and purpose. Quite often, they are created by national governments or economic entities that have their own interests. The ultimate purpose of the map will be to make money for the company or to express its [political] interests.”

Bioregional mapping depicts “everything that's left off of Google Maps and other traditional maps,” said Letsinger. The idea is to create maps that give the land a voice by charting the presence of wildlife, migratory patterns, water flows, and other notable ecological phenomena as they intersect with human communities and their cultures.

This sort of mapping has proved important to various First Nations tribes in Canada in their legal struggles with the Canadian government. The tribes had never signed treaties with the Canadian state, and their documentation of aboriginal circumstances for litigation purposes was sparse. By interviewing tribal elders, Indigenous mapmakers and friends were able to show the historical scope and character of Indigenous homelands before colonial conquests had decimated them. Through a series of bioregional mapping workshops involving some 3,000 people on 17 islands in the Salish Sea, fourteen different bioregional atlases with 30 maps were produced.

The maps were published as a book, Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas, in 2005. The maps depict beloved treasures of the islands such as heritage orchards, fishing spots, locations of endangered wild orchids, bird colonies, and ancient First Nations' sites. In each case, the island community decided what should be included in the map, and local artists were enlisted to create distinctively different maps.

The term “Salish Sea” was itself coined as a bioregional term in the 1970s by Canadian/American biologist Bert Webber. He wanted to honor the Salish-speaking people in Washington State who live in and around the Strait of Georgia to Puget Sound, and to recognize that the oil, fish and marine mammals of those waters don’t have political identities. “Salish Sea” caught on, and is now the customary term for referring to this body of water.

In the course of my interview with Brandon, it became clear that there is a lot to learn about bioregionalism and to emulate in our respective bioregions. For a great introduction to the topic, listen to our conversation here.

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The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves.

More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection.

The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.

So what if humanity instead were to begin to see itself as an integral, engaged part of nature – a force that could engage respectfully with more-than-human life and even restore and regenerate it?

Bram Büscher, cofounder of Convivial Conservation Centre That's the vision that Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in The Netherlands, has for reinventing conservation. As Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, he wants to move beyond the extractive logic of capitalism itself to develop a more commons-based approach that changes the very premises of how land is protected.

Büscher's vehicle for this mission is an ambitious, newly launched international project, the Convivial Conservation Centre.

A growing legion of renegade conservationists, ecologists, farmers, activists, and academics have joined him in rejecting the idea of "fortress protection" for land, through wilderness preserves, as well as the idea of converting landscapes into money-making "natural capital." Convivial conservation wants new practices and policies that can reintegrate people with nature in constructive ways, nourishing wholeness, while addressing the eco-pathologies of capitalism itself.

To learn more about this growing movement, I spoke with Büscher on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #53). https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes/bram-buscher-bridging-the-...

Büscher's developed much of his vision in collaboration with coauthor Robert Fletcher in the course of writing their 2020 book, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (Verso). The book argues that the very premises of the modern conservation movement need to be re-examined and transcended. Conservation should be about moving "from protection to connection," they argue. The word "convivial" signals this goal: conservation should be all about "living with" the Earth, not treating it as an object, commodity or capital.

The problem with wilderness zones is that they don't address the core problem, capitalist “development,” Büscher and Fletcher argue. Nor do they restore land to some aboriginal, pristine state – an idea that is itself a modernist fantasy. Throughout history, especially Indigenous cultures, humans have lived in symbiotic relationships with the land. The problem is not humanity as such or a scarcity of wilderness zones. It’s capitalist-driven extraction and pollution. Can the conservation movement begin to address that in serious ways?

The first step is to develop a more critical stance toward contemporary conservation efforts. Büscher and Fletcher note that “neoprotectionists” seek limits on population growth, restrictions on development, and even limits on consumption and economic growth. But neoprotectionists in their worldview presume that humans stand apart from “nature,” a mindset is idealized in nature photography that eliminates all humans from the frame. This mindset is also seen in the “Nature Needs Half” campaign, touted by the biologist E.O. Wilson, which proposes banishing humans from half of the world’s land, without addressing the capitalist free-for-all destroying the other half of the Earth.

Then there is another faction, the self-styled “new conservationists,” who want to blend capitalist development and conservation. Their strategy has been called “selling nature to save it.” It elevates markets to a central role, and proposes more eco-tourism and hunting preserves and bio-prospecting for drug and product patents. "New conservationists" also like market-based policy schemes that require businesses to pay for “ecosystem services," for example.

But "using the logic of the problem as the logic for the solution never works," Büscher warns. "Simply turning nature into a commodity or natural capital simply never makes as much money as polluting nature or extracting nature by taking species." Taking plant and animal life and resources from nature is usually free, or much cheaper than keeping species alive and finding sustainable sources of income for them." In any case, the size of market-based conservation is infinitesimally small, notes Büscher. It amounts to "slivers of slivers of slivers of the actual, unsustainable [capitalist] economy."

The challenge for conservationists, says Büscher, is to move beyond both the nature/humanity dichotomy and faith in capitalist markets. Taking a cue from social critic Ivan Illich and others, Büscher and Fletcher propose “convivial conservation.” They see this approach as non-capitalist, commons-inspired, and "non-dualist" (nature and humanity are seen as deeply entangled).

The goal of convivial conservation is not to exploit nature for market purposes or lock it up as a preserve, but to build “long-lasting, engaging, open-ended relationships with nonhumans and ecologies.” For this to occur, Büscher has proposed a “conservation basic income” to enable ordinary people to live decent lives while talking care of local landscapes. He also calls for greater “democratic management of nature,” adding that we need to focus on “nature-as-commons and nature-in-context rather than nature-as-capital.”

Unfortunately, there are many retrograde conservation trends these days, most notably crypto and other high-tech systems that purport to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and more ecologically sustainable practices.

"With drones and distance technologies, amd modern forms of surveillance and artificial intelligence, we are deepening our alienation from nature to an incredible degree," said Büscher. "All of a sudden, animals become numbers and pixels and models on computer screens, which somehow or another we think we can manage. But in fact, [these technologies are] a big step away from being able to live with the rest of nature. Meaningful relationships with the rest of the nature are impossible with these technologies, and everyone knows it, especially those who work with these technologies."

Büscher covers many other topics in my podcast interview with him, especially about the importance of commons and dynamic human reciprocity with nature. is still relatively

In an effort to "redirect conservation politics, policy, and practice in support of systemic change," the Convivial Conservation Centre recently issued aConvivial Conservation Manifesto that outlines ten central principles of its work. These include such tenets as "Promote integrated spaces where humans and other species co-exist respectfully and equitably," and "Understand conservation as the stewardship of a global commons, collectively owned and managed by and for all life on the planet."

You can listen to my interview with Bram Büscher here.

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To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates.

Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert. "The idea is to maintain the moisture," said Azouzi, explaining that oases require three distinct layers of vegetation –  the palm tree layer, which produces shade for fruit trees, which in turn provide a layer of shade for growing vegetables.

With these mutually reinforcing layers of plants, oases are able to evolve into food forests to sustain human settlements. In modern terms, they embody the principles of permaculture. Oases are engineered systems in a sense, but not in the modern, mechanical sense of the term. They are instances of co-development and co-stewardship with nature itself – a collaboration that yields a rich, self-replenishing catchment area of moisture and luxuriant growth in the desert.   

"The local Arabic word for moisture is richness," said Azouzi. We talk about an oasis effect. If it's 40° Celsius [104° F.] in the desert, it would be like 30° C. [86° F.] in the oasis….The idea behind oases is to grow as much as possible in the smallest area possible because of the scarcity of the water."

To Western scholars, oases as commons may sound like an arcane topic. But in this time of climate collapse and ecological crises, oases hold many important lessons about how societies can work with ecosystems and develop cultures that support that challenge. 

I explore this and many related topics in a conversation with Azouzi in the latest episode of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #52). Azouzi has studied social design and commons with leading scholars in Italy and  and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 

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Urbánika is an international collective of tech commoners that calls itself an "immersive activism school." Led by Humberto Besso-Oberto Huerta of Mexico, the group wants to help build peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities, especially in Latin America. For this ambitious goal, Urbánika has nearly finished kitting out a climate-positive "SolarPunk Bus." The amazing vehicle will serve as a mobile learning center as it tours Latin American cities in coming months. More about that in a moment.

But first, some news about another innovative Urbánika initiative: an educational video series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons." This course consists of fifteen short videos in which I introduce the commons and commoning in its many dimensions.

The course starts with a brief history of the commons and a survey of contemporary commons, and then moves on to discussing the Market/State and many anti-social, anti-ecological enclosures of commons.

David Bollier in Urbánika video course The series also discusses commons as a relational social system that helps people carry out their own provisioning and peer governance. This challenge requires people to understand the need for making an OntoShift – a shift of worldview in understanding what a commons entails, namely, new types of relationships, social practices, and ethical commitments. The last segments of the video series address bioregionalism, land, and urban commons. More episodes are planned in the coming months.

The course is meant for changemakers, especially for those who are already aware of the serious limitations of the Market/State system and the need for developing new ways of life. You can find the entire series online here.

The course aims to "provide knowledge and modern examples about commons to show that there are plenty of alternatives to our current extractivist and transactional way of living." It also wants to facilitate "reflection, debate, and experimentation" and show that "commoning is an achievable, enjoyable, and full of live practice."

The course is free to access, and the bus was developed, thanks to donations by thousands of people. The course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license, so that it can be reproduced, remixed, and shared at no cost. In the notes section underneath each video, there are links to resources, weblinks, a self-test review of the content, and an invitation to apply one's knowledge of commons to the real world. Schools are invited to use the videos in their teaching about commons. Social-action groups may find the videos useful in reflecting on their own organizational dynamics.

The PostCapitalism and the Commons video series is a follow-up to a lighter series of educational videos produced by Urbánika two years ago. This series, "Commoning 101 – Learning Pills," (with Spanish subtitles), is a series of amusing virtual-reality animations that introduce the commons to viewers in short gulps. The animations feature a space alien, Kin, who engages with an avatar version of me (looking twenty years younger!) in conversations about commons.

Urbánika plans to use the videos – especially the first series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons" – as part of an educational bus tour that will soon travel to twenty cities in seven Latin American countries.

The SolarPunk Bus will tour Latin America as a mobile school for learning about and organizing commons. For this, the group has crowdfunded funds to create a state-of-the-art, climate-friendly "SolarPunk bus." This full-size bus has many eco-features as a rain water harvesting system, wind turbine, a rooftop biofilter (to treat gray water to make it drainkable), and dry toilet. There is a black soldier fly biodigester for organic waste and a vertical garden for food production, among other tech features. The bus will function as a mobile school and home throughout the course of the tour, which aims to "facilitate the emergence of neighborhoods as urban commons." It will also encourage the use of "open source Web 3.0 tech that can help people break free from hierarchical dependencies of the government and the markets."

In addition to the video course, there will be workshops on convivial blockchain tech and peer governance, movie nights with follow-up discussions, and the development of interfaces to assist commoning in neighborhoods. This initiative will contribute to Urbánika's long-term vision, the rise of peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities.

You can check out Urbánika on its Twitter/X feed and Instagram feed , and you can donate to the project at the Giveth website. In coming weeks, I'll share any videos of the workshops that Urbánika hosts.

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There are many reasons why constitutional democracies around the world are faltering and authoritarian nationalism rising. Professor Camila Vergara, a Chilean political philosopher and scholar of constitutional law, has one powerful, audacious explanation: Constitutions offer no meaningful political role for ordinary people in democratic governance, and so oligarchic institutions take root that privilege the domination of the few over the many.

It is the conceit of liberal constitutionalism that the will of the people will be robustly expressed through elections, for example, and representative legislatures. Such systems, in theory, will express the popular will and give the state legitimacy and stability.

Professor Camila Vergara But as Vergara brilliantly argues in her book Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic(Princeton University Press, 2020), corruption is inherent in representative democracy. Oligarchs and other political elites nearly always capture modern republics unless ordinary people have substantive constitutional powers of their own.

Professor Vergara boldly argues for new/old types of "plebeian republicanism" such as citizen assemblies with real authority. This is the only way that constitutional systems can renew themselves and banish systemic corruption.

Systemic corruption is not about a few venal politicians who take bribes or bureaucrats who collude with wealthy corporations. It's about the systemic oligarchization of power within a general respect for the rule of law. Elites come to dominate the state political apparatus and warp the law to suit their interests and desires, betraying the promise of democracy. That's why plebeians must have explicit constitutional powers, says Vergara.

In Systemic Corruption, Vergara opens up a new kind of conversation that I have never heard before in political circles or the news media. She proposes new types of constitutional power for plebeian institutions so that the interests of ordinary people will be baked into modern constitutional systems.

I wanted to learn more about this compelling idea because it has obvious relevance to commoners struggling against the powerful market/state alliance. So I interviewed Professor Vergara on my latest Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #52).

As a financial journalist in Chile, Vergara learned firsthand about the political power wielded by oligarchs and their ability to thwart democracy. She later studied political philosophy and constitutional law at the New School in New York City and got a PhD in Political Theory at Columbia University. She is currently at the University of Essex Business School in the UK.

By Professor Vergara's reckoning, plebeians – citizens without wealth or official power – should be formally authorized to convene local citizen assemblies, make and veto political appointments, and propose and veto legislation. They should be able to curb elite power and punish its abuses.

These types of plebeian republicanism are necessary if a nation hopes to counteract the systemic corruption that naturally emerges in constitutional systems. The problem is not confined to small, remote, poorer nations. It's equally a problem in wealthy, liberal, representative democracies. Constitutional republics invariably decay and grow corrupt through oligarchic capture. Plebeian institutions are needed to give political power to ordinary citizens and thereby renew the democratic ethos and render material outcomes fairer.

It's a masterstroke that Vergara makes her case by relying not only on political theory from ancient Greece and Rome, but by invoking four respected philosophers of the modern western canon – Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Hannah Arendt, and Rosa Luxemburg – whose writings about plebeian institutions have been largely overlooked. Vergara offers fresh interpretations of these four philosophers to recover and revive their ideas about plebeian governance.

Political theorists may object that constitutional checks and balances are the brilliant innovation that prevents abuses of power in the US and other liberal democracies. But Vergara points out that "in a postliberal world, elitist thought has embraced proceduralism as a way to justify the rule of the few on democratic grounds." A neutral proceduralism is said to be enough to yield the best outcomes. Freedom of expression and universal suffrage, for example, are seen as procedural guarantees fairness and consensual results.

But this claim ignores how elites, being rich and powerful, can organize themselves more effectively than plebeians, and therefore, preserve corrupt systems and the benefits that flow from them. Plebeians, by contrast, have little constitutional power to ensure that everyone can enjoy the same liberties and fair outcomes, or to stop systemic corruption.

What about constitutional checks and balances of power? They may constrain some conflicts among elites, but checks and balances mostly apply to the exercise of power among elites themselves, as state actors. Checks and balances don't authorize or enlarge plebeian power, let alone stop abuses by elites.

Given power imbalances between oligarchs and citizens, law is not a force that truly curbs the powerful. Rather, it enables and legalizes their abuses. In this fashion, relying on legal proceduralism becomes a clever ruse: "the burden of the maintenance of liberty is placed on individuals, which is…practically equivalent to leaving the system to its own devices," Vergara writes.

She contrasts the tradition of "elitist-procedural republican thought" with "the materialist plebeian strand that developed from Machiavelli's assessment of the Roman republic." Like Machiavelli, Vergara argues that the rich see, think, and behave very differently from you and me – a something that might be called the "socio-ontological" divide between the rich and everyone else.

While Vergara does not propose doing away with representative legislatures, she does argue that modern democracies need local citizen assembles and other plebeian innovations if they are going to confront, reform, and punish oligarchical power. To this end, she argues for "a mixed constitution in which the few would govern within limits and the many [plebeians] would be active guardians of liberty."

There is much more to be said about Professor Vergara's audacious ideas and their relevance to commoners. For a deeper account, chase down Systemic Corruption – and listen to my podcast interview with her.

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What a delight to encounter the work of the British artistic duo Cooking Sections, two British artists whose virtuoso artworks effortlessly blend art with activism, local commoning, and eco-stewardship in the service of climate-friendly foodways.

Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual -- Senior Research Fellows at the Royal College of Art in London – create distinctive works of art about modern food that are also enmeshed in the fabric of everyday life:  land, intertidal waters, restaurants, buildings, social festivals. The canvas for their art is large and unconventional: the bioregional theaters of the world where food is grown and harvested, from Scotland and Istanbul to southern Italy and South Korea, and beyond.

Cooking Sections' projects – exhibited at prestigious venues such as Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, and biennales and triennials in Taipei, Venice, Istanbul, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, among other cities – reveal disturbing insights into the nature of modern food systems. Yet their work goes beyond art and economic critique to develop ingeniously practical, locally grounded alternatives.

To learn more about Cooking Sections' singular vision, I recently interviewed Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual for my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #50).

In recent years, Schwabe and Fernández have mounted a series of art installations, performances, and videos under the thematic title, CLIMAVORE – “How To Eat As Humans Change Climates.” While I'm no art critic, I daresay the full, rich character of their vision for food is so advanced that it has yet to be fully understood and, shall we say, digested by the culture. 

If international bodies produce scientific data on climate change, Cooking Sections' art jolts our consciousness and perceptions. Then the artists go farther, beyond art, to enlist people to work together to develop better food systems and eco-restorative local economies.  

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Last week, the International Journal of the Commons published a special issue inspired by the ideas of my 2019 book Free, Fair and Alive, written with my late friend and colleague Silke Helfrich.I am thrilled and honored. The collection of eight essays revolves around the theme, “Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons." In varied theaters of action, it deals with many issues that Free, Fair and Alive focused on, especially the relationality that drives commoning and the tensions between commons and state power.

There are thoughtful pieces on public/commons partnerships in Barcelona, and in Naples and Bologna…. on "the incompatibility of the commons and the public".... on commons as "relational ecosystems"…. on the need for new ways of studying commons through "comparison and interpretation," to improve our practical knowledge of how commons work….and a feminist look at the "micro-politics" of commoning and municipalist movements in Spain. (A full list of authors, their essays, and weblinks is below.)

My concluding essay, "Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse," reflects on a broad range of contemporary commons movements, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges in expanding and institutionalizing commoning today. I pay special attention to the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care.

I'm grateful to Professors Hendrik Wagenaar and Koen Bartels, who proposed the special issue to the IJC editors two years ago; assigned and skillfully co-edited the essays over months; and navigated the whole collection to a graceful completion.

Wagenaar, who had briefly collaborated with Silke Helfrich before her passing in 2021, was especially excited to see thoughtful scholars explore the relationality of commoning in specific circumstances. Fittingly, the issue is dedicated to the memory of Silke. A brief tribute notes that "the worldwide community of commons activists and scholars misses her passion, creativity, and unwavering, generous commitment to the advancement and understanding of the commons."

The special journal issue has two primary goals, write Wagenaar and Bartels in their introductory essay:

The first is to introduce the innovative work of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich in theorizing and researching the commons. The second is to explore the possibilities and constraints of the commons and the process of commoning as they unfold in real-world political-economic settings. Bollier and Helfrich have formulated a remarkable, ‘in-the-round’, moral-empirical theory of the commons. In their social ontology, peer governance and moral economy commons form a subversive alternative to the capitalist order.

Bollier and Helfrich’s theory restores an older tradition of a moral critique of capitalism in the tradition of “moral economists” such as Karl Polanyi and H.P. Tawney. It raises important questions about the socio-ethical foundations of our society and economy, the relationship between civil associations and the state, and the nature of the state. In the final part of this introduction, we discuss the complex relationship between the commons and the state. We frame this relationship as one of mutual dependency and argue for the careful redesign of our institutions of public administration and democratic governance to make them more receptive and accessible to the creative powers of the commons.

Here are the other six essays of this special issue of the International Journal of the Commons:

"What is “Political” in Commons-Public Partnership? The Italian Cases of Bologna and Naples," by Antonio Vesco, Sandro Busso

"Relational Ecosystems: Sustaining Prefigurative Change by Creating Conditions for Mutual Learning and Change," by Koen P. R. Bartels

"Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now?" by Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Matt Ryan, Jess Steele

"The Incompatibility of the Commons and the Public," by Roy L. Heidelberg

"Towards Democratisation of Public Administration: Public-Commons Partnerships in Barcelona," by Marina Pera, Sonia Bussu

"No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain," by Manuela Zechner

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The default form of governance on Internet platforms is "implicit feudalism," Nathan Schneider provocatively declares in his new book Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life. Implicit feudalism is "a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms," in which founders become "benevolent dictators for life," he argues. 

Unfortunately, authoritarian governance is not confined to social media platforms. The same tendencies bleed into the "real world," too, if only because the lines between online and "real life" have become quite blurry these days. Not surprisingly, our acquiescence to autocratic tech CEOs makes us more willing to accept authoritarian politicians as well. The crucibles of democratic practice have atrophied under advanced capitalism.

Schneider invites us to consider a daring idea, that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radical and democratic renaissance."  He suggests we could "learn from governance legacies of the past to [make the Internet] a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before."

Intrigued by this gust of fresh air, I invited Schneider to join me on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #49). Our conversation was a sobering tour through some distasteful zones of online culture, and yet it was oddly encouraging, too. New and emerging platform technologies offer some genuinely exciting possibilities – if progressive activism can find the imagination and resolve to leverage them.

Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Media Economies Design Lab, an academic center that explores Internet culture from crypto-economics and DAOs (digital autonomous organizations) to various forms of digital commoning and beyond. What makes Schneider's research so interesting is Schneider's deep grounding in African-American and decolonial history, social movement strategies, feminist economics, cultural theory, and the utopian visions of early Internet history.

"In an age where social movements are so often running on the rails of the Internet," Schneider asked, "How do we create durable power? How do we create critical connections that can enable a movement to fulfill its promises and viral messages? It seems to me that the ability to self-govern in digital space is central. But social movements are relying on networks that aren't designed for building durable power. They're designed for advertising and inflaming people."

Schneider noted that social media tends to foster passivity and dependence on corporations, leaving no meaningful space for user sovereignty and control. He observed that

"when you fire up a new online space or chat on Discord or whatever platform you're using, it invites you into a very top-down structure. Whoever creates the space has essentially absolute power over it. Your only tools for addressing conflict are censorship and exile. This is the logic of implicit feudalism, and I think it is an unfortunate school for building more democratic online spaces." 

And yet many such alternatives exist, he said, citing Mastadon, an open source Twitter-like micro-blogging site that uses cooperatively run servers.

To build a new type of democratic governance online, Schneider believes that progressives need to build a set of "governable stacks" – a software term that refers to a set of interoperable protocols that work at different technical levels. For example, he believes crypto – distributed ledger technologies like blockchain software – offers "a rupture of design possibilities."

By enabling distributed, peer-to-peer communications, crypto opens up the possibility of more egalitarian, participatory power structures than those of websites, which rely on centralized servers that corporations generally control. At least as a practical imaginary, crypto is "a medium and gateway to a different world, a different politics, with different symbolic and mythological references points," writes Schneider.

In fact, remarkable governance innovations are already being used in many crypto spaces, says Schneider. These innovations include decision-making processes that evaluate preferences in nearly real time; algorithmic dispute resolution; widely shared accountability and distribution of benefits; ease of exit and capacity to fork systems; self-enforcing security and censorship resistance; sovereignty from external control or regulation; and transparency of on-chain activity; and novel interfaces for governance activity; among other innovations. 

Not all of these experiments will prove their worth over the long term for general purposes. It's also true that much of the crypto world is overrun with scams, hustles, and speculative currency bubbles. As for DAOs, they may make networked coordination much easier, but coordination is not the same as democratic governance. Greater "user control" can simply mean more direct, frictionless marketplaces, such as a stock exchange, or new types of business partnerships and investment markets. Hardly a democratic breakthrough.

Here is where Schneider's application of African-American history and decolonial writers proves so helpful. Thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis realized that it is not enough to abolish oppressive institutions, whether they are slavery, Jim Crow, or prisons, said Schneider. "You have to build alternative democratic structures that actually produce citizenship, belonging, and participation.  For Du Bois, a big part of that was cooperatives. He was a deep believer in everyday democracy as an essential practice for Black liberation."

"If you go to the website of your average progressive advocacy organization, there's no button to join," Schneider complains, just a button to donate. The websites are not usually designed to help build a bottom-up membership or mobilize mass action. He argues that we need to design online tools that can "bring people up the ladder of engagement, from volunteering to leadership. Sites need to build and encourage people to develop power rather than just to discourse endlessly."

There's a lot more interesting stuff in my interview with Nathan Schneider. You can listen to it here. Schneider's book, Governable Spaces, is available in open access format here. You may also want to check out my October 2020 interview with Nathan, in Episode #7   of this podcast.

 

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Sixteen years ago, when he moved to Kenya, development economist Will Ruddick realized that many poorer communities are not as helpless as they might think. They may not have as much money to meet their needs, but they do have goods and services to offer each other -- cooking, tutoring, bike repair, taxi rides, and so forth. The real problem is the scarcity of a currency to enable exchange; the national currency, the Kenyan shilling, is not so plentiful in many neighborhoods.

So, working with small businesses and households, Ruddick and members of the group he founded, Grassroots Economics, set out to create what he calls "community inclusion currencies." One of his first experiments in this realm was the Bangla-Pesa currency in Mombasa, a community of 20,000 people on the Kenyan coast. The Bangla-Pesa is essentially a system of credit vouchers whose value is pegged to the Kenyan Shilling, but not convertible to it. Under certain rules, anyone can issue a Bangla-Pesa credit voucher for their goods and services.

Will Ruddick, founder of Grassroots EconomicsAs people use the vouchers to buy things, the vouchers begin to circulate and function as a kind of community-based money. The trick is ensuring a critical mass of participants offering a diverse range of goods and services; rules to prevent hoarding; and a brisk circulation of the vouchers. With 218 participating businesses and 87,000 vouchers now in circulation, the Bangla-Pesa mutual credit system helps thousands of people meet many everyday needs.

Ruddick has gone on to create community currencies in over 80 communities throughout Kenya as well as in Cameroon and South Africa. Over 60,000 households are spending and receiving the equivalent of US $4 million in exchange.

A key lesson from the projects is that a community can control its means of exchange to advance its own interests without relying on banks, the mainstream economy, or the national currency.

I recently spoke with Ruddick on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #48) to learn more about his experiments with community currency. He explained how his thinking about "re-inventing money" has evolved in recent years.

After working with Indigenous tribes and traditional communities, he has come to appreciate that the social dynamics of a community are at least as important as the technical issues for how one designs a money system. Premodern societies have a lot to teach us. The lessons mostly have to do with the dynamics of social cooperation and relationships. One can call it commoning, but the more formal academic name for it in this context is "rotational labor associations," or ROLAs.

ROLAs are ancient mutual service practices by which households in a community provide help to each other through reciprocal exchange without any currency involved. So when people need help in harvesting annual crops, building houses, or teaching their children, they help each other and then informally keep track of who owes some reciprocal help to whom.

Ruddick encountered more than 42 different tribal names for these practices, suggesting that mutual aid without money is indeed a spontaneously occurring social phenomenon. Some Indigenous groups practice Mwerya, their name for ancient mutual service traditions -- a term that also functioned as a collective noun for people. The Kikuyu in central Kenya call it Gobato. The Luo tribe near Lake Victoria call it Nyoluoro.

"Surprisingly, if you look through anthropology research," said Ruddick, "this social practice is almost undocumented even though it seems to have been nearly everywhere." He adds that ROLA-behaviors petered out around the time of colonialism, when colonial and national currencies were introduced. A local saying held that "those who would lose their traditions become slaves" -- an apt description of what happens when traditions of mutual aid are supplanted by the wage system using the colonial currency.

However, ROLA-type behaviors have continued in the Global North through "desktop banking" and "banker ladies" groups, which manage the money of people of the African diaspora. The academic term for these groups is ROSCAs, or "Rotational Savings and Credit Associations." Instead of pooling social commitments, they pool their holdings of the national currency as a way to maintain greater control over their money and avoid race-based discrimination often associated with banks and governments. For more, see my interview with Caroline Shenaz Hossein about 'Black Banker Ladies,' in Episode #18.]

To be sure, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously called indirect reciprocity, or pooled commitments, "gift economies." But Ruddick thinks that that term gives an overly idealistic gloss to premodern exchange by implying that the system was animated by personal generosity and altruism. The situation appears to be more complicated and structured than that, Ruddick says. "There was a whole set of social protocols and governance around these practices, and principles guiding a huge amount of reciprocity going on."

Ruddick has set out to understand the principles that make ancient mutual aid and exchange a stable, sustainable way to build collective and individual wealth. In a recently released working paper, "Commitment Pooling: A Protocol for Grassroots Economics," Ruddick explains the pooling of commitments as "a mechanism for curating and fairly exchanging resources within communities. This approach hinges on the idea that commitments can be effectively pooled to create a more equitable and collaborative economic system, and echoes traditional mutual service practices."

What makes Ruddick's thinking about commitment pooling so fascinating is his determination to extend sharing protocols through digital ledger systems. Digital ledger technology – most famously associated with Bitcoin (a capitalist, speculative currency) and its blockchain software (with versatile applications) – is not really so new, Ruddick says. It's really quite old; it's just that the "ledgers" that people once used were the twenty brains of individuals who carefully remembered who owed what to whom.

This collective algorithm, so to speak, was improved with the invention of tally sticks, and then through a progression of accounting systems. Now, thanks to the Internet and software platforms, said Ruddick, "we have new ways to make it really easy to enable people to authenticate themselves across larger networks, using memory systems, transparency, provability, and interoperability. But it's essentially a social infrastructure."

I'm excited about Ruddick's thinking about community currency because it shows how commitment pooling, as augmented by digital ledger technologies, can help communities recover greater oversight and control over market behaviors -- something that even the modern regulatory state has trouble dealing with.

Commitment pooling protocols make it possible to rein in the relentless abuses and externalization of costs that modern economies routinely generate and permit. Rather than allowing individuals to use money and market transactions to overwhelm and destroy commons, commitment pooling makes it possible to govern markets as "economic commons," in Ruddick's words.

Ruddick has identified six organizing principles that he sees as essential to economic commons. They are:

1. Care for People – collaboration and vision driven care for oneself and others’ well-being and happiness

2. Care for the Environment - support environmental protection and regeneration, minimize use of finite resources for economic activity, ecosystem management approach to farming and business development.

3. Fairness - fair and secure access to instruments, land, resources, knowledge & care for members from different backgrounds, age, gender and religion.

4. Reciprocity – mutual sharing of risk, cost and surplus.

5. Non-Dominance – no person or association to have dominant rights over another person or association’s resources e.g., data, finances, intellect, materials and freedom.

6. Resilience – capacity to prepare for, address and adapt to economic, political, climate and other events in order to ensure sustainable community based systems/commons.

If you'd like to learn more about community currencies and commitment pooling, check out my podcast interview with Will Ruddick. See also his short blog post on it and his 30-page paper.

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Energy from the sun is sure one of the most pervasive forms of common wealth. So why not capture and share that wealth more widely with everyone?

That's the basic idea behind the Solar Commons, a prototype project that uses revenue streams from solar energy and partnerships to build community wealth. The primary vehicle is a Solar Commons trust agreement among diverse community groups and the owner of a solar power array.

Kathryn MilunThe driving force behind this socio-legal innovation has been Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer and energy democracy advocate. Milun is also an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota, Duluth and research fellow at the university's Minnesota Design Center. She has spent the past 15 years developing the legal, technical, financial and operational frameworks for the Solar Commons concept.

Four projects are now underway – in Tucson, Arizona two in rural Minnesota, and one in north Minneapolis. They bring together several elements: solar installations, a financial model, a trust agreement, and participatory peer-governance.

It takes many community players working together to make the commons work. In the Minnesota projects, Solar Commons have brought together landowners, community nonprofits, a teaching farm for women, immigrant and new farmers, low-income neighborhoods, and Native American tribes. The trust legal form constitutes a new type of ownership regime for building and sharing solar energy systems.

Milun asserts, "The whole energy transition [to renewable energy] is being slowed down by ownership structures that are in place for electricity." As she explained in a recent podcast interview with me (Episode #47, Frontiers of Commoning), investor-driven public utilities have their own profit-making priorities when it comes to ownership of the grid and electricity pricing schemes; this, in turn, typically channels the benefits to investors and businesses, and not to small businesses, community groups, and ordinary citizens.

Milun believes that we have to ask, "What are the ownership structures available for this technology? That question is absolutely important and can't just be ignored." She says that the advantage of the community trust ownership model is that it helps make solar energy more available and affordable, and its benefits more widely shared.

A trust offers more legal freedom than, say, the legal forms of a corporation, cooperative, or nonprofit, says Milun. "A trust doesn't need registration or state approval," she notes, adding that if the project stays "behind the meter" (serving its energy-sharing users only), the project can avoid the complications of integrating with different, larger ownership structures.

These benefits could make the Solar Commons model especially attractive in coming decades as university campuses, manufacturing plants, and big box stores put solar panels on rooftops, and as solar farms further encroach on rural farmland. The Solar Commons model is also appealing because it can help accelerate the rollout of solar energy and decentralize electricity generation, making the grid more resilient.

A further benefit is social equity. "I think of the Solar Commons as a kind of community development bank or a 'community basic income,' said Milun. It generates "a solid twenty-year revenue stream" that would not otherwise exist, which can be directed to needier, under-served segments of the community.

To make sure that everyone can see what's going on with the Solar Commons, the project has developed a "digital dashboard" that reports energy generation, revenue stream, and other data on a real-time basis. The dashboard interface enables community members to transparently monitor and administer the system: an elegant blend of local commoning, environmental stewardship, and socio-economic empowerment.

This Solar Commons mural serves as a "deed to equitable title" for the project.The sharing of revenues is a particularly powerful tool for building community. Milun told how students at the University of Minnesota have designed a 3 Megawatt Solar Commons project for the university campus. She would love to see similar installations on all five university campuses in Minnesota – which sit on Indigenous lands – and then dedicate annual solar revenues, on the order of $70,000, to Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives. The digital dashboard could be placed in the university library, allowing everyone to see day-by-day how much money is being generated and channeled to Indigenous communities.

The cultural impact of creating a Solar Commons is also significant. As a community comes together to work out practical problems and respective roles, it builds new social connections, solidarity, and trust. It is not so difficult to assemble community partnerships, said Milun, because everyone recognizes the need for solar power and the advantages of pooling resources and sharing benefits.

Still, it does take a lot of work to raise the upfront money and to bring everyone together, from businesses and schools to community groups and needy neighborhoods. Navigating the legal, financial and technical complexities in the first instance has also been challenging -- Solar Commons is still a prototype, after all. Fortunately, many legal, technical, and financial solutions have now been identified.

Solar commons is enjoying some tailwinds of support, too. The CEO of Heliene, Inc., the second largest US solar manufacturing plant, based in northern Minnesota, is highly supportive of the Solar Commons concept. The project won first place in a competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab, which has given the project some national visibility and recognition. And the esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute has published an admiring report about the Solar Commons model.

In Tucson, Arizona, a beautiful public mural at an elementary school serves as a conspicuous "deed to equitable title" for the Solar Commons project. It declares, "Gathering and Sharing the Sun's Common Wealth." Describing such outcomes, Milun glows: "This is what it looks like when we claim common ownership rights in the sun as our right, our commons."

You can listen to my interview with Kathryn Milun here.

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I delivered the following remarks last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in Oxford, England, on January 5, 2024. It was part of a session in the Oxford Town Hall with the noted British activist-scholar-commoner Guy Standing, entitled, "Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society."

Below is my prepared text. A video can be found here (starts at 3:35 timecode). Guy Standing's excellent talk, reflecting a British perspective and themes from his books, The Blue Commons and The Politics of Time, can be found at the same link (starts at 30:30 timecode). There is audience Q&A with Guy and me following our talks.

Established systems don't welcome fundamentally new ideas – even when they desperately need them, even if people are clamoring for them. Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as disruptive. They see them as threatening and even incomprehensible.And yet, as Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them."

We're at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.

I don't want to denigrate the need for critique because the prevailing market/state system must be properly understood in all its awfulness. But what we most need is creative experimentation in developing a new, more wholesome paradigm. So my remarks will focus on how we can make some ambitious, creative leaps forward, and how the commons – as a discourse, social practice, ethic, and worldview – can be very helpful in meeting this challenge.

I'd like to explain how the commons can provide a strong, coherent framework – and many actual, practical projects – that open up some promising vistas of change. I will be channeling the old Buckminster Fuller advice: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

From browsing the program of this remarkable Oxford Real Farming Conference, it's clear that there are many, many fiercely creative and insurgent ideas and projects represented here – from soil improvement strategies to biodiversity initiatives, CSA farming innovations and new frontiers for agroecology, open source technologies in regenerative agriculture and ways to steward meadows and pastures. It's very impressive, but it's also fair to ask:

How can the amazing experiments now transforming agriculture and the food system become the new normal in politics, government policy, and everyday life?

How can existing experiments move from the margins and morph into the default paradigm?

In other words, how can we move from snatching a few crumbs from the table set by state-capitalism, and consolidate ourselves as a cultural juggernaut for regenerative agriculture, food sovereignty, land reform, and climate-preserving initiatives?

Guy Standing & David BollierNow obviously, there are no easy or simple answers, but today I'd like to propose that reinventing the commons and commoning – a new and ancient social form – can help us break on through to other side. This challenge is at once cultural, social, economic, and political. It requires that we adopt a different mindset. It requires collective imagination, new social practices, and political action.

Here's a shorthand account of why we need the commons. In any number of purportedly representative democracies around the world, including the UK and US, citizen agency and liberty in politics are slowly being suffocated. State power, the major political parties, the news media, and neoliberal economics may have their differences, but they each regulate and define the scope of acceptable change. This agenda relies on some very tired and archaic ideas, such as:

“We must privilege economic growth at all costs because everything depends on that.”

“Capitalist finance and free markets offer the best solution-systems for achieving a better future.”

"Only national governments and political parties can solve challenges as big as climate change and social inequality and poverty."

And: “Only centralized hierarchies can get things done and done fast enough. We don't have time for anything else.”

These truisms are the key problem we must overcome. But what are we to do when the dominant system is so totalizing, powerful, and closed to rational persuasion? How do we build an alternative future? How do we overcome a system of elite politics that is unresponsive to the general population, trapped within archaic ideologies, and yet powerful and rich enough to win elections, control public funds, dictate capital investment, and manipulate public debate via the media businesses they own? What to do?

I draw inspiration and strategic guidance from Václav Havel, the Czech playwright. In the 1970s, when he and other cultural dissidents faced a repressive system impervious to serious change – in his case, the totalitarian Czech government – Havel called for the development of a "parallel polis."

A parallel polis is a horizontal world of relationships and provisioning that functions as a working alternative. It's about building convivial relationships and constructive projects with one another, which over time can ripen into a prefigurative new order. A parallel polis offers spaces in which people can mutually support each other, and directly produce what they need. People can think independently, debunk official propaganda and expand their imaginations about what's possible. They can speak the truth, cultivate wholesome ambitions, and muster the courage to do what is needed.

The point of a parallel polis is not to withdraw from politics and culture into utopian fantasies – but rather to build a world that has its own integrity and working capabilities outside of the dominant system.

A parallel polis also chooses different strategies for moving forward. The first priority is not to bang at the door of governments and political parties to seek change. That may be necessary in some measure. But that path is doomed to disappoint so long as the norms of the current market/state system are intact. As recent history shows, even in places like Greece and Bolivia where left-wing parties took over the state, the results have been problematic – chiefly because international capital can continue to bully, co-opt, and constrain the state and social movements.

By contrast, even a small but functional parallel polis of working commons – if properly insulated from these forces – can exert great leverage. We saw this in the early days of Linux and open source software….in the ways that local food movements forced changes on Big Ag…. and in the power of local solidarity when it is organized, as seen in Gandhi's spinning wheel, right-to-roam protests, complementary currencies and mutual credit systems, and so on.

In a way, there is already a parallel polis in the UK and many other countries. It's just not named. It's not culturally visible. There are dozens of initiatives out there, but they are seen as too small, isolated and disaggregated to matter. But I am here to say that a robust Republic of Commoners already exists, and properly organized, could assert enormous leverage for change.

As I show in my book The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking, there is a big, buzzing pluriverse of projects, movements, communities of practice, literature, and visionaries doing amazing stuff right now. Many of these people are here in this room, enacting the next paradigm right now. To be specific:

* The degrowth movement is pointing the way to a post-capitalist macro-economics that can meet needs without economic growth and consumerism, while reducing inequality and carbon emissions.

* Elements of the co-operative movement and democratic businesses are helping emancipate and empower communities and ethnic and racial groups.

* The growing bioregional movement, transition town networks, and relocalization projects are making regions more self-sufficient and ecologically committed.

* Urban commons are empowering ordinary people in Barcelona and Seoul, Korea, and Italian and French cities and towns, through childcare and eldercare commons, participatory budgeting, community gardens, and various types of commons/public partnerships.

* Open source software, hardware, and peer production are powerful engines for decommodifying software code and hardware design. They are enabling tech innovations to be shared and improved by self-organized communities, at minimal or no cost, without Big Tech's systematic exploitation and digital surveillance.

• One powerful offshoot of the open-source revolution is cosmo-local production, a system that facilitates the sharing of design and knowledge globally, and the physical production of things locally. This process – which has obvious implications for reducing the use of carbon fuels -- is being used to globally design and locally produce motor vehicles, furniture, houses, electronics, and farm equipment. (By the way, at 6 pm tonight, I'm co-hosting a panel on open source technologies and regenerative agriculture with Dorn Cox.)

* Creative Commons licenses have made it possible to legally share billions of creative works without permission or payment. Well beyond Linux and Wikipedia, there are peer production movements focused on citizen-science, open access scholarly publishing, and open educational resources. More recently, we’ve seen the rise of digital autonomous organizations, or DAOS, and Holochain, a powerful set of network protocols that make possible decentralized, peer-organized networks.

• I haven’t even mentioned mutual aid networks and care communities… and regional WiFi systems like Guifi.net in Catalonia….and alternative currencies, mutual credit systems, and Timebanking…..and water commons that protect and allocate water in dry regions of the world….and arts and culture commons that let artists reduce their costs and take greater control of their art-making.

The common denominator in these many commons is collaborative problem-solving….peer governance that is fair and inclusive… the sharing of benefits among participants, independence from capitalist investors and state power…and eco-minded stewardship.

Let me pause a moment and discuss the localized alternatives to capitalist Big Ag, such as agroecology, permaculture, traditional commons in the Global South, Indigenous farming, urban agriculture, seed-sharing, the Slow Food movement, and new local food distribution systems.

New types of land access and governance are a big part of commoning, as played out in

• community land trusts;
• Community Supported Agriculture farms;
• modern land commons created by Agrarian Trust in the US and Terre de Liens in France;
• the "convivial conservation" movement that is moving beyond locking up nature and market-driven conservation such as ecotourism; and
• the reinvention of fashion design and production through local sourcing of fibers and regional markets.

You might wonder: How do these diverse commons represent a promising counterforce to the market/state system? How do they overcome the formidable power of private property rights, global markets, and growth-obsessed economic policies?

I see these commons projects as the beginnings of a powerful parallel polis because they are effective operational systems at a cellular level. They have a different social DNA for provisioning and governance. They are hardy and self-reliant. They don't need to be market players. They escape the transactional mindset and corruptions of capitalist business. They rely on committed social and ecological relationships, with commoning and localism at the center of their work.

By seeing themselves as commoners, people can recognize their shared vulnerability to capitalist appropriation, enclosure, and "development," and develop ways to pre-emptively defend themselves.

They treat their shared wealth as inalienable care-wealth that can't be sold or appropriated. They put caps on the use of nature. They adopt agrarian strategies that regenerate and enrich nature. They choose innovative legal structures and governance forms, which help assure that they remain commons. They cultivate the social practices and norms of commoning, which self-consciously stands apart from the logic and values of the current system.

This huge Republic of Commoners has remained largely in the shadows of mainstream modern life. I think it's time for this Republic to step into the full light of day. Its efforts need to be amplified and empowered. Its activities in countless localities need to be more closely interconnected and federated. Its participants need to realize how the commons discourse can itself help people grow fresh categories of thought and culturally express their shared values and solidarity.

Let me spend my remaining minutes suggesting how we might move in these directions.

First, it's important to understand the on-the-ground social dynamics by which commons meet needs and peer govern themselves. Standard economics relies on the idea of homo economicus, the rational, selfish, utility-maximizing materialist. That's the conventional idea of what a human being is. However, the commons has a much richer, more humane concept of what human beings are – and that full palette of humanity drives the inner dynamics of commons, or commoning.

My late colleague Silke Helfrich and I – in our book Free, Fair and Alive – identified more than twenty-five recurrent patterns of social practice that help make a commons an effective system of peer governance and provisioning. These patterns are behaviors like: Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose. Ritualize Togetherness. Share the Risks of Provisioning. Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust. And so on.

What's critical to understand about commons is that they are not simply "unclaimed resources" that no one owns, like the oceans and atmosphere and Internet. Commons are not things. They are social systems. Relationality lies at the heart of commons. In fact, commons are best understood as verbs, not nouns – social practices and relationships, not things.

Second, it's important to see how the language of the commons is an important tool in organizing ourselves and projecting commoning into the wider culture. Language helps people situate themselves with respect to each other, power, and larger systems. Language helps us conceptualize a different world and different roles for ourselves than those prescribed by capitalism, such as consumer, producer, and investor.

If we're serious about building a parallel polis, we need to scale our efforts. In traditional movements, this means building centralized organizations and hierarchies, like political parties and NGOs. This introduces all sorts of new overhead costs, complications, and corrupting, disempowering elements. So third, to build the Commonsverse, we need to keep things at an appropriate size so that local context and geography and traditions can remain influential. That means we need to learn how to Emulate and Federate ourselves.

Fourth, instead of relying on the conventional systems of law, finance, and infrastructure – most of which are designed to favor the larger commercial players – we need to build creative alternatives so that we do not become dangerously dependent on the state, or markets dominated by Big Capital.

This means we need to build our own commons-enabling infrastructures – so that commoning can become easier and more normal, and not require heroic efforts. For example, think of how the website Open Collective lets all sorts of groups, large or small, manage their finances, bookkeeping, and tax compliance. Or how the commons-based WiFi system Guifi.net provides high-quality, low-cost Internet service to people in Catalonia. There are already important infrastructures that help cooperatives flourish, and efforts to build "digital autonomous organizations," or DAOs to mutualize contributions and benefits.

Another critical intervention is creative legal hacks on state law. The only reason that so much information, music, videos, photos, and other content can be legally shared these days is because the Creative Commons folks created a suite of licenses to allow sharing, modification and reuse of copyrighted works. Open source software communities have done similar things to make their code shareable. Now we are seeing legal hacks to give rights to nature, and to make land "self-owning." There's lots more to be done here.

Fifth, we also need to develop new sorts of finance to get beyond the exploitative, extractive tendencies of conventional debt and equity, and their imperatives for centrally controlled organizations and economic growth. I have proposed the idea of "relationalized finance" – in which commoners and their allies pool their money to support their projects, and rely on "transvestment" from capitalist circuits of value to commons-based circuits of value. This is how community land trusts, CSA farms, crowdfunding and crowdequity, alternative currencies, and lots of other commons-based finance systems work. This is a longer story, but let me note that a working group hosted by the City of Amsterdam is already exploring these possibilities.

Finally, we need to develop new ways for state power to interact with commons without the state imposing its political priorities and bureaucratic procedures on commoners. I call these interface patterns – special systems that let states and commons interact on a more neutral, equal basis, much as nation-states have diplomatic protocols to establish neutral zones of respect, communication and cooperation.

Devising appropriate interface patterns is a tricky business…..but if the state can charter corporations, ostensibly because they serve the public good, why can't the state legally recognize commons and enter into constructive, non-coercive relationships with them? There are some fascinating examples out there, from the commons-based experiments in Barcelona to the Co-Cities movement in Italy to stakeholder trusts authorized by the state.

Let me conclude with this wonderful poem by Adrienne Rich that I found quite touching:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.

So much has been destroyed.

I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

There is so much capacity in this room and among livestream viewers to reconstitute the world. Developing the commons paradigm and discourse, its practices and ethical values will have many valuable impacts, not just in the agriculture and food sectors, but more universally. It can help bring about a politics of belonging, an economics of sufficiency, and a culture that decommodifies and shares. So what are we waiting for?

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Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator and curriculum developer, had long been appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people. Students at middle and high schools learn about a "degenerative economic system," as she puts it, in which "the economy" is framed as something separate from society and nature. With little sense of contemporary realities, economics courses assume that endless economic growth is desirable and possible. It focuses on businesses and markets, ignoring the vital role that household care and the commons play.

Brandsberg-Engelmann decided to do something about these deficiencies. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s pioneering book Doughnut Economics, Brandsberg-Engelmann instigated a collaborative project to create a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus. She wants young people to learn about economics as if the planet and people really mattered – and to showcase many fresh new schools of economic thought.

Jennifer Brandsberg-EngelmannOn my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #46), I spoke with Jennifer to learn more about this important work-in-progress.

Like Doughnut Economics, the Regenerative Economics syllabus focuses on a core framework: how to keep the economy within ecological limits while meeting minimum social needs.

This focus naturally elevates all sorts of topics that introductory economics courses marginalize or ignore: feminist critiques of care work and households; strategies for preventing the ecological "externalities" that standard economics blithely accepts; the psychic, social, and cultural ramifications of capitalist economics; and the range of alternative economic perspectives now emerging, such as degrowth, the "circular economy," "doughnut economics," commons, and related movements.

Initially, much of the Regenerative Economics curriculum was focused on UK schools, but as it has proceeded, the project has become broadly international in its ambitions. Doughnut Economics Action Lab remains a core supporter of the project.

While some national or local school systems may formally embrace the course, Brandsberg-Engelmann and her colleagues think its adoption is more likely to be incremental, irregular and bottom-up. In design sprints with teachers, she said, "We were thinking about metaphors for this curriculum, and we talked about it being a weed -- a dandelion – that's going to spring up through the cracks in the pavement."

Interest in the curriculum is strong. Scores of secondary school educators and staff from around the world have signed "An Open Letter for a Course in Regenerative Economics" released by Brandsberg-Engelmann in May 2023. The Letter proposes the creation of "a free, open-access, classroom-ready course in Regenerative Economics…to equip our students with the knowledge and skills needed to create a future of human and ecological thriving."

Brandsberg-Engelmann said: "Many, many teachers around the world are just desperate to break free of a lot of the mandated content that we know – and I'm just going to be straight here – is just wrong!" The Open Letter faults conventional economics courses for:

• framing the economy as separate from society and nature;
• assuming that endless economic growth is desirable and possible;
• ignoring the vital, regenerative role of household care and of the commons in the economy;
• using outdated models that paint humanity as essentially self-interested and competitive; and
• reducing the student’s role to being a passive recipient of narrowly-framed information about the economy, rather than supporting student agency to understand and catalyse economic transformation.

By contrast, the guiding principles of the Regenerative Economics syllabus include:

• facilitating change from the ground up;
• cultivating local awareness and action, such as place-based learning and lived experience, allowing ideas and action to emerge in local contexts;
• inspiring a hopeful, positive and playful approach to learning about and engaging with economic systems, going beyond critiques;
• nurturing interconnection and diversity with diverse educational ecosystems, including the strengthening of positive relationships between humans and the more-than-human world.

The syllabus aims to change not only what is being taught, but also how learning will occur. The idea is to move away from memorization and high-stakes exams towards flexible, meaningful learning that that draws on lived experience and local communities. It even supports students in becoming change-makers themselves! Modular units will make the curriculum more adaptable to future needs and contributions.

A draft version of the Regenerative Economics syllabus, version 2 (May 2023) can be found here. Teachers, students, or others interested in contributing to the development of the curriculum or helping to promote it, should contact Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann at jennifer /at/ regenerativeeconomics.earth. You can sign the Open Letter and express your support for the course at https://forms.gle/mu6NAFyQgU4SHRAq6.

You can listen to my interview with Jennifer Brandsburg-Engelmann here.

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Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money?

Copyright and trademark law are certainly designed for those purposes. They presume a market identity for creators of art, software, and new knowledge. And in fact, the corporate world routinely vacuums up creativity that's developed through commoning – images, music, know-how, social sharing.

Yet history tells another story. It shows that creativity naturally thrives in commons, and need not enter the marketplace to find support or fruition. Commoning is an ideal vessel for the collaborative development of new ideas. The process may involve direct cooperation or merely proximate respect and influence, but in either case, introducing property rights and profit-making can seriously mess up the collective collaborations that yields innovation.

When I learned about Professor Aaron Perzanowski, a legal scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, I decided to quiz him about his work on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #45). I wanted to learn more about the bottom-up, social dynamics of creativity, how commoners sustain them, and the inevitable collisions with intellectual property law.

Professor Aaron PerzanowskiPerzanowski's 2017 anthology of essays, Creativity without Law, edited with Kate Darling, goes into great detail about this topic. The essays show that, contrary to the premises of intellectual property law, artists share. They come up with new ideas by working within a community of peers. They are not solo geniuses,but "nested-I's" working within a community.

Chefs constantly come up with new entrees and desserts even though they don't have copyright protection for recipes. Fashion designers dream up "new" and revamped dress designs all the time, and the industry flourishes, even though any garment can be copied by anyone. (It's the trademarked name that remains proprietary.)

Perzanowski and other law scholars have studied how creative communities actually function and flourish without copyright or trademark protection. These include people like tattoo artists, garment designers, chefs, street artists, and the prolific Nigerian film industry (whose business models don't rely on copyrights).

Comedians can't prevent others from telling their jokes or routines, but the comedy community does sometimes shame or look down on imitators who brazenly copies someone else's jokes without attribution. Street artists make their art in anonymity and without compensation (with exceptions such as Banksy and Keith Haring), if only because they don't own the buildings or surfaces on which their art is made.

While these examples may seem small and aberrational, the creative vitality of these communities suggests that the supposed boundaries between individual ownership and collective use can be far more open and porous than they are today. They don't need to be strictly patrolled. The only reasons that jazz, hip-hop, and rock have developed and stayed creatively vital is because their creativity has circulated freely. Newcomers can borrow and improve the canon with their own innovations. As for individual recognition and rewards, it turns out that social norms and reputation can be highly effective ways to honor individual creativity while disciplining those who rip off and steal. Picasso famously said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." It's entirely possible for markets and commons can play nicely with each other; markets just have to learn to be less greedy.

A logical extension of these ideas can be found in what I call repair commons. As Perzanowski explained:

"For anything that breaks in my house – the washing machine in my basement, the toilet that won't stop running in the bathroom – give me 30 seconds on YouTube and I will find someone who has a detailed, step-by-step process for fixing that particular model and that particular issue. You can go to the website IFixIt, which has a massive database of repair guides. Most of this stuff is created by users."

Perzanowski's 2022 book, The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own, describes how clever, resourceful people are creating their own pools of knowledge and peer-support to help fix broken products. The makers of instructional videos, repair websites, guidebooks, and repair cafes are performing important services mostly outside of markets, at little or no cost.

At this point, this movement has reached a large enough scale – with people repairing their own motor vehicles, bicycles, electronics, household appliances, and more – that companies regard repair commons as a threat. For years, corporate manufacturers have been trying to suppress and criminalize the burgeoning "right to repair" movement by making repairs more difficult, expensive, or outright illegal.

For example, manufacturers often design products in ways that an ordinary consumer can't easily repair them. The idea is to stimulate the purchase of new products (and needless waste), which constitutes an advanced form of planned obsolescence. Or manufacturers design products so that replacement parts are expensive and proprietary; no inexpensive replacements or standard design specs are allowed.

Or manufacturers invoke copyright law to prohibit users from reverse-engineering software components in their cars, computers, or tractors to fix them. Only officially approved (and expensive) technicians can fix them. I find it amazing that companies are allowed to prohibit or prevent people from fixing products they legally bought and own. The waste, expense, inconvenience, and unfairness are maddening.

Fortunately, the "right to repair" movement has made serious headway in challenging the contrived obstacles to repair, and in winning legal rights for repair commons to exist. As Perzanowski explains, the movement has made some real progress in Europe, and more recently in California, when a landmark right-to-repair law was recently enacted. However, the right-to-repair ethic still faces formidable challenges. The great promise of repair-commoning remains unfulfilled.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Aaron Perzanowski here. For more on the repair movement, see the IFixit manifesto; The Maintainers website about DIY repair; the book Tools for Conviviality (1973),by Ivan Illich; and Aaron Perzanowski's books (see above).

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Whenever my late colleague Silke Helfrich and I were poised to discuss a vexing, complicated question about the commons, she would change her tone, pause, and abruptly demand: “Go!”

That was my cue to launch into an exposition of the perplexing issue we needed to tackle. It might be the role of language in making and understanding commons…. or the problematic relationship between state power and commons…. or the shift of ontological perspective that commoning entails.

Go! And so began our reflections and debates and attempts to make sense of Big Topics.

I always felt as if Silke and I were a pair of skiers poised at the starting gate at the top of a dangerous, icy mountain. “Go!” would signal the beginning of our headlong plunge down into steep and unpredictable terrain. Could we slalom through it all at breakneck speeds without falling over, and emerge victorious?

We usually did. It was absolutely frightening -- and exhilarating.

One day, out of the blue two years ago on this date, November 10, 2021, I received a terse and alarming email from Jacques Paysan, Silke’s partner. He wanted me to immediately know that Silke had had a “fatal hiking accident.” Details to follow, he promised.

Wha…?! Stunned and desperate for more information, I tried to comprehend the shocking implications of those three words. My long-time friend and collaborator – the brilliant German activist-scholar who had helped me make sense of the commons as a modern social form – was…gone?

At that point, we had worked together for fifteen years in a transatlantic partnership of Zoom calls and occasional in-person meeting, studying the commons. We had gotten so entangled in each other’s jointly developed knowledge of the commons that we had evolved a kind of parallax consciousness on the topic.

For those readers who didn’t know about Silke, here is the remembrance that I wrote shortly after her passing. (She had accidentally fallen during a morning walk in the Lichtenstein Alps while attending a conference.)

Silke would have been so thrilled to see what has happened in the Commonsverse since the publication of our 2019 book, Free, Fair and Alive, and since the nominal end of the pandemic. She would have been impatient to make better sense of the unfolding drama and needs of this moment. What sorts of new conversations, research projects, partnerships, and interventions must be launched?

These days I still throw myself down icy mountains. I still hope to reach the bottom safely, and with new knowledge of the mountain and new insights about myself. But I confess that it’s a very different experience these days without Silke’s exuberant, joyful yelp encouraging me to plunge ahead: “Go!"

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When I was in Amsterdam in September, I visited an area of land at the edge of the city, Lutkemeerpolder, on which activists are trying to create an urban farm and nature center. They call it Voedselpark Amsterdam, or Food Park Amsterdam. The land is owned by the city, but unfortunately, Amsterdam’s center-left political establishment refuses to retreat from its plans to build a warehouse distribution center on the ecologically sensitive land. (More about this controversy here.)

On that beautiful day, my colleague Natasha Hulst arranged for filmmakers Pablo van Wetten and Ivo Schmetz to do a video interview with me.. It was part of their larger project exploring the idea of “collective property.”

The fifteen-minute video interview focuses on the basics of commons and commoning, Along the way, I also discuss some contemporary issues affecting the development of commons and the fight for the Food Park.

You may also wish to check out this blog post by Natasha Hagenbeek of the Amsterdam commons group I Can Change the World With My Two Hands. Natasha reflects on the nature of commons and collective property as part of the "collective property" film. If you understand Dutch, check out the video interview with her!

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In a novel popularization about commons, the Centre for Future Natures at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, has published a compelling set of comics, "Seeing Beyond the Map." The two comics, presented in the style of an old-style pulp comic book, are an amusing educational experiment in alternative cartography.

The stories unpack many mystifications about the commons, including the so-called "tragedy" parable, while offering a more accurate conceptual map and narrative of the commons. (You can download the 14-page PDF here.)

In a blog post introducing the comics, Amber Huff, Principal Investigator at Future Natures, writes,

"Maps tell stories about relationships. They can tell us how to get from here to there (relationships between places), explain a theory or concept (relationships between ideas), show cause and effect, or show changes and flows over time and space….

"We generally trust maps to represent something in the ‘real world’. But maps aren’t just objective tools. Maps use abstraction and representation to tell stories about the world and these stories are always embedded with power relations. Maps can direct what we see and don’t see in it and how we should move and behave in it."

Applying these insights to the commons, "Seeing Beyond the Map" challenges the standard capitalist, colonial maps that depict commons as zones of commodities and non-white people to be exploited, and instead shows how commons are places of generative living relationships and care.

The second comic explores struggles against enclosure – not just those involving "land and resource grabs, but also, relations of value and care, people’s autonomy and even imaginaries of better worlds and possible futures."

The art and text for "Seeing Beyond the Map" are by Timmy Zocco, with editing and additional text by Amber Huff, Nathan Oxley and David Harvie. The comics are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial, No Derivatives 4.0 International license. You can follow Tim Zocco on Instagram @futurenaturescomic.

While at the Future Names website, check out some of the great blog posts and essays there, such as "Naming, unnaming and commons" "How land in England be reformed for the commons," and "Food that's not for sale."

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Why is Amsterdam, a city famous for its progressive culture, so determined to build a big-box distribution center on a 60-hectare plot of unspoiled land on the edge of the city? Despite the obvious downsides of the idea, politicians and city officials seem more eager to cater to the Amazon retailers of the world than to plan for climate disruption, a carbon-frugal economy, and wiser land use. The City seems poised to sell or lease the public’s crown jewels – land – on behalf of a world of economic growth, consumerism, and carbon emissions.

Thanks to a spirited campaign by thousands of Amsterdam citizens, however, an alternative future for the land may yet materialize. Over the past several years, thousands of city residents have held public protests, teach-ins, and organizing sessions to advance a different vision for the land. They envision the building of Voedselpark Amsterdam, or Food Park, that would use the land as an urban farm and a green space for recreation and nature studies, all to be stewarded as a commons.

The basic idea is to generate locally sourced, nutritious food; create farm jobs that would contribute to the city’s food security; and strengthen civic culture through commoning – while avoiding the problems caused by capitalist growth and climate breakdown. Supporters of the Food Park have been passionate enough about these ideas that they raised half a million euros in cash and pledges through crowdfunding, in an attempt to acquire the land.

To learn more about the campaign to establish the Food Park, I spoke with Natasha Hulst, one of the organizers, on my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #41). Natasha also happens to be a colleague of mine at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, where she is Director of the European Land Program.

“It's very much a David-and-Goliath story,” said Hulst, pointing out that the City of Amsterdam is trying to displace family farmers who have grown organic food on the land for generations. The title of a documentary film about the struggle is entitled, “The Last Farm of Amsterdam.”

Plans to develop the land got underway in 2003 when a zoning change was approved under ethically questionable circumstances. But things really started to heat up over the past five years as more citizens – alarmed by climate change and concerned about local self-sufficiency and resilience – began to protest development plans.

The market value of the land is not exactly clear because much hinges on the land’s zoning status and intended uses. If used for agriculture, the land could probably fetch 4.3 million euros, reflecting the high cost of agricultural land in the Netherlands, said Hulst. But city policies would affect the price. And if the land is used as a warehouse distribution center, its value could skyrocket tenfold.

To complicate matters, the City government is not just a neutral decisionmaker on the land’s fate. It owns the land and is an investor in a plan to develop it, along with a Wall Street hedge fund and others.

Defenders of development have been known to criticize activists by invoking NIMBYism – “Not In My Backyard.” They insist that warehouse centers need to be built somewhere, after all. But Hulst points out that political support for the Food Park has grown precisely because “people started to realize the value of the area for the whole city” – in providing food, recreational space, civic pride among commoners, and climate mitigation. It's not just a location-specific thing.

The land in question is cooler than most locations in the city and so could offset the “heat-island effect” that sometimes makes central Amsterdam a pressure cooker. By producing food locally, too, the Food Park would help all city residents obtain fresh, healthy food. It would also reduce the supply chains and carbon emissions from food transport. Then there is the ecological and economic impact of building an industrial site on a site that is five meters below sea level: not an ideal place to build infrastructure in one of the first areas of the city to flood.

Politicians and political parties initially ignored the groundswell of support for the Food Park, but more recently they have engaged supporters and offered compromises, such as allocating a smaller portion of the land to the Food Park while still proceeding with the warehouse center.

The more significant point may be that the political establishment doesn’t really want to envision a localized, postgrowth economic scenario for the land. Their lack of enthusiasm for the Food Park idea -- a modest initiative for fighting climate change and rethinking agriculture -- is a sobering statement in itself.

In a Washington Post piece, MIT history professor Kate Brown, an expert on urban agriculture and food sovereignty, noted how “city leaders have pledged to make Amsterdam energy self-sufficient and zero-waste by 2050, while consuming food from a belt around the urban center.” However, she argues that the idea of “the technophilic Dutch” and “efficient technocracy riding in on a white horse to save overheated, flood-prone cities is a fantasy.” Brown continues:

The Netherlands has a massive nitrogen crisis with emissions far exceeding European Union regulations. In the past four years, Dutch forests have shrunk, and the planting of new trees has decelerated.

The Green Party running Amsterdam makes a lot of florid statements, but the city has no composting program, earns a mediocre score for its tree canopy, and aggressively pursues development. Protesters have battled for the past decade to save the city’s last organic farm, which municipal leaders want to transform into a logistics center. In the Netherlands, it is citizens, not the government, who have initiated most of the successful projects to save forests and green space.

Hulst agrees with this general critique: “What I’ve found [in] talking to a lot of politicians and civil servants, is that they feel totally powerless to do anything different than is happening at the moment. Even though they are in political power, they are so stuck with being in the System.

"This is why commons are so important. This is why we can’t trust the existing system to get us out of the problems they created. One of the things that really appeals to people is the commons narrative. We can own the land….”

You can listen to the full podcast episode here.

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Below are slightly edited remarks that I delivered at a a workshop, "Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism and the Common Good," in Berlin, Germany, on May 31, 2023. The event was hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the Heidelberg Law Department at the University of Würzburg, and The New Institute (Hamburg, Germany).

A video version of the talk (with my slides, two formal responses, and audience Q&A) can be found here: https://youtu.be/ckseZNahi84 My talk begins at the 5:32 timecode.

The Commonsverse as a Parallel Polis: Opportunities and Challenges

The dialogue provoked by this workshop is timely and necessary because so many of the certitudes of political economy and culture are slowly crumbling before our eyes. It's fair to say that so many grand narratives of our time -- about citizenship, freedom, property rights, economic growth, and theories of value – have been called into question these days. Existing institutions and categories of thought aren't working so well.

On the one hand, few people want to talk about structural change and necessary alternatives lest it open a Pandora's Box of monsters and chaos. On the other hand, as we move more deeply into the danger zones of climate change, authoritarian nationalism, savage precarity and inequality, and institutional breakdown, we have little choice. We need to abandon some settled habits. We desperately need to find a new North Star and a more stable, wholesome order.

Today, I'd like to introduce the idea of the commons to you and suggest its enormous potential for re-imagining so many things – the capitalist political economy, state power, our social relations and hierarchies, our relations with the Earth, our inner lives. To be sure, this is a daunting proposition and a long-term project. We not only have to develop some very different social logics and institutional forms while entrenched in a problematic system. We also have to change ourselves. We have to find ways to overcome the unresolved traumas of capitalism, colonialism, and centralized state power whose norms we have internalized or repressed.

In my remarks, I'd like to suggest that commons and commoning can provide us with the scaffolding to reinvent a vision of the common good. It can help us develop more humane social practices and ethical behaviors at the cellular level, which, as they expand, can help us move beyond a world of capital accumulation, consumerism, and progress-through-growth.

To be sure, most commons today are dismissed as too small-scale, local and cash-poor to be significant. To the mainstream, they appear to be archaic oddities. Respectable opinion assumes that the market and state are the only two serious regimes for "getting things done." There is the “private sector” and the “public sector,” and not much else really matters.

Yet this is a specious debate or at least very narrow framing of our problems. Market and state both celebrate economic growth and are deeply allied – if with different roles – in promoting a liberal political and economic order. The state wants unfettered markets to generate growth, tax revenues, and social mobility for its citizens, while corporations and investors want the state to provide stable governance, legal privileges and subsidies for business, and the cleanup after financial crashes, ecological catastrophes, market abuses, and other "market externalities." Despite divergent priorities, state and market are utterly symbiotic – enough that it makes sense to speak about the market/state system.

It is this regime to which the commons offers an alternative vision. Politicians and economists may dismiss the commons with a wave of the hand, but commoners understand a deeper truth – that the presumptions of capitalist modernity are profoundly flawed, if not already collapsing. The 2008 financial meltdown revealed the arrogant power of global finance and capitalism – and the complicity of the liberal state in perpetuating its abuses. The arrival of Brexit, the COVID pandemic, austerity politics, Donald Trump, reactionary nationalism, and racial and ethnic Othering have only intensified the sense of fear and insecurity.

And I haven't even mentioned the brutal realities of climate change – floods, droughts, wildfires, extreme weather – which are exposing economic growth as a utopian fantasy. Its extractivism and reliance on carbon energy sources cannot continue. Nor can the drive to impose capitalist "development" on the world, as non-white peoples around the world -- victims of colonialism and coercive capitalist "development" – demand reparations, ecological restoration, and climate justice.

New politicians or policies or laws are not going to solve these problems because the problems are fundamentally structural in nature. The market/state does not have the affordances to overcome them, any more than a bicycle could take us to the moon. You might say that we are trapped in an interregnum. The old order has not yet passed away and the new order is not ready to be born.

So what is to be done? I draw inspiration and guidance from Václav Havel, the Czech playwright. When he and other cultural dissidents in the 1970s faced a totalizing, repressive system – in his case, the Czech government – Havel's strategic response was to develop what he called a "parallel polis." A parallel polis is a community-created safe space in which people mutually support each other, directly produce what they need, and build a kind of shadow society.

The idea of a parallel polis serves many purposes. People can have a space to debunk official propaganda and expand their imaginations about what is possible. They can build horizontal, convivial relationships with one another while creating a prefigurative new order. They can speak the truth and express wholesome values. They can reclaim their dignity, social solidarity, and hope.

I see the Commonsverse as a kind of parallel polis. By Commonsverse, I mean the countless projects, organizations, and social movements that are committed to commoning as way to bring about system-change. Two years ago, I published The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking to showcase the enormous diversity of commons that are already here. Let me offer a quick overview so that you can have some reference points:

Land as a commons. Decommodifying land is an important way to make land accessible and affordable for local farming, housing, and conservation. One important tool in this regard is community land trusts, which take land off the market and make it a commons in perpetuity. Land trusts help preserve the landscape, reduce wealth inequality, and make it more affordable to grow nutritious food locally. Peer-directed projects of co-housing, housing cooperatives, or federations such as the German Mietshäuser Syndikat, can provide social housing alongside initiatives by the state or local communities.

Local food sovereignty in the West. There are many movements to reinvent local agriculture and food supply chains in Europe and North America. Organic local farming started this trend fifty years ago, and it is now seen in permaculture, agroecology, the Slow Food movement, and even the Slow Fish movement. Food co-operatives are a time-proven model for bringing farmers and consumers together into mutually supportive relationships – helping to lower prices, assure more stable, local food supplies, and eco-friendly agricultural practices.

The city as a commons. People in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Seoul, Bologna, and dozens of major and smaller cities are experimenting with new forms of collaborative governance. Such commons/public partnerships are creating makerspaces, systems of urban agriculture, civic information commons, and neighborhood improvements and services. They are ways to empower citizens, reknit the social fabric, and reclaim popular control of cities from wealthy developers and investors. There are also lots of independent commons projects in cities such as community gardens, energy-production commons, and regional WiFi systems such as Catalonia's Guifi.net.

Traditional and Indigenous commons. An estimated two billion people around the world depend on commons for their everyday subsistence, through stewardship of forests, fisheries, farmland, pastures, water, and wild game. The commoning performed by traditional communities and Indigenous peoples is demonstrating locally grounded, eco-friendly alternatives to industrial agriculture. Some 70% of the world's biodiversity exists on lands managed by Indigenous peoples.

Alternative local currencies. Many communities around the world have created their own regional currencies. The idea is to capture the financial value locally instead of letting it be siphoned away to major financial centers, so that it can stimulate local markets, jobs creation, and cultural identity. In western Massachusetts, where I come from, the BerkShares currency has become the most successful alternative currency in the US. Timebanking is another valuable currency innovation – a service-barter system that lets the elderly and people without much money meet their needs.

Open source software and peer production. The explosion of free and open source software over the past twenty-five years is a powerful symbol of commoning. By decommodifying code and leveraging the creativity of open, self-organized communities, free and open source software has built Linux, vital infrastructure for the Internet, Wikipedia, and many world-class software systems, for group deliberation, group budgeting, and cloud storage of files.

Cosmolocal production. One powerful open-source offshoot is cosmolocal production, a system that hosts the sharing of design and knowledge globally, and the physical production of things locally. This process is already used for motor vehicles, furniture, houses, electronics, and farm equipment. There is even a global community of diabetics that has produced an Automatic Insulin Delivery device that is cheaper and more sophisticated than commercial medical products. Cosmolocal production of agricultural machinery, as seen in the groups Farm Hack and Open Source Ecology, are helping small holders produce low-cost farm equipment with world-class design.

Creative Commons licenses and shareable content. The invention of Creative Commons licenses twenty years ago has made it possible to legally share writing, music, images, and other creative genres without payment or permission. These voluntary, free public licenses are now recognized in more than 170 legal jurisdictions of the world, enabling vast amounts of content to be shared in ways that would otherwise be considered "piracy" under copyright law.

Now, what's notable in each of these commons, is that they always draw on the peculiarities of their context. I have been astonished to discover commons dedicated to noncommercial theater; to super-high-quality scientific microscopes built with open-source technology; to online maps to aid humanitarian rescue; and to providing hospitality for refugees and migrants. In each case, people are bringing their own distinctive talents, geographies, histories, traditions, provisioning practices, values, and intersubjectivities to meet needs without capitalist markets or state control.

When “seen from the inside,” each commons is not only unique, it is an exercise in "world-making." It is an intersubjective set of feelings, experiences, values, and perspective. The reality of our intersubjective experiences forces us to acknowledge that the world is better understood as a robust "pluriverse," and not a fixed monoculture of neoliberal capitalism.

But….if each commons is unique, how does one begin to make generalizations about them? At a minimum, we can say that a commons arises whenever a given community stewards some type of shared wealth collectively, with an accent on fair access, use, and long-term sustainability. But that doesn't really explain the regularities among very different commons in very different contexts.

My late colleague Silke Helfrich and I came to realize that this problem is an epistemological and ontological problem. Our prevailing modern worldview cannot understand commons properly. It is simply too reductionist and materialistic. It is too focused on individuals and not the whole system. Our worldview misinterprets commoners as the economic individual -- rational, self-sovereign, dedicated to maximizing their material self-interests – but simply pursuing those goals through cooperation rather than through markets.

But I can attest from my own amateur ethnographic study of commons around the world that if we are to understand commoning on its own social and ethical terms, and in the context of evolutionary history and biology, we must recognize commons as deeply relational and social. They are not simply resources, as economists like to see them. Commons are living social organisms. The latest biological research shows how interdependent and connected plants and trees and fungi all are, and how even at the cellular level life is deeply symbiotic, as the pioneering biologist Lynn Margulis showed.

So, too with human commoners. We live in relationship with each other; and with the Earth and its more-than-human life; and with past and future generations. A commons is animated by the full emotional, ethical, and spiritual agency of people – not just their calculative rationality. Silke and I came to realize that commoning is, in fact, a dynamic aliveness that is created and sustained through social and ecological relationships.

This sensibility is well-expressed by the cultural historian Thomas Berry, who said: "The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." I also like this line from biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, "Science and economics are unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality."

In our book Free, Fair and Alive, Silke and I set out to explain how aliveness in commons actually works. We wanted to answer questions like: If it's all about relationality, how exactly do diverse personalities and priorities get aligned into coherent commons? How do important things get made and care provided, without the exchange of money? How do peer-driven systems of cooperation come into being and sustain themselves?

Fortunately, we were able to stand on the shoulders of Professor Elinor Ostrom and her pioneering "design principles" of successful commons. Ostrom had identified the need for clearly defined boundaries, for example, and self-created rules of governance. She discovered how commoners must be able to participate in making the rules, and they must participate in monitoring how rules are enforced. If there are disputes, a commons must have its own low-cost, rapid system for resolving them. And commons must have independence from state authorities.

And yet, this traditional thinking about commons remains largely within the standard economic framework and its methodological individualism. It doesn't give much attention to the inner lives of commoners or to the political economy. So we developed a relational framing that helps us see more clearly and deeply how commons actually work. We found guidance in the work of Christopher Alexander, a dissident urban planner and architect who had developed the idea of pattern languages.

Alexander had observed that in his field, certain solutions to recurrent problems appear again and again, with minor variations, across the grand sweep of history and cultures. He called these solutions patterns. They are designs and behaviors that emerge from social practice; their effectiveness is ratified by their repeated use.

Applying the pattern language methodology, Silke and I identified several dozen relational patterns in the many, many commons we had witnessed over fifteen years. We grouped the patterns into three Spheres – Social Life, Peer Governance, and Provisioning – which can be roughly classified as the social, the institutional, and the economic. Together, these three spheres constitute what we call the “Triad of Commoning.” The Triad helps us answer the question, What social practices and ethical behaviors help create and maintain successful relationships of commoning? I can't go through the twenty-five-plus patterns we found, but let me give you a sense of the patterns.

In the Social Lifeof a commons, one important pattern is Cultivate shared purpose and values. Without this practice, a commons falls apart. People need to share experiences and collectively reflect on their commoning if they are to remain a coherent, vital group. A related pattern is Ritualize togetherness. People have to meet with each other, share with each other, and celebrate their accomplishments and affinities as a group. It's important to play together, and organize rituals, traditions, and festivities. The social life of a commons also requires that people Freely contribute – to give without the expectation that they'll directly or immediately get the same value back – even though commons do deliver real benefits over time.

Peer Governance -- another part of the Triad of Commoning -- is all about seeing others as equals, and sharing the rights and duties of collective decisionmaking. With Peer Governance, you try to avoid hierarchies and centralized systems of power -- because they can be a setup for the abuse of power and accountability problems. Peer governance requires, among other things, Sharing knowledge generously. This is a crucial way to generate collective wisdom. Knowledge grows when it is shared, but this can only happen if information is accessible and freely circulating. A related pattern is Honoring transparency in a sphere of trust. Transparency can't just be mandated. It won't happen unless people trust each other – enough that they will share difficult or embarrassing information.

Finally, the third Sphere of commoning – Provisioning – is about how commoners produce what they need. There is no separation of production and consumption, as in the market economy. A basic goal is to integrate one's economic needs with the rest of one’s personal life. Commoners don't produce to sell in the marketplace; indeed, they must take care to structure how they interact with markets, if at all, in order to protect the integrity of their commons.

One basic pattern of provisioning is Make & use together. Anyone who wants to participate and take responsibility can join. Everyone contributes according to their own capacities, talents, and needs. Co-producing is the core process of what might be called DIT -- ‘Do It Together.’ There are many other patterns that help clarify how provisioning generally gets done reliably and effectively in a commons.

Once you begin to get into the patterns of commoning – once you begin to see how relationality is the fundamental reality of life on Earth – you begin to embrace a different worldview, or what I call an ontological shift, or "OntoShift."

No need to get into philosophical dimensions of this right now. Let's just say that shifting one's worldview begins with adopting new social practices and experiences of commoning, which in time changes our inner life and perspectives. We begin to leave behind the selfish individualism and transactional mindset of market culture – and see the world as an integrated whole driven by a dense web of symbiotic, cooperative relationships.

In the Commonsverse, the "common good" is not some fixed idealization and elusive end-point. It is a dynamic aliveness that manifests as a cooperative ethic expands and emerges horizontally, and from below. It manifests as organic connection and wholeness, which is, in truth, a biological imperative of living organisms. It manifests in our inner lives as a sense of security, fairness, and belonging forged through caring relationships. It manifests as systemic diversity and resilience. In all of this, I am reminded of Pope Francis' Laudato Si' vision of the common good, which accents many similar points about the interconnections of our spiritual lives, the more-than-human world, and our common wealth and destiny as a species.

But at this point, we stand at a threshold and things begin to get complicated in an interesting way. As commons and commoning have proliferated over the past ten years, they have increasingly come into conflict with the power of the state, capitalist enterprise, and neoliberalism. The market/state is aggressively committed to its own priorities and vision, which may or may not accommodate the commons.

History shows that the growth economy usually attempts to appropriate and privatize common assets and dispossess commoners, as seen in the English enclosure movement, centuries of colonial conquest, and today, capitalist "development" that seeks to propertize and monetize anything of value, from artificial nanomatter and genes to mathematical algorithms and flows of water packaged as financial securities.

An urgent practical question for commoners is how they can use law to stop enclosures of their shared wealth and to protect their commoning. Is this actually possible? Can the liberal constitutional order affirmatively protect commoning while respecting its integrity as a noncapitalist social form? Does it want to? Is it possible to artfully blend the vernacular law of the commons and western jurisprudence, if only as a makeshift détente? Or are the philosophical commitments of liberalism too rigid, aggressive, and politically entrenched to support the commons and the living value it generates?

Let's be clear: The commons embodies a very different theory of value than market price, which in our times is considered the default, universal metric of value. The commons instead recognizes living systems as generative – value that is not and cannot be generally propertized, monetized, and commercially traded.

By contrast, the market/state reflexively objectifies life through property law, contract law, and commercial law. State power, for its part, welcomes the opportunities to consolidate its power through its alliances with capital. It generally wants to centralize and regularize the administrative control of people, nature, and other living systems, as political scientist James Scott has made clear:

[T]he modern state… attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess and manage. The utopian, immanent and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observation.

Now that states are armed with digital surveillance technologies and partnerships with Big Tech, the logical end-point of this trend is authoritarian control. It's unclear how far state law and liberalism will bend in this direction.

Liberalism is, after all, deeply yoked to state power and disinclined to recognize the role of customary practice or collective identities of commoners. Like markets, the liberal state is deeply committed to individualism, property rights, contract freedom, and material "progress." This encourages an ethic of separation – of humans from each other, from the Earth, and from historical memory.

As scholar Serge Gutwirth has put it, the liberal state does not have the means to “attribute rights to dynamic collectives without legal personalities” – except for corporations, of course, because economic growth – the collective mission of shareholders – is highly congenial to the state. Some 800 years ago, many specific rights of commoners were honored in the landmark Charter of the Forest – a legal declaration connected to the Magna Carta -- but today it is a largely forgotten. With the rise of the nation-state and even liberalism, legal recognition for commoning – for people's right to access things essential to their survival – has remained elusive.

What this suggests to me is that liberalism as currently practiced is philosophically hostile toward the commons, or at least ignorant about its actual value and dynamics. The state is vigilant in asserting the legality of its exercise of power, as formally enacted through law and state institutions. But it has only passing regard for the social and ethical legitimacy claimed by commons-based regimes. Power preserves itself by upholding its chosen epistemic regime.

When discussing liberalism and commoning, we therefore encounter a rift between legality and legitimacy. The market/state order invokes formal jurisprudence and bureaucracy to affirm the legality of its administrative order. It has far less interest in the dynamic governance and vernacular practices and experiences of commoners, who have their own epistemic order, their own vision of law and legitimacy.

I consider this the territory that our "Beyond Liberalism" workshop should explore. The gap between state legality and commons legitimacy is a space of vulnerability, danger, and possibility. There are some impressive innovations that have attempted to bridge this space, and some fascinating experiments to develop working hybrids. Let me briefly mention three of them:

1) the use of legal hacks to create new social norms and practices;

2) the development of new organizational forms that support commoning; and

3) commons/public partnerships that bring commoners and state officials into collaboration, usually at the municipal level.

Legal hacks are creative adaptations of state law in ways not originally imagined or intended by lawmakers. The point of legal hacks it to carve out new zones of legality from within existing law, and then to fill those zones with new social norms and political action. The point is to leverage popular legitimacy and community practice to establish a “new legality.”

Legal hacks can de-criminalize commoning that may be illegal under state law (for example, seed-sharing and humanitarian rescue) or create protected legal spaces for commoning to flourish. Prime examples include the Creative Commons licenses that hack copyright law by making creative works legally shareable. The various "rights of nature" laws are similarly legal hacks, in attempting to give formal legal personality to rivers, mountains, and landscapes as a way to protect them.

Because the prevailing framework of law authorizing corporations, cooperatives, and nonprofits fails to recognize how commoning works, it is often necessary to create new organizational forms, at least in Western nations. Some legal advocates like the Sustainable Economies Law Center and the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights are developing innovative bylaws and financial structures to design decentralized organizations that can grow from the grassroots. They seek to create self-managed staff collectives managed as commons, and plots of "self-owning land" that have legal personhood.

Finally, actual and proposed commons/public partnerships (as mentioned earlier) are popping up in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bologna, Bangkok, Seoul, and cities associated with the "Co-Cities" movement. The point here is to develop new types of flexible, non-bureaucratic collaboration between municipal bureaucracies and commoners.

These frequently involve eldercare, child care, neighborhood improvement, public spaces and buildings, commons for digital information, and open source technologies. It remains an open question how well open-source participation can be successfully blended with the bureaucratic mindset.

As I hope my remarks make clear, the idea of the "common good" in our world of liberal constitutionalism is very much up for grabs. It is not entirely clear how it should be defined and understood; what social relations are needed to generate it; what sorts of political institutions and processes, including law, are needed to protect it; and how state power may need to be reinvented. Perhaps the most pivotal issue is what implicit vision of human flourishing and spiritual life lies behind a given vision of the common good.

I obviously like to think that the commons and commoning has a lot to contribute to this discussion by critiquing the limits of capitalist modernity and exploring premodern – and utterly contemporary -- traditions of organized cooperation and sharing.

I also believe that a wide array of international social movements to committed to system change -- degrowth, segments of the coop movement, peer production, cosmo-local production, agroecology, Slow Food and other farming and food movements, Indigenous and traditional communities, decolonization and racial justice movements, relocalization initiatives, Doughnut Economics, feminist economics, and many others -- have their own vital, complementary perspectives to contribute to this larger project.

But how can a coordinated, focused response can be mounted to address the traumas of the past and urgent needs of the moment? That, distressingly, remains a very open question.

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The idea that the Ganges River in India or the Amazon Basin in Brazil should have "legal personhood" – and thus be able to defend its interests in court – was considered zany only ten or fifteen years ago, at least in Europe and North America. Now this once-fringe legal concept is going mainstream. Legislatures or courts in twelve countries have recognized the "rights of nature" at the state, local, and/or national levels in a dozen nations. In the United States alone, some three dozen communities –from Pittsburgh and Toledo to Orange County, Florida (population 1.5 million people) – have enacted such laws, often with overwhelming public support. Ecuador now has a constitutional provision recognizing the rights of nature.

It's somewhat surprising that unorthodox legal concept has taken root and developed so quickly. After all, western jurisprudence generally privileges private property rights over nature, humanity over plants and wildlife, and individual rights over collective rights. So how have conventional systems of law come to accept the daring idea that natural systems are alive and deserving of legal protection?

Thomas Linzey, legal visionary A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for "community rights" and more recently, "self-owned land." (More about both of those in a moment.)

Linzey, based in Spokane, Washington, is Senior Legal Counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, where he has been a leading champion of community empowerment and the rights of nature for more than twenty years. Previously, at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Linzey had argued for "community rights" as a legal response to corporate abuses such as fracking and water pollution.

In Episode #40 of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast, I quizzed Linzey about his legal hacks that attempt to protect ecosystems and communities in novel ways.

While Linzey looks to the law, he regards grassroots pressure for change as a critical part of his challenge, much as the civil rights, abolitionist, and suffragist movements sought in their time. All of these movements ultimately required changes in the Constitution, which is something that grassroots movements and municipal laws help move forward, he argues.

"There is a state constitutional amendment currently circulating in Florida for the rights of nature, which is slowly moving up to the state level." This work is "neither left nor right," he said, "because a lot of communities doing this work are not liberal. The work started in rural south-central Pennsylvania, which is about as red as it gets."

Linzey noted that the legal space opened up by "rights of nature" litigation has been impressively large. He noted how the Sauk-Suiattle tribe in Washington State sued the City of Seattle over its hydroelectric dams, which don't have passages to allow salmon to swim upstream to spawn, resulting in a sharp decline in salmon populations. But the Sauk-Suiattle's lawsuit did not invoke a rights of nature law or court ruling, he said. It invoked its own customary, unwritten law, as honored within the tribe for generations. The tribe argued that the formal, written law of US courts had failed to honor Indigenous value systems over generations, and that their unwritten, customary law should be legally recognized as a legitimate tool for protecting wild salmon.

Carving out legal space for customary practice and social norms has enormous implications for the commons, which has always relied on unwritten social practices and informal understandings than on formal legal contracts enforced by the state.

One impediment to moving an agenda of community rights and rights of nature is the idea of "state preemption" – that notion that state and national levels of government can preempt laws made at lower levels of government. But Linzey points out that preemption is often selectively applied to different areas of law, and is not an across-the-board rule. In short, there are opportunities to roll back (asserted) preemption of municipal or state laws.

Linzey argues that these efforts, in turn, must be connected to a movement to expand opportunities for democratic self-determination, particularly at the lowest feasible levels of citizen intervention.

"We're not talking about localities becoming their own countries," said Linzey. "We're talking about widening the portal of lawmaking to allow for an expansion of rights towards sustainability." So instead of federal of state law acting as a ceiling of permissible lawmaking, it is merely a floor – a minimum legal requirement that can be made stronger by lower levels of government if they so choose.

Linzey is now introducing a new legal idea that builds on the rights of nature concept – "self-owning land." Unlike rights of nature laws, which require a legislature or court to recognize such rights, private landowners can introduce self-owning land language into conservation easements for their own land. "What we did was borrow the rights of nature language and embed it into the land easement, so that a landowner could not just restrict use of the property, but actually recognize rights for ecosystems within that conservation easement," said Linzey.

This idea arose, he said, when "a landowner came in the door saying he owns forty acres of the last remaining old growth forest in Nova Scotia. He wanted to find a way for the land to own itself. We said that's crazy, because under western law you can't do that. But we came up with a model by which land can legally hold title to itself. That involves the creation of a legal alter ego within the law. An avatar is one way to look at it," said Linzey.

"So what we do is create an unincorporated association under the law…..The flora, fauna and other elements of an ecosystem that comprise the land come together as an association and create a legal entity. It is then represented by human guardians…. who have a legal relationship with the land and legal duties to carry out the best interests of the ecosystems – like guardians who represent the interests of minors in court."

Fascinating stuff! You can listen to the full interview with Thomas Linzey here. A downloadable PDF transcript of the conversation can be found here.

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To celebrate the publication of the French edition of Free, Fair and Alive, I recently had the pleasure to visit Tunis and Paris to give the commons, and Silke's and my book, some visibility.

Tunis is a country with a long history of commoning in various contexts – agriculture, water in desert oases, learning, social cooperation – but modern culture often dismisses this history as premodern or backward. The Heinrich Boell Foundation-Tunisia is attempting to change this by launching a new program that showcases Tunisian commons and commons discourse. How refreshing that people can consider post-colonial options that move beyond capitalism, socialism, and autocracy!

I was pleased to see the keen interest in Le Pouvoir Subversif des Communs, which was translated into French by Olivier Petitjean and a small team of commoners-translators. Print versions of the book can be bought via Editions Charles Léopold Mayer or read online for free at https://freefairandalive.org/fr/lis-le.

At the Boell Foundation’s invitation, I gave a well-attended public talk and workshop in Tunis. I also gave an interview to the Tunisian video podcast, Ecologia, hosted by Arafet Ben Marzou and Emily Samsar. Episode #30 of Ecologia -- entitled “The insurgent power of the commons and the crisis of imagination” – explored the relevance of the commons in Tunisian culture and history.

'Ecologia' podcast with Arafet Ben Marzou and Emily Samsar In addition to these resources, the Boell Foundation has prepared an online library of resources, and collecting a variety of essays about commoning in Tunisia, with an accent on water and land commons. (French version: https://tn.boell.org/fr/la-librairie-des-communs Arabic version: https://tn.boell.org/ar/mktbt-almshaat.) I am no expert in Tunisian commons, but I was excited to learn about so many vibrant commons that still have resonance in cultural memory. One highlight of my visit hearing the singer Nidhal Yahyaoui and his band, which mixed rock with traditional rhythms and chanting (northwest Tunisian Berber culture) for a mesmerizing performance at a party celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Boell Foundation in Tunis.

I later moved on to Paris for a talk with the "Cognitive Capitalism" seminar at Maison des Sciences Économiques. The ongoing seminar is sponsored by CEMTI Paris 8 in collaboration with CES-CNRS Paris 1, Panthèone Sorbonne, and Sophiapol Nanterre – and in the case of my talk, with the help of Remix the Commons. (Big thanks to Frédéric Sultan!)

Following the Paris talk about Le Pouvoir Subversif des Communs, several speakers and members of the audience took part in a beautiful homage to my friend and coauthor Silke Helfrich, who passed away in November 2021. It was a bittersweet experience to hear so many fond memories and tributes in honor of my dear friend.

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While the many philanthropies of the world address social injustice, gender discrimination, and countless other issues, there is one topic that is off-limits to most of them: changing the capitalist system itself, the source of many problems that philanthropy aspires to solve.

This conundrum is the focus of a new book, Post Capitalist Philanthropy, by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy, which is a bold inquiry into what they call “philanthrocapitalism." As Ladha puts it, “A few people have amassed so much wealth that they're now determining the agenda for a civil society. Ostensibly, we're told that this is for social benefit, but actually they're getting huge amounts of tax breaks, social and political power, and undermining democracy itself. And so, in some ways, you can't think about new economic systems and alternative systems without grappling with the paradoxes and complexity of philanthropy."

Alnoor Ladha & Lynn Murphy, authors of 'Post Capitalist Philanthropy' Ladha, an activist, journalist and political strategist, was co-founder and executive director of the global activist group The Rules from 2012 to 2019. He's now council chair for Culture Hack Labs, a not-for-profit consultancy.

His coauthor Lynn Murphy was once a senior program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. But she found it ethically problematic to be a white, privileged decisionmaker at a wealthy US foundation directing the shape of education in the poorer countries around the world. "I was working on what was then often called global development and international education, with a piece of how do you improve the quality of schooling for the poorest children."

But the mismatch between the capitalist notions of education and development, and the native worldviews and cultures of the south, proved too much for Murphy. She resigned as a self-described conscientious objector to ‘neo-colonial philanthropy,’ and now works as a strategic advisor to foundations and nonprofits in the geopolitical south.

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #39), I interview Ladha and Murphy to explore their criticisms of institutional philanthropy, its embrace of capitalist norms, and their ideas about moving beyond this dominant mindset.

What exactly do Ladha and Murphy find objectionable in institutional philanthropy? It a worldview that Ladha calls "the gaze of modernity," which in turn guides so many other grantmaking priorities.

The gaze of modernity is the idea that "human beings are separate from the living world," said Ladha. It is based on a "dualism that came from Enlightenment logic and was globalized around the world," which says "that our minds and our bodies are dualistically separated., and that we "have these God-like minds and these animal bodies that need to be tamed."

Ladha argues that "this logic proceeded to create the so-called 'other' around the world, and it merged with the colonialist, imperialist project of European domination in the 1500s." It declared "that the Christian, white male is at the top of the social hierarchy, and every so-called other, especially Indigenous people, black and brown bodies, female bodies, etc., are all subhuman. And so the separation is deeply rooted in our alienation from the living world."

This worldview affects how US foundations dole out their funds and the types of societies and individuals they seek to shape. Murphy reported that she saw the "objectification" of communities around the world despite their manifest differences: "I saw again and again and again the reification of what a community is….Community [was] treated as an entity that is somehow almost static across place and very context illiterate." She said that most foundations are "institutionally unable to handle various cosmologies" and "other states of being" among grantees in the South.

For example, many Indigenous cultures reject the subject/object separation that is standard in modern capitalist societies. They reject linear, Cartesian, Newtonian conceptions of the world and machine metaphors of life, instead seeing the world, including nature, as vibrantly alive. This makes it hard to for philanthropy and its staff to escape the "life-destroying norms" of the capitalist political economy, whose worldview is so deeply embedded.

The point of Post Capitalist Philanthropy is to try to offer ways to experience a world beyond capitalist modernity. This requires both critique and creative innovation. As Ladha put it, "If you do not have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. But if all you have is a critique, you are spiritually and creatively impoverished. If we do not understand the oxygen by which we breathe – which is late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, separation from the living world, materialism, rationalism, positivism, scarcity, control, entitlement – then we don't understand the context we're in."

You can listen to the podcast interview with Ladha and Murphy here. A transcript is also available.

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To glimpse an inspiring vision of farming in a post-capitalist environment – one that is in communion with the Earth and its aliveness – look no further than Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley of New York. The 80-acre farm, run by a remarkable Afro-Indigenous-centered community, has pioneered a socially minded agriculture dedicated to regenerating the land and empowering African-Americans and Indigenous cultures. It's a vehicle for training new farmers, feeding people who don't have access to healthy food, and "rabble-rousing for systems change." 

Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol activist-farmer, cofounded Soul Fire Farm in 2010.  She described her journey from science teacher to farmer in her 2018 book Farming While Black -- a manifesto and practical guide to "liberation on the land."  Now Penniman moves beyond some of the practical "how to" issues of farming to explore the cultural and spiritual wisdom that has sustained African American agriculture for generations.   

Her new book, Black Earth Wisdom, describes itself as "love songs for the earth and its people."  It consists of sixteen captivating conversations between noted Black elders in a variety of fields, including author Alice Walker, ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, attorney Savi Horne, farmer Chris Bolden-Newsome, and musician Toshi Reagon, among many others. 

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How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way?  To find some answers, I recently interviewed two leading thinkers and advocates for urban commons, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione, on my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (episode #37). They just published Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities, a book that synthesizes much of what they've learned after years exploring this topic.

Foster is an urban law and policy professor at Georgetown University who studies the role of cities in promoting social and economic well-being, climate justice, better governance, and in addressing racial inequality. Iaione is professor of urban law and policy at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy, where he pioneers creative ways for city governments to work with urban commoners and other stakeholders.

I first met up with Chris ten years ago when he was developing the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons -- a formal legal and bureaucratic system for coordinating citizen collaboration with the city government.  The Regulation gave rise to hundreds of "pacts of collaboration" through which self-organized citizen groups were given the authority – and city assistance – to rehabilitate abandoned buildings, manage kindergartens and eldercare centers, take care of urban green spaces, and much else. 

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Dorn Cox is a family farmer who has long been in the vanguard of improving regenerative agriculture with open source technologies. He sees participatory science and knowledge commons as powerful tools for improving agriculture in countless ways:  crop yields, soil health, water usage, ecosystem resilience. All are especially needed in the face of climate change.

I wanted to learn more, so in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #36), I spoke with Cox about these topics, which are extensively examined in his new book The Great Regeneration:  Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope.  The book explores how open source hardware, software, data analytics, and knowledge-sharing commons are opening up new vistas of possibility for local, regenerative farming. 

With a deep background in earth system sciences and a PhD in natural resources, Cox is a man of the soil – and the computer.  He farms with his family on 250 acres in Lee, New Hampshire, and also serves as research director for the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment in Freeport, Maine. But Cox is also deeply immersed in open source communities dedicated to developing technologies to strengthen small farms and local agriculture.

He a founder of the farmOS software platform, a web-based app for farm management, planning and record-keeping.  He also helped organize Farm Hack, an open source hardware project that designs and builds agricultural equipment. More recently, Cox has helped develop the Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management – called OpenTEAM – which is a farmer-driven collaborative community dedicated to improving soil health and addressing climate change.

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Many years ago I was intrigued to learn of an art institute in the Netherlands, that formally declares its mission to be "working for the commons." That's how the Casco Art Institute in Utrecht presents itself to the world. Their tagline immediately raises questions about how exactly arts and commoning are related, and how an art institute might enter into the world of commoning. 

I decided to learn more by inviting Binna Choi, Director at the Casco Art Institute, to join me in a podcast conversation for Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #35). Binna, a native of South Korea who has led Casco since 2008, curates artistic work for major exhibitions and was a faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute. She has been a curator or artistic director for the Singapore Biennale 2022, the Gwangju Biennale 2016, and the upcoming Hawai'i Triennial 2025.

Choi has brought the ethic and practices of commoning to the creation of art and its exhibition. She and her colleagues have embraced commoning as an organizing principle for how a diverse team of artists can make art and work together. Casco Institute explains its philosophical commitments to the commons in this way:

"Art is an imaginative way of doing and being which connects, heals, opens, and moves people into the new social visions. Art is in fact inherent to the commons, as they are shared resources to keep the culture of community alive. In turn, the commons may well sustain art. With art and the commons we can draw a worldview beyond the divides of private and public, to shape together a new paradigm of living together as “we” desire – be it decolonial, post-capitalist, matriarchal, solidarity economies — we name it!"

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John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world. You can't pigeonhole him in any occupational category or disciplinary tradition because he is so effortlessly transversal. He blends his broadly international and nonsectarian perspective with the many particular projects that are Building the New.

This helps explain why Thackara's work is so appealing: It speaks to us as whole human beings where we live, in distinctive local circumstances. While rigorous and empirical, Thackara isn't constrained by the jargon and norms of a particular discipline or theory. Like so many designers, he lives on the messy creative edge where interesting new things are always emerging. (Check out his website at www.thackera.com.)

On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #34), John and I have a spirited conversation about the things preoccupying him these days: how to design for bioregional, post-capitalist economies; the many local projects that are quietly making a new world; and corporate subterfuges such as "net zero," carbon offsets, and the financialization of nature.

Thackara, a Brit who lives in the south of France, has taught at major universities in Japan, China, and Italy, and held prominent posts at the Netherlands Design Institute and the Royal College of Art in the UK. Now an independent writer, activist, and designer, John avoids arid abstractions; he prefers to document the practical alternatives to capitalism popping up all over.

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Disaffected with his way of life in the US and concerned about the multiple ecological crises bearing down on humankind, Joe Brewer set off on a journey to learn what he might be able to do. He had considerable background in the earth sciences, studied cognitive linguistics and philosophy, and had worked with the activist group, The Rules. But restoring an entire ecosystem would be a novel challenge.

In 2019, Brewer ended up in Barichara, Colombia, with his wife and infant daughter, where he soon found himself helping to catalyze a "living laboratory of regeneration" of a degraded landscape, an arid tropical forest, in the northern Andes. Ninety percent of the forest in the region's one million acres had been cut down, causing the once-fertile food forest to dry out and become a desert.

How does one begin to restore such a profoundly degraded landscape?

Joe Brewer, founder of Earth RegeneratorsAs a newcomer to the region, Brewer quickly realized that there were many great local projects underway, but their practitioners barely knew of each other's existence. So he slowly waded in, forming relationships with farmers and eco-players, and bringing them into closer communication with each other. Brewer also relied on the principles of permaculture, closely observing the patterns and cycles of the ecosystem to try to identify what it needed to begin to flourish and sustain itself.

Fortunately, Brewer had learned a great deal about earth sciences through former affiliations with the International Centre for Earth Simulation, the Center for Complex Systems Research at the Uni­versity of Illinois, the ­Cultural Evolution Society, the Rockridge Institute, and the Evolution Institute.

But for Brewer, reclaiming the ecosystem was not some abstract exercise or supervisory challenge. It was personal and gritty. In April 2020, one month after the pandemic lockdowns in Colombia, Brewer would sneak out of his house to the edge of town, and start to dig "contour swales" in the side of the mountain. These are horizontal irrigation ditches perpendicular to the flow of water that help catch rain water and encourage it to sink into the soil.

"And so I began going out into the rain with a pickax," said Brewer. "At night during the three months of the rainy season, I would take a flashlight and a pickax, and I would let the water be my guide and dig contour swales. The first project was one meter in length." This beginning soon expanded into twenty different water retention systems across four hectares of land, which have completely transformed the evolution of the landscape.

Eventually Brewer used his social media presence to alert bioregional activists around the world to the project, and to raise money to help it expand. He used funding support from Patreon to support his family and his work. And to help seed worthy local projects, he founded Earth Regenerators, a project that is attempting to revive the town's food forest and purchase and restore land critical to the region's aquifers. He currently has 11,000 Twitter followers and 7,500 Facebook contacts.

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #33), I speak with Joe Brewer to learn more about his vision of bioregional restoration, the techniques and tactics he is using in Barichara, and his expanding ambitions to help bioregions internationally to organize their own similar efforts.

Through crowd-funding, $50,000 was raised – enough to buy some land. The remaining money, some 30 million Colombian pesos, were given to a group of fifteen strong local projects to decide how the money should be spent. Through the "prosocial" process developed by David Sloan Wilson, the group identified criteria and a collaborative decisionmaking framework for allocating the money for territorial-scale work.

Throughout, Brewer has been keenly aware of Colombians' skepticism of outsiders. After all, Latin America has suffered from centuries of colonialism, genocide, and neoliberal extractivism. He realized that ecological restoration needs to be driven by local wisdom, participation, and creativity, not by "outside experts." He is just one (important) catalyst among many players in a collaborative process of commoning.

This bioregional approach holds the most hope for developing credible pathways to planetary sustainability, Brewer argues. He rejects two approaches that are embraced by many in the capitalist West – one, that technology will save Earth and humankind, a fantasy that Brewer, citing billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, calls "the Sociopath's Dream"; and two, the "business as usual" approach, including "green growth," which fails to acknowledge that humankind is already overshooting the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Brewer instead puts forward a plan to create a planetary network of local living economies, organized as bioregions. This idea builds on the pioneering work of Dana Meadows and "The Limits to Growth" study published in the early 1980s. Brewer outlines his vision in The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, a short but powerful book synthesizes a vast scientific literature to warn of the colossal ecological dangers now facing humanity. The book also explains the many commons-based, prosocial practices and norms that can help us restore the Earth's living systems.

Brewer has described himself as "a change strategist working on behalf of humanity" – a phrase that aptly describes his work. When I proposed to Brewer that his work "might be important to the future of civilization, if I can put it that bluntly," he didn't hesitate a moment: "I would go beyond that and say, civilizations are a temporary experiment in human organization in the last 1% of human history, the previous 99% being hunter-gatherer societies."

My conversation with Joe is worth a listen! Inspiring and deeply informative. More here.

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Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as distilled in popular culture, holds that individual humans are brutally selfish as they struggle to triumph in a nasty world of scarcity and competition. Life is supposedly an epic "survival of the fittest," an idea ratified by the premises of conventional economics and its notion of homo economicus and scientist Richard Dawkins' famous theory of the "selfish gene."

But many scientists are rewriting this story based on their own empirical studies of life, which reveal the powerful role of cooperation in evolution. David Sloan Wilson, the renowned evolutionary biologist and scholar of cooperation, is a prominent proponent of "mullti-level selection," the idea that natural selection doesn't occur only at the level of genes and individuals, but among groups and even ecosystems.

David Sloan Wilson Evolution is not just a matter of competition among individual organisms, he and other scientists argue. It's also about cooperation within groups and how groups of cooperators enjoy evolutionary advantages over groups consumed by internal competition.

"A group of cooperators can robustly out-compete a group whose members cannot cohere," said Wilson. In a famous essay co-authored with biologist E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson offers a concise summary of this idea: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #32), I explore with David Sloan Wilson some of the insights that evolutionary science reveal about cooperation and other prosocial behaviors.

Wilson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Throughout his long and distinguished career, je has brought the discoveries of anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and religion to evolutionary theory, giving his popularly accessible books a transdisciplinary vigor.

In 2009, when Wilson encountered Elinor Ostrom's scholarship on the commons, he realized that her eight design principles for successful commons have a lot to say about the cultural evolution of humanity. Wilson worked briefly with Ostrom until her death in 2012, and has continued to explore how "prosocial behaviors" (as he calls them) can prevail over competition within groups and spur more effective levels of evolutionary development.

The debate between scientists about how exactly natural selection works – at the individual level or group level, among other levels – is something of pivot point in the field. "If most antisocial behaviors are locally advantageous," writes Wilson, "and most prosocial behaviors are locally disadvantageous, then we have an enormous problem explaining the nature of prosociality, including the nature of human morality, from an evolutionary perspective."

Wilson has doggedly set about addressing this question in a number of books, including Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1999) and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (2016).

Far from being a cloistered theorist, Wilson remains active in exploring how evolutionary thinking can be applied to real-world circumstances. His book, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, deals with cooperative improvement in urban settings.

More recently, Wilson published Prosocial to explain how members of groups can work to align their interests and achieve shared goals. Its subtitle: "Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups." (His coauthors are Paul W.B. Atkins and Steven C. Hayes.)

Wilson continues to spread the word through Prosocial World, a nonprofit that he cofounded and for which he edits an online magazine, "This View of Life." Recently, he has even ventured into writing fiction, with his recent book Atlas Hugged -- a response to Ayn Rand's classic novel celebrating libertarianism, Atlas Shrugged.

In trying to understand human behavior, Wilson leans into the actual diversity of humankind rather than trying to assert a single model. In our interview, he cited the acronym WEIRD, which stands for "Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic," a term popularized by Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich. "Virtually all scholarship and science take place in WEIRD societies," said Wilson. "And so we've been mistaking our culture for human nature…. We have to actually comprehend cultural diversity. How do these other cultures think, especially Indigenous cultures?"

You can listen to my interview with David Sloan Wilson here.

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What a thrill to learn that Cecosesola (Central de Cooperativas de Lara) -- the Venezuelan network of community organizations from low-income areas – has won the 2022 Right Livelihood Award! Cecosesola is a federation of co-operatives and other groups that has created its own distinct social and economic ecosystem. Since 1967, the group has relied on commoning to develop a humane provisioning system that meets the needs of more than 100,000 families across seven Venezuelan states.

The Right Livelihood Award cites Cecosesola for "establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies." It has achieved this in the face of serious problems in Venezuela – a financial crisis, food shortages, hyper-inflation, and a massive out-migration of 7 million people.

Cecosesola doesn't simply provide competitive market prices for food, healthcare, loans, and cooperative funeral services, among other ventures. It changes well below normal retail prices. You could say that Cecosesola has learned how to ignore the market and set its own terms for providing goods and services. Its economic activities are almost entirely self-financed, and its internal governance and culture of solidarity and trust reject the standard management practices of businesses and bureaucracies.

A Cecosesola food market Over five decades Cecosesola has made it a priority to develop a culture of transparency and mutual support. It is committed to an ethic of fairness and concern for well-being. These values and practices have flourished through the group's radically horizontal system of collaboration that pointedly avoids hierarchical control. The culture enables Cecosesola to deal with changing circumstances and crises in highly efficient, flexible, and adaptive ways. "We are just one big conversation," as one of its members said in an interview.

My late colleague Silke Helfrich first alerted me to this fantastic organization after she met with many of its members in the early 2010s. Her interview with them was published in our book Patterns of Commoning in 2014. We later wrote an interpretive summary of Cecosesola in our 2019 book Free, Fair and Alive, seeing Cecosesola as an "omni-commons" because it serves as a hosting infrastructure for all sorts of experimental, niche ventures in commoning. Silke last year nominated Cecosesola for the Right Livelihood Award.

Cecosesola's food operations have become so large and socially sophisticated that they set their own prices, independent of markets. They operate their own trading spaces — four huge marketplaces, one in each section of the state capital, Barquisimeto, a metropolis of 1.25 million people in the northwest of the country.

When we published the piece about Cecosesola, it was selling some 700 tons of fresh produce at a single price per kilo, which is significantly lower than the prices charged by conventional grocers. The net effect was to driven down market prices in the region, allowing about 700,000 people to enjoy both lower prices as they secure half of the food they need.

When Silke interviewed a few of the hundreds of members of the federation in 2011, here are a few things that members shared:

• "We are less interested in producing 'something that's ours' than creating 'us.' We want to understand and change ourselves. That generates a kind of collective energy….We try to conceive of Cecosesola as a personal process of development, not as work."
• "We don't pay ourselves wages. Instead, we pay an advance on what Cecosesola will presumably make. But we don't work in order to make a profit or to accumulate goods. That isn't what drives us, and that's why our surpluses are relatively modest."
• "Everybody gets paid the same amount. The cook earns the same as the bookkeeper, but we also take different needs into account, for example, if someone has just had a baby. The only exception is the physicians. They get about twice as much…"
• "The decisive factor is that we don't follow the market or the market price. If prices for tomatoes and potatoes go up someplace, that doesn't mean that we'll raise prices, too. What matters for us is that we earn what we need." The Spanish above translates as: "The deepening of ethical relations. The emergence of trusting relationships. The widening of the circle of "we" towards an increasingly extended family.

In Free, Fair and Alive, Silke and I returned to consider the Cecosesola experience:

Cecosesola asks a simple question to its farmers and service providers, all of them members of the federation: what do you need to produce the harvest that you do? (It is exactly the same question some CSA members ask the CSA farmer so that they can share the risk of provisioning.) The rural cooperative members working in the fields, and Cecosesola members who coordinate the federation or sell at markets in Barquisimeto, gather in the shadow of a tree. While sitting on simple wooden benches, their casual chat slowly turns to the serious work of estimating what is needed for production: So many days of work, this much seed, that much fuel, enough irrigation pipes, and so forth. The more experienced members remind the less experienced ones that things may fall apart and need to be repurchased, or that more mule fodder may need to be bought because the last 800 meters up steep hills will increase transportation costs. Bit by bit, members bring their situated knowing to bear. Together, they identify the very concrete costs for production in their specific conditions of life and farming. Producers and distributors (people from Cecosesola’s central office in the city; traders or middlemen in the conventional economy) coordinate together.

This is price-making, right in front of everybody’s eyes – but not in any anticompetitive, monopoly-driven sense! Each cooperative within the Cecosesola system does its own calculations, and in the end, the federation sums up the results of all the meetings, adds in some additional sums for extras and losses (yes, tomatoes get spoiled on their way to the capital and some get stolen at the market).

Then Cecosesola takes a radical, counterintuitive step: “We decouple the price of vegetables from the time and effort we put into them,” as coop member Noel Vale Valera explains. “We add up the number of kilograms produced across the entire produce range, on the one hand, and we add up the costs on the other hand. Then we divide one by the other to figure out our average price per kilogram. Our yardstick is simply the production costs including what the producers need to live …What matters for us is that we earn what we need.” Cecosesola members don’t think of producers, traders, and consumers as separate, each having separate interests. They think of everyone as a whole in which everyone has to meet their needs along with the entire enterprise.

Vale’s colleague Jorge Rath insists, “This system saves people quite a lot of money … Our price per kilogram reduces red tape, we don’t work with middlemen, and seasonal fluctuations don’t make a difference, either.” The single per-kilo price for all produce emerges from open discussion among all those who produce and the many others who collaborate with them. In the end, it is no surprise that costs and therefore prices are significantly lower than those of conventional markets. There are no hidden costs, thanks to the trust and transparency within Cecosesola. There are no costs for marketing and advertisements. There are no intermediaries charging inflated prices to act as a wholesaler or distributor. Cecosesola is able to show money efficiency and price sovereignty.

The really stunning fact is the remarkable strength of Cecosesola as a provisioning system in times of political and economic crisis. It is basically due to the federation’s capacity to react quickly to dramatically changing circumstances.

A hearty congratulations to Cecosesola for the recognition made by the Right Livelihood Award! May your work be an inspiration and model to others seeking better ways to meet needs in fair, participatory, and effective ways!

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As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

A free flow of electricity across national boundaries would allow nations to acquire electricity at lower costs, most notably by moving from expensive, atmosphere-destroying carbon energy sources to renewables. The benefits from the vast savings on a global scale could be mutualized through a standard (lower) world price. The Grid would also greatly reduce the need for storage capacity and make the entire electricity-delivery system more flexible and resilient.

To explore the history of the World Grid idea and Buckminster Fuller's wide-ranging influence on systemic solutions, Greg Watson spoke with me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #31).

Watson's push for a World Grid is a logical outgrowth of his long, pioneering work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and community development. He was formerly the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under three governors; the first Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which develops offshore wind energy; and the head of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots community land trust that converted 1,300 abandoned lots in Roxbury, Massachusetts, into a healthy, affordable neighborhood.

Watson often talks about the "Energy Trilemma" that we face – how to "simultaneously optimize sustainability, energy equity and energy security." He argues that a World Grid could address all three optimally: "It could tap the global solar, wind and water renewable energy resources and take full advantage of their geographic, seasonal, and night-day complementarity. In the process it could turn what has been considered a liability—i.e., the intermittency of renewable energy generation—into an asset, making the goal of a secure 100% renewable energy system accessible to all a realizable one."

Dymaxion projection map of the world Watson's work as Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1980s was a springboard into his current line of advocacy. For twenty years, until 1991, the Institute was a hotbed of bold eco-experimentation and systems thinking – a "new age mecca," as the New York Times Magazine called it. It was a testing ground for organic agriculture, sailwing windmills, solar algae ponds stocked with fish, and of course, geodesic domes.

It was at the Institute that Watson encountered a related project that Buckminster Fuller had proposed, the "World Game." This game-like workshop process is designed to help nations think more systematically and practically about global problems, and to develop cooperative solutions.

To help participants understand the inescapable global interdependencies facing humanity, Fuller developed what he called the "Dymaxion Project" – a map that visualizes the entire planet without the geographic distortions of conventional Mercator-projection maps. As Watson has said, "The one-island perspective is obscured by conventional map projections. The resource and energy flows that fuel the Earth’s resiliency are severely limited by the world’s 195 nation-state boundaries that Bucky likened to blood clots."

The Dymaxion map, by contrast, promotes an understanding of global cohesion: "It does not follow the North-up convention. Neither does it follow any South-up, East-up nor West-up—there is no right way up….Perhaps most important regarding the current climate crisis, is the Dymaxion revelation of a 'one island, one ocean planet.' The unfettered flows and recycling of resources make possible synergetic, emergent, regenerative energy interpatternings that are a primary source of Earth’s resilience.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Greg Watson here.

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The following is one of a series of features from The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead, by David Bollier. The Commoner's Catalog, a compendium of dozens of vanguard commons projects and movements, is available through book stores and online (for free) at https://commonerscatalog.org.

Alarmed that certain types of caring for people has been criminalized, a large group of Europeans assembled a course syllabus in 2019 on what they call “Pirate Care.” As the convenors of the project explained, “We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.”

Hence the idea of “pirate care” – and the need to offer humanitarian or lifesaving care even if the state chooses to criminalize it. The Pirate Care syllabus, developed by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, fashions itself as “a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of ‘care’ and ‘piracy.’ It proposes new and interesting ways for intervening in "one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.”

The care deficit of our time can be seen as the failure of various market/state institutions – for healthcare, housing, food, social support – to help those in desperate need.

In general, care is often the most vulnerable human service because markets often do not value care unless there is demonstrable "consumer demand." State bureaucracies like to offer regularized units of service to people, as if they were machines. Large, rules-driven institutions are simply incapable of "care."

And so care remains largely unpaid or poorly paid work. It is often gendered (and marginalized) as "women's work" or as work for people with nonwhite skin.

The Pirate Care syllabus aims to elevate care as something that arises, and is maintained, through commoning. In this sense, care is about resisting state power and markets, and in so doing, revealing how power relations in a society are grossly unequal. This helps explain why providing care is often akin to a political act, such as the Good Samaritan helping an "enemy."

The Pirate Care syllabus explores how providing humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees represents an elemental human act of connection and compassion. The syllabus offers readings about "pirate care" and suggests practical responses for understanding it through structured reflection, direct action, and “collective memory-writing.” The latter is the process of reminiscing and writing memories as a way to heal collective and personal emotional wounds, especially in the aftermath of a violent historical past.

The practitioners of pirate care see themselves as “experimenting with self-organization, alternative approaches to social reproduction, and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges.” This can mean civil disobedience and the risk of persecution for providing “unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against, and condemned to the status of disposable populations.” The Pirate Care Syllabus presents itself as an open, evolving “tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.”

I liked how the syllabus explains the political and power dynamics of care:

1. Caring is not intrinsically “nice”; it always involves power relations. Processes of discipline, exclusion and harm can operate inside the matrix of care.

2. Care labor holds the capacity to disobey power and increase our collective freedom. This is why when it is organized in capitalist, patriarchal and racist ways, it does not work for most living beings. We are in a global crisis of care.

3. There are no wrong people. Yet, caring for the “wrong” people is more and more socially discouraged, made difficult and criminalized. For many, the crisis of care has been there for a very long time.

4. Caring is labor. It is necessary and it is skilled labor.

5. Care labor is shared unfairly and violently in most societies, along lines of gender, provenance, race, class, ability, and age. Some are forced to care, while some defend their privilege of expecting service. This has to change.

6. Caring labor needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.

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For African-American farmers -- afflicted by the legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- the struggle for emancipation has not been easy. I was therefore excited to learn about Jubilee Justice, a fledgling project that is trying to reclaim farmland for BIPOC farmers and secure their economic livelihoods. Besides embracing cooperatives and community land trusts, Jubilee Justice is dedicated to an open-source, climate-friendly type of rice farming and to courageous "transformational learning journeys" for racial healing.

You can learn more about these experiments in commoning in my interview with Konda Mason on the latest episode of my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #30).

Konda Mason, cofounder & president of Jubilee Justice Mason, cofounder and president of the Louisiana-based Jubilee Justice, is a long-time activist, social entrepreneur, and mindfulness teacher. Raised on social justice values by a farm family east of Los Angeles, she later cofounded the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, which brings together progressive finance people to showcase new models of restorative economics and finance.

With Jubilee Justice, Mason decided that it is essential to confront issues of race and class as they manifest in land ownership, economics, culture, and our spiritual lives.

One way that the project does this is by helping reclaim land stolen from African Americans over the decades. There is a long and ugly history in American life of whites using various subterfuges – the legal power of eminent domain, discriminatory US Department of Agriculture lending, legal trickery, and more – to cheat African Americans out of their land.

As a 2019 New Yorker account of this history put it, "Between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland," resulting in a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. (See also these pieces on the theft of Black land in The Atlantic and The Nation.) Land theft has had predictable consequences on the ability of Black households to accrue wealth over generations, aggravating White/Black economic inequality that persists today.

Jubilee Justice is a modest attempt to redress this history by helping farmers acquire land and develop economically stable agricultural practices. One key tool in this regard is to decommodify and secure land by putting it in community land trusts, which protects it against market speculation and future sale.

"When you create a land trust and take the land out of private ownership and into a commons," said Mason, "the land becomes open to groups of people who can work the land and build on it. The land is not subject to the ups and downs of finance, nor can it be liquidated in the future. This approach defies our whole economic system, which allows certain people to get super-rich and others to have nothing." (For more on the potential of community land trusts for African-Americans, see a proposal for a "Black Commons," by Susan Witt, Executive Director of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.)

Through Jubilee Justice, African-American farmers are also using agricultural coops to build vertical supply chains as a way to protect themselves from market exploitation by big corporate players. Instead, farmer coops can have greater control over selling produce to markets and mutualize their collective gains.

Jubilee Justice has even larger ambitions, however. It has entered into a working alliance with a transnational network of farmers to develop a more climate-friendly form of rice farming. Known as the System of Rice Intensification, SRI is an open-source, community-driven style of rice farming whose techniques have been developed by farmers themselves, in India, Madagascar, Indonesia, and many other countries. SRI farming – coordinated and supported by Cornell University's agricultural college – does not depend on the Green Revolution practices using lots of water and fertilizer – and thus pollution and climate-destroying methane gases. It is a more of a localist strategy, with transnational collaboration, that improves rice yields and bolsters community food security while reducing methane emissions.

Even more impressive, Jubilee Justice is pioneering an experiment in racial reconciliation and healing. Its chief vehicles are "Jubilee Journey" encounter sessions that bring together wealthy white Americans and BIPOC wisdom-keepers. The point is to have honest, emotional reckonings with the realities of American racial history and capitalism that mainstream narratives downplay or ignore.

"We brought together all sorts incredible minds here in Louisiana, on a former plantation, with all of its trappings, where we meet in the Big House and have conversations about land, race, money, and our spiritual dimension," said Mason. The sessions often have had life-changing impacts for participants, helping them to understand the past and racial realities in new ways.

After five years, Jubilee Justice is still in its infancy, but it has already developed many productive, hopeful paths for moving forward. You can listen to my interview with Konda Mason here.

I'm happy to announce that this latest podcast episode includes a transcription of my interview with Konda Mason. Forthcoming episodes -- and some previously released ones -- will also include transcriptions. My deep thanks to Gane Ryan Duenas, a regular listener and commons enthusiast, for making this possible.

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It's exciting to see how an Indonesian artists collective, ruangrupa, is attempting to elevate the ideas of commoning in the international art world. A few years ago, ruangrupa, based in Jakarta, was selected to curate one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world, documenta. The event is a showcase for cutting-edge artistic work, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for only 100 days. This 15th edition of documenta ("documenta 15") confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.

Any artist knows that making a livelihood from one's creativity means coming to terms with the brutal realities of markets. The economics of painting, music, photography, and performance are each different, of course, but they generally privilege individual artists over groups, require that artworks be converted into commodities, and tend to splinter and transform coherent artistic communities as market players buy artworks they regard as prestigious, fashionable, or lucrative investments.

Ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul) This process can be necessary and benign, and at least help secure artists' livelihoods. But it can also end up corroding the ethic of collaboration and sharing that are indispensable to any creative genre. Whether it's jazz, hip-hop, painting, conceptual art, or sculpture, artists need each other to flourish. They need a community of caring colleagues who can mentor, criticize, inspire, imitate, and mutually support each other, especially when livelihoods are precarious.

Thanks to ruangrupa, documenta 15, which opened in June and will run through September, is not just an art exhibition. It's an attempt to re-imagine the political economy of art and artistic cultures.

My latest episode of Frontier of Commoning (Episode #29), I speak with Farid Rakun, a member of ruangrupa, who discusses how his collective used their documenta curation to convene a global assembly of artists to develop new ways to organize and support art-making.

Documenta 15 breaks new ground because this is the first time that an Indonesian or even Asian artist or group has been invited to curate the exhibition. Historically, documenta has featured European and Western artists, so the choice of ruangrupa as curators was clearly meant to give non-Western artistic sensibilities greater visibility and validation.

What may be more significant, however, is how ruangrupa has chosen to produce the event. It decided to abandon the traditional curation process by launching a massive experiment in artistic collaboration.

Over the past three years, the collective brought dozens of artists from around the world to discuss, deliberate, and collaborate in producing the exhibition. Through large and small democratic assemblies with a flavor of Occupy, artists decided whom to invite to exhibit, how to allocate funds, and how to develop new nonmarket infrastructures and processes to support artistic solidarity.

For example, ruangrupa decided that funds given to artists groups would not be treated as commissions to produce art. They see the funds, instead, as general support for artists' livelihoods. So the social meaning of the money is changed. It is not a market transaction; it is a recognition of the collective relationships that have enabled artists to exist as artists. The money is meant to recognize the ongoing struggles that artists overcome to produce their work, and a tribute to the ecosystems of artistic support. In this sense, artists' commissions were reimagined as a kind of universal income for a limited period, rather than transactional payment for services.

Farid Rakun of ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul) The animating spirit of runagrupa's bold experiment is called lumbung -- an Indonesian word for a shared rice barn in which surplus is stored and later allocated for collective benefit. Lumbung is an apt metaphor for the cultural sharing that ruangrupa is trying to bring to a higher level in the art world.

International art exhibitions have traditionally been discreetly aligned with art markets and all of their competitive greed and capitalist priorities. An artist featured in a major exhibition typically causes their reputation to soar, along with the future prices of their artworks. Everyone in the commercial ecosystem then scrambles to get a piece of the action.

But what if artists could develop relations of trust, cooperation, and social solidarity – not just in producing exhibitions, but in managing follow-on collaborations? What if artists could bypass the commercial feeding frenzy by developing their own collective vehicles of mutual support and sharing, outside of commercial markets?

After all, introducing money into artistic process often interferes with the sharing and collaboration that an artistic community needs. When markets enter the picture, talented artists often decide to leave their friends and colleagues behind to pursue (more lucrative) solo careers. Other artists may skew their works to pander to market trends. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but why should that be the only option for developing an artistic career?

Ruangrupa's brave experiment at documenta has been marred by one troubling incident. A German blogger accused an artwork by a Palestinian artist of containing antisemitic imagery, which became a major controversy in the German media. How that artwork relates to ruangrupa's curation or not remains a subject of debate.

The more enduring legacy of documenta 15 is likely to be that ruangrupa developed some exciting new structures of artistic curation and solidarity on an international scale. The exhibition has prototyped some impressive new forms of commoning at scale, in the spirit of lumbung, which may inspire other artistic communities to further develop and institutionalize these models after documenta 15 concludes in September.

You can listen to my interview with Farid Rakun here.

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Even though the oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface and provide half the oxygen we breathe, they tend to be "out of sight, out of mind," especially in landlocked nations or regions. It's therefore important to recognize that the market/state system is hard at work ravaging this sector of the natural world, too. Industrial-style fish trawlers are overexploiting fisheries, pushing many to the brink of collapse, and mining companies are chewing up the ocean floor in search of oil, gas, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare-earth minerals.

How might the commons address these horrific market enclosures? In my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #28), Guy Standing, an economist and scholar of the commons at SOAS University of London, offers some specific, practical answers. Standing has just published The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea, a book that synthesizes vast amounts of complicated maritime histories, international law, and ecological science to explain how commoning could curb the market/state's irresponsible, life-destroying treatment of oceans.

British economist and commoner

Guy Standing Standing sees the ecological destruction of the seas as the predictable result of 'rentier capitalism'. This is the economic system that privileges expansive property rights, financialization, and industrialized exploitation of "resources" over all else. Corporate interests working with governments like to call its rip-and-run practices "blue growth" -- but it is actually a story about the tragedy of the market.

Companies systematically attempt to "de-commons" coastal fishing communities, claim patents on deepsea lifeforms, and exploit offshore mineral deposits. The South African company De Beers Group, for examples, uses a fleet of specialized ships to scrape the sea bottom in search of diamonds, leaving deep scars and disruptions in marine ecosystems.

Standing offers lucid, readable chapters on the collusion between states and corporations in illegal fishing practices, and on the European Union's destructive Common Fisheries Policy and Brexit. He explains how aquaculture techniques could be a constructive answer, but how in the hands of corporate players aquaculture fisheries commodify and privatize blue commons communities rather than helping them.

The greatest contribution Standing makes in his book may be his proposals for commons-based solutions: empowering fishers and coastal communities, enacting new legal principles, and establishing trust funds to benefit commoners.

"Some new organizational forms are taking shape that have encouraging characteristics, based on principles of cooperativism and feminism," said Standing. These efforts recognize the "dangers of co-optation by the state, finance, and international philanthropy," he said, and therefore are not taken in by the progressive veneer on nasty, predatory policies.

Standing names a number of legal principles that ought to prevail, such as a "right to subsistence" for fishers on coastal communities, which should override industrial fishing rights. There should also be a "right to habitat" and a "right to social memory" among such communities, and "intergenerational equity" principles.

Standing's Blue Commons agenda also offers up the idea of "commons capital funds." The idea is to charge levies on corporate uses of ports, gas extraction, access to fishing grounds, and "bycatch" (the catching of unintended marine species, which causes ecological harm).

Money from levies would be put into a commons fund managed as a stakeholder trust for the benefit of everyone. The fund would yield regular dividends paid to everyone, much as the Alaska Permanent Fund uses its equity fund of revenues from drilling on state lands to generate dividends for every household in Alaska.

"If a company uses land or the seabed that belong to all of us as commoners, and makes a profit in the process," said Standing, "then we as commoners should be compensated. That's the principle."

In this spirit, Standing thinks that mega-cruise liners should be charged a steep levy simply for their normal operations. They emit huge amounts of pollution into the oceans and diesel emissions when docked at harbors. Commercial users of huge coastal ports should pay commoners, too, he said. "There are 485 mega-ports across the world, and they're all privately owned by corporations and corporate chains, who make a phenomenal amount of money from our ports!"

This sort of plunder of our common wealth is standard procedure in the oceans, he said. "The Queen of England has auctioned off large parts of the seabed to multinational corporations for so-called renewable wind farms," he noted. "This guarantees the Crown estate a flow of billions of pounds stretching into the future." But the Queen has no right to do this: "The seabed does not belong to the Crown. It belongs to the commons. I would say, 'Stop it!' and require compensation."

You can listen to the full interview with Guy Standing on the Blue Commons here.

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There is a tendency in national politics to praise "the local" as a zone of authenticity and popular legitimacy while quietly disempowering local action by consolidating power in the national government. It's one of those structural problems that doesn't get enough attention.

Fortunately, on Tuesday, June 21, the third annual World Localization Day will remind us of the need to elevate and strengthen localism. Through a series of in-person and virtual events in more than 20 countries, the event will celebrate the many efforts around the world to relocalize the economy and strengthen community bonds.

In previous years, World Localization Day took place on a single day, but this year the organizers of the event, Local Futures, have expanded the celebration into a full month. The schedule of events will focus on people across six continents who are organizing virtual and in-person events to bring attention to (for example) community gardens and co-ops, independent local businesses and credit unions, and local food systems and locally produced textiles.

World Localization Day will also feature some notable activists and thinkers, including Jane Goodall, Vandana Shiva, David Holmgren, Naomi Klein, and Satish Kumar, among others.

One goal of the event is to expand the very definition of "the economy" to include all sorts of social, nonmarket activities that make a community a great place to live. As E.F. Schumacher put it memorably in his famous book nearly fifty years ago, small is beautiful.

Local Futures is the group founded in the late 1970s by Helena Norberg-Hodge after she witnessed the happiness and community solidarity that she witnessed Ladakh, in the Indian Himalayas. Local Futures now has offices on four continents, and produces all sorts of materials that probe the systemic roots of our global crisis and demonstrate the huge benefits of localization as a strategic response.

For this year's World Localization Day, a new film will be released, "Planet Local: A Quiet Revolution." which shows how producing things locally or regionally, and building social ties among our neighbors, can make our lives more connected, happier, and more resilient.

More details at the event's website.

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If Earth is indeed Gaia, and we humans are a living part of Gaia, then maybe the living biosphere has something to say to us.

Recall that Gaia, the Mother Earth myth of the ancient Greeks, was reborn in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a modern scientific paradigm that sees the Earth as a dynamic living system.

Gaian science revolves around the idea that the earth's oceans, atmosphere, rocks, and living systems all interact in complex, intelligent ways to self-regulate the biophysical conditions of Earth so that life can flourish.Earth is not just a dead rock hurtling through the universe; it is an always-evolving living system whose many living organisms collectively contribute to its ecological stability for life.

Dr. Stephan Harding Dr. Stephan Harding has long been a leading scholar of Earth as an animate entity. As a cofounder of Schumacher College (England) and senior lecturer in holistic science, Harding is a pioneering earth scientist who has focused on deep ecology and the theory of Gaia.

His many books often build on the insights of his friend and colleague James Lovelock, the originator of Gaia theory, and on the work of microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who developed the once-controversial idea that symbiosis among living organisms is a driving force in evolution.

In my latest podcast, Episode #27, I talk with Stephan Harding about his latest book, Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul, in which he explores how Gaia manifests itself in human consciousness, feelings, and soul. Much of his book focuses on the power of Jungian depth psychology in helping us understand Gaia through the collective unconscious. He also probes medieval history to show how the imagery and observations of premodern alchemists can help us understand Gaia.

While resolutely empirical and scientific in a conventional sense, Harding also dares to explore a larger, neglected story: the mystery of how human consciousness, emotions, and spirituality are embedded in physical matter. He argues that this subjectivity of life is not a side-story or epiphenomenon, but a driving force in the biophysical evolution of life. Many of these arguments are rigorously presented in his previous books, such as Animate Earth (2006, reissued in 2016) .

But in Gaia Alchemy, Harding goes a step further and argues that each of us, as living creatures, are participants in Gaia, and that Gaia has things to say to us if only we would listen. Part of the problem is that we must overcome the human/nature divide that for 400 years has taught us to see nature as a dead object. We must tune into Gaia as a living mystery in which we are immersed.

“The [human] psyche takes part in the wider psyche of nature,” Harding asserts, arguing as a scientist that we must learn to develop a more holistic perception. By using certain techniques used by alchemists, who saw the world as a more integrated cosmos, Harding aims to overcome the dualistic habits of modern thought that separate mind and body, life and matter, and humanity and the Earth.

“Gaia alchemy heals the Cartesian split by making matter and psyche intensively aware of each other as an unbroken wholeness in the unus mundus," writes Harding. "As fact and image meld within us, an integrated style of consciousness is born – an epiphany happens that combines our deeply buried Indigenous soulful outlook with a modern mentality informed and shaped by the stunning discoveries of the contemporary sciences of the Earth.”

To tune into the life of Gaia, Hardin recommends that we put quantitative empiricism in its place along with conscious logic and rationality. We must learn to listen to the psyche, he writes. “Our culture has forgotten, for the most part, to pay attention to dreams,” he writes in the opening line to his book. We do not take symbols from the unconscious and alchemical images seriously.

Harding freely acknowledges that many aspects of medieval alchemy are "hogwash" by the lights of modern science. However, we moderns forget that many alchemists were the direct precursors of our brand of science. Their attempts to learn how life subsists within matter is not so crazy even though modern science has largely abandoned this line of inquiry.

The question of how life and physical matter are conjoined and integrated remains highly relevant to our times, Harding insists, if only because the mind cannot exist without the body or the rest of nature and life. The mind's hubris and narrow forms of knowledge have encouraged humans to indulge their fantasies of total rational control, and their disregard for other living systems. We very much need to learn about alchemical coniunctio, writes Harding: the blending of two substances that appear to be antithetical to each other, into one unified whole.

In arguing that modern science reconsider the Cartesian split of mind and body, Harding is obviously taking on an ambitious agenda. He argues for a new metaphysics and epistemology for modern science. Given many of the catastrophic consequences that Cartesian thinking has engendered through modern science, capitalism, and modern culture, our very survival as a species may hinge on finding a more integrated, embodied, and life-affirming metaphysics.

You can listen to my interview with Dr. Stephan Harding here.

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It takes a lot of effort by small-scale commons to get started, especially to raise and manage money, negotiate budgets, pay people, comply with tax laws, etc. That got easier with the rise of Open Collective, a new type of platform nonprofit that helps many types of collectives gather and spend money transparently.

You can consider Open Collective an infrastructure for commoning -- a backend system that makes it easier and more normal for people to manage money fairly, collectively, and with open accountability.

In the latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, I speak with Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, a nonprofit that handles the complicated, messy administrative and financial work for small, often-underfunded collectives. This work includes handling donations, providing fiscal sponsorship, making payments, and so forth, which are often too costly and complex for mutual aid groups, cooperatives, commons, and other small projects to manage.

Alanna Irving, COO of Open Collective Irving comes to the challenges of network-based governance with a wealth of firsthand experience. She was an early member of Enspiral, the pioneering New Zealand group that developed new organizational structures and culture for their online community. That project had two notable offshoots that helped pave the way for Open Collective: the software platforms known as Loomio, for group deliberation and decisionmaking, and Cobudget, an app for managing shared spending and allocations of money within a collective.

As an early participant in this journey, Irving became an expert in "distributed leadership" and peer governance in horizontal, networked organizations striving to live by open source principles. She also learned about cooperative governance.... technology that is designed to be participatory.... and radically collaborative uses of money.

Irving believes that it is entirely possible for people to self-manage themselves on horizontal networks, eliciting a diversity of talent and nurturing people's personal growth while serving the common good. But this challenge usually requires "hacking organizational structures with our values," as she puts it.

People also need to learn how to "harness the dark side of money and bring it into the light," and to deal frankly with issues of power. Irving has found that, in managing money and risk, "it's very helpful to do it together" because "I'm personally risk-averse. What I've found is that, if I can do it together with others, then I can actually take risks."

The same idea holds true for power. If the issues are frankly addressed, everyone's talent and initiative can shine in different ways, without relationships getting caught up in controversies about power inequities.

Open Collective helps reduce the risks and opacity of money-management by figuring out the many legal, financial, and tax complexities that small groups must navigate. Then it tries to help design legal and financial systems that are more aligned with the values of progressive-change organizations than, say, a corporation or a bank.

Started six years ago, Open Collective is now stable, breaking even financially, and growing in size as interest in its backend services surges. But the venture does not aspire to be an investor-driven, profit-maximizing success. It wants to be an infrastructure owned by its users. So the executive team is actively exploring an "Exit to Community" ownership plan at some point. This is a shared-wealth alternative to the standard IPO [Initial Public Offering] that is routinely that investors typically use to liquidate their investments and make serious money.

In addition, Open Collective is engaged in a "learning in public" process with its community of users to figure out how they should organizationally structure and govern themselves after an Exit to Community shift of ownership. Should Open Collective become, for example, a cooperative, a perpetual purpose trust, or a DAO [digital autonomous organization]?

As all this suggests, Open Collective does not want to be a merely transactional market enterprise, but one that fosters social solidarity, co-learning and peer governance in the course of managing money.

This is a real frontier for many small collectives, so it's a pleasure to see Open Collective thriving, growing, and dealing candidly with the complicated challenges. I find it thrilling to encounter such a promising infrastructure to enable commoning.

You can listen to my full interview with Alanna Irving here.

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In recent weeks, we commoners have lost three great visionaries. Each spawned robust institutions and movements to carry their visions forward; the continuing vitality of their projects confirm that their spirits remain very much with us. We should pause to reflect on and celebrate their towering contributions.

I'm talking about the British architect/philosopher Christopher Alexander, who invented the "pattern language" approach to urban design and building; Edgar Cahn, the creative American legal activist who invented timebanking and cofounded Antioch School of Law; and Gustavo Esteva, the post-development thinker and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca.

Christopher Alexander's Fearless Exploration into Aliveness and Design

I remember encountering Christopher Alexander's seminal book, A Pattern Language, in the late 1970s, a cultural moment that was erupting with all sorts of mind-blowing ideas. Alexander wanted to know why certain designs in architecture and urban spaces were consistently used across cultures and history. These include the proportions of space in rooms....the placement of windows....the design of public squares... the popularity of cafes in cities....among dozens of other forms. What accounts for their timeless appeal?

Alexander and his coauthors came to see that beauty, grace, and spiritual satisfaction actually play vital roles in the design of everyday life and buildings. Certain designs embody aliveness! But that quality can only be seen through a certain prism, which is what Alexander set out to name and analyze. He called his method a pattern language.

A pattern, in Alexander's view, describes "a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice."

Each solution is unique because the context of the problem -- the geography, culture, values, and history of the designers -- is always different. Yet there are regularities -- or patterns -- to be identified and studied. In A Pattern Language, Alexander identified 253 interrelated patterns in urban and building design.

As my late colleague Silke Helfrich and I began to think about the nature of commons as social systems, we saw how the pattern language methodology could help us explain how commons actually work -- because commons, like buildings, are not primarily about physical things. They are about the interactive social dynamics of humans as they engage with each other and the Earth.

Silke and I came to realize that there is no standard blueprint or prescriptive approach for explaining commons. Rather, each commons reflects its own creators' humanity and circumstances. It must organically grow over time, and thus reflect the cultural preferences, local conditions, etc. of that particular system. But patterns can help us identify the regularities and fractal similarities.

From 2002 to 2004, Alexander published a four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order, that summarizes his vision of how aliveness is imbued within buildings and the built environment. It's a longer presentation that can be summarized here (check out this Wikipedia summary). Let's just say that Alexander tried to explain how consciousness and spirit manifest themselves in physical structures like buildings (or commons). He saw the need to move beyond the mechanical, Newtonian mindset and reinterpret architecture as a cosmological act of creation -- a life process expressed through buildings and space.

Edgar Cahn: Inventing Institutional Systems of Care

I mourn as well the passing of Edgar Cahn, an American law professor who may be best known to commoners for creating Timebanking. An early commons colleague of mine, Jonathan Rowe, worked with Edgar to write Time Dollars, published in 1992. Its subtitle says it all: "The new currency that enables Americans to turn their hidden resource -- time -- into personal security and community renewal." (Time Dollars later became "Timebanking" as it went international.)

Timebanking is a service-barter system. People can earn one credit for every hour of service to someone (mowing a lawn, providing eldercare, etc.), and that credit can be used later to "buy" other services. In communities without much money -- e.g., the elderly and people with low-incomes -- Timebanking helps organize and mobilize people's care work. But it had a much deeper purpose as well -- to build new bonds of community and personal affection in a world decimated by market individualism and a culture driven by money.

The idea behind timebanking came from a place of deep compassion. As Edgar explained:

"There is a value in just 'being' who you are that systems do not create, cannot define or control, and may not necessarily satisfy what one wants," Edgar once said. "The freedom 'to be' is at the heart of those so-called inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Exercising those rights may need protection. But 'to be' means that one matters, that one's existence makes a difference."

Timebanking is a way for anyone, regardless of their talents or training, to make a positive difference in other people's lives, despite the countervailing pressures of the modern capitalist world.

Over the past twenty years, Timebanking has proliferated around the world in scores of contexts. Here, for example, is a profile of the Helsinki Timebank, which became so robust that the project attempted to persuade the city to let people pay their taxes with timebanking credits. (The city government rejected the idea.)

In the larger scope of Edgar's remarkable life, Timebanking was just one achievement. He was also an active force in starting a federally funded US system of legal services for the poor (Legal Services Corporation); spurring Native American tribes to fight for their sovereignty as nations within the US polity; and pioneering a new practice-based approach to legal education at Antioch School of Law (now the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law). Here are some further tributes to Edgar Cahn.

Gustavo Esteva: Encountering Life Beyond "Development"

It is painful to note, also, the loss of Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican philosopher, economist, activist and educator who made a big mark on his times, both within Mexico and in internationally. Based on his experiences among Indigenous peoples, as a guerrilla activist, a government official, and a disillusioned Marxist, Esteva saw firsthand the pathways of modern "development." Drawing on his varied experiences, he became an eloquent and ardent critic of it -- and a champion for more grounded forms of human agency and authentic ways of being.

After serving ten years as a top economic minister within the government, Esteva soured on statist politics and moved into the world of commoning in its various guises. After meeting the Catholic social critic Ivan Illich, Esteva became a fast friend, adopting many of Illich's critiques of capitalist modernity and championing the need for people to develop their own human agency and authentic ways of living. He became a fierce advocate for peasants, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized urban dwellers.

In this quest, Esteva rejected the idea that "reason" is the "ultimate horizon of intelligibility." For example, he explained that in modern life "reason became a substitute for God, without my knowing it; it became the ultimate referent, valid in and of itself. This new consciousness, typically Western for both believers and nonbelievers, presupposed a trust in reason that assumed it to be the objective and solid foundation of all human thought and behavior."

Esteva may be best known for his founding of Universidad de la Tierra (or Unitierra, 'University of the Earth'), based on the radical educational ideas of Illich and Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire. Unitierra provides free learning opportunities, especially for young people who have not completed school or vocational training, to learn communally what they are interested in.

In the mid-1990s, Esteva became a friend and advisor to the Zapitistas movement in Oaxaca as they struggled against repression by the Mexican government. He wrote numerous essays and books, including Grassroots Postmodernism, The Future of Development, and the essay"The Zapatistas and People's Power." Here is a rich profile of Esteva's remarkable life. I am proud to say that Gustavo contributed an essay to Silke Helfrich's and my edited anthology, The Wealth of Commons. It was entitled, "Hope from the Margins," which is a wonderful summation of his life's work.

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The general public may not give much thought to how scientists and scholars publish their work, but please know that it matters. Like so much else in the world, corporate markets have colonized this space, which means that turning business profits is the primary goal, not the easy, affordable sharing of knowledge.

Commercial academic publishers have long privatized and monetized academic research, which over time has resulted in an oligopoly of a few publishers able to charge exorbitant prices for their books and journal subscriptions. The impact has been greatest on researchers in the Global South and at smaller, less affluent colleges and universities, where it is harder to access and share the latest scientific and scholarly research.

Sam Moore of Radical Open Access Collective The most spirited response has come from the open access publishing movement. Open access, or OA, got its start twenty years ago as a way to publish academic books, journals, and other research that can be readily shared and copied. This was a break from the traditional publishing models that allowed major corporations to take researchers' copyrights and convert the fruits of academic commons into expensive proprietary products.

OA publications offered a refreshing alternative for making works permanently shareable at no or minimal cost. An example is open textbooks. They can rely on Creative Commons licenses to make the works legally shareable; print them using print-on-demand technology; and sell them at the cost of printing.

Open access not only helps scientists, scholars, and students build on the work of those who came before them. It assures a basic fairness -- to the academic fields that generated the knowledge in the first place, and to taxpayers who often pay (via the government) for research in science, medicine, and the humanities. Why should corporate publishers get to own the copyrights and privatize the gains of publicly funded research and public universities?

To explore the state of open access publishing today, I spoke recently with Sam Moore, an organizer with the Radical Open Access Collective on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (episode #25). Moore is also a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library in England, and a research associate at Homerton College.

My interview digs into the oligopoly control of academic publishing, the high prices of academic journals and books, the lack of choices among many scientists and scholars, the limited leadership of university administrations, and some open-access innovations now being developed.

While open access publishing is no longer a novelty, the Radical Open Access Collective believes that much of it has been co-opted or sidetracked over the years by commercially oriented presses and funders. Many universities and foundations are happy to outsource the publishing process to commercial enterprises even though that means unnecessarily high prices, access restrictions, and a growing divide between rich and struggling academic institutions..

For the most part, commercial academic publishers have adapted their business models to accept the reality of open networks; they realize they can no longer maintain the total proprietary control they once enjoyed. But the new commercial regimes they've invented, while ostensibly providing open access, still allow publishers to make a ton of money and dictate the ways in which scholarly and scientific knowledge can be accessed and circulate.

OK, so readers are no longer paying as much. Instead, many OA publishers have simply shifted expenses to authors. They often must pay upfront "article processing charges" [APCs] and "book processing charges" [BPCs], which still impedes the circulation of knowledge, albeit in different ways.

The Radical Open Access Collective think there are better ways. That's why it came together in 2015 to form a community now comprised of 70 scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. ROAC is committed to developing and championing “non-commercial, not-for-profit and/or commons-based models for the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge.”

"What brings the scholar-led projects of the Radical Open Access Collective together," its website declares, "is a shared investment in taking back control over the means of production in order to rethink what publishing is and what it can be.

"One of the ways we try to achieve this is by shifting our unpaid labour away from toll access journals and publishers who do not allow authors to self-archive copies of their work online, or who have high charges for annual subscriptions, APCs [article processing charges] and BPCs [book processing charges]."

"Research access is a fundamental right," Moore insists. "It's good for democracy, it's good in many ways for the market. It's good to have free and accessible research for everything." The Radical Open Access Collective is one of the key forces trying to show how commoning in scientific and scholarly publishing can actually work.

You can listen to Sam Moore's interview on Frontiers of Commoning here.

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Here's a fanciful but almost-real scenario: the bees, squirrels, geese, bugs, trees, and other species of your local park have decided that they've had enough of human aggression and abuse. They're not going to take it anymore, and rise up and demand equal rights with humans. Through a series of interspecies assemblies, a treaty is negotiated to ensure that every living being in the local ecosystem can flourish.

This scenario is a "live action role-playing" (LARP) game devised by Furtherfield, a London-based arts collective as part of its stewardship of part of the Victorian-era Finsbury Park. Over the next three years, Furtherfield is inviting humans to don masks and play the roles of each of seven species in negotiating "The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025" -- the name of the project.

By casting humans as beetles and squirrels attending Interspecies Assemblies as delegates of their species, the LARP aims to help people develop "empathic pathways to nonhuman lifeforms through play." There is even a Sentience Dial to help different species communicate with each other. Who knows, this process may actually make Finsbury Park a more lush and lively place?

This adventure in animism is just one project that Furtherfield has hosted over the past 25 years, most of which blend art, digital technologies, and social action in some creative fashion. In my latest Frontier of Commoning podcast (Episode #24), I speak with Ruth Catlow about Furtherfield's distinctive approach to participatory art as a way of thinking anew about the world.

Catlow, an artist, curator, and co-leader of Furtherfield, has been a guiding visionary for its many artistic projects since its inception in 1996. She helps orchestrate collaborations with various local, national and international partners -- but especially with ordinary people. The point of its many artworks and technology projects is to try to get us to see the world differently, and to honor the role of art in envisioning new futures for ourselves.

Most of Furtherfield's projects take place in its green space and gallery in Finsbury Park, London, and in various digital spaces that bring together artists, techies and activists. Local officials have invited Furtherfield to use the park as a participatory canvas for its artistic projects. Traditionalists might call the group an arts center, but Furtherfield playfully calls itself a "de-center" because its work is so outward-looking and network based.

Ruth Catlow Furtherfield sees itself is a convenor of artistic experiments that engage people in clever, provocative, and playful ways. The explorations are deeply rooted in open source technologies and philosophies while striving to -- in Furtherfield's words -- "disrupt and democratize existing hegemonies" and "re-landscape the terrain."

For example, when countless Black Lives Matter protests were rocking the US and cities around the world, many people began to question why slaveholder-businessmen and military generals were honored with bronze statues in public parks. Furtherfield decided to open up a public conversation about who or what should instead be celebrated atop pedastals in the park.

The People's Park Plinth project invited artists to propose new people or things to be honored in the park. The medium for this conversation was the smartphone. People strolling in the park could scan QR codes affixed to trees or pedestals, and instantly watch a video about the spot in the park. In effect, the scheme turned "the entire park into a platform for public digital artworks [that] asks you to pick the one you want for your park," as the project described itself.

Anyone could vote on a number of proposed artworks. The one that won -- 'Based on a Tree Story,' by Ayesha Tan Jones -- won was an artwork that used QR codes on a tree to summon a video of the the tree sprite who lived there. ("A site specific, sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite that tells tales of the tree’s past, present and future.")

'Based on a Tree Story' artwork in Finsbury Park The public voting for the artworks was itself quite novel. Rather than tallying just one vote per person for the preferred artwork, each participant was given a number of votes that could be spread among as many artworks as they wished. This scheme, called "quadratic voting," doesn't just calculate which project gets a majority of votes, but rather indicates which ones people feel most passionate about. The system is meant to overcome the "tyranny of the majority" problem that overrides minority voices, and cases in which strong factions act as spoilers.

One of Furtherfield's more intriguing roles has been to host a laboratory and series of debates among artists and techies about how blockchain software could help reinvent the arts in an age of networks. The point was to explore how the cultural sector could develop "pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society – in particular through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs)...."

Furtherfield has wanted "to end gatekeeping and elitism in the artworld" and "bring this spirit of deep and radical friendship as a way to build resilient and mutable systems for scale-free interdependence and mutual aid." But it also wanted to move beyond the libertarian individualism that animates so many DAOs in the tech sector.

Two books have resulted from Furtherfield's convenings: Artists RE:thinking the Blockchain (2017), about critical artistic engagement with blockchain; and Radical Friends, an anthology to be published in May 2022 about the hazards of digital autonomous organizations (DAOs) in the art world and commons-based DAO alternatives. (Furtherfield's alternative goes by the acronym DAOW, which stands for "DAOs with Others.")

You can listen to the podcast conversation with Ruth Catlow here.