Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier: Recent Episodes
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier
In the face of real estate markets that cater to upscale buyers and the resulting scarcity of affordable housing, a variety of co-living arrangements are flourishing....though they remain largely invisible to mainstream culture. In this episode, two notable architects -- Neeraj Bhatia of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Antje Steinmüller of the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning -- describe their research into the social dynamics of co-living. They also explain how architectural design, commoning, and municipal policies can support co-housing, co-ops, intentional communities, and communes. To make co-iiving options a robust sector of housing, these strategies need far more attention. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
With collaborators Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon has produced a gloriously eccentric and sumptuous folk history of land rights, enclosure and resistance among English commoners. Their book, 'Common People' (Watkins, 2025) features stunning historical paintings, etchings, and folk relics from local cultures of commoning, as well as contemporary photographs of commoners who continue these traditions as Ramblers, Gypsies, travelers, squatters, festival-goers, ravers, antinuclear protesters, and nature lovers. The visual imagery is augmented by a series of insightful essays about "vanquished peasants," vagabonds, rural rebels, and folk traditions, revealing how historical memory about the commons is still very much alive in England. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
By applying commoning practices in rural towns in the Italian Alps, Bianca Elzenbaumer, a community economies designer and cofounder of Brave New Alps, is catalyzing many new forms of rural development and ecosocial transformation. Working from a repurposed railway station in Vallagarina, the group relies on radical pedagogy, "feral approaches" to community economies, and lots of DIY making and organizing. Projects don't aim for market development and conventional investment, but for participatory vehicles that honor social imagination, improvisation, and collective impact. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
In his new book 'Ecocivilization', Jeremy Lent offers a bracing vision for how humanity can escape the destructive imperatives of capitalism and create ecologically centered societies that work for everyone. The book draws on dozens of real-world projects and social movements to describe what a stable, humane world would look like and what strategies can get us there. Chapters focus on significant socio-economic changes that must occur in business organization, agriculture, technology, finance, infrastructure, law, global governance, among other areas. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
Benjamin Mako Hill has spent years studying the distinctive social dynamics and governance structures of collaborative websites, from open source software (GNU/Linux), wikis (Wikipedia), collaborative filtering (Reddit) and a range of social media. A noted hacker, activist, and computer science professor at the University of Washington, Hill has come to see that digital commons go through developmental stages, each with its own special needs. Fledging projects need to attract contributors by remaining open and welcoming, for example, while more established collaborative websites need to protect their shared code, curated information, and reputations from outside political and corporate players that attempt to capture their "epistemic legitimacy." More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
Federico Savini, a professor in environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, talks about the state of the degrowth movement today -- its priorities, challenges, and hotspots of possibility. As the author of the book 'Post-Growth Planning' and many essays on degrowth, Savini advocates many policy changes that could make agriculture, energy, transit, and social services more ecologically sustainable. Of course, degrowth as a political agenda faces formidable challenges, especially in the US and Europe. But coming to terms with climate change will ultimately require reducing economic growth, which is tightly linked to carbon emissions usage. Projects based on commons, the Solidarity Economy, cooperatives, cosmo-local production, bioregionalism, mutual aid, and more, offer promising pathways forward. More on the commons at https://www.bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
For the past five years, Stéphanie Leyronas has been part of an internal team at the French Development Agency (AFD) exploring how it might pioneer new forms of development by supporting commoning in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Instead of promoting the linear "progress narrative" of capitalist markets and growth, AFD's efforts seek to strengthen social collaboration and shared benefits, drawing upon the distinctive strengths of each local context. The experiments are forging a Global North-assisted development approach rooted in traditional "relational logics" of cooperation, co-learning, and long-term eco-stewardship. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
Lewis Hyde, a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic and poet, wrote two classic books on aspects of the commons -- 'The Gift,' in 1979, about the power of gift-exchange in forging and maintaining social reciprocity, and 'Common as Air,' in 2010, about creativity as a force nourished by cultural commons. In this episode, Hyde discusses the origins of his striking perspectives on creativity as a gift that must be shared ("the gift must always move"), and the ways in which the US Founding Fathers sought to protect the free circulation and sharing of knowledge rather thane excessive private control through copyrights and patents. More more on the commons, visit www.Bollier.org. Credit for photo of Hyde: Anna Schuleit Haber For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
As the capitalist economy grows more expensive and predatory, Stephanie Rearick and her colleagues are building an alternative social economy that meets people’s needs through care and cooperation. As founder of the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and Dane County Timebank in Wisconsin, Rearick is a leading champion of mutual aid projects as a force for building the "real wealth" of community. She also works internationally through Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (HUMAN), a global network of networks dedicated to building the mutual aid economy. More on Mutual Aid Network at https://mutualaidnetwork.org/man. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
At a time when the superstructures of modern civilization seem terminally messed up, the authors of 'Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human' argue that we must start a new conversation about the nature of being and modern myths of the self. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar, cultural studies scholar Michal Osterweil, and biologist Kriti Sharma draw on a diversity of sources – evolutionary science, cultural studies, art and poetry, Indigenous practices, wisdom traditions, and more – to explain the deep interdependence of all living beings: a perspective can help us develop a new political economy and culture. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.
What might the world look like if capitalist growth and carbon emissions continue, and modern civilization collapses? Chris Smaje, a small farmer and writer in England, extrapolates from existing trends to sketch a vision of post-capitalist social economies. His new book, 'Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft,' envisions a world that is largely rural, decentralized, and grounded in local ecosystems and self-reliance. The book is neither a doomer nor survivalist tract, but rather an intelligent, speculative inquiry into models of collective organization, bottom-up governance, and ethical belief that will shape "local livelihood communities."
As climate change and other crises makes the economy and everyday life more precarious, innovative forms of bioregional action are needed to respond to 'Gaia on the move," says Isabel Carlisle, founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in Devon, England. Carlisle describes the importance of building local ecological expertise, participation, and institutions to build community resilience in the years ahead, especially because centralized nation-states will not be able to do the job. The BLC is part of a growing worldwide interest in 'bioregioning' -- activism, projects, and philosophical shifts to build a new type of socio-ecological economy. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, is a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and decentralized technologies. Here, Rabble explains how network protocols are critical infrastructure for enabling -- or impeding -- commons and open markets, not to mention privacy, free speech, and community control. Their ambition is a future in which everyone has "access to authentic, private online communities built on care, connection, and sustainable relationships.” [More on commons at www.Bollier.org.]
Gustavo Salas describes the remarkable culture of commoning at Cecosesola, a federation of 30 rural and urban cooperatives in Venezuela that serves hundreds of thousands of people with fresh produce, healthcare, funerary services, and many other goods and services. Cecosesola's priority is to create spaces of trust, togetherness, and self-improvement for its 1,300 associates while meeting the everyday needs of low-income families. Market prices and norms are secondary. For its work in escaping the transactional, capitalist-driven mindset and pioneering forms of provisioning that are fair, personally enriching, and much more affordable, Cecosesola won the Right Livelihood Award in 2022.
Jack Kloppenburg has been a leading figure in the fight to protect seed-sharing commons over the past forty years. It's a struggle that began in the 1980s as large ag-biotech companies have sought to make seeds privately owned and proprietary using all sorts of legal, technological, and market restrictions. Kloppenburg has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison since 1985 and a founder of the Open Source Seed Initiative. OSSI leads a movement of farmers, breeders, gardeners, and small seed companies dedicated to building a culture of openly shareable seeds and breeding innovation.
Tom Llewellyn, Executive Director of Shareable, describes the countless varieties of organized sharing that it supports through its journalism, organizing, and partnerships. In recent years, Shareable has helped amplify the work of mutual aid networks, expand the Libraries of Things concept, championed new forms of urban commoning, and develop new infrastructures of sharing. Its work on creative, bottom-up collaborations also showcases dozens of vanguard ideas, such as peer-to-peer lending, DIY bike lanes in cities, emergency battery networks for neighborhoods, and "Permablitz" conversions of suburban backyards into micro-farms for vegetables.
What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? This episode hears from artists' collectives in three countries to learn how they organize their commoning practices. The three collectives are the "-" (dash) collective in Iran (with an artist who goes by the pseudonym "M" for political reasons); Papaya Kuir, a lesbo-transfeminist collective for Latin American migrants in the Netherlands (with Mexican-born Alejandra Maria Ortiz); and Indonesian artists who practice 'nongkrong' (Angga Cipta, aka "ACip," on left in photo, and MG Pringgotono, founder of Serrum and Gudskul, on right). More on commons at www.Bollier.org.
Radio Kingston host and executive director Jimmy Buff interviews David Bollier about his new, updated and revised edition of 'Think Like a Commoner,' originally published in 2014. This popular introduction now includes material on the commons as a living, relational organism, bioregionalism and the relocalization of economies, governance of digital commons, legal hacks to support commons, and new ways for state power to facilitate commoning. More about the book at https://www.thinklikeacommoner.com. More on Bollier and the commons at https://www.Bollier.org.
Anthropologist Amber Huff, coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures at the University of Sussex in England, explains how popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, podcasts, and video, among others, can illuminate contemporary commons, enclosures, and the disorienting crises of capitalist modernity. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like, and how can subjective experiences and emotions be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?
Pirate Care is a term used to describe creative, public acts that challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene to show compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people. Pirate Care also highlights how the state, markets, or patriarchal families have politicized particular types of care by declaring them unpatriotic, a threat to business revenues, or unacceptably kind to people of the "wrong" citizenship, race, or gender identity. In their new book, 'Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity' (Pluto Press), activists Valeria Graziano (Italy; England) and Tomislav Medak (Croatia) explain the varieties and logics of pirate care. (The book's third coauthor is Marcell Mars (Croatia; England)).
Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous researcher in the Department of Psychology at University of California Berkeley, discusses how contemplative practices in Indigenous traditions can expand mindfulness, heartfulness, compassion, and planetary flourishing. Her new book, 'Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Well-Being,' argues that relationality lies at the heart of Indigenous cultures, as seen in seven key principles. Celidwen explains that happiness is "only possible in community, when we cultivate our relationships toward all kin, from human to more-than-human, and to our living Earth." Learning to listen mindfully to life is an essential process in healing the Earth, the alienation of modern, Western cultures, and Indigenous cultures traumatized by genocide and other colonial traumas. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Zoe Gilbertson is a British fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up, literally. In an effort to curb the ecological harms of fast fashion, global supply chains, and relentless consumption of clothes, Gilbertson is figuring how fiber crops like hemp and flax could be grown bioregionally to produce textiles and, in the process, catalyze localized garment design, production, and distribution as well as bioregional clothing cultures. This vision is part of a larger, expanding movement of fashion innovators who are incubating "seed to closet" initiatives, traditional clothing crafts, mending and upcycling projects, and other types of fashion commons. More on Gilbertson: https://liflad.substack.com. More on the commons: https://www.bollier.org.
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and therefore an important incubator of just, regenerative, self-determined communities that move beyond the market/state paradigm. The traveling international exhibit, 'An Atlas of Commoning,' which he helped curate, and his course on 'Commoning in the City', study how participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public partnerships are reinventing urban life. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, discusses the history of bioregional activism in Cascadia and current challenges and strategies. Cascadia consists of three watersheds in the Pacific Northwest extending from British Columbia to northern California. For more than 40 years, Cascadia activists have been in the vanguard of a larger, now resurgent global movement. Its general goals are to reinvent markets, cultures and identities in ways that foster bioregional self-reliance and responsible stewardship of watersheds, energy, agriculture, wildlife, and other living systems.
Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in sociology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, has launched an ambitious international project to invent noncapitalist forms of land conservation. He calls it "convivial conservation." Instead of locking up land as wilderness or using it to make money through ecotourism and genetic patents, "convivial conservation" is about enabling humans to become integral, respectful co-creators with nature. The new Convivial Conservation Centre, with staff in five countries and many allies worldwide, champions constructive, symbiotic human relationships with local ecosystems and the bridging of the deep divide separating humans from nature. More on commons: www.Bollier.org
Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world. For the Global South, long victimized by colonialism and capitalist extraction, oases culture embodies an eco-friendly, alternative vision of development. For the industrial West, oases reveals the importance of commoning in building stable, regenerative economies in sync with ecosystem needs. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. A PDF transcript of Episode #52 can be found here: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Safouan_Azouzi_Ep._52_transcript.doc.pdf
Chilean political philosopher Camila Vergara boldly argues in her book 'Systemic Corruption' that decay and corruption are inevitable even in liberal, representative systems because oligarchs end up capturing state governance and law. Ordinary people rarely have their own plebeian institutions to express their interests and curb the abuses of the elite. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman history and four modern political philosophers, Professor Vergara makes an audacious case for constitutionally ordained plebeian institutions such as citizen assemblies through which citizens could propose and veto legislation and political appointees, among other powers. More on the commons: https://www.bollier.org. More on the commons at Bollier.org.
The artistic duo known as Cooking Sections -- Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the Royal College of Art in London -- use their virtuoso visual, performance, and installation artworks to jolt people into new understanding of local ecosystems, capitalism, and food. Their work, shown at prestigious venues around the world to great acclaim, dramatizes how modern diets are products of "a globally financialized landscape," ranging from artificially colored farmed salmon to eco-destroying monoculture crops. But Cooking Sections also uses its art to work closely with farmers, restaurants, schools, politicians, and citizens to reinvent local foodways through commoning. (Photo by Aman Askarizad, IHME)More on the commons at Bollier.org.
To counter the "implicit feudalism" that is the norm on the Internet, activist-scholar Nathan Schneider explains the potential of democratic governance in online life and its importance to "real world" democracy. A professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Schneider argues that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radical and democratic renaissance." But this will require progressive activists to heed the lessons of various social and decolonial movements throughout history, and to find the resolve to use the technologies in creative ways.More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Will Ruddick, development economist and founder of Grassroots Economics, has spent the past 16 years in Kenya developing innovative "community inclusion currencies" for dozens of poorer communities. By combining ancient mutual aid practices with credit vouchers (circulating as a kind of money) and digital ledger technologies (to expand the scale of exchange), people are able to develop their own economic commons to meet everyday needs. Ruddick credits the success of the currencies to "commitment pooling" protocols that have long been used by Indigenous and traditional communities. Blog post: https://www.bollier.org/blog/will-ruddick-commitment-pooling-build-economic-commons More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer, and energy democracy advocate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, has spent the past 15 years developing the innovative Solar Commons model. This powerful prototype uses decentralized solar arrays to generate steady revenue streams to build community wealth. Through partnership agreements, four Solar Commons trusts are now channeling funds to low-income neighborhoods, rural communities, regenerative farming, and Native American food sovereignty. More about Solar Commons: www.solarcommons.org More about commons: www.Bollier.org.More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people, Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator, has launched an open, collaborative project to develop a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus. Instead of framing "the economy" as a growth-obsessed machine standing apart from society and nature, Brandsberg-Engelmann showcases alternative economic approaches such as 'Doughnut Economics,' the circular economy, and feminist critiques of care, as well as value-creating sectors like households and commons. The project has attracted strong international attention and will likely debut in September 2024. (More at www.regenerativeeconomics.earth.)More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Professor Aaron Perzanowski of the University of Michigan Law School explains how many artistic communities flourish as commons, without copyright protections that privilege private ownership and marketization. Tattoo artists, fashion designers, chefs, and stand-up comedians are among the communities that don't strictly own their primary creative works. This ethic of bottom-up collaboration and sharing also flourishes in many repair commons, where resourceful people have created pools of shared knowledge and peer-support to fix broken products. Corporate manufacturers are trying to suppress the "right to repair" movement, but repair-commoners are making significant gains these days.More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Shane O'Donnell, a sociologist and researcher, has been at the forefront of the "device activism" and #WeAreNotWaiting movement, a globe-spanning community of techies and people living with diabetes who have pioneered patient-led innovations in medical devices and healthcare. Outflanking a stodgy, risk-averse medical device industry, the movement has relied on commoning to develop the Tidepool Loop device, the first open source, interoperable, and automatic insulin-delivery system, and Nightscout, a collectively managed data system for treating diabetes more effectively. More on the commons at Bollier.org.
The best term for this era of geological history is not the Anthropocene, says Mihnea Tănăsescu, a research professor at the University of Mons in Belgium, but the Ecocene. "The increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life” requires us to shed our anthropocentric notions, and recognize our deep, entangled relationships with nature and other living beings. In this interview, Tănăsescu talks about his book 'Ecocene Politics' and explains what it means to unlearn the modern mindset and cultivate a relational ethics of reciprocity, cooperation, and care for living beings. We must learn to renovate our legacy forms of political economy and culture, and develop the infrastructures and practices to support mutualism. More on the commons at Bollier.org.
Hannes Gerhardt, a professor of geography at the University of West Georgia (US), talks about his new book, 'From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism', especially as it applies to digital technology and online life. While Big Tech monopolies have crushed the hopeful experimentation that once prevailed in Internet culture, Gerhardt argues that commoning and technology might engineer a transition away from capitalism through "compeerism," a lens that highlights the counter-capitalist possibilities. More on the commons: http://www.Bollier.org. Downloadable PDF transcript of this episode: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Hannes_Gerhardt_Episode_42_transcript.pdf
Natasha Hulst, Director of the European Land Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, describes a spirited campaign by commoners to build an urban farm and green space, Voedselpark, or Food Park, on the edge of Amsterdam. While climate change and global economics argue for relocalizing agriculture, city officials and businesses are determined to build a big-box distribution center on the unspoiled land. The question at hand: Will a famously progressive city double-down on capitalist growth and consumerism as its vision for the future, or can it embrace a modest experiment in climate-friendly land use and commoning?
Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, has been at the forefront of ambitious campaigns to create novel legal doctrines for "community rights," "the rights of nature," and more recently, "self-owning land." The primary goal is to expand democratic self-determination, especially at the local level, and provide stronger legal protections for land, water, animals, and other elements of living ecosystems. More on the commons at Bollier.org. Downloadable PDF transcript: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Thomas_Linzey_transcript_Episode_40.pdf
Long-time activist Alnoor Ladha and former program officer Lynn Murphy explain why so many philanthropies aren't really interested in system change. In their book 'Post Capitalist Philanthropy', they explain how large foundations are more intent on reproducing capitalist modernity and its norms than in moving beyond the growth economy. The real challenge for philanthrophy, say Ladha and Murphy, is to help the world move to a post-capitalist economy and culture that overcomes the cultural traumas of Western conquest and colonality.
Leah Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York, showcases the history of African-American farming and Indigenous land traditions in her new book 'Black Earth Wisdom' in which sixteen Black elders of various backgrounds discuss the intertwined fate of the earth and our spiritual lives. The book brings attention to often-neglected protectors of the Earth such as enslaved herbalists, seeds-savers, scientist-mystics like George Washington Carter, artists, musicians, poets, and earth-centered religious traditions. More about the commons: www.Bollier.org. PDF transcript of this interview: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Leah_Penniman_transcript_Episode_38.pdf
How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way? Professors Sheila R. Foster of Georgetown University and Christian Iaione of Luiss Carli University in Rome, share their insights into this topic after years of study and collaborative experimentation. Their new book, 'Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities,' describes lessons from Elinor Ostrom's research, the six distinct phases of the "co-cities protocol," and the work of the interdisciplinary research clinic LabGov, among other things. More about the commons at Bollier.org. A PDF transcript of this episode can be found here: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Foster__Iaione_Episode_37_transcript.pdf
Dorn Cox is a New Hampshire 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 crop yields, soil health, and ecosystem resilience, especially in the face of climate change. Here, Cox talks about his new book 'The Great Regeneration' on these themes, and the encouraging vistas of possibility that open source hardware, data analytics, knowledge-sharing and localism are opening up. [PDF of transcript: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Dorn_Cox_Episode_36_transcript.pdf More on the Commons: https://www.bollier.org]
As Director of the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Binna Choi is in the vanguard of exploring how commoning can be used to make art and curate exhibitions. Choi and her colleagues in Utrecht, Netherlands, see commoning as an organizing principle for how artists can produce art collaboratively, in service to the community. As the Institute puts it, "Art is an imaginative way of doing and being which connects, heals, opens, and moves people into new social visions." PDF transcript available at https://www.bollier.org/binna-choi-podcast-transcript-episode-35. More on commons: https://www.Bollier.org [Photo credit: Francisco Baquerizo, 2022]
John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world. A Brit with extensive academic and journalistic background in design, Thackara is an independent writer, activist and thinker who is probing the idea of "designing for life." For him, this means elevating the many brave local projects that are pioneering new eco-friendly, socially constructive ways of living while critiquing corporate greenwashing ploys like "net-zero" and "sustainability reporting," and the financialization of nature.
Credits: Transcript: Gane Ryan Duenas. Theme music: Peter Buffett. Opening intro: Jimmy Buff.
BIPOC farmers -- many afflicted by the persistent legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- generally do not have an easy path forward. To help inaugurate a different history, Jubilee Justice, a small Louisiana organization, is developing an ambitious array of commons-oriented projects. As cofounder and president Konda Mason explains, these strategies include community land trusts as a way to secure farmland in perpetuity; cooperatives that help protect farmers from market exploitation and discriminatory practices; an open-source-style of climate-friendly agronomy known as the System of Rice Intensification; and the hosting of "transformational learning journeys" to help White and BIPOC Americans heal the wounds of American slavery and racism.
When the Indonesian artists collective ruangrupa was selected to curate the prestigious international art exhibition Documenta, held every five years in Germany, the group made a bold choice: to prototype a new type of commons-oriented political economy for art-making. In this episode, Ruangrupa member Farid Rakun explains how the exhibition not only showcases many first-rate artists from marginalized countries. Ruangrupa's curation also became a massive experiment in artistic commoning, with democratic assemblies of artists deciding how the exhibit would be organized, funds allocated, and noncapitalist infrastructures of social solidarity built. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul, 2019)
Guy Standing, an economist and scholar of the commons at SOAS University of London, talks about his new book, 'The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea'. He argues that overfishing and destructive deepsea mining are predictable results of 'rentier capitalism', the market/state system that privileges expansive property rights, financialization, and industrialized fishing practices. To help restore marine ecosystems and coastal fishing communities, Standing proposes a detailed 'Blue Commons' agenda that relies on commoning, commons-based legal regimes, and stakeholder trusts.
Dr. Stephan Harding, a cofounder of Schumacher College (England) and senior lecturer in holistic science, is a pioneering scientist focused on earth sciences, deep ecology, and the theory of Gaia. His work stands on the shoulders of his friend and colleague James Lovelock, the originator of Gaia theory, and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who bravely championed the idea of symbiosis as a driving force in evolution. In his new book, 'Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul,' Harding explores how Gaia manifests itself in human consciousness, feelings, and soul, and how Jungian depth psychology and the history of medieval alchemy can guide us to new insights.
It takes a lot of hard work to get small-scale commons started, especially with complications of managing money, budgets, and tax and legal compliance. These challenges have gotten easier since the rise of Open Collective, a nonprofit platform that acts a kind of commons-enabling infrastructure. In this episode, Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, explains the challenge of "hacking organizational structures with our values," the benefits of distributed leadership, and the confidence that comes from managing risk together.
Open access is a term used to describe academic books, journals, and other research that can be freely copied and shared rather than tightly controlled by large commercial publishers as expensive, proprietary product. Over the past 20 years, this vision has fallen far short of its original ambitions, however, as large publishers have developed new regimes to control the circulation of scientific and scholarly knowledge and charge dearly for it. Since 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective has been championing experimental, noncommercial and commons-based alternatives. In this interview, Sam Moore, an organizer of the Collective, takes stock of the state of open access publishing.
Ruth Catlow is an artist, curator, and co-leader of Furtherfield, a London-based arts collective that has been convening playful, participatory art projects for more than 25 years. The group's artistic experiments -- deeply rooted in open source technologies and philosophies -- use digital platforms and its green space and gallery in Finsbury Park to invite people to imagine new shared futures. The aim, in Furtherfield's words, is to "disrupt and democratize existing hegemonies" and "re-landscape the terrain."
British activist Sara Arnold and Dutch fashion scholar/activist Sandra Niessen explain their vision for "a radical defashion future" driven by degrowth, decolonization, and commoning. As two leaders of Fashion Act Now, they are part of a growing network of dissident fashionistas trying to make the global clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and responsive to climate change. They argue that the fashion industry needs a serious economic and cultural makeover to curb its colossal waste and energy use, and allow a rich pluriverse of clothing cultures to flourish.
Why is there so much hunger in the world today when the global food system produces, and wastes, amazing quantities of food? Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist and PhD Research Fellow at the Universite catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, points to our treatment of food as commodities, as traded in heavily subsidized markets dominated by large corporations. In this podcast, Vivero explains how growing and distributing food through commons (instead of globally consolidated, extractivist markets) can help make food far more accessible, affordable, and nutritious for everyone.
David Cayley has written a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his late friend and colleague, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), 'Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey', which reveals the ongoing relevance of Illich's searing social critiques. Illich was a radical Christian, cultural historian and itinerant scholar who soared to international fame in the 1970s with such books as 'Medical Nemesis,' 'Deschooling Society' and 'Tools for Conviviality,' which criticized professional institutions for diminishing our humanity. Illich helped lay the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning by validating the power of “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring that the mainstream economy and political culture ignores.
When he died in 2012, David Fleming -- a polymath thinker among the earliest to address Peak Oil -- left behind an unusual book manuscript about climate change, the fragility of capitalism, and the likely nature of our post-capitalist future. Fortunately, Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist who was Fleming's associate, shepherded the manuscript to publication as 'Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It' and a companion volume, 'Surviving the Future.' In this podcast, Chamberlin reflects on Fleming's brilliant, visionary writings and his own ongoing activism and initiatives.
Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? In his new book 'Ours', Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, proposes inventing a new class of property rights -- "universal property" -- to protect land, watersheds and the atmosphere as well as co-inherited civic infrastructures such as our financial and communications systems. The point is to stop investors from privatizing the benefits of this wealth by instead instituting trusts (and other forms) to manage it as universal property. These alternatives can both protect common assets and generate reliable revenue streams shared by everyone.
Among millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, ROSCAs, or 'rotating savings and credit associations', are trusted alternatives to racialized, exclusionary systems of formal banking. The self-organized, informal pooling of money among friends and neighbors offer a way to help people amass the money to buy a used car, pay for school, and meet other household expenses. Professor Hossein of the University of Toronto at Scarborough, in Ontario, Canada, discusses the resourcefulness and resilience of the Black social economy despite attacks by many state authorities and mainstream banks.
Ecological economist Tim Jackson has spent over three decades investigating what a post-growth economy might look like and how to pursue it. His 2009 book 'Prosperity without Growth' became a landmark exploration of this topic. Now, more than a decade later, Jackson’s thinking has evolved in some new and unexpected ways. His new book, 'Post Growth: Life After Capitalism', urges economics to expand its narrow, hyper-rational frameworks, and draw on insights from the worlds of art, culture, philosophy, storytelling, and the human quest for meaning.
Jeremy Lent, author and self-described "integrator," has spent years exploring the "cognitive history of humanity" as expressed in diverse civilizations. Lent continues this investigation with a new book 'The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe," which can be succinctly summarized: "Our mainstream worldview has expired. What will replace it? A world of deep interconnectedness."
Kate Raworth's 2017 book 'Doughnut Economics' has become an international phenomenon by debunking the many half-truths of standard economics and offering a new framework for dealing with 21st Century realities. Her reconceptualization of the economy as a doughnut accents two vital concerns that economics often ignores -- the importance of meeting everyone’s basic human needs (the inner ring of the doughnut) and the importance of staying within the planet's ecological limits (the outer ring). Economics should not focus on market and state alone, says Raworth, but also on households and commons, and the trust, reciprocity, and creativity that they engender.
Professor Peter Linebaugh, the acclaimed historian of commons, discusses the social and political histories of English commoners caught up in their struggles with state power and early capitalists. He explains the importance of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest; the criminalization of customary practices as early capitalism arose; the special relationship of women to the commons and therefore their persecution; and the role of commoning in struggles for political emancipation.
With an international network of scholars known as CERN – the Community Economies Research Network – Katherine Gibson, a professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, has explored the possibilities of a post-capitalist future for more than thirty years. Community Economies scholars reject many premises of standard economics and instead shine a spotlight on actual, constructive nonmarket and local work unfolding everywhere – in care work, community life, cooperatives, gift economies, barter, online collaborations, vernacular culture, commoning, and many other generative forms of life.
Rejecting the standard neoDarwinist account of life as mechanical and objectifying, theoretical biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber insists that science must study the subjective aliveness of organisms. While living beings certainly compete to survive, they also participate in symbiotic, relational webs of many other beings, each endowed with fierce creative agency. Weber argues that life itself amounts to a commons because living beings, working in distributed, bottom-up ways, are all struggling to co-evolve constructively with others and expand the fecundity of the whole system.
Jimmy Buff, Executive Director of WKNY Radio in Kingston, NY, explains how he and a team of local talent converted an oldies-format AM radio station into a vibrant community broadcaster. The station features the usual blocs of rock, pop, and classical (with slots for polka and German music, too!), but also voices from the LGBTQ world, seniors, people of color, feminists, local artists, mindfulness practitioners, environmentalists, and businesspeople -- all with a local perspective..
Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a young organic farmer who helped start Agrarian Trust, an organization supporting land access for the next generation of farmers. Ian McSweeney, the organizational director of Agrarian Trust, explains strategies for decommodifying land for farmers even as the pandemic drives up land prices. Also discussed: Greenhorns, a cultural network for young farmers; Farm Hack, a global design community for open source farm equipment; and Seaweed Commons, a network studying the stewardship of intertidal zones.
For Dave Jacke, a designer of ecological landscapes and lead author of the classic book 'Edible Forest Gardens,' the key to how humanity will navigate its future on Earth lies with our culture and "inner landscapes," as refracted through our technologies. Paradoxically, the extreme underdevelopment of Western culture, psychosocially, is a reason for hope, he argues. If humanity truly were advanced while facing so many planetary challenges, "we’d be screwed." Fortunately, we have so much room to grow in self-awareness, and ecological design can help us learn to co-evolve abundant landscapes once again.
Janelle Orsi, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, in Oakland, California, is an accomplished practitioner of creative legal hacks. She and her colleagues at the Law Center focus on ingenious ways to decommodify land to keep housing and farmland affordable; to empower peer governance and give people control over their lives; and to provide legal structures that help people acquire greater security by "surrendering into each other's arms." Orsi and the Law Center are at the forefront of the kinds of innovative lawyering needed to build a more just, eco-friendly, localized and humane world.
Marcos García is Artistic Director of Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain -- an independent, city-funded 'commons laboratory' that facilitates bottom-up innovation on various tech platforms. As a commons incubator, Medialab-Prado actively facilitates the formation of new communities of experimental, collaborative practice in such diverse fields as citizen science, participatory budgeting, data visualization, open source software, Wikipedia entries, and book translations, among many others.
Professor Neera Singh, a geographer at the University of Toronto, has long studied forest commons in India as part of her research into conservation, “development,” and the governance of natural systems. One of her key findings is that the “affective labor” of commoners produces healthier, more resilient forests than corporate or bureaucratic state management. A key challenge is how to honor the power of affective stewardship in a world dominated by state and corporate power.
Drawing on their worldwide work with schools, tech ventures, and other projects and organizations, Ted Rau (left) and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Cofounders of Sociocracy for All, explain how Sociocracy provides a fair, effective, commons-based system of deliberation and decisionmaking.
Paul Baines, Outreach and Education Coordinator of the Great Lakes Commons, fosters new attitudes and practices toward the Great Lakes in collaboration with other groups. Through crowdsourced maps, public celebrations, cultural projects, and reconciliation work with indigenous peoples, the Great Lakes Commons is exploring what stewardship of water means.
Rachel Moriarty of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics tells the history of the BerkShares currency and its ongoing evolution in developing a new vision for its regional economy. BerkShares, which circulate in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, are one of the most successful local currencies in the world today.
Matthew Glassman and Carlos Uriona, co-artistic directors of Double Edge Theatre, explain how commoning animates the performances and stewardship of their artist-owned ensemble theater company in western Massachusetts.