A Sampling of Commons Projects All Over

From Bangkok to Grand Rapids to London

The projects profiled below represent a wide array of individuals and organizations working to build community and create a better future for all. With a focus on co-creation and developing a sense of belonging within communities at the local level, these initiatives showcase the commitment and creativity required for establishing a commons-based society. Read on to learn about The Rapidian, a community-driven, hy- perlocal news source located in Grand Rapids, Michigan; 350.org, a global, grassroots movement dedicated to solving the climate crisis; and more.

The Oregon Commons, a volunteer-driven nonprofit organization, inspires appreciation, stewardship and advocacy for the Oregon commons—“the gifts of nature and civilization shared across generations.”

City Repair Project, also based in Oregon, employs artistic and ecologically oriented place making strategies. City Repair inspires people to understand themselves as part of a larger community, participate in decision-making that shapes their future, and realize their creative potential.

Down the cost in Point Reyes Station, California, West Marin Commons aims to enhance, protect, and illuminate our shared environment. The organization creates space for spontaneous sociability and community activities, including sharing rides, garden produce, tools, and “household stuff.”

The Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, based in Gloucester, Mas- sachusetts, works to restore enduring marine systems. If we truly care about the health of our oceans, does it matter how, where, and when we fish? NAMA strongly believes it does.

Across the Atlantic, The London Orchard Project plants community orchards in London’s unused spaces. The initiative has many local benefits, including the promotion of fruit production within communities, the greening of London’s urban environment, the creation of wildlife habitats, increased biodiversity within city limits, and improved food security. It also helps Londoners rediscover the simple pleasure of eating organic fruit grown close to home.

[editor: Hard to believe Commons Magazine consistently omits mention of the cultural miracle that is the Transition Movement - a real leader worldwide and the group that initiated nut and fruit tree planting.]

350.org, founded by author Bill McKibben, is a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. 350.org is well known for its online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions—all of which are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.

On the hyperlocal level, The Rapidian is a news source powered and published by citizen journalists in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It provides tools, training, platforms, and support to empower neighborhood residents to report community news from the inside out. The Rapidian promotes inclusiveness, civility, and ethical reporting as the foundation for increasing civic engagement.

The School of Commoning utilizes the global communication and information sharing capacities of the Internet. As an online resource for people who want to learn about the commons, the School offers a bank of resources and educational programs to commoners around the world.

Located in Sacramento, California, the Sol Collective provides arts, cultural, and education programming that supports social justice and empowers youth. The Collective maintains a brick and mortar center, which often hosts art exhibitions, multimedia workshops, apprentice/ mentorship programs, and community forums.

Occupy Sandy illustrates the power of commons solutions—without the burden of bureaucratic red tape—in times of crisis. An impressive, nimble, and well-coordinated relief effort to distribute resources and volunteers to help neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy, Occupy Sandy is a grassroots emergency management response formed by a co- alition of individuals from Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, recovers.org, and interoccupy.net.

In Detroit, Michigan, there is another locus of commoning in re- sponse to crisis. The People’s Water Board maintains that “water is life” and a human right. The Board advocates that all people should have ac- cess to clean and affordable water.

The Greening of Detroit’s Openspace program is another Detroit-based effort that aims to transform some of the 100,000 vacant lots in the city into places that contribute to the fabric of the community. The program helps residents turn lots into community gardens, fruit orchards, market gardens, pocket parks, and native plant gardens.

The local arts community is yet another key group making a commons-based contribution in Detroit. The projects are numerous and inspiring and include Detroit Artists Market, 555 Creative Community, and Community Arts Partnerships Detroit, to name but a few.

Restore/Restory, is an interactive story map that gives a people’s history of the Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Woodland, California. The project tells the diverse stories of California’s peoples, traditions, and re- lationship to the land.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the Vital Aging Network promotes self-determination, civic engagement, and personal growth for people as they age through education, leadership development, and opportunities for connection.

CoCo Coworking, also based in the Twin Cities, is a place where independent workers, small businesses and corporate workgroups can gather to share ideas, team up on projects and get work done.

The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance provides innovative strategies, working models and timely information to support environmentally sound and equitable community development. Don’t miss their recent TEDx Talk: Why We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Better Economy.

And in an effort to engage thinkers around the world in conversation about economics and the commons, the Commons Strategies group, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation are hosting three Commons Deep Dive workshops—two of which already took place during October and November—in Mexico City, a city near Paris, and Bangkok. These Deep Dives will serve as preparatory events for a major international conference called “The Economics of the Commons” to be held in Berlin next May.

– ON THE COMMONS TEAM

Editor: This is the final chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine presented each Sunday at EYNU.

One Town’s Unexpected Economic Renaissance

                            COMMONER                             

Hardwick, Vermont embraced agricultural projects based on sharing

Here is a small town that thrives on a kind of agriculture where scale matters, stakeholders collaborate, and, in most cases, ownership has more to do with stewardship than it does with possession. Community members know each other by name and value civic engagement. Young people who moved away for bigger and “better” opportunities now flock home, seeking jobs and dedicating themselves to community improvement. This town, Hardwick, Vermont, embodies the spirit of the commons in so many ways—but it wouldn’t be that way without the vision and drive of Tom Stearns, an ardent commons advocate and the founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Over his years working in the seed business, Stearns has come to understand that, even more so than the land he works, the seeds themselves are a special kind of commons. The vegetable seeds we have now, he says, are vastly different than the seeds that existed one hundred years ago, and today’s seeds will assume new qualities in the future. That’s partly why privatization and commodification have become commonplace in the seed industry. Corporate giants have denied public access to information about our seed resource because “when you control seeds, you control a lot,” says Stearns.

But the High Mowing team engages and interacts with everyone who uses seeds, including farmers and gardeners, plant breeders at universities, other seed companies, and soil scientists. They do this in an effort to bring the seed community’s collective wisdom to bear on how to develop new seed varieties, how to make seeds available to consumers, and how to promote them as a critical element in building healthy food systems. By encouraging this knowledge sharing, High Mowing empowers the whole community to engage in a ten-thousand year old practice of food provision that is vital for the future. They are framing seed saving as a commons‐based solution.

Stearns is also a co-founder of the Center for an Agricultural Economy, a Hardwick‐based nonprofit that coordinates regional food system activity. Among many other contributions to the community, the non-profit just purchased the old town common. Until recently, no one had hope that Hardwick, an aging granite-mining center, would ever recover from the mining industry collapse. The town common had been neglected since the thirties, but members of the Center for an Agricultural Economy saw its potential and purchased the sixteen acres in the heart of Hardwick. Today, Stearns describes all kinds of activity planned for the property, including an educational farm and community garden.

The combined effect of these many assorted commons solutions is a small town renaissance no one could have expected in Hardwick. Stearns describes countless new economic opportunities growing up around healthy food, ecological awareness, and value‐added agriculture. There are new jobs—good jobs—at High Mowing and elsewhere.

The rural “brain drain” is reversing in this area, as smart young people who moved away are coming home. People are once again running for town select boards and school boards. “People are actually competing [for those positions] because they want to have a voice,” Stearns says.

“It’s really cool.” When asked about the secrets to this success, Stearns speculates that Vermont’s size has something to do with it. Towns operate on a “human-scale,” and political figures are readily accessible (you might event spot the governor walking down the street, he says). As a result, people sense their ability to make an impact—they are not just one among millions. To Stearns’s mind, the hopelessness that comes from feeling inconsequential is one of the main obstacles to creating commons-based societies in other places today.

—JESSICA CONRAD

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

How Indigenous Forms of Governance Can Improve Our Modern World

Ardoch Algonquin Chief Robert Lovelace helps us re-imagine society’s relationship to nature

Indigenous cultures are complex knowledge systems that utilize energy, food security, transportation and communications in balance with natural systems. Understanding how indigenous economies, as well as social and cultural systems work can help bend the curve against the prospects of social, environmental and economic failure.

Present governance structures conform little to environmental or ecosystem realities. For the most part, political boundaries were created to serve colonial settlement, resource extraction and industrial manufacturing while denaturing ecosystems and limiting environmentally appropriate governance. Faced with overexploitation of resources, ecosystem degradation, contamination of soils and water and climate change, the people of North America need to re-imagine how we connect to the earth. Ecosystem appropriate governance is a step in the right direction. We also need to ensure economic, social and cultural practices work with natural replenishment cycles rather than against them.

Language is the “signature” of culture. How we speak to one another, how we describe and discuss the world in which we live, determines our success in relating to the world. Indigenous knowledge systems are reflections of empirical interaction with the earth, rational discovery, symbolic imagery and social reinforcement, directed toward a deep understanding of the local. Indigenous languages are verb-based rather than using nouns as the foundation for communication as we do in English. If we simply want to acquire “things,” then the structure of our present language works fine. If we want to relate with the world, make appropriate ecological choices, and rebuild collapsing environments then we need to learn, think and create in action words. We need to live within dynamic eco-natural processes to live well together.

– ROBERT LOVELACE

Professor Robert Lovelace, retired Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, has decoded elements of aboriginal governance that are key to re-indigenizing the commons. Lovelace presented part of his work at the Great Lakes Commons Gathering. Excerpted from “Kosmos magazine.”

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Take Back the Streets

How one Dutch neighborhood made streets safer for the whole world

Traffic calming has swept the world over the past 20 years. It’s based on the rather simple idea that cars and trucks don’t have exclusive ownership of our streets. Streets are shared commons that also belong to people on foot and bicycles, in baby strollers and wheelchairs. Reminding motorists of this fact, traffic calming uses design features such as narrowing roads, adding speed bumps or elevating crosswalks to slow traffic and assert pedestrians’ right to cross the street.

This idea has altered the literal landscape of urban life in the Northern Europe, North America and the rest of the world as people move about their communities with more ease and pleasure.

The origins of this ingenious idea trace back to Delft, Netherlands, where residents of one neighborhood were fed up with cars racing along their streets, endangering children, pets and peace of mind. One evening they decided to do something about it by dragging old couches, coffee tables and other objects out into the roadway and positioning them in such a way that cars could pass but would have to slow down. Police soon arrived on the scene and had to admit that this project, although clearly illegal, was a really good idea. Soon, the city itself was installing similar measures called woonerfs (Dutch for “living yards”) on streets plagued by unruly motorists.

Invented by neighbors in Delft, Netherlands, who were tired of cars speeding down their street, traffic calming is now spreading throughout the world.

One can only imagine the response of city officials if these neighbors had meekly come to city hall to propose the idea of partially blocking the streets; they would have been hooted right out of the building. But by taking direct action, they saved their neighborhood and improved everyday life in cities around the world.

—JAY WALLJASPER
Photo by Walk Eagle Rock under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

How New York City Kept Its Drinking Water Pure

. . . and saved billions of dollars

Beginning in the 1830s, the City of New York created a water system generally considered to have no equal in the world. Generations of city leaders chose to go far north and west of the City, to find rural environments that would provide pure, pristine water.

But in the 1980s, as the economics of industrialized agriculture began to undermine the economic vitality of the small family farms that dotted the Catskill mountains, things began to change. Catskill farmers, in a desperate attempt to remain economically viable, began industrializing their own farm operations. Chemical fertilizer use increased, erosion accelerated, and pathogen contamination began to grow. Farmers also began selling off the forested portions of their land for environmentally damaging exurban development.

By the end of the 1980s, public health specialists were publicly stating the City would have to substantially increase the treatment of its drinking water source. The costs for the advanced treatment were estimated to be $4 billion to build and $200 million annually to operate. This would double the cost for water in New York City, with major adverse impacts on low-income families.

Thus, when I became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Director of the New York City Water and Sewer system in early 1990, determining if there was any alternative to this was at the top of a very crowded agenda.

However, unlike nearly the entire American water industry and its regulators, both of which were dominated by civil and public health engineers who thought almost exclusively in facility construction terms to solve water quality problems, my background was in management reform, public finance and environmental policy, particularly land use.

My new management team and I were quickly convinced that allowing Catskill drinking water purity to deteriorate and then spending massive sums to clean it up was not the ideal option. The team’s philosophy was that a good environment will produce good water. And that made investing in the environment a smart and profitable investment for New York City.

It took eighteen months of mutual work between the City and the Catskill farming community but, in the end, using concepts that have now come to be called ecosystem services, an innovative and far reaching agreement was crafted.

Operationally, the question became what environmental investments should the city make. Some, such as adding to the publicly held land in the watershed— particularly critical lands threatened by development—along with stream corridor restorations and better stewardship of city owned lands were obvious. But that did not answer how to control non-point source pollution on privately held farmlands and other rural landscapes.

The City began to organize an unprecedented program of regulatory enforcement against non-point source pollution runoffs in its watersheds. Some farmers and other rural landowners reacted angrily. But with the city’s support, the Catskill farmers created a program they called “Whole Farm Planning,” which incorporated environmental planning into the business strategy of the farm. A pollution control plan was developed for each farm by the farmer and local farm and agricultural experts.

To ensure pollution control efforts would reach critical mass, the program set a goal of obtaining the participation rate of 85% of Catskill farmers within five years. Thus, while the program was voluntary for any individual farmer, the Catskill farm community as a whole was committed to reach a goal that would ensure the City met its pollution reduction objectives. After five years, 93% of all Catskill farmers were full program participants.

In terms of Clean Water, the results speak for themselves:

There was a 75% to 80% reduction in farm pollution loading;  

The pristine quality of the City’s drinking water was preserved and improved, and the threat that New York would have to spend billions on advanced treatment of drinking water was eliminated; 

The program paid for itself many times over through its many cost savings and played a critical role in helping to stabilize water and sewer tariffs, providing major benefits to low-income households; 

The program was wildly popular with the public and helped build strong urban support for future watershed protection efforts by New York City.

On a broader scale, the Catskill program spurred watershed protection and environmentally-friendly farm programs throughout the United States and catalyzed interest in non-traditional facility construction approaches of the U.S. water industry.

Ecosystem service payment programs like the one used in New York are a way of capturing the environmental profits from the services rural ecosystems provide urban areas and then funneling those profits back into the rural landscapes and the rural communities that provide them, creating a righteous cycle of mutually supportive economic and ecological investments between urban and rural areas, leading to a more sustainable future for both.

The importance of these payments for environmental services (PES) to the future of rural landscapes in particular cannot be overstated. All over the world, rural landscapes are being transformed at a rate that has no historic or economic parallel. PES payments can stabilize rural land use at a more balanced point by making environmental stewardship a new source of economic wealth for rural populations.

The list of water related ecosystem services is almost endless. Water utilities need to go beyond deployment of their traditional engineering skills and pioneer innovative financial arrangements with upstream residents, as New York City did, to take full advantage of these potentials.

—ALBERT APPLETON
photo from Ephemeral New York (ed: a wonderfully fascinating site)

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

The Little Free Library That Could

Bringing the shareable society to a sidewalk near you

You can boost literacy, neighborliness and the commons all at once with a Little Free Library. It’s such an ingeniously simple idea, one wonders why no one thought of it until now. You can take a book or leave a book (or both) at these informal institutions, which “look like birdhouses and act like water coolers” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They are popping up all over Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, and spreading throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The idea began with social entrepreneur Todd Bol who built the first one in his home of Hudson, Wisconsin and kept right on going. He soon teamed up with his friend Rick Brooks in Madison to form the non-profit group Little Free Libraries to spread the idea. Today, they’ve nearly doubled their goal of establishing 2510 new libraries around the world, outdoing philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

For the latest about the movement as well as all the information you need about building, buying, stocking and maintaining a Little Library in your neighborhood, go to their website Little Free Library.

—JAY WALLJASPER

Photo from Little Free Libraries website

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Philanthropy Cannot Solve All Our Problems

                            COMMONER                             

An authority on non-profits explains the necessity for government programs

Kim Klein, an eminent authority on fundraising for non-profit groups, first realized the importance of the commons one afternoon at a workshop in Monterrey, California.

“I was fielding questions about how groups can raise money,” she remembers, “and I realized that half the people in the room were school principals and superintendents, who were taking a day off of work because raising money had become so important to their jobs.”

Klein, author of Fundraising for Social Change and co-founder of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, immediately wondered, “What’s going on here?” Education is a commons that should be supported through public taxes, she says, not private donations. If school principals need to write grants to cover teacher’s salaries, something is wrong.

Even more shocking was another growing segment of the fundraising business that Klein noticed at the time. “About twice a month I got a call from parents who want to raise money to buy Kevlar vests for their kids in the Iraq War. Everything has become so privatized—even the safety of our soldiers.”

It’s become her mission to highlight the importance of the commons to people in the non-profit sector, which accounts for 10 percent of the workforce in the U.S. and 12 percent in Canada. She does this through her firm Klein and Roth Consulting and the activist group Building Movement Project.

For Klein, a Methodist who once considered becoming a minister, the commons is a spiritual as well as a political and social issue.

“I introduce the idea of the commons into all my workshops, conversations and speeches,” she adds, “starting with the premise that the commons is becoming enclosed because of privatization, poor tax policy, environmental degradation and the like. I am now leading specific workshops on the role of taxes in our society.”

Klein lives in California, and therefore has seen firsthand the pain and suffering that happens with reflexive opposition to tax increases. “Tax cuts rarely save money for the public,” she notes. “They enclose our commons and they allow only very wealthy people and corporations to become wealthier. The sooner we understand the absurdity of saving money by cutting taxes, the sooner we can actually become the...nation that people imagine: welcoming to all, with high-quality schools and health care, well paying jobs, and vast protected natural beauty.”

She notes that in many countries,“ people pay half their income in sales and income taxes. But they get a lot for it. Unlimited health care and universal higher education, for a start. That’s why they don’t hate taxes.”

Klein’s vision of a commons-based society is built on a foundation of sensible tax policy as well the civic sector, community involvement and people treating one another well. “How do we make sure each person has what they need and how can we take care of the common good? That cannot all be accomplished by philanthropy, it needs public funding.”

—JAY WALLJASPER

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

We Need Economic Security Beyond Jobs

A commons sense plan to pay everyone dividends on our common wealth

A cushion of reliable income is a wonderful thing. It can help pay for basic necessities. It can be saved for rainy days or used to pursue happiness on sunny days. It can encourage people to take entrepreneurial risks, care for friends, or volunteer for community service.

Conversely, the absence of reliable income is a terrible thing. It heightens anxiety and fear. It diminishes our ability to cope with crises and transitions. It traps many families on the knife’s edge of poverty, and makes it harder for poor people to rise.

There’s been much discussion of late about how to save America’s declining middle class. The answer politicians of both parties give is always the same: jobs, jobs, jobs. The parties differ on how the jobs will be created—Republicans say the market will do it if we cut taxes and regulation. Democrats say government can help by investing in infrastructure and education. Either way, it still comes down to jobs with decent wages and benefits.

It’s understandable that politicians say this: it was America’s experience in the past. In the years following World War II, we built a solid middle class on the foundation of high-paying, mostly unionized jobs in the manufacturing sector. But those days are history.

Today, automation and computers have eliminated millions of jobs, and private-sector unions have been crushed. On top of that, in a globalized economy where capital can hire the cheapest labor anywhere, it’s no longer credible to believe that America’s middle class can prosper from labor income alone.

So why don’t we pay everyone some non-labor income—you know, the kind of money that flows disproportionally to the rich? I’m not talking about redistribution here. I’m talking about paying dividends to equity owners in good old capitalist fashion. Except that the equity owners in question aren’t owners of private wealth, they’re owners of common wealth. Which is to say, all of us.

One state—Alaska—already does this. The Alaska Permanent Fund uses revenue from state oil leases to invest in stocks, bonds and similar assets, and from those investments pays equal dividends to every resident. Since 1980, these dividends have ranged from $1,000 to $2,000 per year per person, including children (meaning that they’ve reached up to $8,000 per year for households of four). It’s therefore no accident that, compared to other states, Alaska has the third highest median income and the second highest income equality.
Alaska’s model can be extended to any state or nation, whether or not they have oil.

Imagine an American Permanent Fund that pays dividends to all Americans, one person, one share. A major source of revenue could be clean air, nature’s gift to us all. Polluters have been freely dumping ever-increasing amounts of gunk into our air, contributing to ill-health, acid rain and climate change. But what if we required polluters to bid for and pay for permits to pollute our air, and decreased the number of permits every year? Pollution would decrease, and as it did, pollution prices would rise. Less pollution would yield more revenue. Over time, trillions of dollars would be available for dividends.

And that’s not the only common resource an American Permanent Fund could tap. Consider the substantial contribution society makes to publicly traded stock values. When a company like Facebook or Google goes public, its value rises dramatically. The extra value derives from the vastly enlarged market of investors who can trust a public company’s financial statements (filed quarterly with the Securities and Exchange Commission) and buy or sell its shares with the click of a mouse. Experts call this a ‘liquidity premium,’ and it’s generated not by the company but by society.

This socially created wealth now flows mostly to a small number of Americans. But if we wanted to, we could spread it around. We could do that by charging corporations for the extra liquidity that society provides. Let’s say we required public companies to deposit 1 percent of their shares in the American Permanent Fund for ten years, up to a total of 10 percent. This would be a modest price not just for public liquidity but for other privileges (limited liability, perpetual life, constitutional protections) we currently grant to corporations for free. In due time, the American Permanent Fund would have a diversified portfolio worth trillions of dollars. As the stock market rose and fell, so would everyone’s dividends. A rising tide would truly lift all boats.

There are other potential revenue sources for common wealth dividends. For example, we give free airwaves to media companies and nearly perpetual (and nearly global) copyright protection to entertainment and software companies. These free gifts are worth big bucks. If their recipients were required to pay us for them, we’d all be a little richer.

Regardless of its revenue sources, the mechanics of an American Permanent Fund would be simple. Every U.S. resident with a valid Social Security number would be eligible to open a Shared Wealth Account at a bank or brokerage firm; dividends would then be wired to their accounts monthly. There’d be no means test—and no shame—attached to these earnings, as there are to welfare. Nor would there be any hint of class warfare—Bill Gates would get his dividends along with everyone else. And since the revenue would come from common wealth, there’d be no need to raise taxes or cut government spending. All we’d have to do is charge for private use of common wealth and feed the resulting revenue into an electronic distribution system.

The United States isn’t broke, as some Republican say; we’re a very wealthy and productive country. The problem is that our wealth and productivity gains flow disproportionately to the rich in the form of dividends, capital gains, rent and interest. If we want to remain a middle class nation, that needs to change. Jobs alone won’t suffice. We need to complement wages with non-labor income from the wealth we all own. That would truly make us an ownership society.

—PETER BARNES
Photo by Wikinut Wealth & Job Creation

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Who Needs Government?

What’s right and what’s wrong with Libertarians’ vision of a volunteer society

Libertarians, the Tea Party and other so-called conservatives devoted to slashing all government spending not related to the military, prisons, the drug war and highways have an easy answer when asked what happens to people whose lives and livelihoods depend on public programs. They point to volunteerism—the tradition of people taking care of each other, which has sustained human civilization for millennia.

It’s a compelling idea, which evokes the spirit of the commons. Volunteers working largely outside the realm of government—neighborhood organizations, local fire brigades, blood banks and other civic initiatives—are obvious examples of commons-based sharing and caring.

So that means John Boehner, Ron Paul and Sean Hannity qualify as commoners, too, despite their adamant skepticism about Medicaid, environmental regulations and campaign finance limits? Not so fast! Volunteerism never rises above a convenient smokescreen, which right-of-center politicians use to justify shredding the social safety net. Increased support for the people and institutions that help the poor and the sick, strengthen our communities, protect the environment and generally make America a kinder and gentler place (to quote the most ardent proponent of volunteerism, George H.W. Bush) never make the final cut in the right-wing blueprint for our future. They’re a lot of talk, and but little action when it comes to actually supporting the kind of cooperative efforts that make a better world.

Theoretically you could imagine a classical conservative model of a commons-based society based upon strong incentives for everyday citizens people to fill the void of services now provided by federal, state and local governments—everything from police protection to basic scientific research to the Public Health Service. But to actually create such a society, however, would mean some sweeping changes to current economic and social policies that today’s right-wing spokesmen would never tolerate.

To truly encourage widespread volunteerism, we’d need to make sure that everyone (not just the well-to-do) had the time to do it. Most people today, working longer hours for less pay, are frantic just to get through the day. Finding extra time in their crunched schedules to manage upkeep at the local park or take care of elderly neighbors looks impossible.
What it would take to make this happen would be a dramatically expanded vacation time, family-leave benefits and probably a four-day workweek—or at least stringent enforcement of overtime provisions for all people working more than 40 hours a week.

Even more important to brightening what George H.W. Bush called the thousand points of light would be a return to the days of the family wage—the period before the 1970s when a middle-class household could get by on one workers’ wages. And unlike the days before the 1970s, minorities and low-wage workers would not be excluded from this social contract. And since we live in a different social era now, it’s likely that many couples today would elect to both work half time. But any way you want to do it, this would trigger a volcanic eruption of volunteers. The place to start would be enacting a Canadian-style health care system and tripling the minimum wage right away.

I cannot imagine political leaders who call themselves conservative these days would stand for any of the ideas laid out in the previous two paragraphs—although some of the people who vote for them might, including evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics and “conservatives” who are actually in favor of preserving community values rather than sacrificing them in the name of exponentially expanding corporate profits.

Boehner, Michelle Bachmann and many Democrats, too, would recoil at these ideas because they shift the balance of power in society from the wealthy who finance their campaigns to the poor and middle-class who, in the famous words of Bill Clinton, “work hard and play by the rules.”

These pro-volunteer, pro-commons policies also depend on government playing an important role: Enforcing new vacation, family leave, work hours and minimum wage laws, as well as making sure everyone has adequate health care coverage and access.

Politicians and pundits on the right often accuse progressives of being naïve about human nature for not recognizing the true motives that drive people’s behavior. That’s debatable in light of new evidence from many fields that our cooperative instincts are stronger than our selfish ones.

But we certainly have a case of the pot calling the kettle black right here: Conservatives laud volunteerism as the best way to maintain our social fabric, yet they naively believe that this will happen with no provisions to stop unscrupulous employers from stealing so much of people’s time with low wages and stingy vacations policies that they have no time left over for the common good.

—JAY WALLJASPER
Photo by Jam Creative - Encinitas Marine Safety

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Business Based on What We Share

                            COMMONER                             

Latino entrepreneur Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin returns to his roots with a local food project

“Common sense” is a term entrepreneur Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin uses with ever increasing enthusiasm to describe the local food initiative he is creating with immigrant Latino farmers in Minnesota.

“I come from the commons,” declares Haslett-Marroquin, who grew up in Guatemala, where his family still farms com- munal lands. “And I am going back to the commons.”

He is the co-founder of the fair trade Peace Coffee Company, and leads the Sustainable Food and Agriculture Program at the Minneapolis-based Main Street Project. In 2006 founded the Rural Enterprise Center in Northfield, Minnesota, which like many Midwestern communities has attracted growing numbers of Latin American immigrants.

In times of economic stagnation, many people worry that immigrants are taking jobs needed by native-born Americans. These fears are especially keen in small towns, where the impact of the continuing economic crisis hits hard. Haslett-Marroquin, however, sees an opportunity that can benefit both immigrants and the community as a whole.

He noticed that many people around Northfield were eager to eat more locally raised, healthy food but were unable to afford it or sometimes even find it. At the same time, he saw that Latino immigrants had lifelong experience as sustainable farmers but lacked the financial means to take up farming. The solution was obvious. Find a way to get Latino farmers back on the land and connect them with consumers seeking wholesome food. This is exactly what Haslett-Marroquin did in launching a free-range poultry enterprise, market garden and family farmer training program, all designed to put good food on local dinner tables and income into the pockets of family farmers.

“Agripreneurship” is how Haslett-Marroquin describes this effort to revive family farming for local markets by taking advantage of immigrants’ first-hand knowledge of small-scale sustainable agriculture practices. “Commons sense,” he says, is another word for what he and his colleagues are doing.

This training center and enterprise are a shining example of an emerging idea known as commons-based development—a strategy that strengthens the commons by making sure that economic expansion projects help the community as a whole.

While commons work is often seen as an activist or community cause more than a business model, Hasslett-Marroquin’s projects embody fundamental commons principles: a commitment to future generations, a focus on sustaining the earth, and a means of providing a benefit to everyone.

As Haslett-Marroquin says, “the commons is a very straightforward common-sense approach to creating systems that sustain society and sustain life on the planet.”

—JAY WALLJASPER

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

The Foundation of Commons-Based Solutions

Six elements of a new paradigm

1. We understand that everyone belongs—and everyone has a stake in any decisions made. No exceptions.
2. We act out of sufficiency (“there is enough”) and share a mutual responsibility to take care of this abundance and pass it on.
3. We value the humanity of everyone.
4. We seek a rough social equity in decision-making, outcomes and across society as a whole.
5. We take history into account—everyone’s history. Who we are, what we’ve experienced and where we come from.
6. We put structures, systems or rules in place to make sure everyone belongs and ensure continuity of this work into the future.

—THE ON THE COMMONS TEAM
Photo by Ben Strader.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Stealing the Common from the Goose

A 17th century rhyme that stands the test of time

This 17th century folk poem is one of the pithiest condemnations of the English enclosure movement—the process of fencing off common land and turning it into private property. In a few lines, the poem manages to criticize double standards, expose the artificial and controversial nature of property rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy of state power. And it does it all with humor, without jargon, and in rhyming couplets.

– James Boyle, Professor at Duke Law School

The law locks up the man or woman 

Who steals the goose off the common 

But leaves the greater villain loose 

Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone 

When we take things we do not own 

But leaves the lords and ladies fine 

Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape 

If they conspire the law to break; 

This must be so but they endure 

Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman 

Who steals the goose from off the common 

And geese will still a common lack 

Till they go and steal it back.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

The Re-Mix Master

                            COMMONER                             

The living embodiment of collaboration: DJ Spooky.

Hip Hop sound artist DJ Spooky fuses music from all over

Paul Miller, a beret-wearing hip hop musician, is the living embodiment of collaboration. He performs and records as DJ Spooky (the name is taken from a character in William Burrough’s novel Nova Express). His CD remixes and deejay performances “steal” materials from every imaginable source—from Yoko Ono to Metallica to modern minimalist composer Steve Reich to Jamaican pop tunes of the ‘60s to D.W. Griffith’s movie “Birth of a Nation” to Pacific Island traditions.

But he has earned his eclecticism honestly. He travels constantly to music-making subcultures around the world, from indigenous people to electronic music undergrounds, from Antarctica to Angola to a New Year’s Eve party on the beaches of Rio—and then produces some thing “new.”

Miller deeply explores the philosophy and meaning of music sampling. This is reflected in the book Sound Unbound, an anthology of essays about music sampling by the likes of Sun Ra, Philip Glass, William Burroughs, and a few dozen others.

Miller points out the artificiality of “authorship” because in practice no one creates something entirely new. We are constantly borrowing from the past and from our peers, and then remixing it into something “new.” Why should the most recent individual “author” get all the credit for the work, as copyright law mandates?

Miller pointed out that societies that openly honor the re-use of works from the past are actually “keeping the past alive” through that re-use. New art becomes an ongoing conversation with our ancestors. By contrast, modern copyright-driven culture considers its past “dead,” which in a sense it is. We are impoverished by not being able to access the past freely and openly unless it is very old. Copyright terms are now the lifetime of an author plus seventy years.

(This fall DJ Spooky was a resident artist at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.)
—DAVID BOLLIER
Photo by Scott Beale under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Protecting the Planet Starts With How We Think About the World

Life is more than a never-ending race to acquire more stuff and assert dominance over everything around us

In an era of rapid global warming and accelerated loss of biodiversity, protecting the Earth will take more than merely adjusting our actions— polluting less here, conserving more there, moving toward sustainability within the confines of today’s prevailing worldview.

To really save our planet, we must change how we think about the world itself and our place within it. This means taking a fresh look at nature, learning from its amazing rhythms, patterns and interconnections. And it means opening our selves up to new possibilities for how humans work together to survive, thrive and ensure good lives for coming generations.

A shift of this importance will not happen easily. It requires a fundamental reorganizing of our industrial, hierarchical, technocratic, economic-centric culture. And it will be ferociously opposed by those who reap fat profits from the way things are.

Yet we must remember that the modern industrial, market way of life—which is so deeply instilled in many people’s minds that they can’t imagine living any other way—actually benefits only a tiny sliver of the planet’s inhabitants. Certainly not plants and animals, nor people living in the global south, nor the poor and most of the middle-class in the overdeveloped world, nor people who love nature, nor those seeking meaning in their lives beyond buying and selling.

Most people envision their lives as something more than a never-ending race to accumulate more money, acquire more stuff, achieve more technical prowess and assert dominance over everything around us. Competitive instincts do not wholly define the human character—we also possess deep urges to cooperate with one another and to appreciate the wonder of this world we call home.

That’s why I believe the global movement for the United Nations to adopt a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (modeled on the landmark Universal Declaration on Human Rights) is not a quixotic crusade. It only makes sense to move toward a different worldview that challenges the dictates of a globalized profit-crazed industrial system. But how? Well, the commons is a proven model of how we can relate more harmoniously with nature and each other that has been the organizing principle of many cultures through the centuries.

The commons represents an old way of looking at life that’s now being heralded as a bold new idea for solving the problems that face us. In essence, it’s an operating system for life on Earth that focuses on what we share, rather than on what we own individually. The commons still flourishes around the globe today, not only in indigenous and peasant societies where it is the foundation of daily life, but also in the heart of rich, technologically advanced nations.

We all need the gifts of air, water, soil, plants, animals, minerals and genes bestowed by Mother Earth. We all depend on the bounty of oceans, forests, skies, plains, rivers, prairies, wilderness and biodiversity. Without sharing these resources, and the many layers of collaboration they foster, modern society would not exist.

The commons puts useful tools in our hands to stop the assault on Mother Earth and start the healing of our planet. Restoring the commons and defending the rights of Mother Earth are really the same cause, which depends upon discovering a different vision of looking at and living in the world.

—JAY WALLJASPER

Credit: Tatoo: Nick Wasko from Sacred Heart; Photo: Melissa Dex Guzman under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Triumph of the Commons

An excerpt from 55 Theses For the Future

But before we can redesign society, we must first learn to see the world as a commons.

Thesis 01

Some people see the world as a battleground, while others see it as a commons.

Thesis 09

Those who see the world as a battleground strive to suppress surprise from others. “Loose cannons” are dangerous.

Thesis 10

Those who see the world as a battleground revel in what they’ve made impossible for others. Those who see the world as a commons revel in what they have made possible with others.

Thesis 14

As in battle, as in a market economy: for every plus there must be a minus. This is the essence of profit.

Thesis 51

He who sees the world as a battleground requires an opponent. Lacking an opponent, he lacks an identity. And a future for his past.

If the previous centuries were about protecting the world from the tragedy of the commons, then this century will be about redesigning society to promote their triumph

– LELAND MASCHMEYER

Excerpted from Triumph of the Commons: 55 Theses on the Future is a book written by Maschmeyer and illustrated by fifty-five international artists. A mix of philosophy and pop culture, this book reveals the philosophic DNA that makes the commons our most important cultural narrative. Leland’s aim is to vividly frame these key concepts and to provoke discussion about them. Triumph of the Commons: 55 Theses on the Future can be ordered on Amazon.com.

Leland Maschmeyer is an award winning creative director and author in New York City. Working in the fields of design and business innovation, he strives to infuse both disciplines—and their output—with the commons ethic. He speaks regularly at conferences, universities, and companies about the topic and its importance to businesses and culture.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

If there is to be a successful narrative, I believe the Commons is our most accessible hope.  But, I also have serious doubts about this approach or any other being now.  Isn't it already too late? The conversations aren't even being had in our papers, news media or city hall, despite the mayor or deputy mayor trying to raise awareness and excitement for a more resilient future.

As American as Apple Pie

A people’s history of the commons in the U.S.

Although new to us, the commons is actually a very old idea that has continually influenced human progress. It remains a central organizing principle of indigenous peoples, peasant communities and advanced industrial nations. Social democracy, as practiced in Europe and other places, embodies a basic commons principle—that no one should be denied basic needs like food, housing, health care, day care, education, transportation, job training, paid vacation, a comfortable old age and a measure of dignity in their lives.

American society has been grounded in commons since the beginning. “Nature’s gifts are the common property of the human race,” declared Thomas Paine. The Land Ordinance of 1785, drafted by a committee of the Continental Congress that included Thomas Jefferson, established a cooperative model for settlement of the West (and removal of Indian nations) by setting aside one square-mile section of every township as common property to be used to support a public school.

New Deal legislation, crowned by the Social Security Act, as well as the GI Bill drew upon a sense of the commons—the belief that we’re all in this together—to ease economic disadvantage and elevate millions of families into the middle class. In many cases, however, these benefits were denied to African Americans, a situation Ira Katznelson chronicles in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. Repairing the long- standing injustice done to African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and other excluded groups remains one of the central missions of commons activism today.

Although rarely articulated as a distinct philosophy, the ideals of the commons provided inspiration for key advancements throughout our history—some by government programs and others by citizen initiatives, ranging from public health improvements to the labor and women’s movements. All these success stories refute frequent claims that individualism alone accounts for America’s progress.

—JAY WALLJASPER
Photo from flickr.com under a Creative Commons license

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

A “Tragedy of the Commons” or Not a Tragedy?

Elinor Ostrom’s global research showed that commons work for everyone when they are properly managed

Everyday more and more people are realizing that many of the most important things in life belong to all of us. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that in this era of market absolutism, the commons itself is under threat like never before.

In some cases, what belongs to all of us is being privatized—stolen, really—for the benefit of a few. Since the 1980s, owners of radio and TV stations have had almost no responsibilities to the public interest in return for the fortunes they make on our public airwaves—a free ride now being sought by web providers who want to shred net neutrality rules that ensure everyone equal access to the Internet.

In other cases, the commons is simply neglected or nibbled away until it becomes less valuable to everyone—reinforcing the market mantra that you cannot depend on anything you don’t own yourself. Although this never made sense to Americans left behind by the economy, many middle-class people came to accept that logic over the past 30 years. Who cares that Social Security appears shaky and the recreation center at the park is falling down, when you can stash your cash in a 401K and buy into a private health club?

That’s all changed with the economic distress of the last five years. Suddenly what we share—parks, libraries, transit, public schools, a social safety net, a sense of community cooperation—has become increasingly important. Yet, ironically, at a time when demand for public and civic services is rising, sharp reductions in tax revenues and charitable giving mean they are being cut back or eliminated altogether.

It’s crazy that library hours are being slashed at a time when increasing numbers of people can’t afford private Internet service or new books. It’s ridiculous that transit fares are rising and routes being cut at a time when it’s harder than ever for some people to afford cars or gas, and when it’s clear that auto emissions are affecting the world’s climate. It’s criminal that programs helping the poor, both in government and the nonprofit sector, are struggling to find money when so many more people now depend on them.

This amounts to full-scale retreat from the greater good, which we can call “a tragedy of the commons.” Of course that’s the opposite of how this phrase is generally understood—that the commons itself is the tragedy, not its destruction or theft.

This negative view dates back to 1968 when wildlife biologist Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a hugely influential essay in Science magazine where he speculated that collective ownership of resources was a major factor in environmental destruction. He described a hypothetical common pasture and argued that because no one owned it outright, no one has an incentive to take care of it, meaning that everyone will graze as many cattle as possible there until the land turns barren and worthless.

Zealous free market advocates seized on Hardin’s parable as proof that any system other than rigid private property leads to ruin. It took the work of the late political scientist Elinor Ostrom—co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, the first woman so honored—to finally debunk the belief that commons inevitably lead to tragedy.

Ostrom’s field work in Kenya, Switzerland, Guatemala, Nepal, Turkey and Los Angeles shows that real people in real communities generally create rules and systems to protect the precious resources they share. These can be enforced by government regulation, local customs or other means to make sure that common property and livelihoods are protected. Other examples include the rules New England lobstermen developed through the years to prevent overfishing or irrigation systems in New Mexico that have been successfully and fairly governed by community groups for four centuries.

Garrett Hardin eventually admitted that what he was talking about were unmanaged commons, not all forms of commons.

In situations when there is no governance of what belongs to all, the tragedy Hardin describes still goes on. We see this today in the collapse of ocean fish stocks, and the increase in greenhouse gases, which are disrupting our climate. This is because selfish national interests have stymied any international agreements to protect our global commons.

—JAY WALLJASPER
Photo of Elinor Ostrom courtesy of Augsburg College.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

7 Reasons Why We Believe Land Is an Essential Commons

Even when privately owned, it must be stewarded for future generations

Here at On the Commons, we believe land is an essential commons. What follows is a list of beliefs that support that idea.

1. Land is not a commodity; human beings did not create it. Land is a gift given by the universe to us all.
2. In order for a restorative economy to emerge and for local economies to flourish, we must gradually transform our thinking and behavior toward land.
3. Viewed through the lens of the commons, all communities have a fundamental and equitable claim to our common inheritance of natural and created abundance, and they must also play a critical role in the stewardship of those resources.
4. When we buy and sell land we are really buying and selling certain rights of use to the land, rather than the land itself. And these rights are always balanced by responsibilities. Therefore, having the right to a certain piece of land should always come with an obligation to practice social, economic and environmental stewardship.
5. Land is a form of commons—something we all share the same as we do air, water, scientific knowledge, and the Internet. People can use these commons for their own livelihood, but cannot diminish them for future generations. When the interests of the earth and the community are prioritized, private property can be treated as a commons.
6. Food underlies every aspect of human activity and economy. It is, quite literally, the source of our health, sustenance and sustain- ability as a species. (See The Food Commons: Building a National Network of Localized Food Systems)
7. We live in a time of extraordinary opportunity. People are re-awakening to the fact that food is not only the basis of our health but it is also at the basis of traditions, customs and culture that bind us together as a family and community. (See The Food Commons: Building a National Network of Localized Food Systems)

—ON THE COMMONS TEAM
Photo Pacific View from Patch

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Putting the Commons Into Action

A Social Charter for the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes, of course, are already a commons—something shared by many and owned by none. But can a commons truly be a commons if not recognized in law, public policy and the minds of the public at large? This was a central inquiry at the Great Lakes Commons Gathering, held at the University of Notre Dame last fall, which sparked exploration about how to activate people in various arenas to work for the recognition of the lakes as living commons.

One form of governance for the Great Lakes could be the creation of a social charter.

Social charters are a tool commoners have long used to protect themselves from destruction or enclosure of their commons. When people in 13th Century England found their commons lands under threat by the monarch, they drafted the Charter of the Forest alongside the Magna Carta to protect what belonged to all. In South Africa, the South African Freedom Charter ratified by the Congress of the People in 1955 articulated a just vision for the country and unified resistance to the oppression and exploitation of apartheid.

A social charter process will do two vital things toward the establishment of a Great Lakes Commons. First, it will help activate commoners to see they have a rightful, in fact critical role in establishing the vision and principles that can reshape governance of the Great Lakes. Secondly, by engaging people about what those principles ought to be, it will invite a sense of responsibility and stewardship in what happens to the water.

Today, the average person thinks little about their relationship to the waters or their responsibility for them. And yet there is a deep love of the Lakes that evident among the people of the region, but rarely is tapped politically or socially. That’s why we are embarking on a social charter creation process to renew, rediscover and reinvent a stewardship relationship and culture around the Lakes. Beyond the importance of the charter itself, the audacity and clarity of calls for a social charter will break through the status quo and galvanize people around a new possibility.

All of us realize that we need to deepen and expand our knowledge of each other if we are to forge a life sustaining future for our Great Lakes. But it is not easy to connect given the history between the region’s people—Native and settler, urban and rural, descendants of African, European and First Nations peoples. When a commons has been lost, taken or forgotten, our first task is reweaving the web of relationships and understandings. In our days together at Great Lakes Commons gathering we worked to build, recover and recreate the knowledge and connections that will enable us to act together—it marked the beginning of a truer spirit of “we” for the Great Lakes commons that extends hope for the path forward.

—ON THE COMMONS TEAM

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

A framework for what goes around and comes back

I. Center of the Circle: These core principles characterize all commons-based initiatives and any vital commons.

Equity: Everyone has a fair and just share of our commons to expand opportunities for all.

Sustainability: Our common wealth must be cared for so that it can sustain all living beings, including future generations.

Interdependence: Cooperation and connection in our communities, around the world and with our living planet is essential for the future.

II. Second Ring of the Circle: New ways of life arise when our communities and society as a whole become more rooted in the practice of the commons.

Shared Governance: Everyone is engaged in gathering information, making decisions and exercising power to steward common resources.

Deepened Responsibility: Together we claim the power to repair inequity, restore our common inheritance and expand opportunities for human fulfillment and planetary resilience.

Belonging: A more expansive view of belonging fosters broader understandings of what ownership means and new structures for how it works.

Co-Creating: A spirit of common purpose lets us realize that abundance, not scarcity, prevails when we invite wider participation in our endeavors.

III. Outer Ring of the Circle: Commons exist—what we inherit and create together.

—THE ON THE COMMONS TEAM

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.