In November, “Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning the Next 50 Years” focuses on the enlivening dynamics of the commons. A recording of “Expanding the Frontiers of Commoning” is now available online.
This panel brought together three pioneers of commoning who are transforming food, fiber and energy systems. Dorn Cox of Farm Hack joined with Kathryn Milun of the Solar Commons Project and Sandra Niessen of Fashion Act Now. David Bollier, Program Director of Reinventing the Commons at the Schumacher Center, moderated.
The group began by identifying common threads in the marginalization and cultural erasure of commons-based practices in the name of “progress.” Turning to the present and future, they compared notes on designing autonomous, responsive patterns of shared governance, infrastructures capable of recovering common rights to shared resources, knowledge, and benefits of technological change.
Highlights from our November Conversation
The life, and work, and happiness of all societies depend on certain ‘psychological structures’ which are infinitely precious and highly vulnerable. Social cohesion, cooperation, mutual respect, and above all, self-respect… —all this and much else disintegrates and disappears when these “psychological structures” are gravely damaged…
No amount of economic growth can compensate for such losses….
— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
Dorn Cox on the nnowledge commons for regenerative agriculture
In July’s Conversation, Dorn Cox introduced Farm Hack’s open-sourced software FarmOS, a web-based tool for farm management, planning, and data designed by and for regenerative farmers. In this latest Conversation, he expanded on Farm Hack’s mission: to apply a “public science approach” — familiar via ambitious endeavors like the Human Genome Project — to local, regenerative agriculture.
“So many of today’s problems,” Dorn recounted, are “based on degradation of our landscapes.” Inviting many more people to be part of the solution involves a narrative reframing of technological progress in farming. As regenerative agriculture involves the management of complex factors and microbiology, Dorn asserts, it is more “knowledge-intensive” than industrial farming, which levels and simplifies the complex at the expense of biodiversity, nutrition, and soil health.
…Much of what we’re now asking of agriculture is not just providing adequate food, fiber and energy; we’re also asking it to produce all these public goods — like clean water, carbon sequestration, mitigating flood and drought — from private enterprise.
Farm Hack’s activities connect local practitioners on a global scale, aiding insight-sharing and partnering on innovation to rebuild an inter-generational knowledge commons. Accordingly, this commons requires shared governance and agreed ethics, including commitments to open access and open source code.
Sandra Neissen shares a positive vision for regenerative garment production
With multiple groups critiquing the global fashion industry’s unsustainable practices, the new activist network Fashion Act Now is taking a different tack to dismantling fossil-fueled fashion.
The idea of a “fashion commons” may sound like an oxymoron, but according to Sandra Niessen, notions of status-seeking and consumer novelty widespread in the West are a vestige of colonial capitalist ideology. Just as in agriculture, FAN’s advocacy starts with a historical reframing. Marking a distinction between “big F” and “little f” fashion, Sandra affirms the tapestry of local, place-based, small-is-beautiful cultural expressions undermined and written off as “bound to disappear” in the face of industrial progress.
“We have little faith in fashion reforming itself into sustainability” Sandra says of “big F” corporations, but “when ‘big F’ fashion comes down, ‘little f’ has to be there: ready, resilient, regenerative; free, fair and alive.”
One method of supporting regenerative alternatives, still early in development, is FAN’s “common market” showcasing small and carbon-sequestering producers (think farm-to-fashion, sharing and repair communities— a catalog of ideas and solutions). With a nod to Schumacher, Sandra described reversing the trajectory of garment production as ultimately a matter of cultural survival and renewal.
Kathryn Milun on building community wealth through the energy transition
The Solar Commons Project is sharing free, open source tools intended to help communities to capture and manage the savings from renewable energy generation for shared benefit. A Professor at the University of Minessota Duluth, Kathryn Milun called the free energy of the sun “common wealth” in a Schumacherian sense, describing how the surplus can be directed to further community wealth building efforts locally.
Kathryn’s theoretical foundation underscores the historical insight mentioned by both Dorn and Sandra:
I read Small is Beautiful as a call to integrate what the classics called ‘the good, the true and beautiful’ in designing economic solutions that avert the Great Derangements we now experience in the industrial-scaled design of modernity.
…If modern industrial food and energy systems reduce the power of beauty to advertising, and restrict the good to the rational, then Schumacher’s alternative technology movement, combined with historical thinking inherent in commons movements, provides the antidote…
This model is currently piloted in Tucson, Arizona and is proposed for University of Minnesota campuses. With savings from a switch to solar paying off the investment within the first few years, she says, savings thereafter are agreed to represent a gift of nature that can be directed to reparative justice initiatives.
Part legal innovation, the Solar Commons Project uses a “community trust agreement” to codify this equitable title to electricity generated from the sun. “Neighbors can then use a digital dashboard to transparently govern solar savings via trust law,” she explains. In one case, school students in underserved neighborhoods help disburse the surplus to community benefit organizations via participatory budgeting.
Unlike in food and fiber, energy commoners have no pre-industrial references, making such experimentation vital. On the issue of scale, a study by the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that community solar arrangements like those Kathryn advocates are best not to exceed 500 kilowatts, beyond which administrative burdens grow disproportionate.
This insight, Kathryn highlighted, should inform rural renewable development, which tends to get divisive where profit-driven mega-solar arrays are proposed on arable land. By holistically incorporating not only scale, but crucial questions of ownership and governance, she emphasizes, “solar power can be a beautifully integrated part of our twenty-first century life-world.”