David Bollier is Director of the Schumacher Center’s Reinventing the Commons Program. Together with American and international colleagues, Bollier explores why specific commons work so well, what challenges they must overcome, and how to grow the Commonsverse.
Bollier’s classic 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons, is now available in updated form from New Society Publishers. Its companion, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking, inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog, details the wide variety of commons projects around the world.
An Invitation to Tour the Commons
through the Frontiers of Commoning Podcast
By David Bollier
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the centralized state and global markets have distinct limitations in addressing the climate crisis, unaffordable food and housing, the decline of democracy, and many other urgent problems. A very different sort of mindset, social ethic, and politics is needed.
This may explain why the commons paradigm is surging in so many places around the world. It bypasses the dysfunctions of rigid, large-scale institutions, and it empowers people to take great control over their everyday lives.
From Indonesia to Amsterdam, and Bangkok to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, commoners are demonstrating that effective, democratic alternatives are entirely practical. They can be seen in bold innovations in agroecology, housing, energy systems, social services, alternative currencies, collaborative digital platforms, and many other realms.
Through the practice of commoning – the social process for creating and maintaining a commons — people are able to craft their own decentralized systems of governance and provisioning. They can meet their needs quite well – affordably, honestly, with a sense of belonging – outside of capitalist markets and government programs.
Alas, standard economics continues to peddle the myth of “the tragedy of the commons” – the idea that collective assets are invariably mismanaged to the point of ruin. Yet countless examples show that commons stewardship is entirely practical.
Particularly since the pandemic, commoning has moved from the fringe of cultural consciousness to become a more visible, mainstream affair. Mutual aid networks are a lifeline of food and services for many people. Community land trusts are making land more accessible to farmers and affordable housing. Community supported agriculture makes high-quality, local produce more accessible. Open source software lets computer users avoid the costly upgrades and privacy invasions associated with proprietary software. And so on.
The great appeal of commons is their democratic empowerment while meeting real needs. Without top-down administration, private property, and individual consumerism, everyone who contributes shares the bounty. Participants reap the satisfactions of belonging while participating in efforts to meet their needs in fair-minded ways.
One of the more lively projects of the Reinventing the Commons Program is the podcast Frontiers of Commoning. The podcast features probing interviews every month with vanguard commoners about their work.
Now in its sixth year, approaching its 68th episode, Frontiers of Commoning prowls the many creative edges of innovation in the Commonsverse that don’t usually get much attention. It showcases remarkable commoners and explores the inner complications of their ideas and projects. Episodes tend to leave listeners in a hopeful mood because the takeaway lesson is: Another way IS possible, one that’s humane, fair, and ecological. And it’s happening right now!
Each episode runs from 35 to 50 minutes and covers such diverse types of commons as repair cafes, digital governance, bioregional activism, solar commons, regenerative economics, and ecological wisdom from African-American and Indigenous traditions. The roster of sixty-seven episodes can be found here.
Here’s a listing of some of the more notable episodes of Frontiers of Commoning over the past six years, grouped by general themes.
BIOREGIONALISM
Leading pioneers of bioregional action
Interviews with Joe Brewer, a transnational activist/organizer for bioregionalism who is based in Barichara, Colombia (Episode #33); Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion (Episode #54); and Isabelle Carlisle, founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC), who is building community resilience in southwest England (Episode #66).
How the BerkShares currency is strengthening the Berkshires
The BerkShares currency in western Massachusetts has become one of the most successful regional currencies in the world today. Rachel Moriarty, then-director of the project led by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, describes the history and ongoing evolution of the complementary currency (Episode #2).
Bioregional textile growing and clothing production
In the UK, Zoe Gilbertson is a fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up by developing supply chains and methodologies for bioregional fibersheds for textiles (Episode #56).
ECOLOGICAL WISDOM
The land traditions and ethics of ‘Black Earth Wisdom’
Leah Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York, tells of her efforts to revive African-American farming and Indigenous land traditions – work that she memorializes through her book anthology, Black Earth Wisdom, featuring sixteen Black elders (Episode #38).
Earth as Gaia & its influence on our inner lives
Dr. Stefan Harding, Cofounder of Schumacher College in England and a pioneering scientist focused on earth sciences, deep ecology, and the theory of Gaia, describes the Earth as an animate system that manifests itself in human consciousness, feelings, and the soul (Episode #27).
The biopoetics of life as a subjective, creative force
German biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber rejects the standard neoDarwinist account of life as mechanical and objectifying, insisting that science must study the subjective aliveness of organisms in the context of deeply symbiotic, relational webs of many other beings (Episode #12).
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL ECONOMICS
Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth, a renegade economist, became an international phenomenon with her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, which offers a new framework for addressing concerns usually ignored by mainstream economics – 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) (Episode #15).
Commitment-pooling currencies in Africa
Will Ruddick, a development economist and founder of Grassroots Economics in Kenya, describes how ancient mutual aid practices and credit vouchers (circulating as a kind of money) can blend with digital ledger technologies to create new types of economic commons (Episode #48).
A regenerative economics curriculum for secondary school students
Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an educator appalled by the state of economics education for young people, set out to develop a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus, working with other teachers and economists. The course is now being used internationally in dozens of secondary schools (Episode #46).
Community solar commons
Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar and writer at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, has worked with many partners to develop the Solar Commons, a prototype community trust model that uses decentralized solar arrays to generate revenue streams to build community wealth. (Episode #47).
URBAN COMMONS
Developing an urban food commons in Amsterdam
Amsterdam activist Natasha Hulst, Director of the European Land Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, recounts the struggle to create an urban farm and green space called Voedselpark, or Food Park, on the edge of Amsterdam (Episode #41).
An Atlas of Urban Commons
Carnegie Mellon University professor Stefan Gruber 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 (Episode #55).
COMMONING IN AGRICULTURE
Sharing seeds in a world of proprietary agriculture
Seed-sharing pioneer Jack Kloppenburg discusses the legal complications of making agricultural seeds shareable as large ag-biotech companies use all sorts of legal, technological and market restrictions to make seeds privately owned and proprietary. (Episode #63).
Desert oases as human-maintained commons
Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions of commoning in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world as an alternative vision of development (Episode #52).
When open Source meets regenerative agriculture
Dorn Cox, a New Hampshire family farmer in the vanguard of regenerative agriculture, explains how participatory science and knowledge commons, can improve crop yields, soil health, and ecosystem resilience, while open source farm equipment can reduce costs and increase flexibility (Episode #36).
DIGITAL COMMONS
The importance of network protocols for digital commoning
Rabble Henshaw-Plath, a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and decentralized technologies, describes how network protocols are critical infrastructure for enabling, or impeding, commons and open markets, not to mention privacy, free speech, and community control (Episode #65).
Building democratic governance on the Internet
Activist-scholar Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains the potential of democratic governance in online life and its importance to “real world” democracy (Episode #49).
The breakthrough insulin device developed by commoners
Irish sociologist and researcher Shane O’Donnell has been part of a global “device activism” movement that developed an open source, automatic insulin-delivery system for people with diabetes. The system includes a smartphone app and insulin-pump, leaping way beyond what the proprietary medical device industry offered (Episode #44).
ARTS, CULTURE & CARE
The artistic duo ‘Cooking Sections’ serves up art, eco-activism & local food
The British artistic team known as Cooking Sections – Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernandez Pascual of the Royal College of Art in London – use their virtuoso visual, performance, and installation artworks to jolt people into new understandings of local ecosystems, capitalism and food (Episode #50).
Commoning at an artist-owned ensemble theater
Double Edge Theatre regularly attracts sell-out crowds to its outdoor performances on its farm in rural western Massachusetts. Co-artistic director Carlos Uriona and his then-codirector Matthew Glassman describe the social and creative ethic of the troupe as well as its deep engagement with its local community (Episode #1).
Acts of ‘Pirate Care’ to support victims of ‘organized abandonment’
To combat the “organized abandonment” of people in need, a group called Pirate Care, in the tradition of civil disobedience, show compassion and social solidarity for refugees, victims of gender violence, and other ordinary people. Two instigators and theorists of creative, public acts of care — Valeria Graziano & Tomislav Medak – see their often-illegal acts (“pirate care”) as revolutionary (Episode #58).
All podcast episodes are accessible for free wherever you find your podcasts!
Enjoy the inspiration and learning, and step out with your own commoning initiative!
David Bollier
Director, Reinventing the Commons Program