COMMONS MAGAZINE
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Wenonah Hauter, who works on the political frontlines to ensure safety and health of Americans’ food as director of Food & Water Watch, details the threat that huge unaccountable agribusiness corporations pose to the public health and the natural environment in her new book “Foodopoly”:http://www.foodopoly.org/.
In downtown Northfield, Minnesota, you’ll find The Key—the longest running youth-run youth center in the country. Founded in 1993 by the Northfield Union of Youth, it was named for one of the founders who died unexpectedly before the center opened.
Powered entirely by the sustainable energy of young people, The Key is an at-risk youth center of the youth, by the youth, and for the youth. In other words, the Key is a commons. It’s something we all own together. Every youth, like me, who walks into the Key is an owner.
In 2006 I gave my music away. That music had previously existed on CDs and LPs (yes, I began making music in the days of vinyl and tape). I moved all of it to the Web, downloadable for free.
Today, seven years later, I see that giving away music for free is not as easy as I had imagined. In some ways, it turns out to be impossible. The reasons why this is so say a lot about creativity,property, and power in a networked world of corporately owned digital commons policed by netbots and stochastic algorithms.
Former New York mayor Ed Koch envisioned bicycles as vehicles for the future, and in 1980 created experimental bike lanes on 6th and 7th Avenues in Manhattan where riders were protected from speeding traffic by asphalt barriers. It was unlike anything most Americans had ever seen—and some people roared their disapproval. Within weeks, the bike lanes were gone.
The commons is, at its essence, the act of giving and receiving carried out on a massive scale across all levels of society. It seems apparent that generosity is hard-wired into human beings, despite several centuries of fevered protest from figures such as Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Richard Dawkins that we are guided by self-interest.
So it’s great news that the subject of giving has recently surfaced in a number of TED talks—the influential video lecture circuit that increasingly functions as the ideas soundtrack for the 2010s.
Founded in 2003, Sol Collective is a community-based meeting space in Sacramento, California that uses art, education, and technology for community empowerment. The nonprofit is led by a dynamic team of volunteers, educators, and activists—community members dedicated to fostering connections between Sacramento residents. We had the opportunity to connect with Rafael Aguilera, an active member of the Collective, at the “2012 Commons Solutions Lab”:http://www.onthecommons.org/work/change-system-we-must-start-everywhere-once.
In 2006, a group of community members expressed a strong desire “to foster a social complement to the scenic landscape and natural ecology of West Marin,” and after a series of discussions about the commons and its life-enriching capacities, an organization called West Marin Commons emerged. Today West Marin Commons is dedicated to establishing, preserving, and enhancing common spaces in the semi-rural western region of Marin County, California. It also seeks to create social infrastructure for resource sharing, conservation, and learning.
Sure, we can treat drinking water in filtration plants before it pours out of your tap. Most cities do just that, some better than others. But with energy costs rising and watersheds in miserable shape, what does it take to work with upstream communities to ensure that the water doesn’t get contaminated in the first place? That’s the challenge that Our Water Commons, an On the Commons project, tackled during a recent conference.
Sure, we can treat drinking water in filtration plants before it pours out of your tap. Most cities do just that, some better than others. But with energy costs rising and watersheds in miserable shape, what does it take to work with upstream communities to ensure that the water doesn’t get contaminated in the first place? That’s the challenge that Our Water Commons, an On the Commons project, is tackling during an upcoming conference.
The international Economics and the Commons Conference is a commons in itself, deliberately planned to include ample time for discussion and convivial spaces for attendees to get to know one another.
Rather than the usual Q-and-A at the close of a presentation, we are encouraged to share our own ideas with the audience. This morning began with fresh perspectives on caregiving, public infrastructure and the dual role of the commons as both a reform and revolutionary movement, followed by a spate of equally compelling observations.
The international Economics and the Commons Conference is off to a flying start. More than 200 commoners from 30 countries met in Berlin May 22-25 to discuss “new ideas, practices and alliances” for gradually installing the commons as the “core paradigm” for our economy, our society and our lives.
Silke Helfrich, co-founder of the Commons Strategy Group, opened the event with a round of rousing answers to the question: How do you get to the commons?
The creative community is experiencing an unprecedented interest in the arts’ ability to impact public life. Just one example is ArtPlace, an Obama administration catalyzed collaboration of thirteen leading foundations, eight federal agencies—including the National Endowment for the Arts—and six of the nation’s largest banks. ArtPlace focuses primarily on creative placemaking, or “investing in art and culture at the heart of a portfolio of integrated strategies that can drive vibrancy and diversity so powerful that it transforms communities.”
We are honored to introduce the inaugural team of poet advisers who have generously agreed to review submissions to UNCOMMON/WORD: A collection of commons-inspired poetry. The team includes poets Sarah Browning, Douglas Kearney, Juliet Patterson, Crystal Ann Williams. And our poet fellow is Elizabeth Dingmann.
Sarah Browning is the executive director of Split This Rock, a national organization that helps poets take a greater role in public life and heightening poetry as a living, breathing art form. Split This Rock integrates the poetry of provocation and witness into movements for social justice and supports poets of all ages who write and perform this vital work.
With only thirty British pounds, in 1634 John Winthrop and his Puritan followers purchased fifty acres of Reverend Blackstone’s land in what is today the heart of of Boston. Part of that land was set aside for sheep grazing, a space which came to be known as the Boston Common, now America’s oldest public park.
In his 1996 State of the Union Address Democratic President Bill Clinton famously declared, “the era of big government is over.” And during his tenure he did everything he could to make that true—deregulating the telecommunications and the financial industries; enacting a free trade agreement severely restricting the authority of the federal government to protect domestic jobs and businesses; and abandoning the 75-year old federal commitment to the poor.
Both the idea and the reality of the commons have been declining since at least the 18th century. Why now, at the beginning of the 21st century, should we struggle to revive them? What purpose do they serve in a modern, urban society?
The simple answer is that we have to.
Despite the many benefits it brings us, the market operates like a runaway truck. It has no internal mechanism telling it when to stop—stop depleting the commons that sustain it.
For 225 years the U.S. Post Office has been the most admired and ubiquitous manifestation of government. From 1789 until the 1960s, the Cabinet level agency saw its mission not only to deliver the mail but to aggressively defend the public good. In the late 19th century when oligopolistic mail order delivery companies abused their rural customers the Post Office launched parcel post. The competition quickly forced private companies to reduce their exorbitant prices and dramatically improve the quality of their service.
The first unmistakable signs of summery weather—warm temperatures already at breakfast time, passersby in short sleeves, sounds of squeeling kids coming in through open windows—are greeted here in Minneapolis with an exuberance reserved for Super Bolw victories in other cities. This gentle delirium overtook us last week when temperatures hit the 70s. Appointments were abruptly cancelled and offices grow empty throughout the afternoon as everyone conspired to spend as much time out-of-doors as possible.
In the belief system called economics, it is an article of faith that commons are inherently tragic. Almost by definition, they are tragic because they are prone to overuse. What belongs to all belongs to none, and only private or state ownership can rescue a commons from the sad fate that will otherwise befall it.