COMMONS MAGAZINE
What can we do to build our capacity and that of other commons catalysts?
To change the system, we must start everywhere at once—and it seems that we’re already well on our way, if the work represented by those who attended the recent Commons Solutions Lab (CSL) is any indication.
Follow this link to our YouTube playlist to learn about some of the truly amazing work that’s already underway to protect and enhance all that we share.
Want a sure way to kill the generative energy in the room after several days of meetings? Start facilitating the “next steps” session. We’ve all participated in this part of an agenda before: It’s the time when all the great ideas, creativity, and connection unleashed by being part of a dynamic dialog gets pigeonholed into clear, definable, and achievable…next steps.
In late October, Icelanders voted in an advisory referendum on whether their country should adopt a draft Constitution that would replace principles established in 1944. The ballot included six yes-or-no questions on a range of policy changes, but one question in particular caught our attention:
In the new Constitution, do you want natural resources that are not privately owned to be declared national property?
Bill Clinton, a man whose self-deprecating charm has carried him far in life, likes to tell a story about his appearance on a Shanghai radio show. It was a historic event: The president of the United States would field questions from everyday citizens in a nation notorious for its tight lock on information. But to Clinton’s surprise, two-thirds of the calls coming into the station were not directed at him, but to his host, the mayor of Shanghai. “People were more interested in talking to the mayor about potholes and traffic jams,” Clinton laughs.
The most expensive election campaign in U.S. history is now over.
The good news is that the Republicans’ advantage in Super-PAC money did not make a big difference this year—unlike 2010. Fat cats like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson went 0-8 in races where he invested $60 million. Linda McMahon spent an estimated $100 million of her own money to buy a Connecticut Senate seat and still lost.
Election night was a happier occasion than we dared hope a few weeks ago.
Aside from winning the White House and the Senate, Democrats unexpectedly won Senate seats in North Dakota and Montana (subject to recounts) and progressives celebrated four victories in gay marriage ballot measures. African-American, Latino and young voters turned out in numbers close to 2008, proving that election represented a genuine political realignment more than a one-time burst of enthusiasm.
Bill Clinton, a man whose self-deprecating charm has carried him far in life, likes to tell a story about his appearance on a Shanghai radio show. It was a historic event: The president of the United States would field questions from everyday citizens in a nation notorious for its tight lock on information. But to Clinton’s surprise, two-thirds of the calls coming into the station were not directed at him, but to his host, the mayor of Shanghai. “People were more interested in talking to the mayor about potholes and traffic jams,” Clinton laughs.
It’s not hard to start a commons revival in your neighborhood. In fact, as Dave Marcucci discovered, a simple bench can do the trick. After attending a Project for Public Spaces training course in 2005, Marcucci came away inspired by the idea that every neighborhood needed places for people to gather. He returned home to Mississauga, Ontario determined to make his house, which occupies a prime corner lot, one of the great places within his neighborhood.
If this election is a referendum on the benefit of government then superstorm Sandy should be Exhibit A for the affirmative. The government weather service, using data from government weather satellites delivered a remarkably accurate and sobering long range forecast that both catalyzed action and gave communities sufficient time to prepare. Those visually stunning maps you saw on the web or t.v. were largely based on public data made publicly available from local, state and federal agencies.
It has become increasingly clear that we are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by an archaic order of centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, presided over by a state committed to planet-destroying economic growth, people around the world are searching for alternatives. That is the message of various social conflicts all over the world—of the Spanish Indignados and the Occupy movement, and of countless social innovators on the Internet.
“The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract.”
— Daniel Kemmis, former mayor of Missoula, Montana
At the Great Lakes Commons gathering, scholars, economists, engineers, Indigenous leaders, environmental and social justice activists, attorneys, artists, and students from the U.S., Canada, and Indigenous Nations came together to explore strategies for establishing the Great Lakes as a living commons.
Below you will find a few reflections from Great Lakes gathering participants on the state of the Great Lakes and our time together, as well as links to the work of participating artists.
Reflections
A social charter is an established set of norms, rules, rights, and practices that define a community’s relationship to a commons and way of governing it. When commons have been enclosed, lost, or forgotten, commoners have historically turned to the social charter as a tool for reclaiming those commons and managing them in trust for their beneficiaries.
In late September, On the Commons and the Mendoza School of Business at Notre Dame—with sponsorship from the Blue Mountain Center, Michigan Technological University, and Vermont Law School—co-hosted a historic gathering to explore a life-sustaining future for the Great Lakes, and to reclaim the water as a commons.
(Photo by M. Christian under a CC license from flickr.com)
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.
Medieval European agriculture was communally organized. Peasants pooled their individual holdings into open fields that were jointly cultivated, and common pastures were used to graze their animals.This system of village commons prospered for more than six hundred years at the base of the feudal pyramid, under the watchful but often nominal presence of the landlords, monarchs, and popes. Then, beginning in the 1500s, powerful new political and economic forces were unleashed, first in Tudor England and later on the continent, that ultimately destroyed villagers’ communitarian way of life.
In a democracy the majority wins. Which makes minority groups vulnerable. At the dawn of the Republic John Adams warned about “the tyranny of the majority.”
The Democrats’ decisive victory is a good sign for the commons.
I realize the political and economic progress we desperately need won’t come directly from the ballot box. 2008 taught us that. Even with a former community organizer in the White House and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate, many urgent reforms were stalled, watered-down or completely MIA. I wish today I could take back at least half of my campaign contributions four years ago, redistributing them to grassroots fighting for the common good.