COMMONS MAGAZINE
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” So begins a significant new report by the New Economics Foundation in the U.K., quoting economist Kenneth Boulding. “The most pressing problem facing humanity now,” says the report, The Great Transition, “is how to share scarce planetary resources in ways that are just, sustainable and support the well-being of us all.”
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” So begins a significant new report by the New Economics Foundation in the U.K., quoting economist Kenneth Boulding. “The most pressing problem facing humanity now,” says the report, The Great Transition, “is how to share scarce planetary resources in ways that are just, sustainable and support the well-being of us all.”
Here at On the Commons, we believe land is an essential commons. What follows is a list of beliefs that support that idea.
At a time when city parks are suffering deep budget cuts, leaving recession-strapped American families with fewer choices for fun, there’s growing evidence that first-class park facilities may be a key to economic revitalization.
Ambitious park projects in struggling places like St. Louis, Detroit and central Houston are “ bringing urban centers back to life,” according to a recent headline in the “Washington Post”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073003588.html
It is a sign of the predatory nature of markets today that a tradition that goes back 4,500 years now needs to affirmatively defend itself as a common legacy of humankind. Yes, the latest endangered resource is…. yoga.
Yoga was developed in India as a physical and spiritual practice for everyone. The breathing known as pranayama is perhaps the most elemental aspect of human existence. But wouldn’t you know it…. all sorts of scheming entrepreneurs now want to convert yoga into “intellectual property.”
For pragmatic activists fighting the good fight against expansive copyright laws, the focus is usually on the here-and-now — how the law prevents us from sharing our works online, how it criminalizes all sorts of everyday activities, how it sanctions monopolies that charge ridiculous prices and stifle competition.
Reprinted from the Charlotte Observer
This week my daughter had to phone Live Nation about some concert tickets. As she worked her way through endless voice-mail menus and critiqued the different “on hold” songs, I told her a story about the olden days.
Before you were born, I said, when you called places people answered. Lacking voice mail menus, companies hired people whose job was to answer the phone and deal with your problem.
Science has always recognized the power of sharing in developing new knowledge. But in the search for treatments and cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the sprawling bodies of highly diverse research data are not easily shared. Either they are considered proprietary resources for making money, or they are hidden in academic databases that others may not know about, often inaccessible because of incompatible software formats. No single researcher really has the resources or incentive to develop an overarching regime to enable cooperation and sharing.
The Pavlovsk Experimental Station near St. Petersburg, Russia, is considered a priceless repository of agricultural biodiversity. An estimated 90 percent of its seed varieties are not found anywhere else on the planet — more than 5,000 rare varieties of fruits and berries from dozens of countries. The seeds are irreplaceable jewels of genetic history that could be vital in developing new plant varieties as climate change threatens existing varieties of plants.
Right now I’m celebrating the completion of a new book, All That We Share: A Field Guide to Commons, which I hope will serve as a bracing, inspiring introduction to the promise of the commons as a new (well, actually old) way of looking at the world. It’s due out in November from The New Press.
But after the elation, comes the second guessing. Since it’s too late to change anything in the book, I am now pondering everything in it that may not be exactly right.
A remarkable piece of water history should have been headline news everywhere this week.
After more than a decade of grassroots organizing and lobbying, the global water justice movement achieved a significant victory when the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to affirm “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”
In considering the essential problem of how to produce and distribute material wealth, virtually all of the great economists in Western history have ignored the significance of the commons — the shared resources of nature and society that people inherit, create and utilize. Despite sharp differences in concept and ideology, economic thinkers from Smith, Ricardo, and Marx to Keynes, Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter largely based their
In late June of 2010, On the Commons went to Detroit to participate in the U.S. Social Forum, a large-scale gathering of people committed to making history by transforming American society.
The focus of the event was to find equitable solutions to ongoing economic and ecological crises by building “a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement.” The week-long forum—inspired by the World Social Forums held in Brazil, India, Kenya and other countries—attracted roughly 10,000 participants.
We believe that nature, culture, human work, and knowledge itself are currently being privatized and commodified on an unprecedented scale. In countless arenas, private interests are claiming our shared inheritance—including the sciences, creative works, water, the atmosphere, public education, genetic diversity, living creatures, and so much more—as private property. Their compulsive quest for short-term financial gain discounts prosperity and stability for human and ecological communities.
Wikileaks’ release of 76,000 government documents about the Afghanistan war is already provoking a firestorm of debate – Will it help or hurt the war effort in Afghanistan? What will be the diplomatic and political fallout?
Under a 1959 treaty, the Antarctic is regarded as a global commons for scientific research. Scientists from many nations live and work together to investigate the strange geology, atmospheric conditions, glaciers and other natural realities of those regions of the world. The 1959 treaty shrewdly dodges questions of “ownership” of the poles, providing instead for multi-nation stewardship of the region by scientists working together.
As the son of a geography teacher, who spent endless hours of my youth poring over maps, I’ve always been fascinated with borderlines. As a kid I imagined that crossing from, say, Nevada into California would offer an immediate change of scenery from desert to Redwood trees.
Imagine that you’re a company that is increasingly besieged by complaints that your heavily advertised junk foods and sugary drinks are contributing to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. The First Lady has even gotten into the act, making “eating healthy” a personal priority. Naturally, the company wants to neutralize public criticisms about its unhealthy products and refurbish its corporate image.
What better way than to buy a slice of respectability and high-minded objectivity from an Ivy League school – say, Yale University?
Lost in the chatter about the firing of Shirley Sherrod and subsequent USDA apology is the unquestionable fact that she had devoted her entire life to economic justice.
In my view, she is a moral giant compared to shameful media celebrities, like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly, that wrongly accused her of racism.
I met Shirley Sherrod in 1982, when I was 22 years old.
Why should the free and open source software community regard their work as a commons? For people focused on building a specific piece of software, the need to label it a “commons” may seem gratuitous. What’s the value? But there are some good reasons for understanding free/open source software as a commons, as I explain in a recent essay published by the FLOSS Roadmap project.