COMMONS MAGAZINE
On July 28, after years and years of grassroots pressure, the United Nations’ General Assembly will finally consider and debate a resolution supporting the right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation”.
Maude Barlow, former Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly described the denial of access to clean water as the “most violated human right”. It’s worth recalling some alarming statistics:
What happens when a market-based agricultural juggernaut invades a 9,000-year-old system of commons-based maize production in Mexico? What are the on-the-ground consequences? How have the farmers using traditional agriculture responded? Journalist Peter Canby offers a stunning account of this saga in his well-reported piece in The Nation, “Retreat to Subsistence.” Highly recommended reading.
“What does it mean to be creative as a conscious social activity—to create a commons, rather than individualizing creativity?” —Joshua McPhee, artist and founder of Just Seeds
Once in a while you come across some juicy tidbit of information that gloriously confirms something you always suspected was true. That happened to me a while back when reading William Murray’s book A Walk in Rome — a collection of musings, memories and historical research from _The New Yorker_’s longtime Italy correspondent.
Where our future used to be, we now face a massive debt.
The debt is national and measurable. We in America spent two decades buying on credit. We made promises we couldn’t keep to buy cars, houses, vacations, and plasma screens we couldn’t afford. When we defaulted, the debt shifted upward to a government that had already been putting its wars and occupations on the global equivalent of plastic.
In 2011, On the Commons hosted a gathering of organizations invested in reclaiming farmland as a commons. You can download the three-day agenda here.
At the 2011 Farming Commons Gathering, On the Commons brought together farmers, investors, and sustainable agriculture and land trust leaders from an array of cultural, historic, geographic, and economic realities in order to contextualize our individual efforts within a collective body of work and to learn from one another’s endeavors. This gathering initiated a deeper and more extensive conversation than many of us have had about the future of farmland.
New Spirit Ventures, a social finance organization that facilitates a flow of capital to farmers while fostering the kind of land stewardship and social ethic that will protect and nourish the earth for future generations.
RSF Social Finance, a nonprofit financial services organization that provides capital to social enterprises addressing food and agriculture, education and the arts, and ecological stewardship.
Imagine this. For the next four decades, you plan to squirrel away your extra money in a retirement account on Wall Street to pay for food in late life. Yet once the time is ripe to draw from the account, you will likely face higher market rates on food. And while you might have the opportunity to purchase kale, carrots, beets, and garlic from your favorite local vendor, chances are you won’t feel that your decades-long investment helped you create a meaningful connection to the vegetables you’ve purchased, the land you live on, or your local community.
On the Commons is calling for a People’s Movement Assembly (PMA) to identify, discuss, and commit to strategies for reclaiming our commons. We believe the commons are the essential natural, social, and cultural resources of our communities—many of which are rapidly being destroyed. We can claim, protect, enhance, control, and benefit from the shared abundance only through a direct relationship with those commons; so we believe new strategies for reclaiming our commons are vital both for the survival of our communities, and for achieving our goals of racial and economic equity.
With thousands of community, environmental and social justice advocates converging on Detroit for the U.S. Social Forum, OTC decided it was the ideal moment to launch our new storymapping project.
Storymapping is a simple but exciting idea—a map of the world where people detail their experiences with the commons. Click on a brightly colored balloon anywhere around the world, and up pops a story about the commons from that place in photos, video, text or audio.
On the Commons is headed to Detroit to take part 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, held June 22-26, is to find equitable solutions to the ongoing economic and ecological crises by building “a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational,? diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement.” The Forum—inspired by the World Social Forums held in Brazil, India, Kenya and other countries— is expected to attract 10,000 participants.
A growing movement needs your story
On The Commons is launching a new StoryMapping Project – a way to upload and share stories of change and transformation.
It is easy to participate. Take a moment or two to share (link) your organizations Web address, link to an existing video, create a new video, or write a short piece about how your work is related to the commons. Your contribution will be uploaded to a map – so everyone can see how our stories compose a widespread movement for a commons-based society.
An intense day of talking, discovering, searching, debating and connecting yesterday at the U.S. Social Forum.
Over four-and-a-half hours, a richly diverse (age, race, geography, class) group exchanged ideas about the potential of the commons to revise the stories we tell about politics, economics and culture.
The setting was one of several dozen People’s Movement Assemblies at USSF. The room was packed to the rafters with nearly 100 participants, some of whom were just learning about the commons.
The U.S. Social Forum is wonderful chaos—a mass of people in a huge convention hall with a million ideas about a different kind of world ricocheting off the walls. The crowd looks like America: young, old, black, white, brown, red, yellow, scruffy, sharply-dressed, gay straight, East coast, West coast, Heartland.
In December, a delegation of racial, economic, and environmental justice organizers went to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Negotiations. They were there fighting for real solutions to the crises that capitalism has created in poor communities around the world. The “Copenhagen moment” must now rapidly become the “people’s moment” if we are to win a just transition to a new world. Left values and vision will be essential in leading us out of the ecological crises we’re in.
Could we be reaching a turning point in history where the monopoly on societal communication enjoyed by governments and corporations is finally broken? Will the commoners be able to share information freely without risking jail, civil penalties or authoritarian retribution?
The gift economy is alive and global among an improbable network of “Couchsurfers” who stay in strangers’ homes when traveling. The idea got its start when Casey Fenton impulsively booked a flight to Iceland because of a cheap online airfare, and then realized that he didn’t know anyone there and had no idea what to do there.
So he found a list of email addresses for students at the University of Iceland in Rejkevik, and sent out emails asking if he could crash with them on their couches. He got lots of invitations and had a fantastic weekend with utter strangers.
No one complains about the convenience of getting water from the tap, but there is something deep within us that loves drawing fresh water from the ground, the way generations of humans have done. Is it the special taste? The cool moistness of that spot of ground? Or is it the wondrous mystery that hovers around a well?