COMMONS MAGAZINE
“If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.”
So said Walter Hickel, a former Republican governor of Alaska who died on May 7 at age 90. Hickel was a businessman who campaigned first for Alaskan statehood and then for its economic development. He also served as President Nixon’s Secretary of Interior, until he was forced out over differences on the Vietnam war.
While “the commons” is an evocative term, sparking images in our minds ranging from English peasant revolts to a park in downtown Boston, the full scope of its meaning is not always clear to people upon first encountering it.
That’s part of our mission at On The Commons “to make the idea of the commons and a commons-based society as familiar to everyone as the winner of last year’s American Idol competition.
As a vehicle for passionate participation and, transparent management, free and open source software (FOSS) has become an icon of our time: a synonym for a happier, more productive and democratic way of producing things. But sometimes the progressive image of open source may skate past some of the messier realities. Developing software code is, after all, a different challenge than journalism or music. And hackers are a different kind of social cohort than writers and musicians, let alone the general public.
To judge from a flurry of conferences, resolutions and events about the commons, international interest in the commons is growing. Here’s a quick overview of some of the more salient developments:
Excerpted from the book EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2010 by Bill McKibben.
Reprinted from Yale Environment 360, published by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Is carbon cap-and-trade legislation alive or dead in the U.S. Congress? Does the energy bill being proposed by senators John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham— or for that matter any climate and energy legislation— stand a chance of passing the U.S. Senate before this November’s midterm elections?
We humans like to gather, and to be around other people in informal and unstructured settings. For time out of memory, places in which to do so were built into daily life. Medieval cities had squares outside of churches, which is where markets first began. Boston and other New England towns began with commons. Towns in Mexico have zocalos, or central plazas where people congregate and socialize.
Bostonians got an amazing glimpse of our water commons this week — as an entire infrastructure of largely invisible “commons” institutions revealed itself.
On Saturday afternoon, I was driving home to Boston from a meeting on the North Shore of Massachusetts. My cell phone rang with a bilingual message indicating that a major water main had broken west of Boston and that we should boil all water for a minute. As I approached the city, electronic billboards flashed signs “Boil Water, Emergency Advisory.”
David Bollier has been the Croxton Lecturer at Amherst College for the past semester, teaching a course, “The Rise of the Commons.” Below are remarks that he delivered at the Robert Frost Library on April 26, 2010.
I realize that any mention of digital technologies and copyright law can induce a certain mental stupor among many people. The topic is rife with many complicated legal and technical issues. But I believe that we commoners have too much at stake to leave copyright law to the lawyers and the Internet to the techies.
Here’s a surprise: the enclosure of the village common — as it occurred in medieval times — is still occurring, in a literal sense. As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia, a mining company working in tandem with the Australian government has taken possession of the village common of Camberwell, Australia. (Thanks to Leo Burke for alerting me to this story!)
Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer.
Can abstract ideas be patented? Sometime soon, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to make a major decision regarding the constitutional scope of patents. The decision could have major implications for the legality of free software.
The private jet is always cast as the ultimate status symbol. Flip through The New Yorker and other upscale magazines, and you are invited to enter the fantasy world of private aviation, where there are no crowds, no long security lines and no boring waits in noisy airport lounges. You can just drive up to the plane (in your limo, of course) and jet to wherever and whenever you want!
OTC Fellow Kim Klein, an authority on fundraising
for nonprofit groups, is trying to restore some
political and economic equilibrium to her home
state of California.
This time of year it is useful to recount the parable of the taxpayer and the member of Congress. Tip O’Neill, the colorful congressman from Massachusetts who said “all politics is local,” used to recount a version of this.
The taxpayer woke up one winter morning feeling angry about his taxes. He decided to travel to Washington to complain directly to his Congressional representative.
From: The New Republic Daily Report
This is a tale of two bills “a tale that illuminates how policy-making may unfold under the most progressive administration, and most Democratic Congress, in a generation. And it’s not a tale with an especially happy ending.
A federal court ruling this week opens up the door to a chilling possibility — that cable and telephone companies might be able to interfere with transmissions of Internet traffic to suit their own business purposes. Paying partners could get “fast lane” service while the rest of us are shunted into “slow lanes.” Objectionable transmissions could be interfered with or blocked.
The weekend news showed exultant customers hoisting their newly purchased iPads over the heads in stunning images of triumph, transcendence and rapture. You gotta hand it to Steve Jobs. He knows how to stage a PR coup.
Too bad that the iPad is hardly a paragon of “freedom.” It is actually a “tethered appliance,” as tech guru Jonathan Zittrain puts it — a closed, proprietary system that enables Apple to control what we may do with the iPad and which new applications may run on it.
In a ruling that shocked most patent lawyers, a federal court has ruled that human genes may not be patented. The case involved seven patents on genes are thought to be related to breast and ovarian cancer.
Anyone who sees the world through the lens of economics is likely to see humanity as an unruly mass of selfish individuals clamoring for as much as they can. It’s a dog-eat-dog jungle that is only constrained by the rule of law and government.