Some Democratic Congress members oppose the bill because it would hand over 85 percent of the pollution permits absolutely free to energy companies, and it would result in higher energy costs for everyday Americans.

There is an alternative bill, sponsored by key House leader Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), which would minimize those problems. The Cap-and-Dividend approach in this bill is similar to Cap-and-Trade in curbing pollution, but it requires companies to pay for pollution permits with the resulting revenues being returned as a rebate to every U.S. citizen on an equal basis. That would help low- and middle-income households deal with rising energy costs.

Cap-and-Dividend uses a commons-oriented approach based on the idea that sky belongs to everyone and private companies should not be allowed to pollute it for free. The idea was developed by Peter Barnes, an energy and financial entrepreneur who is cofounder of OnTheCommons.

Cap-and-Dividend has gained some influential supporters recently, including the Washington Post editorial page, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, leading environmentalist Bill McKibben and, most recently, the editors at Scientific American.

After careful study of climate change legislation, the authoritative science journal editorialized, “We urge Congress to set a cap on fossil-fuel production…and send the proceeds back to the taxpayer.”

That is the fairest way to curb carbon emission, and it will prove more politically popular over the long run than penalizing average American families while enriching the companies that cause global warming in the first place.

Initiated by Louise Rooney and environmentalist Rob Hopkins in 2005, the “transition towns” movement is dedicated to drastically reducing carbon emissions on a local basis, developing alternatives to oil, and nurturing resilient local economies. Instead of looking to federal governments for money or leadership, transition towns are taking on the responsibility themselves. They are committed to working as communities to find new and better ways to live in harmony with nature while meeting essential needs.

The movement recognizes that meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and climate change will require more than better public policies; it will require an interior change in ourselves and how we find meaning and satisfaction.

Claire Milne speaks to the people of Brixton, England, about the town’s food sovereignty. Photo by jodyecolabs,, via Flickr, licensed under an Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license.

Rooney and Hopkins hatched the idea of transition towns in Kinsale, Ireland. Hopkins then took the idea to Totnes, South Devon, in England, when he moved there in 2005. The idea quickly spread, and there are now 150 towns in fourteen countries that consider themselves Transition Towns.

What this means is that a town has organized itself to give serious consideration to the implications of Peak Oil and global warming. Transition towns have mobilized significant support from ordinary people in the community and from its leading institutions, including businesses, schools and civic organizations. Their shared, self-appointed task is to figure out how to reduce carbon emissions and how to increase the community’s “resilience” once oil is no longer plentiful.

The Transition Initiative looks at how people will obtain food, energy and health care, and how they will manage transportation and education. The project studies how people will earn livelihoods and develop more meaningful lifestyles that are less dependent upon material acquisitions and economic growth. The end result is an “Energy Descent Action Plan” that plots a community-devised strategy for transforming itself over the course of 15 to 20 years.

From the outside, the whole process may sound dreary. But that’s not how it feels to participants. As an article by Brian Goodwin in Resurgence magazine reports:

One of the remarkable features of the Transition movement is that, despite the gravity of our situation, there is a sense of empowerment and excitement that results from inviting people to discover their own solutions to the problems we face. They are not being told what to do. Threat and blame do not liberate people; invitation to participate in designs for radical transformation does. This is a truly bottom-up movement of deep change which people recognize is increasingly necessary.

At a Transition Town meeting in Brixton, England, Claire Milne spoke to a meeting about the town’s dependence on outside food. As reported on Flickr, Milne said: “Our current food system invests 10 calories of fossil energy to get 1 calorie of food energy out. We import more than 40% of our food. As oil and gas supplies dwindle this will present problems. In the city we are reliant on supermarket distribution chains, but supermarkets only hold enough food to feed us all for three days, leaving us ‘nine meals away from anarchy’ should our imports be interrupted.”

At bottom, the Transition Towns movement is about raising consciousness and changing culture. It’s about showing how the Western habits of hyper-individualism and material acquisition are intimately wrapped up in our dependence on oil, which has contributed greatly to global warming. The Transition movement is attempting to redesign the very nature of community and culture so that people can escape debt-dependence and growth pathologies, and begin to develop more locally based lifestyles that are satisfying and meaningful.

The whole process is about commoning – the practices needed to develop a commons. The Transition Initiative invites everyone from the community to participate. It is not something that government simply delivers from on high. Transition initiatives expressly honor seven principles: position visioning (“tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of community life beyond dependence on fossil fuels”); trust and empowerment; inclusion and openness; sharing and networking; building resilience; inner and outer transition; and subsidiarity (“self organization and decisionmaking at the appropriate scale”).

The Transition Towns website admits: “We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.” It’s hard to imagine a more visionary yet practical approach to the dire challenges that face us in the years ahead.

For more, visit the Transition Towns website, the Transition United States website or the Wikipedia entry on Transition Towns. Or read the excellent article in the July/August 2009 issue of the Britain-based Resurgence magazine.

But in the second half of the 20th Century, that all changed. Streets became the exclusive property of automobiles, and everybody else had better get out of the way— or else!

An old Disney cartoon, starring a character looking likes very much like Goofy, shows how this Tragedy of the Streets came to pass. It can be watched on the website of Bike Walk Twin Cities , one of many organizations that have popped up recently to reclaim the streets for pedestrians.

See it here

p(photo-credits). photo by photojordi.com under a Creative Commons license with no commercial use or adaptions

Harvard doctoral candidates Ryan Bubb and Alex Kaufman describe how credit cards issued by investor-owned banks charge higher fees and penalties than customer-owned credit unions. And when the credit unions do charge fees and penalties, they charge less than banks. Credit unions also offer Visa and Mastercard cards for lower annual fees and longer grace periods.

Bubb and Kaufman cite these facts – the results of an extensive study that they performed – to show that banks can still lend profitably under the recently passed credit-card reform legislation, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act. Banks have pissed and moaned that the reforms will require them to cut credit limits, raise annual fees and eliminate rewards programs (e.g., free plane tickets) for credit-card users. These are the same banks, incidentally, that have recently benefited from billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Even a modicum of public accountability from banks — in terms of reasonable credit card terms — is apparently too much to ask for.

Bubb and Kaufman utterly demolish the banking industry’s claims that it cannot afford to offer credit under the law’s new terms. If credit unions can profitably offer credit cards to customers under the new law, well, so can banks. They will simply earn less money. That’s the real bone of contention. As Bubb and Kaufman put it:

Banks and credit unions compete for customers in the same market. The primary distinguishing characteristic of credit unions is that they answer to a different group of owners: profits that are not reinvested are paid to the union’s shareholder-customers as a dividend, much as investor-owned banks reinvest or pay dividends on their shareholder-investors….Credit union cards demonstrate that punishing fees are not an essential ingredient of profitable lending.

The lesson here is that commons-based businesses can act as a competitive wedge for higher-quality performance in the marketplace. They often have superior cost-structures and financial loyalties (to investor-customers), enabling them to compete more effectively. That’s why conventional businesses loathe them. In the past, the banking industry has tried to impose new restrictions on the ability of credit unions to compete and expand.

This same dynamic is currently playing out in the health care reform battles. Insurers and pharmaceutical companies are not eager to see a publicly managed alternative provide genuine competition to them. Republicans and centrist Democrats are enraged that a public option would provide more efficient services at more competitive prices. Hello? Isn’t that the point? And let’s not start with claims that commons-based businesses have subsidized advantages. If anything, it’s the conventional businesses that have leveraged their political power to acquire all sorts of financial and regulatory advantages for themselves. And yet that is STILL not enough to make them competitive in many instances (because so much of the revenue is being constantly siphoned off to investors).

If the market as now constituted can’t compete against commons-based alternatives, well, then, perhaps it’s time to let the bloated, inefficient businesses of the conventional market give way to the superior alternatives.

Today, “the commons” generally means the resources and institutions to which a community has rights of access; in other words, what we hold in common, such as clean air, the public airwaves, streets, parks, public safety, schools, public art, etc. We determine the commons not only by tax dollars, but more importantly by human right, mutual commitment, and cultural and social value. Perhaps, sometimes anyway, if we move our tax arguments more toward a discussion of the value of our commons, we can find that philosophical common ground more readily and with less conflict.

Perhaps if Jay Walljasper had hung around with us for a month or two in Johnson County earlier this year, our debates over the local option sales tax and other recent public issues could have been less ugly.

Twin Cities resident Walljasper is a writer, speaker, former editor of the Utne Reader,current editor-at-large of Ode Magazine, and author of The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Placemaking. Walljasper is also a fellow and editor for On the Commons and their website Onthecommons.org. On the Commons defines themselves as “a network of citizens and organizations that champions the cause of the commons on many fronts. Our mission is to advance a new worldview by naming, claiming, protecting and expanding the commons for the good of all.” The organization defines “the commons” as “everything we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished, to future generations.” Walljasper says that not until recently did he realize his myriad interests—the environment, social justice, community empowerment, urban revitalization, etc.—were all part of “the commons.” Maybe Jay Walljasper could have put many of our current civic debates into this larger context of “the commons” for us.

Maybe he still can. In fact, he is coming to town, this month. He will speak at the Iowa City Public Library June 13 on “Everything I Need to Know I Learned at the Public Library: Important Lessons Drawn from Books, Librarians, Neighbors and Life Itself. Full disclosure time. I serve on the Board of Trustees of the Iowa City Public Library. The reason I’m on the Board (and serving as President this year) is that I believe the Iowa City Public Library is a truly great institution—and one of the most important elements of our local commons.

Photo by annethelibrarian under a Creative Commons license stipulating no commercial use or alteration.

This summer, the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL) is celebrating its fifth anniversary in its newly remodeled building. Five years ago, we celebrated an expansion of this community’s beloved library that nearly doubled its size, upgraded its infrastructure, and changed the face of downtown. In those five years, circulation and patronage have increased at a steady five, six, or seven percent each year. In the past five years, Iowa Citians, cardholders from other communities, and visitors have checked out over 7 million items. As a community center, the Library held over 1,500 meetings and events in its community rooms in the last six months of 2008 (that’s almost 10 a day).

Clearly, the community loves and uses its library. It exists for the common holding and distribution of knowledge, media materials (books, periodicals, DVDs, CDs, computer databases, etc.), and public gathering. Several years ago, Iowa Citians declared that this was a part of the commons we highly valued by voting to pass an $18.4 million bond referendum in order to expand and update an institution that is so much a part of our community identity.

“The commons” is not a happy land where flowers bloom and the sun shines all day. It’s a real place, with real people. Clashing opinions and realities are inevitable. But there are ways to conduct and support the commons with a greater mutual understanding, compassion, and respectful process than our community has shown in recent months.

Reprinted from Thomas Dean’s UR column in Little Village, Iowa City’s News and Culture Magazine (June 2009). www.LittleVillageMag.com

The book was edited by Silke Helfrich and published by the Heinrich Boell Foundation; Helfrich is the former director of the Foundation’s Mexico City office, which hosted a major conference, Citizenship and Commons, in December 2006. The collection, whose title in English is To Whom Does the World Belong? offers a thoughtful and provocative array of viewpoints on the commons. (The links below connect to pdf files of the essays.)

Silke Helfrich: Commons: The Network of Life and Creativity In her introduction Silke Helfrich gives a review of the commons debate as laid out in the Spanish and German anthology published recently by the Heinrich Boelll Foundation and references most of the articles of this web-dossier.

David Bollier: The Commons: A Neglected Sector of Wealth-Creation In his introductory essay David Bollier highlights the extent to which the commons – meaning natural, social and cultural resources – are the wealth of us all.

Antonio Lafuente: The four realms of the commons Antonio Lafuente points out the plurality, elusiveness and historical nature of common goods as they appear in four realms: our body, the environment, cities and digital spaces.

Helix photo by mamnaimle,, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

José Esteban Castro: Commons and citizenship: the contradictions of an unfolding relationship Esteban Castro emphasizes the importance of the individual within various communities, pointing out the emancipatory potential of the commons. He argues that the commons debate is capable of adding a new dimension to the concept of citizenship.

Yochai Benkler: The Political Economy of Commons Yochai Benkler defines the structure of the information commons, its sustainability, and its importance for democracy and individual freedom.

Elinor Ostrom: Governing a Commons from a Citizen’s Perspective Elinor Ostrom points out that citizens play an “essential role in the governance of common pool resources and that efforts to turn over all of the responsibility for governing these resources to external experts are not likely to protect them in the long run.” Thus, when we talk about commons, we must think of them in relation to their communities, to commoners, and to a new kind of citizenship.

Achim Lerch: The Tragedy of the “Tragedy of the Commons” Achim Lerch points out the similarities and differences between various property regimes, criticizing the famous metaphor of Garrett Hardin, the so called “Tragedy of the Commons”. He distinguishes between defined property rules and open access regimes and argues that overuse is not a tragedy of common property structures but rather a tragedy of open access to no man’s land.

Richard Stallman: The Right to Read In his short story Richard Stallman describes a future in which the reading and lending of digitalized books is highly restricted – illustrating some ongoing processes of the enclosure of cultural techniques by intellectual monopoly rights.

Silvia Ribeiro and Pat Mooney: The New Enclosures of the Mind New technologies create new possibilities to enclose the commons. Mooney and Ribeiro show that technological progress enables those who are interested to even enclose our ability to judge.

Jean Pierre Leroy: The Guardians of Our Future: Territorial Management in Gurupá There are plenty of possibilities for the sustainable management of natural common pool resources. Pierre Leroy from Brazil describes the struggle to arrange rights to access and use of natural and cultural resources within the Amazon community of Gurupá (Pará, Brazil) in a fair manner, by making use of (a combination of) different property regimes

Leticia Merino: The forestry communities of Mexico Leticia Merino critically reflects on the various forms of managing Mexican forests. She shows that – given certain political and economic conditions- community based resource management may produce good results.

Sunita Narain: When markets do work for people Sunita Narain reports on how Indian village communities are successfully overcoming the acute water shortage and ultimately ensuring that “markets truly work for the people” by organizing themselves.

Michael Earle: Fishing in the Commons Michael Earle assesses the numerous attempts at the regulation of fishing that have already been “tried” or are on the table. There seem to be few promising solutions to overfishing in the world’s oceans. The global fish stocks are a global commons, which easily escape the patterns of local or national resources management.

Jamie Metzl: Brave New World War Jamie Metzl examines the ethical and moral reasons for governments to set limits on the manipulation of human genetic resources.

Lisa Thalheim: Trusted Computing Lisa Thalheim outlines how the existence and use of Trusted Computing technology can weaken our individual options vis-à-vis the computer and media industry. Technology may be a powerful tool to enclose the commons.

Silke Helfrich: Interview with Richard Stallman Richard Stallman was the first to develop free licenses for software and other content. As the founder of the Free Software Movement he talks about the achievements of the movement as well as the challenges ahead. Free Software is a new commons built from the bottom up.

Silke Helfrich & Jörg Haas: The Commons: A New Narrative for Our Times An essay that reviews some of the key elements of commons theory and presents some ideas about the political and strategic reach of the commons both as a political perspective and praxis.

Christian Siefkes: The Commons of the Future – Building Blocks for a Commons-based Society /Siefkes_Commons_Future.pdf Christian Siefkes discusses the components of a commons-based society. Such a society “springs from numerous communities” – communities “that make and develop their own rules to create, preserve, and use commons.”

One measure of what our nation has lost – in terms of culinary variety and authenticity – can be found in a new book, The Food of a Younger Land (Riverhead Books), edited by Mark Kurlansky. Its subtitle says it all: “A portrait of American food – before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation’s food was seasonal, regional and traditional – from the lost WPA files.”

Rabbit stew, a specialty of Long Island. Photo by cwphobia, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license.

When I read the phrase, “from the lost WPA files,” I perked up. The WPA was the Works Progress Administration, Franklin Roosevelt’s brilliant innovation for getting people back to work during the Great Depression. One WPA project, the Federal Writers’ Project, sought to help unemployed writers. As author Kurlansky explains, the WPA “was charged with conceiving books, assigning them to huge, unwieldy teams of out-of-work and want-to-be writers around the country, and editing and publishing them.” The Federal Writers’ Project produced at least 276 books and hundreds of pamphlets and brochures. Its most famous product is surely its series of guidebooks to the states, many of which are classics still consulted today.

The Federal Writers’ Project was also responsible for a major book that never quite saw the light of day. Katherine Kellock, who ran the Project, decided in 1939 that it would be worthwhile to document how America eats. The intended book, America Eats, would describe the various eating traditions and foods in various parts of the U.S. As Kurlansky tells the story:

_With the Depression waning and war looming, it was clear that America and its customs would soon be changing. By the 1930s frozen food was appearing. Industrial food from the beginning of the century, such as Jello-O, factory-made bread, and cake mixes, was making huge gains in the market from new advertising vehicles such as radio. What could better spell the beginning of the end than bottled salad dressing, the manufacture of a product that was so easy to make at home? The editors of America Eats understand that in another ten years American food would be very different._

And so the word was sent out to FWP offices instructing writers to contribute to a 75,000-word book that would focus on “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life, as exemplified in the group meals that preserve not only traditional dishes but also traditional attitudes and customs. Emphasis should be divided between food and people.” Significantly, the book was to take food seriously, and not the way that women’s magazines might write about it. The tone was to be “light but not tea shoppe, masculine not feminine.”

For the next two years, the various writers projects around the country assigned, edited and polished contributions about food traditions from Maine to New Mexico and from the Dakotas to Florida. But Pearl Harbor and the onset of World War II interrupted the book’s progress, and in February 1943, the WPA itself was shut down. The unfinished notes and contributions for America Eats, in varying degrees of publishability, were stuffed into five boxes and shunted into a Library of Congress storeroom.

Those boxes were a time-capsule into America’s past, which Kurlansky discovered and edited into his just-published book, The Food of a Younger Land. Poring through onionskin carbon copies (photocopiers had not been invented!), Kurlansky found a “chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts” – the raw dispatches from the field awaiting an editor’s keen eye and blue pencil. Ironically, this made the materials all the more revealing because the individual voices and direct accounts have an authentic flavor, even if there are also many gaps and omissions.

To browse through The Food of a Younger Land is to be transported into a time when mothers improvised recipes because of shortages of certain ingredients and fathers brought home fresh game from the woods and mussels from the ocean. The book describes the “sugaring off” parties in Vermont, where people hosted neighborhood celebrations as they finished off the annual tapping of sap from trees for maple syrup. It describes the making of persimmon beer among Mississippi African-Americans. In and around Darlington, South Carolina, people would host outdoor gatherings and serve “chicken bog,” a distinctive chicken-and-rice dish. Nebraskans loved buffalo barbeque and Wisconsin folks enjoyed sour-dough pancakes.

I’m not enough of a foodie to go nuts with this book, but I found it endlessly fascinating to read how American food was once had the improbable variety of the Internet — a world before McDonalds and Campbells Soup and Chilis had homogenized the locally distinctive into oblivion.

To the rest of the world, it may seem strange, even ludicrous, that something as basic as food traditions could be eclipsed; Michael Pollan eloquently makes this point in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But the rise and consolidation of national food markets over the past 75 years has assuredly achieved this amazing feat – the eclipse of the local.

To be sure, vestiges of the past remain. But their vitality is muted. The speed, convenience and (deceptive) cheapness of mass-produced and branded foods has prevailed. The riotous diversity of our food traditions and the fierce eccentricities of local identity are mostly gone.

How wonderful that one commons – the Federal Writers’ Project – has preserved the history of another – our vernacular food traditions and practices! As so many of us locavores try to resurrect a more locally rooted food system, we would do well to study the cast of mind of those who once cherished their local dishes. Browsing through The Food of a Younger Land will not only work up a powerful appetite, it will make you jealous of the gusto and pride that people once felt toward their daily food. That’s something worth recovering.

Shifting to “We”
There is a groundswell of yearning for a commons-based society in the world today, which can help shift the balance from a “me” perspective to a “we” perspective. We can re-imagine how things could be different in society, Ristau noted, if we focus on abundance instead of scarcity.

p(photo-credits). Photo by twenty5pics under a Creative Commons license, with no commercial use or alteration

She then threw out a question to the whole room: What new openings do you see right now for a commons-based society? Here are responses from the group:

• Local food, organic food, community gardens – which brings people closer to the earth and one another.
• Reversing the rampant deregulation of the last 30 years that fueled privatization of public resources.
• Shifting from negative to positive perspectives about aging – focusing on wellness, wisdom and meaningful work.
• A holistic approach to health and support for integrated medicine.
• More women around the world looking for ways to empower other women. More women taking risks in how they carry out the responsibilities of leadership.
• A shift in the direction of personal responsibility for environmental sustainability. We’re moving from “Let the do-gooders do it,” to “What can I do to contribute?”
• Focusing on assets rather than deficits—finding solutions through a positive, can-do attitude that builds upon what’s working in a community as well as fixing what’s not working.
• An opening for more complex thinking, which accepts ambiguity and the simultaneous duality of local/global and personal/public perspective.
• A move to create more alternative institutions within the current economy, such as Time Banks, which circulate people’s knowledge and helpfulness through the economy, not just money.
• People embracing a broader perspective that sees interconnections all around us, leading to a realization that everything affects everything else.
• A new emphasis on the value of informal learning from others rather than viewing education as a wholly professionalized process.
• A growing recognition that health disparities are neither inevitable nor a matter of personal will
• Focusing on integrity and connection in communications rather than public relations.
• An increasing understanding that the commons is a concept that has endured through the ages, and has a particular resonance for our times.

The Commons Movement
People today are hungry to activate new solutions, Ristau explained. Growing numbers of us are part of a movement to protect and promote the commons, even if we don’t use that exact term. This emerging movement involves people networking, spreading ideas, co-creating solutions to the problems we face together. It affects how people see themselves, how they recognize the future, and how they work together to shape a life sustaining future for all of us.

“A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use, and sustainability,” she said, quoting her OTC colleague David Bollier. This means that cooperative decision-making and engagement with the public are essential elements of the commons movement.

This is exciting to think about, Ristau noted, but also raises the big question: How do we help shift consciousness? Here are more thoughts from the group:

We can focus on sufficiency—on deciding what is enough and what is too much.

We can focus on repairing inequity in our society through reparations to those who have been harmed.

We can focus on consciousness raising – stimulating people to search beyond what they know and make new connections.

We can focus on developing new forms for people to take action– organizing people to invent new forms of governance via the Web, and creating new structures to meet social needs such as Time Banks, co-housing communities, and community schools.

We can focus on reaching across the silos in which people are stuck, to initiate collaboration. We can all look for like-minded people in other disciplines, cultures, and generations to create a new space to dream.

We can focus on connecting with people from all walks of life based on their everyday experiences.

We are working to build a commons-based society, where we will open up new opportunities for leadership, foster more small-scale settings for people to interact, and instill a new sense that our dependency on one another is a point of strength rather than a problem.

Western society has been constructed on a foundation of specialization, Ristau observed. But we are now increasingly aware of the faults of a culture narrowly focused on the belief that solutions come only from the experts in a particular field. Only doctors can heal. Only traffic engineers can decide how our streets work. In reality, we are all experts. We need to see ourselves in that light, looking at the whole and depending on our own common sense.

No one is saying we have to join a ‘60s-style commune or rigid collective. We are who we are as Americans — individuals, each with a dream. But in the future we do need to see how our individual efforts affect the whole.

The essence of the commons is that we need want to connect people in a cooperative effort to shift our society shift from “me” to “we”. This is the moment for this movement.

In April 2008, more than 140 researchers in economics, the environmental sciences and social sciences from 30 countries converged on Paris for the first conference on “Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity.” Now the proceedings from that epochal event are available online as a pdf file. The 322-page document is probably one of the best single collections of timely, authoritative writings on “steady state” or “no-growth economics.”

Photo by “nicorien,“http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicorien/118131870 via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, ShareAlike license.

The core question of the conference – and of a proto-movement with strong support in France, Italy and other European nations – is how to imagine a world that is not based on indefinite economic and material growth. “Is degrowth of industrialised countries possible in the present context?” asks the conference website. “What are the social and institutional conditions required for a fair and sustainable economic de-growth process?”

Of course, merely asking this heretical question immediately raises a host of additional questions: How should progress in achieving degrowth be measured? How does the global South regard degrowth? What effects would degrowth have on consumption, production and the distribution of wealth? How could degrowth, social equity and sustainability be achieved in a coordinated way?

In the context of conventional economics, even asking questions like these is considered incendiary. The fact that there is now a committed international corps of thinkers collaborating in trying to answer such questions is a hopeful sign indeed.

Browsing the conference proceedings yields a number of interesting articles:

• “Why Environmental Sustainability Can Most Probably Not Be Attained with Growing Production”
• “Conceptual Roots of Degrowth”
• “Gastonomic Sciences: Slow Food Revolution versus Gene Revolution”
• “Why Are We Growth-Addicted?”
• “Less is More: The Influence of Aspirations and Priming on Well-being”
• “The Finality of Degrowth and its Relation with Justice”

• “The Degrowth Economy and Lifestyles”

The planet’s various ecological crises will surely have to get worse before the premises of the Degrowth conference will receive a fair and open hearing. Still, I am encouraged that a degrowth conversation has begun. I know that readers of OntheCommons.org are not timid or parochial, so you will probably enjoy the formal declaration that was ratified by conference participants:

We, participants in the Economic De-Growth For Ecological Sustainability And Social Equity Conference held in Paris on April 18-19, 2008 make the following declaration:

We therefore call for a paradigm shift from the general and unlimited pursuit of economic growth to a concept of “right-sizing” the global and national economies.

The paradigm shift involves degrowth in wealthy parts of the world.

Such “contracts of adhesion” as the classic legal tool for corporations to unilaterally impose their own terms for a seller/buyer relationship, while maintaining the free-market fiction that consumers make their own sovereign, informed choices among competing sellers. Under a Web TOS, all you have to do is hastily click an “I Agree” button, and you have formally accepted pages of impenetrable but potentially consequential legalese. If you use Facebook, eBay, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube or countless other social networking sites, you are legally bound by the TOS, which the company may change at a moment’s notice.

As the number of users on a website grows, it often becomes irresistible for the host company to alter the terms of service contract to enhance its legal rights. A few months ago, for example, Facebook altered its TOS to allow it to own any users’ content on the site if the user terminated his or her account. They even arrogated to themselves the right to sublicense your content to others. So any of your photos or text that you uploaded as a user would belong to Facebook (or to an advertiser that might wish to use it in an ad, under a sublicense).

When word of this obscure change in the TOS became known in the blogosphere, thousands of Facebook users went nuts – and Facebook management had a major PR/brand image problem on its hands. They eventually backed off, but not before the point had been made: a TOS can contain some one-sided, socially unacceptable terms without many people really knowing it.

Which is why we should all welcome a great innovation just launched by the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation. To fight “TOS creep” and other predatory legal stipulations that crafty tech lawyers may devise, EFF has launched a new website, TOSBack, “the terms-of-service” tracker. The site keeps track of any changes made to a TOS on 44 sites (and counting).

Among the terms-of-service licenses tracked: the ones for Amazon’s Kindle device and MP3 music player, the privacy policy at Facebook and Whitehouse.gov, and the general TOS for Google, Craigslist, eBay, Blizzard World of Warcraft, and GoDaddy (a domain registration firm).

EFF does not add any interpretive commentary to the TOS licenses that it catalogs, but it does offer a convenient highlighting function for deleted text and new license terms. Eliminated text in the old license is highlighted in blue, and new text – displayed as part of the new license, in a parallel column – is highlighted in yellow.

Years ago, Professor Larry Lessig likened the predatory arrangements on certain websites to “digital sharecropping.” Users can cultivate the land, but the almighty owner gets to own and control the harvest. TOSBack is a fantastic tool and clearinghouse for empowering web users. If the owner of an open web platform gets too greedy or conniving, the site helps web users — especially the more vigilant, legally minded ones — to monitor TOS and alert everyone else if a new legal provision is problematic.

Of course, it would be better if the commoners owned and managed their own Web platforms, but that’s another proposition entirely. At least TOSBack offers commoners a convenient new way to recognize and assert their interests. This is no small thing. An exodus of users from a misbehaving website with a nasty TOS could destroy the company’s revenue model and tarnish its brand reputation: the consumer revolution of the 1960s has come to fruition.