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.

“Unlike oil, there’s no substitute for fresh water,” says Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly. “We all need it.”
This dawning recognition of the indispensability of water has raised the profile of a number of groups arguing that we should treat water as a common good. Put simply, this idea means that water is no one’s property—and everyone’s. It is part of the commons, rightfully belonging to all of humanity, nature and to the earth itself.

p(photo-credits). photo by Keith Bacongco under a Creative Commons license stipulating no commercial use or alteration

People in Davao City, Philippines, protest plans to turn over the local water supply to a private firm

Across Latin America and Africa, consumer, human rights, and environmental organizations have campaigned successfully for constitutional amendments and laws enshrining water as a human right. At the recent World Water Forum in Instanbul, 25 countries signed a declaration affirming that same right (the official declaration weakly suggested that it was simply a human need).
Here in the United States, a bi-partisan group of Vermont legislators working with the citizen’s group, Vermont Natural Resources Council, enacted legislation to protect the state’s groundwater. The 2008 law declares groundwater a public trust and requires industries to acquire permits for withdrawals of more than 56,000 gallons a day.

Yet it remains an uphill battle to shift policies and public consciousness to ensure that water is managed as a commons that belongs to everyone. This work is made more difficult by the fact that the principal venue for global water policy discussions is not the United Nations but the World Water Forum, a mostly pro-privatization, tri-annual gathering of government delegations, non-governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry representatives. It is convened by the World Water Council, a French non-profit whose board of governors is dominated by the powerful water industry.

At the latest World Water Forum meeting March 16 to 22 in Istanbul, the dominant view of water-management issues prevailed. Whether discussing the Parisian water system or problems in South African townships, the prescription was the same: full cost recovery, which means that agencies, even public ones, that provide water must recover the full costs associated with delivering the service. This leaves the door wide open for privatization of our water. Increasingly pro-water-privatization development agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), are insisting that consumers pay more for water.

Full cost recovery policy is immoral, claim organizers of the People’s Water Forum – an alternative to the World Water Forum advocating that water to be managed as a commons for all rather than a commodity for the profit of a few. Water commons activists point out that the full cost recovery strategy is applied only selectively. Poor users who consume the least amount of water bear a disproportionate burden of the cost. A better system would use progressive taxation programs to support public water systems just as they do public schools.

Consider the example of the Finnish company Botnia, operating in Uruguay. Its production of cellulose products consumes 80 million liters of water per day, using a large percentage of the daily output of Uruguay’s public utilities at a low, subsidized price. Similar regressive anti-conservation subsidies are found throughout the world – especially in the United States – where irrigation water is priced far below cost, a boon for water intensive agribusinesses and a blow to family farmers.

Unlike air, it costs money to deliver clean water, so it’s necessary to put a price on its management while taking care not to turn the water itself into a commodity. But the largest users – and the wealthiest ones – should pay their fair share and subsidize water use by the world’s poorest families.

Another Water World Is Possible

Citizens and government officials around the world have challenged the way we think about water. In Bangladesh and Brazil, for instance, public water utilities are seeking public loans rather than private equity to improve water delivery infrastruc¬ture. They are bucking the privatization trend, refusing financing from development agencies like the World Bank when privatization is one of the conditions to receive a loan.

Innovative financing approaches like this go hand in hand with new approaches to water management. Local authorities world-wide are beginning to base water governance less around often arbitrary political borders and increasingly around watersheds, through which the shared nature of water across boundaries becomes crystal clear.. This watershed governance approach has been at least partially inspired by the citizens group Tarun Bharat Sangh, which has shown great success increasing the water supply in this arid region by constructing johads—small-scale earthen reservoirs that help to harvest rainwater and improve the recharge of groundwater resources.

Many other examples of innovative water policies are outlined in a new report, “Local Control and Management of Our Water Commons: Stories of Rising to the Challenge”. LINK http://www.onthecommons.org/media/pdf/original/WaterCommons03.pdf.

Maude Barlow suggests 10 principles to create and manage a water commons. These principles are broad-ranging, ranging from applying human rights and public trust law toward water management policies to improving conservation and public delivery. She, too, sees privatization of water supplies as antithetical to this notion of the commons. She cites the case of Felton, California, which has taken back its public water system after a failed privatization experience. Cochabamba, Bolivia is experimenting with community-managed water utilities to deliver quality water at fair prices. In South Africa, communities have rejected pre-paid water meters and pricing schemes that undermine families’ water security.

Adriana Marquisio, president of Uruguay’s water workers union, insists that public water management must be improved but is equally adamant that water remain a public good. She calls for measuring efficiency not just in terms of liters flowing per second but through public oversight over water fees and system improvements, public health indicators, innovations in community management, and the ecological health of groundwater reserves.

Flawed U.S. Policy

In the U.S., the principal proposal on world water policy is the Water for the World Act of 2009, which would push privatization schemes through an Office of Water within USAID, an agency which consistently seeks to shrink the public sector.

If passed, the Water for the World Act will further force private investment in public drinking and waste water infrastructure on developing nations, according to Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch. “Water privatization has proven a commercial failure in most countries around the world because private companies have, time and again, proven incapable of meeting their obligations to both their customers and their shareholders,” she explains. “Reinforcing the role of private investment in the water infrastructure systems of developing countries will only perpetuate the problems that this well-intended act is designed to solve. Instead, we must work with developing countries to implement sound water policies based on public management of this essential resource.”

In reports to Congress, USAID largely measured its success in implementing earlier water acts by the amount of dollars spent on water systems. Certainly, the recent damage caused by channeling public monies to poorly regulated mortgage companies ought to offer pause about a similar strategy for water. These funds must be channeled to local governments and public utilities (with no strings attached mandating privatization) and to non-governmental organizations working on community-led, commons-based water strategies.

The Obama administration’s performance at the World Water Forum was lackluster. It did not sign the alternative declarations to declare water a human right or seek to move policy deliberations about water to the UN. Whether the administration’s plate is too full to pay attention or it is intentionally repeating the Bush administration’s poor stewardship of the globe’s natural resources is still unclear.

In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to the world’s people “to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow.” So there is hope that the administration has been too busy to give this important issue proper attention. But hope is a poor substitute for action. It is still early in the new administration, giving citizens time to press for change. That change will happen when we insist that water debates are public debates about how to best manage our common water resources.

The original version of this article appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus in June, 2009.

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.”

Towns are discovering that development will threaten as much as 44 million acres of private forests, or 10% of the total, by the year 2030. Key culprits include logging, shopping malls and second home estates. There are special budgetary and management challenges for a town to own a forest, but as Arcata, California – a pioneer in the field – has shown, it is a reasonable and attractive proposition.

Photo by Molas — http://www.flickr.com/photos/molas/22597995 — via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license.

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.