Rethinking the commons - common lands

As a species, we have two special attributes. We have speech or, more accurately, conversation that is unequaled by any other known species on the planet. With conversation, we make willful and elaborate decision about how to jointly utilize and share the biosphere. These two traits of our collective enterprise -- conversation and shared landscape -- enkindle as if alchemically the commons.

While working outside Tucson with the Tohono O'odham, a group of Pima/Papago speakers, I learned just how complex and cantankerous collective decision-making, shared landscape, and private property could become. Austin Nunez, Julie Ramon Pierson, Joanne and Danny Preston, Mike and Juanita Enis, Lena Ramon, and Mike Rios, to name a few, formed the Defenders of O'odham Land Rights to protect over 10,000 acres of the district from an invisible, unknown Canadian developer. On paper, the "reservation" land had been subdivided decades ago when White administrators decided the O'odham should be like everyone else and live in suburbia. But, the O'odham people never had the water nor the inclination to settle in suburbia. The desert remained an open creosote and mesquite flat between two black volcanic sacred hills, adjacent to a river sucked dry by Tucson.

The developer was quietly paying two O'odham to find descendants of the original signees and pay them a pittance to sign off their "private property" rights so he could build a new city. But, after so many generations, no one was sure who had the right to sign off; no one was sure they even wanted the desert planted. The land appeared neither private nor public (owned by the tribal government). In fact, it was a relic commons.

Like sitting on a cactus, I woke up. Traditional, placed-based commoners were being invaded by global commerce. The invaders -- individuals or corporations -- had little interest in shared landscape. They seemed intent on minimizing conversation about the consequences of their commercial venture. They believed in networked places: financial management in Ontario, field offices in Sydney, Savanna and Rome, planning in Paris. If a subdivision or fishery failed in one place, they just moved to another. Locals, mostly taken unawares, had few tools to block invasion or maintain guardianship of their shared commons, be it music, genes, mesquite, or fish.

Mike Enis gave me a T-shirt (above) and a matching sky-blue baseball cap. On it, I'itoi, the O'odham culture hero, enters a maze that covers the Earth and its peoples. Within the Earth, the O'odham people hold each other's hands in trust, confident in each other, and with the inner truth of gentleness, but they no longer enjoy a sense of security. I knew it was time to rethink the commons.

Views of the Commons

The Indo-European origin of "common" is simple. The "com-" comes from the root for "together" or "beside." The "-mon" comes from "to change," "to move," or "to go." Moving together contains the double meaning that has always haunted the commons: the mutual comings-and-goings and the joint movement of the residents as a single community.

The "commons," when even known as a word in America, adheres to places like the Boston Common and harks back to a time in England when villagers shared a pasture for grazing their cows. The Boston Common is now an urban park and holds few remnants of that past. Pasture is now "public space" or "city property." The old commons was thick: a fairground, a marketplace, a courtship spot, the turf where working rules for the village and etiquette evolved. Today's urban commons is still a place filled with unexpected, delightful voices -- a ghetto blaster playing a song you never heard, a street person screaming about beer cans and God, a banker arranging a tryst -- but the commons talk is rarely about the guardianship or productive capacities of the landscape itself.

Traders merchants, economists, ecologists, environmentalists, and politicians tend to see the landscape as a common pool of material resources. Coastal fish, pasture grass, wildland fiddlenecks and mushrooms, petroleum, or streamflows for irrigation make up the common pools. Traditional peoples, internet users, anthropologists, and some literary folk are less likely to harshly separate the material resources from the symbolic. These common pools of the imagination include our mental capacity for relationships, lore, the glamour of metaphors, and the magic of words.

In many societies (and in today's animated cartoons, advertisements, and children's stories), the landscape easily talks with humans. The river says; "I'm sick." A rock holds the memory of a battle lost. Frogs and lizards sing Budweiser ditties.

Four Commons

End-of-the century commons reside in four "places" or landscapes: place-based, places-based, global, and psycho-cultural. Place-based commons usually refer to traditional homelands, which Gary Snyder sees as bounded by watersheds and bioregions. Within place-based commons, the daily intimacy of commoners and commonage -- nurtured by walking, vernacular, sacred spots, rites, customs, dialect, etiquette, and peculiar taboos that do not always make sense (especially to outsiders) -- enriches a caring, if not baroque, dialog between inhabitants, including named individual wildlife, and ecosystem.

Place-based commoners tend to be loyal, intensely generous to each other, with a fatalistic humor about ups and downs. Pride and honor thrive, but they accompany a tendency to take personal affront and a long memory that inspires revenge.

Today, place-based commons also include the shared space of urban neighborhoods. They are less well-defined geographically. Their communal actions are sometimes fugitive; commons arise when there is a need and disappear afterwards (e.g., at Love Canal or when flightpaths bring noisy overflights by commercial airplanes or, in Europe, on sidewalks where parked cars usurped pedestrian routes). Urban place-based commons tend to be political and intimately entangled with private/public and legal conflict over such wastes as smoke in restaurants.

Places-Based Commons

Places-based commons are primarily the realm of traders, merchants, bankers and appropriators. Places-based commoners have less interest in landscape. They prefer the conversation about trade and mutual interests. Each place has its resources which present opportunities for extraction. In many ways, the stories of places-based commons speak to society's fluidity. The common good is often mythologized in heroes who have gained from common goods. These media heroes have transformed the sacred from multi-generational guardianship of place to the ritual of free trade. But, even global trade remains heavily embedded in old networks of ethnic, religious, and national identities that encourage trust (e.g., Jewish, Asian Indian, Chinese, British, Sicilian or Russian mafias, or the conscientious Swedes).

Most traders -- optimistic, entrepreneurial, efficient, focused -- feel "liberated" from the taboos of place, guardianship, and ecosystem processes. They are single-purposed and programmatic without any detailed knowledge of the complexity of causality experienced by place-confined natives "lost in the morass" of kinship and landscape obligations and obscure manners. Trade is the essence of the modern polycentric commons where the value of specific places has been depleted and the value of mutual interest narrowed.

The conversation between place-based and places-based commoners is intense, if not vitriolic. To many local residents, the traders may be rich financially, but they are, from the traditional point of view, impoverished in most other qualities of daily life. Both see each other as marginalized: one from the long-term responsibilities to people and place; the other from a quality of life that can only be attained from financial gain. Local residents must increasingly define themselves in the face of outsiders. They draw up their own maps with sharp boundaries, fearful that without a map they will be mapped by others. Who has the collective authority and power to limit access and extraction? How deep into a local commons should traders penetrate? How much ought the outsider extract? How can outsiders be made to help restore what they have taken? For outsiders, access and extraction rarely link to monitoring outcomes, restoration of damaged resources, or institutions that protect long-term viability and dish out punishment for violations of the commons's rules.

The Global or Gaian Commons

The third sense of commons is geographically well defined, but its scale its huge. The global commons is roughly equivalent to the biosphere, although we've pushed property rights into the extra-Gaian realm. Not only filled with the already well-known resources, our biosphere has tempting frontier resources like minerals at the sea bottom, fugitive fish schools outside national fishing limits, the ionosphere wall which bounces radio and microwaves for wireless cell phones and video, and parking Spots 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface for geostationery satellites. Biospheric and spacescape working rules are primitive, with little monitoring of outcomes and almost no enforcement of regulations. There are no global taboos that all humans "instinctively" follow, and etiquette and mores are up for grabs.

Wastes emitted into the biosphere degrade or deplete the qualities of the global commons. Polluted air and a more fickle climate have sparked a new transnational conversation that, in many ways, parallels traditional discussion. The global public must learn the personalities of these modern biospheric dragons (CFCs in the ozonosphere, greenhouse gases in the troposphere) to shame, scold, and sanction the conjurers who diminish planetary/human health.

The psycho-cultural commons

A fourth sense of commons -- the common heritage of humankind -- has been debated in the great written traditions of the Asian and European ethicists. The resources include the diversity of languages, archetypes, insights shared from inner journeys common to the human brain and heart, as well as the richness of ideas and practices developed by formerly isolated commons and societies. The common heritage has common desires: less suffering, more inner peace, moments of collective fun, secure food and shelter, and long lives.

Today that psycho-cultural commons sports a lot of hot air and some very serious issues. On the one hand, for instance, many humans pay homage to cultural diversity. But when African women in specific tribes suffer clitorectomies, respect for diversity gives way to a "higher" ethical heritage. What locals might label "cultural imperialism," other global commoners insist are interventions to eliminate cruelty. This "common heritage" morality has been influential. Rape and torture of civilians in war is now an international crime. Slavery, infanticide and cannibalism -- once widely accepted -- have become taboos within today's global commons.

The "common heritage" morality is often ignored by industrial powers. It is debatable whether so many Iraqi civilians had to die for US objectives in the Gulf War to succeed. Industrial nations continue to screw up the climate which, in turn, accelerates sea-level rise and puts the lands of Pacific islanders at risk of permanent inundation. The industrialized nations do not consider this as the conquest of land. Yet, slow conquest it is. When Pacific Islanders conversed with representatives of industrial nations at the Kyoto meetings on climate change, their input was essentially ignored. Might, rather than a common heritage morality, prevails.

The Thorny Self

My dream of the commons is, in part, a self-governing collective that does not abuse its own power. You might ask: what exactly is the "self" in self-governing? Again and again, Whole Earth writers pointed to "trust" and "security." These are emotional human resources that dwell inside individuals but also "float" in a community. Though much harder to assess than material resources (which are hard enough), trust and collective confidence change in abundance and quality -- shaped by conversations, personal relationships, childhoods, external events, history, the whole works. An abundance of trust nurtures generosity and feelings of fellowship, confidence, self-worth, and an enthusiasm for celebration. Security nurtures a place for happiness and ease; a sense of long-term continuity. Security within the commons can reduce angers and fears, desires for revenge, free-riding, and cheating. When the commons is experienced as fair, it engenders pride and hope. Trust and security insure inner and outer dependability.

Let us not wax abstract, romantic or nostalgic. Rethinking the commons means jumping from one sense of commons to the next, because they all occur simultaneously and many are nested within each other like a series of Chinese boxes. National governments are losing out to private control as their influence within and beyond national boundaries diminishes. Transnational commerce and banking show little self-discipline and there are no institutions to discipline them. Most transnationals spend time polishing their image while doing business as usual. NGOs can help by educating and lobbying and working in the field. But, they are issue-focused and many NGO workers come and go, drastically limiting their ability to organize or form partnerships between the various commons. Invaders, con men, shirkers, bullies, commercial media, and insincere leaders all consume trust the way bad farming wastes the natural capital of soils.

From Ouagadougou to San Francisco: How do the overlapping place-based, places-based and all-place (or no geographical place) human and natural resources commons come together? Who's eligible to sit at the table? How to frame collective discussion and decisions for a multi-scale geography? What fosters trust? Who can converse without direct punishment or blackballing?

Details

A detail can spark conversation and collective action. A runover Bud can in the street can organize the commons. First of all, everyone is eligible to speak -- kids to parents, strangers to strangers, family to family, office mates to bosses, politicians to constituencies. Underlying any disagreement, trust and fellowship remain. No one will be sent to Siberia for expressing an opinion. "The can" eventually becomes part of our selves, a taboo, a metaphor, a canned joke -- as crucial as grass or wood to the traditional conversation of the commons. In some circles, the can's origin will be traced to the mine or manufacturer with concerns for the local commoners at the mine in Jamaica, or the water diverted to process the aluminum in the Pacific Northwest, or the energy used to recycle vs. to mine virgin ore. The conversation of the can can also remain gentler, an indirect forum to expose commoners' ideas of personal freedom and imagination. What's permitted? What's encouraged? Who sets the limits? Is there a "public eye" to shame or build self-worth or must the commons rely on a Can Cop to monitor the streets and, hopefully, act as reasonable enforcer?

The commons then is not just about how to live within a neighborhood, watershed, or the world, it is also the conversation itself. Both are precious, and it's hard to know the balance. Polycentric conversations incubate the common good. Little appreciated is how the emergence of a robust, resilient, creative, and intelligent culture begins with these dispersed, complex daily dialogs. If for only the small talk, all kinds of commons need attention.

This issue of Whole Earth beats the drums for the fairly wild conversation of the commons started millennia ago. It jump-starts a vigorous powwow of many voices which may ultimately feed collective joie de vivre and soul. We know, as Gary Snyder counsels: It is hard work with many meetings. We point to trust and security as essential ingredients with which to seek harmony; to a new supply of ideas and practices to map and to architect the globalocal commons; to the NGOs who currently hold the flames of creativity and speak loudest for the dispossessed and lost-in-the-storm commoners and commonage. Ultimately, this issue of Whole Earth provides some PR for the perseverance and multi-dimensionality of the traditional commons itself, a truly mind-boggling human collective experiment. The past has told too many stories of commons tragedies. We aim at a flourishing commons. Enough tragedies.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group