[Scpg] the revival of the commons

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

Vision: Fighting Privatization  and Corporate Control By Taking Back the 
Commons


By Maria Armoudian, AlterNet
Posted on March  3, 2011
_http://www.alternet.org/story/150076/_ 
(http://www.alternet.org/story/150076/) 
In an age of privatization in which a handful of large corporations are  
seeking to divvy up control over vast resources, a new "commons" is emerging  
with potential of generating a sharing revolution. From the worldwide web 
and  scientific knowledge to public lands, parks, language, institutes and 
dot.orgs,  the things that we share in common connect us with the broader 
community. The  idea of returning to a commons-based approach is the subject of a 
new book,  titled _All That We  Share: A Field Guide to the Commons_ 
(http://onthecommons.org/all-we-share-field-guide-commons) , edited by Jay 
Walljasper. How big  is the commons revival? And what is its promise?
Maria Armoudian: All That We Share suggests on its  cover that through an 
expanded commons, we can "save the economy, the  environment, the Internet, 
democracy, our communities and everything else that  belongs to all of us." 
That's a heck of a lot to promise. 
Jay Walljasper: I know, but I truly do believe that the commons is a  
breakthrough idea. It offers us a new lens, a new way of looking at the world  
that suddenly can change what we see as possible and what we see as  
impossible. 
MA: Although you say it's a revolutionary idea, almost as if it's  new, in 
fact it's as old as civilization, going back to the Romans when it was  one 
of three types of property. Why do you think it's a new  concept? 
JW: Obviously, it's as old as the hills, really, and in fact indigenous  
societies through the centuries lived by the commons, and so there is nothing  
new about it, but unfortunately we've lost sight of its importance and how 
it  affects our lives since the Industrial Revolution and particularly over 
about  the last 30 or 40 years. 
MA: Backing up to the general broad strokes, when you say "the  commons," 
what do you include and what do you exclude? 
JW: My definition that actually tries to distill it is "all that we share," 
 but it's also the ways that we share it. And really the "commons" is 
everywhere.  If you look around, it's hard to think that you'd be anywhere where 
there  wouldn't be some aspect of the commons visible, whether it's just the 
sky, the  environment, the streets, where the Internet is going. The 
commons is also not  just a set of things but a kind of spirit of cooperation that 
infuses most of  human activity. Clearly there are things that aren't the 
commons too. 
A bunch of us were sitting around in Germany trying to come up with a list 
of  things that we would definitely not want to be commons. And we decided 
that at  the top of the list was underwear and toothbrushes. So there is 
certainly a  place for private property, and sometimes private property is the 
very best way  to get something done. But in our western culture over the 
last three or four  decades, we have come to believe that private property is 
the solution to almost  any problem. That's just simply not the case. I think 
there's an awful lot of  commons things that we depend upon every day. Do 
you really want to create your  own water filtration system for tap water in 
your house? Or have your own energy  sources, rather than having it come in 
through the power grid? There are a lot  of things that just are more 
efficient, more equitable and just more commonsense  if they're dealt with 
cooperatively rather than individually. 
MA: In political science, we have a very famous piece that Bill  McKibben 
noted in your introduction, called "The Tragedy of the Commons." The  idea 
behind it is that many people take advantage of the commons by not  
contributing their share, so say a shared body of water that many think they can  
pollute or take from. So how do we deal with the tragedy of the  commons? 
JW: The tragedy of the commons exists. One of the biggest tragedies of the  
commons is the fisheries. Because anyone can fish at any time outside of 
20-mile  borders, stocks of fish are being depleted. It's amazing to our 
grandparents  that cod, which was once seen as the most common fish in the world, 
is now an  endangered species. But the tragedy of the commons is not 
universal, and the  woman who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009 -- Eleanor 
Austin, who is  also a political scientist -- her lifelong work has been to 
show how in culture  after culture around the world, when given the chance, 
ordinary people figure  out ways to ensure that the commons aren't 
destroyed. 
She did work in Kenya, Guatemala, Nepal, Turkey, Switzerland and right in 
Los  Angeles, where she grew up. In every case, she found that people aren't 
stupid,  and people aren't competitive to the point of lunacy. And with a 
small group of  people they will come up with the solutions to maintain the 
commons and not  deplete them. She looked at grazing land in the high pastures 
of Switzerland, a  place that if everybody put their cows out to pasture, 
would soon be destroyed.  It would end up being a worthless, almost 
desertified place. But people realized  the carrying capacity of that land, and they 
came up with systems to measure  that. 
In Guatemala they did the same kind of thing with pastureland. In fact,  
throughout the American Southwest, particularly New Mexico and Arizona and  
Colorado, there is a 400-year-old tradition, which is essentially communal  
irrigation ditches that are managed by the community as a whole. They were put 
 in by the first Spanish settlers but really drew on Native American 
traditions  and technologies. They're still in many places, still functioning, and 
they're  the lifeblood of these communities. 
And I love that each year in a lot of the villages in northern New Mexico,  
they elect a mayor who has two important functions, one of which is to make 
sure  that the water is equitably distributed to all members and secondly, 
to make  sure that there's enough water for the next year and the next year 
after that  and for the succeeding generations. 
MA: You've also implied through this book that there's a new crop or  a new 
growth of commons-related efforts. Which ones are really  compelling? 
JW: The Internet itself is, of course, a commons. It's not owned by anybody 
 and was created by our tax dollars, so we are in some sense all the owners 
of  the Internet. And there's a generation of young people that have really 
grown up  with the Internet always there for them, so it has become a bit 
of an organizing  operating system for how they look at the world. So it just 
seems natural to  them. There doesn't seem to be anything odd or overly 
idealistic about it. So  when they shut off the computer, they are looking for 
ways in the world that  they can have a similar kind of commons system. And 
the Internet is great for  sharing. Like that old phrase, "information wants 
to be free." 
MA: You had a few other examples that I thought were particularly  
interesting. One was in Germany, the state-owned brewery. 
JW: Yes, and in fact there's nothing new about this. It has been owned by 
the  state of Baden-Württemberg since about the mid-19th century. There's a 
tradition  in all countries that important public services are best taken 
care of in a more  cooperative rather than a private manner, and I guess in 
Germany, beer may be  considered essential public service. There are two 
fascinating things about this  story: One is that the brewery is owned by what is 
currently the most  conservative state of all the German states. It has had 
a conservative  government since World War II, and yet they've never 
privatized this brewery. In  fact, the brewery has even acquired a certain cache 
value particularly among the  young hipsters in Berlin and Bremen and Hamburg 
and other cities like that. It's  kind of the cool beer to drink. When I was 
in Berlin at a commons conference, it  really was the beer that I noticed 
the coolest looking people in the room were  drinking. 
MA: And the new crops of community gardens like the one in north  
Philadelphia? 
JW: Community gardens are a great example of the commons. In many cases  
particularly in New York City, L.A. and other big cities around the country,  
when there was an empty vacant lot that was full of rubble, people said, 
"This  is a travesty, a terrible thing for our neighborhood. Let's brighten 
things up  and plant some flowers and vegetables, and put in some public art." 
That was the  beginning of the whole community gardening movement. In many 
cases, these  community gardens later became parks. You can see a commons 
movement bubbling  up. 
MA: While there is a commons movement, we're also in an age of  
privatization in which corporations are trying to privatize water and other  resources. 
In Los Angeles, there is discussion about privatizing public parking  
structures. Other cities have already done that and are considering selling off  
their parking meters, highways and turnpikes. Is one moving more rapidly 
than  the other? 
JW: I think the two trends are probably a little bit symbiotic in the sense 
 that people are seeing that the commons, which are very important to their 
lives  are being privatized, and that's creating a new awareness of the 
commons and a  new determination to protect the commons. The financial collapse 
of 2007 has had  a huge impact on our culture. A lot of us bought into the 
idea that you can just  buy your way out of your problems, or argue that we 
don't really need the  commons because we'll just buy a bigger house with a 
bigger yard and forget  about the park that's falling apart. Or we join a 
health club and forget about  the recreation center that's only open five 
hours each week. 
But after the sudden screeching halt that the economic crisis put on many  
people's spending, some people said, "Thank goodness that public library is  
there." Or "Thank goodness I can send my kids to the public schools because 
I  can't afford private tuition anymore." People realized that they need to 
depend  on the public realm and depend upon one another to get their needs 
met. It can't  all just be done by spending more money. At the same time, 
we've seen tax  revenues decrease, not only in Washington DC, but in our 
counties, states and  cities and so very important public services are being cut 
back and sometimes  eliminated. So I think people are more and more aware of 
the acute crisis of the  commons. 
MA: You've mentioned in the book about a kind of "do it yourself"  (DIY) 
movement with neighborhoods and small groups that can do a lot. Give us  some 
sense of what they can do. 
JW: One example that I think is pretty surprising is in Detroit. This is a  
really hard-hit city from racial tensions that have dominated that place 
for 50  years and the crash of the auto industry. There is a park in downtown 
Detroit  that essentially had been reduced almost to the size of a concrete 
traffic  island. But a number of civic leaders in the community said, "This 
is a shame;  this is really sad that no one would actually dare go to this 
park anymore  because it was just an unsightly place." They expanded the 
park. They closed off  streets to expand the park. They've put in a music band 
shell; there's a skating  rink there in the winter. There's a café, public 
art, and it's a little oasis, a  little gem of a place, a little slice of what 
we think of Paris, right in the  heart of downtown Detroit. That was 
something that was done outside the realm of  government or the private sector. It 
was just a group of citizens that wanted to  give their city a birthday 
present for the anniversary of its founding. 
Another great example, which began in San Francisco and now is taking off 
all  over the world, is kind of a symbolic thing, but it really says a lot. 
It's  called Parking Day. It began when an art group in San Francisco looked 
around  downtown and saw that San Francisco gave over about 40 percent of 
all the space  to the automobile. And for a short while, they plugged the 
meter and turned the  parking space into a park. They rolled out some Astroturf, 
set up some barbecue  grills and some chaise lounges and said, "This is our 
park now." The cops came  by and said, "You can't do that, this is a 
parking space." But they had plugged  the meter, so the cops had to agree that 
made sense. It's a reminder that the  streets themselves are common. 
Portland, Oregon is getting a lot of attention as a very progressive city 
in  terms of livability issues. One of the things that you'll see is that a 
lot of  people have put up basketball hoops at the edge of their curb and the 
kids shoot  baskets on residential streets. It's very symbolic but yet a 
very real way of  claiming that the street is shared property. It's not just 
the exclusive domain  of the motorist but belongs to everyone. I've seen 
bicyclists and even kids who  want to shoot hoops. My son has taken that idea 
here in Minneapolis where I  live, and he and his pals now stage all their 
football games in the street  outside of our house. And obviously they go away 
when a car is coming by, but  the rest of the time they feel like the street 
is theirs, so it's essentially a  commons for the use of all. 
MA: That's a little reminiscent of the Ciclovia/CicLAvia phenomenon  where 
they actually shut down streets for an entire day and turn them into a  
park. 
JW: Yeah, and in fact there's a lot of great commons ideas coming out of  
Latin America, particularly Bogotá. 
MA: I was hoping you would talk about Bogotá. 
JW: The Ciclovia began in Bogotá, where 200 kilometers or something of  
streets are closed every Sunday morning from about 6 am to 2 pm, and on a nice  
sunny day, there are sometimes as many as one and a half million people 
that  come out into the streets. There are street performers; you can ride your 
bike.  It's kind of like having a state fair every Sunday. And Bogotá has 
done some  amazing things. They have the largest urban bikeway in the world, 
something like  26 miles long and runs through the entire city. When 
Penalosa was mayor, he  built hundreds of new parks, refurbished parks, built new 
schools, libraries,  and recreation centers because he actually had the very 
idealistic notion that  fits very well with the commons that while it's hard 
in this day of global  economies to redistribute income, there's no reason 
why we can't redistribute  happiness. Everyone ought to have an equal share 
of being happy. He thought, how  can I make my constituents happy? And he 
decided to give them a place to hang  out together and give them things so 
their kids can play, things that people can  buy with money but that everybody 
ought to be able to have access to as  well. 
MA: The other two models I'd like for you to address are cooperatives  and 
trusts. 
JW: People often mistakenly think that the world is divided into the 
commons,  which is what the government is responsible for, and the market which is 
what  private investors and owners are responsible for. But actually 
there's a whole  middle realm between those two worlds that are not under 
government ownership.  They are what you would call civil society. Two great 
examples of those are  cooperatives and trusts. Cooperatives are technically not 
exactly a commons  because they don't belong to everybody, but they do belong 
to the people  involved, whether it's a food co-op or a labor co-op or 
something like that, but  it's the idea that everyone working in an organization 
ought to be able to share  in the profits. 
One of the examples was developed in Minnesota by an entrepreneur in a 
small  town called Northfield. There were a bunch of INS raids, immigration 
service  raids, and it was really awful because parents were being thrown into 
jail, and  their kids were coming home from school, and there was no one 
home. And so he  came up with a plan to address what would happen in his 
community if this  happened. 
He asked, "How do we create a climate where there's less animosity toward  
immigrants?" And he came up with was this idea of cooperative grazing 
chickens  because these people, particularly from Central America and Mexico that 
lived in  those communities, have great skills as small farmers, but don't 
have the  opportunity to do that in American agriculture. And through this 
co-op, they're  able to raise chickens again, and it's a win/win. It's an 
economic bounty for  the immigrants themselves but also for the people in the 
community. They're  getting locally grown, sustainably raised chickens at a 
far lower cost than it  would be if they were buying them at the grocery store 
or the food co-op, and at  the same time, it's creating the situation where 
the townspeople are seeing that  immigrants aren't taking things away; 
they're contributing to the community,  economically and in terms of wholesome 
foods. It's a way that the cooperative  becomes a great model for seeing that 
we're all in this together. 
Trusts are a different method of ownership. It's neither government 
ownership  nor private ownership. A trust is people that trust one another to take 
care of  a bit of property. Much of the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for 
Public Land and  things like that work in the realm of trusts. They take a 
patch of land that has  some great scenic value, or maybe in a city it could be 
affordable housing, a  neighborhood business or something that's important 
to that community. The  importance to the community may be far higher than 
the actual assessed valuation  of this land, and they want to protect it. 
They place it into a trust.  Oftentimes the owner can have a house on the land 
but doesn't actually own the  land itself, which keeps it more affordable. 
This is used in many different  varieties -- affordable housing, historic 
preservation and ecologically  sensitive landscapes. 
MA: Give us the Web site for people who want to read  more. 
JW: I wrote this book with an organization called On the Commons, which is 
a  commons movement strategy center that is really trying to raise awareness 
for  the commons. Our Web site is called _onthecommons.org_ 
(http://onthecommons.org/) . 


_Maria  Armoudian_ (http://armoudian.com/)  is a fellow at the Center for 
International Studies at USC  and host of the Scholars' Circle and the 
Insighters, which are heard on KPFK and  WPRR.



 
 
 
 





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