BRATTLEBORO-What do community land trusts, the slow food movement, water stewardship, distributed cooperative organizations, crowdfunding, cooperatives, and community arts groups all have in common?
Each is a manifestation of "the commons."
On Monday, June 23, Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) hosts commons expert and advocate David Bollier, author of several books and host of the monthly podcast, Frontiers of Commoning, for "Think Like a Commoner," an exploration of innovated systems for better, more fulfilling, healthier living among all peoples - systems that are focused on provisioning, peer governance, and everyday social life and practices.
"In its broadest sense," the WWAC website offers, "the commons is about the stewardship of all that we share as human beings: land, water, agriculture, food systems, energy, digital collaboration, mutual aid, alternative currencies, and more."
In his presentation, Bollier poses an essential question: "How can we imagine and bring about a socioeconomic order that is actually climate-friendly, democratic, fair, effective, and inclusive?"
Drawing on the recently published second edition of his book, Think Like a Commoner, as well as on his other work and writing (such as The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking), Bollier will seek answers and explain "how commoners are creating horizontally connected, open-source style networks of mutual care, collaboration, and autonomous provisioning."
After a decade or so in Washington, D.C., Bollier has lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, for 25 years, having gone to Amherst College there in the 1970s. He's spent a lot of time, too, in Europe, "where I got my education about the commons with the right colleagues and partners, especially [the late] Silke Helfrich."
Bollier has worked with television writer/producer Norman Lear on public affairs projects and co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy group dedicated to the public's stake in copyright and Internet policies. He's currently director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.
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Annie Landenberger: How did you get involved in the commons?
David Bollier: The longer story is I worked for Ralph Nader in the 1970s, and all my friends - I was in my 20s - were fighting what I would now call "enclosures of the commons" - essentially attempts by the corporate world to privatize public lands, forests, water, information resources, drug research, the internet, the airwaves, broadcast airwaves.
Then in the '90s, I became increasingly disillusioned with the capacity of the Democratic Party to be the transformational change we needed. And I fell in with others who'd been Washington policy people or political people who wanted to explore the commons.
So we created a little think tank of three or four of us to develop the discourse on the commons [...] as something that's generative and powerful - as much as is market exchange - in creating value.
A.L.: It's been life work?
D.B.: This has been a long journey for me for the past 25 years. My pre-commons world had prepared me for thinking about the commons by giving me mental building blocks, experiences. I've worked with a lot of Europeans in the past 20 years, especially because they have more of an intellectual, philosophical, and political tradition of collective action.
In capitalist, market[-driven], individualistic America, you can't even talk about that stuff without being [called] socialistic or communistic.
But there are all sorts of collectivist [activities] from quilting bees to barn raisings that are part of the American tradition [demonstrating that] we can do a lot of important stuff to meet people's needs that has nothing to do with capitalist markets.
A.L.: Your background going to working for Nader was in...?
D.B.: I was just a punk - 22 or 23. It was my post-college political education. Much of my background was journalistic and writing, but I was also politically oriented. It's hard to get a political education that matters. That [with Nader] was a very useful one.
The real story is not who can grow the economy and how the benefits are shared, but how we can own the assets themselves and not let the government give them away to the corporate investor class.
A.L.: You dispel the notion that the commons wouldn't work because of our solipsism, our me-me attitude, our buy-buy thinking.
D.B.: The way I put it is that the past 200 years of capitalist industrial society have been an aberration in the sweep of human history. Evolutionary scientists show that cooperation is the default norm for how we govern ourselves, how we make progress as a species.
Capital doesn't like unions, organized consumers, or other ways that would challenge their extractive market capabilities. And yet, cooperation pops up the way open-source software did in the late '90s, [which] was more productive and creative than conventional proprietary corporate software development. So cooperation doesn't go away, but there's always an attempt to co-opt it or to take the fruits of cooperation for capital.
A.L.: Is this an advantageous time for promoting the commons?
D.B.: Well, it remains to be seen, but I have seen an uptick of interest because I think people now are starting to realize, "Oh, we really do need to think about system change and alternatives."
Previously, people thought that liberal normalcy could be restored and prevail. I think there's been a rupture in that liberalism. It cannot deal with a lot of problems ranging from climate to inequality. Washington is just too centralized and out of touch with what's going on on this vast continent.
So yes, the commons is speaking to the moment, I think, in ways that maybe haven't been fully discovered. A lot of people are still struggling to restore the old order instead of saying, "We've got to create something new that's going to be functional over the long term."
[Consider] the metaphor of a butterfly trying to get out of the chrysalis. Do you try to restore the chrysalis, or do you spread your wings and become something new?
We've had 35, 40 years since we'd documented evidence of climate change, yet nothing significant or structural really occurred. I think the commons can help speak to these deeper concerns: They put forward a different theory of power and ways of meeting our needs.
A.L.: The commons is saying "less is more." I don't know enough about global economics but certainly here there seems to be an addiction to "more is more."
D.B.: The term I've seen is that we need five Earths for everyone on Earth to have the standard of life that we in the U.S. now have. It's just biophysically impossible. And somehow, whether through cataclysmic crisis or choice, we're going to have to find a way to get to a non-growth economy.
A.L.: Do we have to hit rock bottom before we can repair?
D.B.: I think that may be the case in the aggregate level. Having said that, there are plenty of pockets of commons-based innovation out there. A lot of this stuff is not culturally legible. It's not recognized by mainstream press or corporate media. It's seen as fringe, merely local, not important.
My audacious belief is that these forms are related because they leverage our natural propensity to want to cooperate. I think modern life, especially on the steroids of social media and coming AI, is increasingly incoherent and crazy, as we see with the [current] regime. And people yearn for stability, security, connection, belonging.
A.L.: What does the commons offer in terms of that stability and belonging?
D.B.: The commons [offers] more authentic, caring connection, and it recognizes pluralism and diversity. It strives to be inclusive, provided you're contributing. The collective fulfills itself only by having difference, by you being your best self and having your individual gifts to contribute. Diversity of talent is what makes a commons function so well.
[The commons offers] a wholesome arrangement as opposed to being part of a cult in which you're disempowered, and you don't have human agency. The thing is that, on the right, "belonging" is weaponized with real weapons.
A.L.: Frightening.
D.B.: The only caveat I would add to that is that the commons need to preemptively protect themselves against nefarious outside forces. A commons is aware that it's not just an open free-for-all, take-what-you-want. It's a governed, organized system that protects itself the way any living organism does.
A.L.: Can there be harmonious coexistence between the state and the commons?
D.B.: That's the question. I think state power needs to be reconfigured to be supportive of the commons by providing law, finance, and technical support so people can have bottom-up authority and responsibility.
A lot of European cities are experimenting with public partnerships, in which city government is trying to work with and facilitate various self-identified commons to let them do their thing on their terms, but with city support and assistance as opposed to bureaucratic-driven meddling.
A.L.: Commonsverse, as it's coined, has a bright future?
D.B.: I think it is promising because the existing systems are falling apart for all different reasons. It's not as if I'm celebrating that, but it was going to happen.
Well, I think a lesson from ecosystems and evolution is that disruptive events - whether meteors or earthquakes or other natural disasters - have the benefit, despite the horrible harm they cause, of opening up new evolutionary pathways.
In a strange way there are enormous opportunities given the disarray and chaos we're experiencing right now. For God's sakes, let's make the most of that. We have opportunities to establish some new social and economic logics that will serve us better over the long term than trying to restore some old systems that are artifacts of the 1940s and '50s.
I'm in the business of trying to catalyze and advise without taking charge. I'm not an organizer. I don't have aspirations to direct stuff, but I have countless conversations with people who are trying to develop post-capitalist [systems].
A.L.: I'm grateful for that, for your work. And for your wisdom.
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Bollier's WWAC talk is on Monday, June 23, 6:30 p.m., at Centre Congregational Church, 193 Main St. The suggested donation is $10, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information, visit windhamworldaffairscouncil.org.
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Editor's note: Columns that include interviews in this format are edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets, as do brief editorial clarifications.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.