localism

When I walk my dog Jackson along a burbling brook, I always smile when I pass the Bunny House.  It’s like greeting a familiar leprechaun in the forest.  The “house” is a small wooden box with a shingled roof, sitting atop a four-foot pole.  One side of it is open to passing hikers.

Peer in and you can see two tiny stuffed rabbit-dolls sitting on chairs in a living room enjoying a cup of tea. There is a table in the house, with a thick book on it, and a tiny mirror on the back wall bearing the inscription, “Home, the spot of earth supremely blest / A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest….”

It’s a mystery who had the whimsy to build this fairy-tale jewel in the forest. I’ve always appreciated it as a puckish gift to pleasantly startled strangers. In the years I’ve been walking there, no one has ever vandalized the Bunny Room. It has become a kind of folk-art fixture and landmark.

I have come to realize that the Bunny Room is no aberration in and around my town of Amherst, Massachusetts. There are other monuments of homespun generosity and expressive beauty that some anonymous souls simply decided would enliven the community. I call them micro-commons because they slyly build a shared community of appreciation that is rooted in a particular, meaningful spot.

Another micro-commons that I love is an impressive pile of stones on a hiking trail in nearby Pelham. The four-foot work sits like a prehistoric alter in the dark, quiet woods known as Buffam Brook Community Forest.  There is a verdant forest canopy some 30 or 40 feet overhead and the happy sounds of a cascading stream off to one side.  The stone pile – a four-foot high cylinder that tapers to smaller circumferences at the top and bottom – is made from hundreds of stones, each carefully fit together.

I realized how much the landmark meant to me when, after several days of fierce storms, I was walking by and noticed that a tree branch had fallen on the structure, destroying much of it.  Tragic!  I was so dismayed.  The mess made me realize how much I had come to love this living piece of folk art and the thoughtfulness behind it.  The next spring, lo and behold, the same anonymous stone-worker had quietly re-built the pile of stones. It lives!

I call these anonymous gifts to the world micro-commons because countless people have come to depend on them as welcoming landmarks and symbols of this place. They subtly convey a sense of care and appreciation for our favorite spots, and their own spirit. The anonymity of their creation makes them radiate a special feeling, as if to say, “Here is my expression of gratitude for this wonderful place.”

The micro-commons remind me of the cover image on the original edition of Lewis Hyde’s classic book The Gift, which featured a painting, “Basket of Apples,” by unknown members of the 19th Century Shaker Community in Hancock, Massachusetts. “The Shakers believed that they received their arts as gifts from the spiritual world,” writes Hyde. “Persons who strove to become receptive of songs, dances, paintings, and so forth were said to be ‘laboring for a gift,’ and that the works that they created circulated as gifts within the community.”

New Start magazine, a British magazine associated with the Manchester-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies, has just come out with a terrific issue (#525, October 2014) about co-operatives and commons.  The essays focus on how “more democratic forms of ownership – of land, housing, workplaces and the public realm – can revive our places.” 

While most of the essays deal with British co-ops and commons, the lessons and strategies mentioned have a relevance to many other places. Consider land ownership, a topic that is rarely a part of progressive political agendas.  Steve Bendle, director of a group called Community Land and Finance, offers a clear-eyed assessment of how government is obsessed with enhancing the value of land for landowners and developers – while largely ignoring how land could be used to serve citizens, taxpayers and the wider community. 

Unneeded land and government buildings, for example, are generally put up for sale on the market rather than used to serve the needs of a community for housing, work spaces or civic infrastructure.  The assumption is that privatized, market-driven uses of the assets will yield the greatest “value” (narrowly defined as return on investment to private investors). 

When government (i.e., taxpayers) finances new roads, subways or rail systems, the market value at key locations and buildings invariably rises.  But government rarely does much to capture this value for the public. 

Bendle concludes:  “So developers and landowners make profits, while the public sector struggles to secure a contribution to infrastructure costs or to deliver affordable homes despite successive attempts to change the planning system.”

Currently, less than 3% of the food that Americans eat is grown within 100 to 200 miles of where they live.  And many people in poorer neighborhoods simply do not have ready access to affordable local produce.

A fascinating new project, the Food Commons, aspires to radically change this reality.  It seeks to reinvent the entire “value-chain” of food production and distribution through a series of regional experiments to invent local food economies as commons. 

By owning many elements of a local food system infrastructure – farms, distribution, retail and more – but operating them as a trust governed by stakeholders, the Food Commons believes it can be economically practical to build a new type of food system that is labor-friendly, ecologically responsible, hospitable to a variety of small enterprises, and able to grow high-quality food for local consumption.

Food Commons explains its orientation to the world by quoting economist Herman Daly:

“If economics is reconceived in the service of community, it will begin with a concern for agriculture and specifically for the production of food.  This is because a healthy community will be a relatively self-sufficient one.  A community’s complete dependency on outsiders for its mere survival weakens it….The most fundamental requirement for survival is food.  Hence, how and where food is grown is foundational to an economics for community.”

Food Commons is a nonprofit project that was officially begun in 2010 by Larry Yee and James Cochran.  Yee is a former academic with the University of California Cooperative Extension who has been involved in sustainable agriculture for years.  Cochran is the founder and president of Swanton Berry Farms, a mid-scale organic farming enterprise near Santa Cruz, California.

So why should investors always have the upper hand in “development” plans when the resource at stake is a beloved building or public space? Why should the divine right of capital necessarily prevail? 

How refreshing to learn that England has created a special legal process for preventing market enclosures of community pubs.  There is even a Community Pubs Minister, whose duty it is to recognize the value of pubs to communities and to help safeguard their futures.  So far, some 100 pubs have been formally listed as “assets of community value.”

I know, I know – what would Margaret Thatcher say?  "Damned government interventions in the free market!"  Fortunately, that kind of market fundamentalism has abated for a bit, enough that the Community Pubs Minister -- Brandon Lewis, a Conservative Party member of Parliament! -- now extols “the importance of the local pub as part of our economic, social and cultural past, present and future.”  He adds:  “We have known for hundreds of years just how valuable our locals are.  Not just as a place to grab a pint but also to the economies and communities they serve and that is why we are doing everything we can to support and safeguard community pubs from closure.”

Some of the most interesting new commons are those that you don’t usually hear about, probably because they are so small or local.  I recently stumbled across the New Cross Commoners and was quite impressed with their zeal and ingenuity in exploring the meaning of commoning in their district of South London.  The “About” section of the New Cross Commoners website explains their mission quite nicely:

Capitalism is the term we can use to call the private / public system that dominates not only the economy but also our social relations and our lives. Our desires and efforts for a good life together get exploited by capitalism (see for example “Big Society”). Commoning can be a process of struggle to reclaim those efforts and desires for ourselves. A commoning that is worth of its name, one not entirely exploited by the private / public system, implies a degree of struggle against this private / public system. It also implies a negotiation amongst the people who produce it: we are “privatized” as well, we need to learn how to live together, how to take care of each other collectively.

To understand what is commoning in New Cross we’ll read and discuss texts together, and at the same time we’ll explore the neighbourhood to find out what processes of commoning are already part of the life of New Cross (we’ll start with communal gardens, housing associations, youth and community centres, and the New Cross library). We would like not only to understand the commoning already produced in New Cross, but also to produce new commoning here: to share and organize skills and resources in such a way that this sharing can become more and more autonomous from private / public interests, from the market, from interests that are not those of the people using them.

The New Cross Commoners website is an inspiration to other would-be commoners who may wish to rediscover commoning in their own neighborhoods and towns.  The group has held meetings at which they discuss essays by the commons historians such as Peter Linebaugh; Massimo De Angelis, and Silvia Federici, for example.  They have met together to brew beer and drink it when it was ready. 

For all the enthusiasm that “going local” has garnered in recent years, securing local control as a legal entitlement is generally a very different matter.  Federal and state law tend to place strict limits on what local communities can do to protect themselves from outside commercial forces.

A hearty salute, then, to the path-breaking work by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that provides legal advice and advocacy for municipal governments and, more recently, international allies.  Journalist Barry Yeoman has a terrific profile of CELDF, Rebel Towns,” in the latest issue of The Nation (February 4). 

The truth of the matter is that local communities don’t really have much legal authority to prohibit polluters and extractive industries (mining, water-bottling, timber companies) from coming into their towns and ruining the place.  In the U.S., at least, and in most other places around the world, national governments have the sovereign power to override local authorities, and they are only too willing to do so.  After all, politicians’ partnerships with major industries help grow the economy, boost tax revenues and reap political contributions to repeat the whole cycle. 

Of course, the “market externalities” that result -- poisoned soil, polluted rivers, etc. – aren’t taken into account.  The traditional response of public-interest attorneys is to “work within the system” to deal with these problems, using available laws and judicial processes.

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A beloved place in my town is Amethyst Brook, a gorgeous wooded area with majestic stands of trees, a cheerful, babbling brook and a few open fields.  This patch of natural beauty is the theater in which various townspeople walk their dogs, socialize before and after work, garden, exercise and commune with nature.

The place is a classic mixed-use commons. In the summer, the community garden plots sprout all sorts of vegetables and sunflowers. There are occasional convoys of runners. Dog walkers revel in being able to let their dogs off-leash. There are bird-watchers. Kids sometimes wade in the brook. I once encountered a bearded college student playing a harp under the canopy of the trees, next to the brook. Fantastic!

But there are also tensions between the commons and private landowners, leaseholders and among the commoners themselves. On an open field in the park, a private farmer leases land from the town to grow vegetables. But he wants to expand. Should that be allowed? A private landowner on an adjacent swatch of land lets the public use his forest land for hiking – wonderful! – but he has also been known to dump farm animal carcasses on his land, which lets a truly foul odor waft throughout the area.  Don't nuisance laws cover this sort of thing? Yes, but he could well decide that hikers are “nuisances” that intrude on his private property.

As the free-market siege of government intensifies, I propose a new index for assessing the desperation of municipalities.  Let’s call it the School Bus Hucksterism Index, or SBHI.  This scientifically calculated number will represent the number of school districts nationwide that have begun selling advertising space on their school buses, multiplied by the aggregate number of ads and the average revenue per bus.   

What was once a bizarre novelty – advertising on school buses – is becoming the new normal in many school districts.  It is an ominous sign of a great decline of our civic identities and commitment to place.  As the NYT reported this week:  

“Cash-hungry states and municipalities, in pursuit of even the smallest amounts of revenue, have begun to exploit one market that they have exclusive control over: their own property. With the help of a few eager marketing consultants, many governments are peddling the rights to place advertisements in public school cafeterias, on the sides of yellow school buses, in prison holding areas and in the waiting rooms of welfare offices and the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

The idea got its start in Colorado in the 1990s, and was picked up by Texas, Arizona, Tennessee and Massachusetts.  Now Utah has begun selling ads on the sides of it school buses and at least eight other states are considering doing the same.

The market has rendered its verdict on serious journalism:  it just ain’t profitable enough.  This is a serious bodyblow to democratic accountability because there are now fewer independent watchdogs over powerful institutions, which can carry out their work in semi-darkness confident that nosy reporters will not be exposing abuses and scandals to the light of day. 

So what is to be done?  I just participated in a interesting one-day conference aimed at exploring how librarians and journalists might collaborate to reinvent serious, community-oriented journalism.  The Beyond Books conference at M.I.T.’s Media Lab showcased a number of intriguing proposals and experiments, but one that caught my eye is the Banyan Project, which seeks to organize community coops as a new financial and institutional support for community journalism. 

Tom Stites of Newburyport, Massachusetts, is the moving force behind the idea.  One reason that newspapers are failing, Stites argues, is because they are geared to a dwindling sector of affluent readers and ignore the great middle of Americans whose earnings are between the third and seventh decile.  Readers didn’t abandon newspapers; newspapers abandoned them.  Stites believes that consumer-based coops could support “high-quality, Web-based journalism that serves less-than-affluent everyday citizens and engages the civic energy of this huge public.”

I often despair of the sad state of political/cultural commentary, even (or especially) among the established journals of progressive thought.  The substance and sensibilities seem so stale and predictable, so focused on Washington, so resistant to really new ideas.  Consider The Nation magazine’s clueless, near-reactionary reviews of books about copyright and Internet culture, and the general neglect among U.S. political mags in focusing on the Transition Town movement, Solidarity Economy and other emergent strands of the worldwide commons movement.

What a breath of fresh air, then, to encounter a new British magazine Stir [as in "Stir to Action"], just released into the world by its editor Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh.  I immediately confess a bias because Stir features an essay by me, but I contributed the piece in ignorance of what the first issue would look like.  Now I am eager for the next issue to appear!  The magazine is a highly thoughtful, provocative look at the creative energies of local community action. It doesn't pander to prejudices; it challenges them in a constructive way.

“The reason for this existence of this magazine,” writes Gordon-Farleigh in his opening preface, “is the self-evident need to move beyond the idea of critique as a catalogue of crises and problems by producing and referring to various social groups and communities’ strategies that will inspire and en-courage us to surmount the particular challenges we face…. Critique has been more than adequate in describing and naming the problems we face, but has been insufficient in devising feasible and viable ways of living and exchanging that are not subordinated to wealth creation.” 

Stir makes good on its founding premise  by featuring a rich variety of fascinating essays and profiles about local action.  I was especially taken by “The Practice of Unknowing”  by Marianne Maeckelberg, a Dutch anthropologist, who clarified for me something that I had intuited but had trouble articulating:  that the very forms of knowledge about the commons are radically different from those of 20th Century politics.