David Bollier

At a time when the superstructures of human civilization seem terminally messed up – unable to address climate collapse, authoritarian capitalism, among many other wicked problems – I was thrilled to encounter a book that dares to imagine a fresh and compelling way forward. The book, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, is a big-hearted and poetic yet rigorous scholarly book.

On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #68), I interviewed the three authors -- noted anthropologist Arturo Escobar and global studies professor Michal Osterweil, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Kriti Sharma, a professor of critical race science and technology studies at UC Santa Cruz. 

Relationality is not a treatise of policy prescriptions. It’s something more profound – an inquiry into the power of love and embodied presence as forces for liberation. It doesn’t look to politics, policy, or law as the primary levers for change, important as they are. Instead, the book confronts a more fundamental problem – our modern myths of the self and our dualistic assumptions about the separateness of everything. 

The book attempts to imagine how we might emancipate our very sense of identity, as forged by capitalist modernity, by focusing on our relationships with other humans and the more-than-human world. The authors argue that we moderns can reinvent ourselves and the world on very different terms, but this quest must begin at some deeper, inner places. 

They entice us into this process through poetry…  trying to imagine the “mind” of seagrass as it adapts to changing environment over deep time… describing the limits of cognition as a way of knowing….and exploring the ways in which modern capitalism actively produces individualism and nonrelationality.

Isabel Carlisle is a leading figure in bioregional education and action who has a great term for describing the planetary eco- mayhem now underway -- “Gaia on the move.” As climate change intensifies and humankind disrupts ecosystems, Gaia is causing ice caps and glaciers to melt and the atmospheric jet stream to skitter and shift course. The Amazonian forest becoming a net emitter rather than absorber of atmospheric carbon 

As these system-changes disrupt local ecosystems, through coastal flooding for example, Carlisle sees cues for how to move forward. The disruptions “reveal where the fragility is,” said Carlisle, and that’s where to focus attention.

“By working into those points of fragility, we think we can flip them around and make them leverage points for change,” she said. “We can start to demonstrate the value of bioregioning and what it is.” 

Carlisle founded and now directs the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, England, in 2017. Over the past eight years, she and a modest team have taken a leading role in mobilizing bioregional action at practical, strategic, and policy levels. One sentence nicely captures the group’s mission: “We generate trust through partnership, resource others, lay out pathways for practical action, inspire and demonstrate.” 

The Bioregional Learning Center (BLC) is chiefly concerned with improving the resilience of its own regional ecosystem in southwest England. But it has also become an important node in the global network of bioregional activists. BLC hosted a major virtual conference on bioregioning in 2022, which helped re-energize a field of activism that had been somewhat dormant since its  heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. 

Most of us don’t give much thought to the arcane technical protocols that make the Internet and its various platforms work. Yet these invisible architectures of code profoundly affect how we can interact with others. They determine what sorts of information we can receive and even how our worldviews and identities are shaped.

Sometimes tech protocols empower us to govern ourselves as commoners and freely collaborate with each other. Think open source software, wikis, and collaborative websites. More typically, network protocols are used to create closed, proprietary corporate platforms that turn us into dependent consumers and victims of data-surveillance. 

To learn more about how network protocols can foster digital commoning, I recently talked with the activist-minded programmer Evan Henshaw-Plath, perhaps better known as Rabble (pronouns they and them). Rabble has long been a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and champion of decentralized, open technologies. Our conversation can be heard here, as Episode #65 of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning. (It is also posted on Rabble’s podcast, Revolution.Social.) 

What makes Rabble so interesting is their priorities as a programmer, which differ significantly from those of venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tech firms. Rabble’s ambitions are to build platforms that allow “everyone [to have] access to authentic, private online communities built on care, connection, and sustainable relationships.” 

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers.  Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results.

For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture:  legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South. 

To explore the current state of seed-sharing movement and its battles against proprietary seed, I spoke with Jack Kloppenburg  of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #63).  

As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1985 (he’s now a professor emeritus), Kloppenburg has been at the forefront of seed-sharing issues for forty years. His 1990 book, First the Seed, was a pioneering look at the political economy of plant biotechnology, a theme that he later explored in Seeds and Sovereignty, about the corporate capture of genetic resources.