David Bollier

New issues of two of my favorite journals have come out.  Time to check out some fascinating articles on commons-related themes.  First, an introduction to the two publications, Common Voices and Stir to Action.

Stir to Action – with the tagline, “Anger.  Analysis.  Action” – is a scrappy, fiercely smart quarterly that prowls the cultural and political frontier that few other publications cover.  Stir is published and edited by Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh in the UK.  Stir understands, citing Nathan Schneider, that “politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for.”  While established political journals handicap the horserace with smarty-pants/cynical commentary, Gordon-Farleigh has shown just how much fresh, uncovered political innovation there really is out there.  It's not just that "another world is possible," he writes, but that "another world is happening."

Stir deliberately avoids “the disproportionate fixation on Washington and London [that] produces mere spectators who can only rely on financial and political elites to save them and who can only be disappointed and failed by them.  This read-only political culture dominates our experience of our options and choices, and the German comedian Klaus Hansen expresses this reversible point in terms of commercial sport — “Football is like democracy: twenty-two people playing and millions watching.”  As Stephen Duncombe says in his interview, “It’s not enough to change people’s minds.  You have to change the social, political and economic structures in which they live.” 

So Stir gets out of London, avoids the venerable pundits and pols, and gets out on the street, and even ventures abroad.  In the latest issue, cultural anthropologist Marianne Maeckelbergh has a thoughtful piece about the horizontal decision-making process in the Occupy movement.  Maeckelbergh, who has participated in such processes in Barcelona, New York and Oakland, describes the history of participatory decisionmaking models and the rationale for them at Occupy gatherings.  She writes:  “In order to create new political structures we actually have to let go of certain economic relations which we take as given. For example, horizontal decision-making does not work when we assume a) that resources are scarce, b) that we therefore need to compete with each other and c) ownership is an exclusionary relation – a proprietary relation.”

The political right in the U.S. is dominated by libertarian-minded champions of the “free market” and highly limited government – not the most natural ally of progressives who like the commons.  Yet that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some interesting possibilities to explore.  Consider this remarkable video clip of Bill O’Reilly talking with Lou Dobbs on Fox News about rising oil prices.  (A tip of the hat to Peter Barnes for bringing this to my attention.)

O’Reilly starts off the segment by noting that oil companies are exporting U.S. oil to foreign countries, which in turn has caused U.S. gas prices to rise.  “It is my contention,” O’Reilly says, “that we the people own the gas and oil discovered in America.  It’s our land and the government administers it our name...Land and water are the domain of we the people.  That’s why oil companies have to get permits.  They can’t just go around drilling anywhere! That’s why there are environmental laws – to protect the domain of we the people.”  (Wow -- O'Reilly defends environmental laws!)

Bill then asks Lou Dobbs, a former CNN business news anchor, Tea Party supporter, and now a Fox commentator, what he thinks.  Dobbs says that he agrees with O’Reilly -- we the people own the oil, coal and other energy resources in the U.S.  Then he adds, “In Alaska, there is a perfect model for what we should do as a nation.”  He then proposes that the federal government create an American Trust Fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-charted trust fund that collects a percentage of revenues from all oil drilled on state land.  The trust then invests the money and distributes annual dividend checks to every citizen in the state.  In 2010, every Alaskan resident received $1,281 kicked from a trust fund worth more than $40 billion.  None of the trust fund money goes to the government.

The Occupy movement is beginning to discover the commons, and the result could be a rich and productive collaboration.  This was the lesson that I took from a three-day conference, “Making Worlds:  A Forum on the Commons,” hosted by Occupy Wall Street in Brooklyn this past weekend. Rarely have I seen so many ordinary people from diverse backgrounds embrace the commons idea with such ease and enthusiasm.

There was a certain cosmic appropriateness that this gathering was held in a church meeting hall, the Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  This is the kind of humble, out of the way setting that gave rise to the civil rights movement 50-60 years ago.  Church basements virtually require us to shed our pretensions and credentials, and to get real with each other.  As they say in the Occupy world, this was a “truth event” – an occasion meant to rip a hole in the fabric of mainstream culture and provoke some deep and honest reflection on the truth.    

Can the commons paradigm take us to higher ground?  For the 100-plus people who showed up, the forum was an occasion to consider how the commons can open up new vistas in “alternative economies, open source, education, environment, technology, labor, politics, race, gender, sexuality and more.”  In typical Occupy style, the meetings were run in a fairly loose fashion; it was not always clear who was “running” the meeting because many people intervened at various times. 

And yet things never got out of hand, and I cannot recall a meeting of this size that was richer, more provocative and constructive.  People really listened to each other.  People actively invited everyone to speak out, especially those who were more reticent.  Your professional credentials were a secondary matter.  And if someone got too agitated, people would use calming hand gestures to cool things down. The dialogue was an intelligent, passionate, highly sophisticated and practical dialogue of ordinary American citizens.  Refreshing!  Now if only such traits could somehow be engineered into our mainstream political culture and media!

The world of law is not especially welcoming of the idea of the commons.  There are too many blurry lines and idiosyncratic contingencies.  Lawyers like bright-line rules and cause-and-effect scenarios.  The varieties of commons are also unsettling to legal minds, it seems, because commons can be difficult to systematize and square with western law and its focus on individuals. 

Lawyers also prefer to see law as a partner with neoliberal capitalism and its mythopoetic narratives about human progress through technology, consumerism and economic growth.  These attitudes are especially problematic when it comes to environmental law, which has not been terribly effective over the past fifty years in restraining the appetites of capital-driven markets and corporate property owners.

To be sure, property law scholars spend some time dealing with the commons as an alternative to the standard narratives.  But here, too, the “tragedy” parable tends to prevail and the commons is usually treated as a curiosity of medieval history and rural, “under-developed” countries.  It is not seen as a hardy, versatile contemporary paradigm that might actually address some deep pathologies of the "free market."  For example, the commons helps us talk about the compulsive externalizing of costs, the ethics of monetizing all value, the growth imperatives of the economy today, the legal prejudices against collective stewardship and long-term commitments, and our cultural alienation from nature and each other, among other issues.

Generations of such thinking will not be easily overcome, I realize, but I am nonetheless pleased to announce a brave attempt to carve out a richer space for the commons in legal education.  A new law textbook, International Environmental Law and World Order:  A Problem-Oriented Coursebook, just published in the Third Edition by West Publishing, includes a chapter by me, “The Future of International Environmental Law:  A Law of the Ecological Commons?”