David Bollier

It’s been a year since the publication of Think Like a Commoner:  A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. I’m pleased to report that not only have domestic US sales gone well, but there will be seven foreign translations by the end of 2015.

There is already a French translation, La Renaissance des Communs:  Pour une société de coopération et de partage, published by Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, of Paris, which commissioned me to write the book in the first place. 

There is also a Polish translation, The Commons:  Dobro Wspólne dla każdego, (downloadable for free from the Internet Archives. The Polish edition was initiated and translated by Petros & Natasha of the Freelab collective and published by the Social Cooperative “Faktoria,” in Poland.

Now, translations are underway in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese and Korean, all with the generous permission of the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation (which is directly supporting the Chinese translation).

The Spanish translation is being made by Guerrilla Translation of Madrid in cooperation with a number of commons-based groups in Spain. A special thanks to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for their tenacity and leadership in making this happen.

Italian translator Bernardo Parrella has done a lot of work exploring publishing arrangements for Think Like a Commoner in Italy.  The good news is that Stampa Alternativa will publish the Italian edition in the spring, probably in April.

The Korean version will be published by Galmuri Press.  Details of the Greek and Chinese publishing arrangements are still being worked out, but in the meantime translations are proceeding. 

I was frankly surprised at the number of translations that have materialized for Think Like a Commoner in only one year. The cross-cultural interest suggests that the commons is fast becoming part of the Zeitgeist, recognized as a powerful way to begin to confront the dead-end economics and values of neoliberalism and to imagine a new and better world.

My thanks to everyone who is helping make these translations of my book happen!

In industrialized societies, where so many people regard economic growth as the essence of human progress, the idea of deliberately rejecting growth is seen as insane.  Yet that is more or less what the planet’s ecosystems are saying right now about the world economy. It’s also the message of an expanding movement, Degrowth, that is particularly strong in Europe and the global South. 

A few months ago I blogged about the massive Degrowth conference in Leipzig, Germany, that attracted 3,000 people from around the world. The basic point of the discussions was how to get beyond the fetish of growth, intellectually and practically, and how to transform our idea of “the economy” so that it incorporates such important values as democracy, social well-being and ecological limits.

Several of the movement’s leading figures have now released a rich anthology of essays, Degrowth:  A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge). It is the first English language book to comprehensively survey the burgeoning literature on degrowth.  More about the book on its website and an amusing three-minute video.  

The editors -- Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgios Kallis – are three scholars at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and members of the group Research & Degrowth. The editors describe degrowth as “a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism.”  The basic idea is to find new ways to achieve “the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.” 

Here’s how the book jacket describes the volume: 

We live in an era of stagnation, rapid impoverishment, rising inequalities and socio-ecological disasters. In the dominant discourse, these are effects of economic crisis, lack of growth or underdevelopment. This book argues that growth is the cause of these problems and that it has become uneconomic, ecologically unsustainable and intrinsically unjust.

When the language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary. A movement of activists and intellectuals, first starting in France and then spreading to the rest of the world, has called for the decolonization of public debate from the idiom of economism and the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective. ‘Degrowth’ (‘décroissance’) has come to signify for them the desired direction of societies that will use fewer natural resources and will organize themselves to live radically differently. ‘Simplicity’, ‘conviviality’, ‘autonomy’, ‘care’, ‘commons’ and ‘dépense’ are some of the words that express what a degrowth society might look like.

Participants in a workshop hosted by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) and the German Institute for Human Rights are featured in a nicely done five-minute video, “A Commons Conversation.” (Tip of the hat to Silke Helfrich.)  It’s a thoughtful introduction to subsistence and traditional commons, especially in Africa. The focus is on secure land tenure and food security.

The July 2014 workshop is in the midst of producing a “Technical Guide on Tenure Rights to Commons” (or “TG Commons,” for short) at the request of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).  The guide seeks to support the adoption of “Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT).” 

According to the workshop, the TG Commons will:

provide strategies to overcome the challenges inherent in the recognition and protection of tenure rights to commons. The overall objective of the guide is to contribute to national food security, to secure access to natural resources (especially for marginalized and vulnerable groups), to support human well-being and livelihood, sustainable resource use, and ecosystem functioning. This is particularly timely, since today about three billion rural families’ livelihoods depend on common lands, forests and fisheries. 

The TG commons guidebook is focused on “providing concrete strategies to achieve the recognition and protection of tenure rights to commons."

I don’t normally feature crowdfunding campaigns in my blog because there are so many worthy ones to support.  But here are two projects that I have a special affection for:  An ambitious campaign by CommonsSpark to raise money for a new mapping project called “CommonsScope,” and a set of twelve workshops to build local economies hosted by STIR magazine in the UK. 

Ellen Friedman and her colleagues have done a great job in pulling together an amazing number of maps of commons from around the world, featuring such categories as water, transportation, local commons and art commons. In an Indiegogo campaign that hopes to raise $35,000, CommonSpark plans to build a web catalog of hundreds of commons-related maps, data visualizations, open data, and tools – “a knowledge commons about the commons.”

Friedman also notes that CommonSpark is creating a catalog of commons with thousands of profiles that will communicate the story of each commons (who is the community, what is the resource, what are the commoning practices, where is it located, etc) along with best practices and data visualizations to identify patterns of commoning.

The CommonSpark Collective doesn’t want just want to raise money to build this useful web tool; it wants to attract a larger community to help build and steward the new world atlas of commons. You can help the effort by helping build the inventory of commons, joining the community and contributing to the Indiegogo campaign.  If this is any inducment, I've agreed to be a "reward" for any donor that gives $2,500 or more.