books

An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived!  The Ecology of Law:  Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning if we are going to address our many environmental problems.

The book is the work of two of the more venturesome minds in science and law – Fritjof Capra  and Ugo Mattei, respectively. Capra is a physicist and systems thinker who first gained international attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics, which drew linkages between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mattei is a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy who teaches at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and at the University of Turin. He is also deputy mayor of Ch­ieri in the northern region of Italy.

The Law of Ecology is an ambitious, big-picture account of the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview – a legacy that we must transcend if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. The book argues that modernity as a template of thought is a serious root problem in today’s world.  Among other things, it privileges the individual as supreme agent despite the harm to the collective good and ecological stability. Modernity also sees the world as governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life such as subjectivity, caring and meaning.

As a corrective, Capra and Mattei propose a new body of commons-based institutions recognized by law (which itself will have a different character than conventional state law).

It’s quite a treat to watch two sophisticated dissenters outline their vision of a world based on commoning and protected by a new species of “ecolaw.” Capra and Mattei start their story by sketching important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature.  We still live in the cosmological world articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, all of whom saw the world as a rational, empirically knowable order governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

I am happy to report that the Italian translation of my book, Think Like a Commoner, has now been published. La Rinascita dei Commons: Successi e potenzialita del movimento globale a tutela dei beni comuni -- or The Rebirth of Commons:  Successes and Potential of the Global Movement for the Protection of Commons --was translated by Bernardo Parrella over the past year. 

My thanks to Bernardo for his initiative and tenacity in doing the translation and in finding a suitable publisher, Stampa Alternativa. And my thanks also to the pioneering Italian commons thinker and activist Ugo Mattei for writing the preface. 

Italy is at the vanguard of many commons innovations these days.  One sign of this is the first International Festival of the Commons (organized by Mattei), which will be held in Chieri, Italy, from July 9 to 12. I plan to attend, so perhaps I will see you there.

For the record, the Italian edition of Think Like a Commoner is the third translation, following the Polish and French translations. Translations into Spanish, Korean and Chinese are now pending.

Not so long ago, the language of “intellectual property” (IP) was the only serious way of talking about creative works and inventions.  Copyright and patents provided the default framework for explaining how someone’s bright idea grew into a marketable product, and how that in turn contributed to economic growth and human progress. It was a neat, tidy, reassuring story.  It had an irresistible simplicity – and the endorsement of the ultimate authority, government.

And then…. the pluriversal realities of life came storming the citadel gates!  Over the past fifteen or twenty years, the monoculture narrative of IP has been attacked by indigenous cultures, seed activists, healthcare experts, advocates for the poor, the academy, and especially users of digital technologies.  It has become increasingly clear that the standard IP story, whatever its merits on a smaller scale, in competitive industries, is mostly a self-serving, protectionist weapon in the hands of Hollywood, record labels, book publishers, Big Pharma and other multinational IP industries. 

We can thank the authors of a new anthology for helping to explain how the standard IP narrative is profoundly flawed, and how an array of challengers are showing how knowledge-creation so often emerges through social commons.

Free Knowledge:  Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery, edited by Patricia W. Elliott and Daryl H. Hepting, provides a refreshing survey of the many realms in which corporations are enclosing shared knowledge -- and a sampling of commons that are democratizing the production and control of knowledge. (The book is published by University of Regina Press, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

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!

With so much scholarship focused on commons as “resource management” and the measurement of externals, it’s refreshing to encounter a book that plumbs the internal dimensions of a commons –that is, commoning.  Canadian writer and scholar Heather Menzies has taken on this challenge in her recently published Reclaiming the Commons for the Commons Good (New Society Publishers), a book that she describes as a “memoir and manifesto.”  It is a three-part exploration of commoning as a personal experience, social negotiation and finally, as a spiritual quest.

The first part of Menzies’ book is the memoir:  an account of her trip to the land of her ancestors, Scotland.  She wanted to try to imagine their lives as commoners and understand the impact of the cataclysmic enclosures known as the Highland Clearances, in the late 1700s and 1800s. 

The Clearances, a landmark in Scottish history, saw thousands of small family farmers forced off their traditional lands to make way for “Improvements” -- that is, conversion to the profitable enterprise of sheep-raising.   Landlords raised rents, colluded with politicians to “legally” take the lands, and when necessary, resorted to violence to get the job done.   

The Clearances were not only a major economic and political disruption, but also a profound cultural, ecological and spiritual dispossession, as Manzies writes:

My forebears and their neighbors didn’t just lose their together-as-one connection to the land.  They lost all that these ties meant to them economically, politically, socially, culturally and even spiritually.  They lost ways of working the land and working things out together.  They lost ways of knowing the land directly, intimately through the soles of their feet, the tone of their muscled arms and hands….They lost ways of knowing the animals too, wild and domestic, and how they moved from woodland to water and claimed certain spots conducive to begetting.  As well, they lost ways of sharing this experience, this knowing as common knowledge, with that knowledge both informing and supporting the authority of local decision-making.

This is the last in a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

In our preceding essays in this series, we introduced the idea of Green Governance, a new approach to environmental protection based on a broad synthesis of economics and human rights and, critically, the commons. We also described the burgeoning global commons movement, which is demonstrating a wide range of innovative, effective models of Green Governance.

In our final post, we'd like to focus on how a vision of Green Governance could be embodied into law. If a new paradigm shift to Green Governance is going to become a reality, state law and policy must formally recognize the countless commons that now exist and the new ones that must be created.

Recognizing the Commons as a Legal Entity

Yet here’s the rub: Because the “law of the commons” is a qualitatively different type

of law – one that recognizes social and ecological relationships and the value of nature beyond the marketplace – it is difficult to rely upon the conventional forms of state, national and international law. After all, conventional law generally privileges individual over group rights, as well as commercial activities and economic growth above all else.

Establishing formal recognition for commons- and rights-based law is therefore a complicated proposition. We must consider, for example, how self-organized communities of commoners can be validated as authoritative forms of resource managers. How can they maintain themselves, and what sort of juridical relationship can they have with conventional law? One must ask, too, which existing bodies of law can be modified and enlarged to facilitate the workings of actual commons.

 Threee Domains of Commons Law

Clearly there must be a suitable architecture of law and public policy to support and guide the growth of commons and a new Commons Sector. In our book Green Governance, we propose innovations in law and policy in three distinct domains:

• General internal governance principles and policies that can guide the development and management of commons;
• Macro-principles and policies that facilitate the formation and maintenance of “peer governance;”
• Catalytic legal strategies to validate, protect, and support ecological commons.

This is the fourth of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

The overriding challenge for our time – as outlined in our three previous CSRwire essays – is for human societies to develop new ways of interacting with nature and organizing our economic and social lives. It’s imperative that we rein in the mindless exploitation of fragile natural systems upon which human civilization depends.

The largest, most catastrophic problem, of course, is climate change, but each of the “smaller” ecological challenges we face – loss of biodiversity, soil desertification, collapsing coral reefs and more – stem from the same general problem: a mythopoetic vision that human progress must be achieved through material consumption and the ceaseless expansion of markets.

State/Market Solutions Doomed to Failure

While most people look to the State or Market for solutions, we believe that many of these efforts are doomed to failure or destined to deliver disappointing results. The State/Market duopoly – the deep alliance between large corporations, politicians, government agencies and international treaty organizations – is simply too committed to economic growth and market individualism to entertain any other policy approaches.

The political project of the past forty years has been to tinker around the edges of this dominant paradigm with feckless regulatory programs that do not really address the core problems, and indeed, typically legalize

existing practices.

Solution:  Stewardship of Shared Resources

So what might be done?

We believe that one of the most compelling, long-term strategies for dealing with the structural causes of our many ecological crises is to create and recognize legally, alternative systems of provisioning and governance. Fortunately, such an alternative general paradigm already exists.

It’s called the commons.

This is the third of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press.  The essays originally appeared on CSRWire.  I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

 

In the previous two essays in this series, we outlined our approach to Green Governance as a new model or paradigm for how we can relate to the natural environment. We also stressed how “Vernacular Law” – a kind of socially based “micro-law” that evolves through commons activity (“commoning”) – can establish legitimacy and trust in official state law, and thereby unleash new sorts of grassroots innovation in environmental stewardship.

In this essay, we explore another major dimension of the large shift we are proposing: how human rights can help propel a shift to Green Governance and thereafter help administer such governance once achieved.

Nothing is more basic to life than having sustainable access to food, clean air and water, and other resources that ecosystems provide. Surely a clean and healthy environment upon which life itself depends should be recognized as a fundamental human right.

This is the second of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press in January 2013.  The essays originally appeared on CSRWire.

 

Is it possible to solve our many environmental problems through ingenious interventions by government and markets alone? Not likely. Apart from calls for eco-minded behavior (recycle your cans, insulate your house), ordinary citizens have been more or less exiled from environmental policymaking.

The big oil, coal and nuclear power companies have easy access to the President and Congress and expert lawyers and scientists have privileged seats at the table. But opponents of, say, the Keystone Pipeline are mostly ignored unless they get arrested for protesting outside of the White House.

A New Kind of Law to Underpin the Commons

That’s why we believe it’s important to talk about a “new” category of law that has little recognition among legislators and regulators, judges and lobbyists. We call it “Vernacular Law.” “Vernacular” is a term that the dissident sociologist Ivan Illich used to describe the informal, everyday spaces in people’s lives where they negotiate their own rules and devise their own norms and practices.

In our last essay, we introduced the idea of commons- and rights-based governance for natural ecosystems. We turn now to Vernacular Law because

its matrix of socially negotiated values, principles and rules are what make a commons work.

Vernacular Law originates in the informal, unofficial zones of society – the cafes and barber shops, Main Street and schools, our parks and social networking websites. What emerges in these zones is a shared wisdom and a source of moral legitimacy and authority. Colonial powers frequently used their formal law to forcibly repress the use of local languages so that their controlling mother tongue could prevail.