Surging real estate markets, among other factors, have made US housing unaffordable to large segments of the population, especially young people. So much of it is designed for conventional nuclear families and upscale buyers seeking luxury amenities. For lower- and middle-income people, simply finding affordable housing is hard enough; it almost seems utopian to want housing with attractive public…
Our modern mental maps of commons are woefully inadequate, in part because we have forgotten the history of commons and its once-flourishing folk culture. Leah Gordon, an English photographer, writer, and filmmaker has set out to fix that through a deep dive into the history of English commons. The result, produced with two collaborators, is her fascinating and beautiful book, Common People: A…
To outsiders, the Alps may conjure images of majestic mountain landscapes and carefree ski vacations. But to tens of thousands of people living in small Alpine towns, the challenges they face aren’t so different from those of many rural towns: How to meet basic needs and make the economy more resilient? How to deal with the worsening disruptions of climate change? How to assert greater regional…
With so many social movements seeking system change – cooperatives, commons, Doughnut Economics, peer production, relocalization and more – things quickly get confusing. There are so many different vocabularies, political premises, and theories of change swirling about. How can we possibly work toward a coherent, common future? Jeremy Lent’ s new book, Ecocivilization , is a significant beachhead…
One point of using a Creative Commons license is to make a book (and other creative works) as widely available as possible. To that end, I’m thrilled to announce a new stage in the life of Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition , published last year by New Society Publishers . The printed text of the book is now posted online, for free. Here’s the weblink:…
Understanding how online communities function is a particularly vexing challenge. For example, is a wiki best understood as a volunteer club and nonprofit organization? Or does it more closely resemble a business that organizes the wisdom of crowd -- or tames the unruliness of a mob? It becomes even more complicated when you consider that wikis have porous boundaries, enabling people to become…
Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet. It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains. And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or…
The western world has long promoted “development” as a high-minded mission to bring capitalist markets and growth to impoverished areas of the world. But what if development were seen not just as a matter of creating markets, but of strengthening social collaboration and sharing in meeting needs? In short, what if development agencies were to support commoning? One major national development…
In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde ’s T he Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property . I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social…
This is the fifth and final section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here and at Natasha Hulst s Substack. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning ; 2. Commons…