Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Politicians and economists may dismiss the commons with a wave of the hand, but commoners understand a deeper truth – that the presumptions of capitalist modernity are profoundly flawed, if not already collapsing.
A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for “community rights” and more recently, “self-owned land.”
With water becoming an ever more valuable and contested resource, we need to be crystal clear that it doesn’t belong in the private property system. It belongs in the commons.
The initiative is called the Common Wallet, and through it our group wants to develop more radical forms of solidarity, kinship, trust, as well as a thorough questioning of and experimenting with different possible relationships to money.
Not everyone will yet be ready to meet us in commoning. But some will. And these are the friends we will be needing
Although I recognize that degrowth is not a certain theory but more of a pluralistic critical frame calling for socio-ecological transformations, here is what I managed to put together regarding the economic activities related to clothing inspired by degrowth.
I believe deeply in the commons. I believe it is the only true economic expression of all this interconnected biophysical reality.
Choi has brought the ethic and practices of commoning to the creation of art and its exhibition. She and her colleagues have embraced commoning as an organizing principle for how a diverse team of artists can make art and work together.
A resurgence of the Commons activities that once made Lebanon thrive, coupled with the implementation of cosmo-localism, may be the key to restoring the country’s social and economic health.
Brewer instead puts forward a plan to create a planetary network of local living economies, organized as bioregions. This idea builds on the pioneering work of Dana Meadows and “The Limits to Growth” study published in the early 1980s.
As we embark upon this great transition that is already taking place, all efforts need to be focused on retiring the dying fossil fuel assets, what Vinay Gupta calls the ‘heroin of the economy’, while commoning the renewable and healthier assets being created in their stead.
“If most antisocial behaviors are locally advantageous,” writes Wilson, “and most prosocial behaviors are locally disadvantageous, then we have an enormous problem explaining the nature of prosociality, including the nature of human morality, from an evolutionary perspective.”
