By Donovan C. Wilkin, Resilience.org
Simultaneously husbanding and equitably sharing multiple global common resources is the ultimate social challenge to humanity’s survival. Today specifically, that means navigating the impending perfect storm of simultaneous climate change, soil destruction, and fossil fuel depletion.
By Naomi Lipke, Shareable
Solikyl aims to create the latter, a food commons, where food is seen as a shared resource through social practice rather than as a private good.
By Ugo Bardi, MAHB
I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are on to something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain.
By Silke Helfrich, David Bollier, Free, Fair, and Alive
Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
The Urban Commons Cookbook seeks to answer such questions as: “Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work?“
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
By Ashish Kothari, Miloon Kothari, Open Democracy
If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
This piece is a gust of fresh air – a much-needed, long-overdue challenge to the corporate and university powers that control academic publishing. Through inertia, ignorance, and sometimes complicity, universities are not challenging the distinct limits of corporate-controlled “openness" and defending the ideals of academic scholarship.
By David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive
But as capitalism teeters under the weight of its own contradictions, leading to such existential crises as climate breakdown, economic inequality, and violent nationalism, an obvious question on the lips of most people is, how can the Commonsverse grow larger and transform the political economy and culture?
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
So, it comes down to this. The answer to these crazy times, is to evacuate & de-spend the enclosures and to inhabit and re-spend the skill, ingenuity, sensuality (intelligence gathering) and moral probity of the common.
By John Holloway, Daraja Press
The doors open. You can feel the pent-up energy even before the faces appear. The lockdown is over. A dam is burst. Out pours a torrent of angers, anxieties, frustrations, dreams, hopes, fears. It is as if we cannot breathe.
By CIVICUS Staff, CIVICUS
Water is in the hands of large producers who have dried out our territory and compromised the lives of our communities. Ours is an extreme case: Chile has entirely privatised water, which means that theft is institutionalised. Chile has clearly prioritised extractive industries over the rights of communities to water.