By Marie Venner, Rapid Transition Alliance
Unlike the Magna Carta, pertaining to the rights of barons, the Charter of the Forest addressed the rights of common people; it restricted the amount of land that the king could claim for private use and restored common rights to common natural resources.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
The “tragedy of the commons” is an idea that has so thoroughly seeped into culture and law that it seems normal for people and corporations to own land, water, and even whole ecosystems. But there’s a BIG problem: the “tragedy” part of it has been debunked – it really should be the triumph of the commons.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
In recent weeks, we commoners have lost three great visionaries. Each spawned robust institutions and movements to carry their visions forward; the continuing vitality of their projects confirm that their spirits remain very much with us. We should pause to reflect on and celebrate their towering contributions.
By Marco Berlinguer, Red Pepper
The development of the digital commons, with its denial of the exclusive rights of the owner to appropriate its value privately and exclusively, was seen as either exciting or frightening, depending on one’s perspective.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
The Radical Open Access Collective is one of the key forces trying to show how commoning in scientific and scholarly publishing can actually work.
By Eliza Daley, By my solitary hearth
What the “property as investment” people never seem to learn is that you don’t need to earn money if you have a good life… Because investors? They’re only chasing after some future dollar that will never buy them a home.
By Yavor Tarinski, Towards Autonomy
When the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood or complex of buildings manage to institute a radically different mode of collective co-existance, then the self-managed units, of which Castoriadis speaks, begin to emerge.
By Sabrina Chakori, Medium.com
Based on principles and practices of resource use reduction, sharing, conviviality, solidarity, and mutual aid, the Brisbane Tool Library can be considered a small-scale laboratory for a reorientation of society towards degrowth.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
It's been more a year and a half in the making, but I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead!
By Thomas Allan, Radix
Practiced and shared well, grief gives voice and value to the diversity of the life journey, expressing and crystallising the whole, often painful canvas of lived experience.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat.
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.