Open Source Seeds and Commoning Mushrooms: The Iriaiken Philosophy
By David Bollier, Free, Fair, and Alive
The appropriation of seeds raises a profound challenge to farmers and, really, everyone, because we all have to eat.
Tag: the commons
Beating the Bounds: Inside the Struggle to Make Open Source Seed
By Maywa Montenegro de Wit, David Bollier blog
Commoners in medieval Europe variously employed boundary beating as physical mapping of space, territorial defense, and performative acts of community, collective memory, and shared responsibility.
Dave Jacke on Ecological Design and Abundance
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
For Dave Jacke, a designer of ecological landscapes since the late 1970s, human culture and our “inner landscapes” are the floating variables for our future on Earth.
Care as Commons: A Brief Introduction
By Thomas Allan, Resilience.org
A broader political economy of care can make visible the interdependence and reciprocity that are fundamental parts of our social world.
Rescuing civilization: Does the conservative/progressive rift pose an existential threat to humanity?
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.
How one Swedish city grew the commons by foodsharing during the pandemic
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.
Money, Gods, and Taboos: Re-sacralizing the Commons
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.
Growing the Commonsverse: Rethinking Property
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.
Guidance from The Urban Commons Cookbook
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?“
‘Affective Labor’ in Community Forests in India
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.
We are Doomed if, in the Post-Covid-19 World, We Cannot Abandon Non-Essentials
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’.
The Frontier Beyond Open Access Publishing? Commoning
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.