Rescuing civilization: Does the conservative/progressive rift pose an existential threat to humanity?

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. 

Money, Gods, and Taboos: Re-sacralizing the Commons

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.

Guidance from The Urban Commons Cookbook

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

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

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

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.

Growing the Commonsverse

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?

Being, Nothingness, Cumquats and Walter Scott

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.