Brad (lt) and Vernon (rt) present the WeJay at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

I blogged about the project on MySpace for a while, but Myspace is overrun with ads and became too annoying. I’m going to try this space out as a new home. You can follow progress of the making of the “transmedia experience” we call What We Got. Here is my first entry.

In June of 2008 I met Tim Kring, the writer and creator of the NBC hit series Heroes, while participating in a Bay Area Video Coalition-sponsored new media workshop. He told me that we are inventing a new form with What We Got. He was talking about the documentary/fiction post-modern sensibility of our film, but the same can be said for the entire project. It’s become what some might call a “transmedia experience”, morphing our outreach remix and share strategy and the storytelling into a single muti-modal force hurtling forward in real and cyber space.

Here is my paraphrasing of wikipedia’s definition of transmedia storytelling:

Transmedia storytelling, also called multiplatform or enhanced storytelling, is storytelling across multiple forms of media. By using different media, it attempts to create “entrypoints” through which audiences can become immersed in a story franchise’s world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship across multiple new media forms like television, movie theaters. video games, the internet, and mobile platforms. By encouraging the sharing of assets and user generated content, transmedia conveys a complex story through numerous media sources.

Since the institute, we no longer think of ourselves primarily as filmmakers. We think of ourselves as content producers. This is a term that Jim Sommers of the Independent Television Service emphasized at one of the BAVC institute’s seminars. And we embrace the notion that we are one set among many storytellers telling the story of the commons. We will enable and embolden others to share that mission through our transmedia strategy to transform viewers into doers who shape the story and join a community working online and offline to name, claim and protect commons.

We have a clear, conceptual understanding for what we are doing. That’s the good news.

That’s the bad news, too.

The bad news, if you wish to call it that, is that we are working hard at the “bleeding edge” of storytelling form, new media, and web 2.0 strategy. Conceptualizing this project has taken far more time that we anticipated. Consequently, we have not met some our key goals. We had hoped to have developed a script, a website, and the plan for our first outreach summit by now. Instead, we have busied ourselves with the work of figuring out how to tell our story of the commons and educating ourselves about web 2.0, shifting our focus from a website to a multiplatform digital strategy to organize our outreach engagement campaign. Whereas we once thought of our storytelling (the film), our remix strategy (the user-generated versions) and the on-the-ground outreach organizing (partnerships and events) as separate but related, we now think of them as one in the same, each a dynamic within a single ecology: a transmedia experience.

In short, we’ve spent more than a year trying to figure out what the heck we are trying to invent for What We Got. Thanks to some invaluable mentorship and the building of a fantastic team, we are making steady progress.

The script writing journey has been at turns exciting and frustrating. What compelled me to think I could write a script for a fiction/documentary hybrid, a kind of post-modern comic book-styled film, as Tim Kring describes it? The script challenges have delayed this project because so much of our fund raising depends on its completion.

What We Got is wholly different from anything I’ve ever done. Every documentary I’ve produced up to this point — and there have been many — consists either mostly of “cinema verité” footage or a combination of archival and interview footage. While storytelling is always a challenge, each successive film has been, increasingly, terra firma. This one is terra incognita. Personally, that is a significant attraction — to do something new. I swallow hard when I admit that it took a full year of attempting to write a script before concluding that I will not be the person to write this film. This conclusion comes after great effort and half a dozen writing retreats with my directing partner, Vernon.

We have amassed a mountain of research and a stack full of real and virtual note cards with potential scenes. We’ve honed our stylistic approach. Now we will turn over all of our work to a writer. In line with our new plan, we are currently vetting a short list of writers and expect to hire someone within weeks. Novelist Jonathan Lethem will help us. A Brooklyn native, Jonathan has not only written nearly a dozen novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude; he’s written a gorgeous essay about the Commons — The Ecstasy of Influence — that was published in Harper’s Magazine last year and included in Paul Miller’s (DJ Spooky) new anthology Sound Unbound. Jonathan’s website hosts a project called Promiscuous Materials wherein Jonathan grants one-dollar licenses to much of the material he’s written, challenging conventional notions of authorship and intellectual property. Jonathan has agreed to help us vet writers and work with our team to shape a script.

One of the most helpful undertakings in the course of climbing this steep learning curve was producing our first shoot with Paul (DJ Spooky). Motivated by the need to have some media to bring with us to the BAVC producer’s institute, we shot Paul on a green screen in a studio, featuring him in snippets that I think of as “commercials for the commons”. I wrote, Brian Glazer produced, and Vernon and I directed four scenes:

• T-Shirt – Spooky mixes and grooves as he moves through different commons environments, each of which turns to text on his t-shirt — Who Owns the ___? The blank is filled in by “sky”, “water”, “language”, “internet,” etc…

• Electric Company – Two Spookys in silhouette sound out the names of different kinds of commons.

• Copyright – Spooky reads the original copyright act as graphics around him depict the ever-escalating term of copyright.

• Goose – Spooky is a carnival barker shouting a 17th century poem through a megaphone about punishing the person who steals the goose from off the commons, but letting the greater crime of stealing the commons from the goose go unpunished. He’s accompanied by a remixed chorus of voices while flash animations dance around him.

Producing the shoot taught me an enormous amount about directing this kind of filmmaking, about co-directing with my partner, Vernon, budgeting, systems, post-production technology and tested our newly formed team — especially our producer, Brian Glazer. The shoot confirmed that we will not only work with Brian, but we’ll work with a number of people he brought onto the production and post-production team for this shoot. We learned how much we trust and enjoy working with Brian, a first-rate producer with loads of television (HBO, Sundance Channel, PBS...) and independent movie experience. His experience complements mine. Whereas I’ve worked primarily on PBS indie docs, Brian has worked with larger budgets and with celebrities on shows like Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts. He also brings to the team a funding and producing network and the skills to help realize our funding goals. Last, but certainly not least, he “gets” the commons and has already been an insightful creative influence on the project.

Making these scenes is my first serious foray into the world of motion graphics, especially using the program After Effects. The creation of these scenes deepened my understanding of how to use motion graphics and animation in our storytelling.

We’ve completed nearly one entire After Effects and animation pass of T-shirt and created a rough cut of the Electric Company sequence. Our plan is to finish these four scenes and release them online through various portals including zoominonline.com and through our WeJay, the online dj mixing console widget we created at BAVC’s producer’s institute. More on that later. This will mark the beginning of our sharing of media for this project.

I predict that we will have a script and storyboard by February of 2009. We hope to premiere the film in March of 2010 at the South By Southwest film festival, followed by a summer of “commons” screenings organized by our partners and each featuring remixed versions of the film and locally determined commons-oriented events. We’ll follow the commons event season with a limited theatrical release and a broadcast on PBS that leads into a season of meetups to motivate continued momentum and activism on behalf of the commons.

One of the most important assets that Brian and Jonathan bring to our effort is the proven ability to engage audiences on a political level without being didactic. Their projects do what we hope ours will do: communicate powerful political ideas that foreground artistry and entertainment over grandstanding to win new audiences. A delicate balance between entertainment/engagement and messaging is crucial to achieving the kind of cultural awareness and protection of the commons that we hope our work will help to catalyze.

We have also added a number of other talented souls to our original team of Vernon Reid, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Sam Pollard and myself. Henry Poole is our internet strategist. One of those freaky smart kids, Henry was hacking computers in middle school during the 1970s and 80s, and had already started and sold several businesses before he was old enough to legally drink. He’s been solving tech problems ever since, floating effortlessly between the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. His currently company, Civic Actions, has built web presences for organizations like Creative Commons and Amnesty International, and a massive human rights media hub online for Witness. The Hub is a participatory website enabling people anywhere in the world to use their cameras, camcorders and cell phones to document and share their human rights-related footage to promote discussion, action and policy change. Henry’s colleagues have figured out how to standardize and handle the uploading and downloading of massive amounts of multiple formats of media in order to make Witness’ The Hub work. This achievement and the rest of his long-view strategic skills and network of talented tech problem-solvers will help us achieve our transmedia storytelling and organizing goals.

Norman Lear came on board over a year ago as a creative consultant. Needless to say, Norman has legendary producing and storytelling advice to share. I’ve leaned on him during the process of finding a writer to help.

We have not hired an outreach staff, yet…but we had an opportunity to meet a very talented young woman, Mattie Weiss and at one point hoped that she might begin this part of the work. Mattie is currently the director of Campus Camp Wellstone at Wellstone Action in Minneapolis. We were simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate that this hire did not work out. Unfortunate, because Mattie is a proven talent in organizing youth and savvy in the use of technology and grassroots techniques. Fortunate, because we weren’t ready when the opportunity was presented to us. Since that time we have restructured our outreach approach, and, hence, the job. We’ll likely hire an outreach director and staff in February of 2009.

From the beginning, we have talked about having a robust online presence and the goal of going “viral” with our media. In the months since this grant was approved we have learned what that really means — our journey to understanding our project as a transmedia experience.

I must single out participation in the Bay Area Video Coalition’s (BAVC) Producer’s New Media Institute as transformative in the development of our transmedia strategy. The Independent Television Service sponsored our attendance. We spent 10 days working with web developers, game developers, designers, Second Life experts, mapping experts and other talented folk re-imagining public media strategy. While we wrote in our proposal that we want our project to be “viral” and to build community through online sharing and remixing, we actually figured out how to make those goals a reality in the hive of BAVC’s institute. There we not only worked with all of the talented mentors — some of whom we’ll continue to work with — but also worked together as a team (Henry, Vernon and me from points East, West and Midwest) in an environment that breathed into us a heightened state of productivity. The crux of our strategy is to de-emphasize a single address on the web (a website) and to focus on portability, being everywhere and anywhere on the web by using applications and widgets and by using networks to grow communities concerned with the commons. To this end, we dreamt up our WeJay, a remix and share widget that we prototyped at the BAVC institute. It’s a “toy” that can live anywhere, Facebook, Myspace, the iPhone. It could really make “viral” a reality.

What the WeJay does is simple, which is its beauty. Tony Walsh, a game developer based in Toronto, was key in pushing us in that direction. And the style that complements its “toyness” was the result of hard work by designers Abigail Rudner and Laura Hilliger. Creative Commons organized a focus group to test our WeJay prototype.

The WeJay is a widget we call a “toy.” Our goal was to make something fun that promoted the experience of the commons through direct engagement. The WeJay is an online DJ console that enables users to scratch media, change its backgrounds, change it’s soundtrack, just by moving a cursor across it’s face. It invites you to play with media. Delve deeper into its modes and it is a powerful tool that allows for video, audio and background remixing, downloads and uploads, sharing and publishing to and from networks like Flickr and Facebook, and naming through tags of commons: water, sky, language, internet, etc… Most powerful, perhaps, is the social graphing of all derivative works. We can gather the network of authors using WeJay media (the bank of which grows as users use it) and push them toward commons actions and outreach events, most notably our 125+ screenings of different versions of What We Got. I have attached a keynote presentation that demonstrates the WeJay. We are working hard to launch the WeJay on the iPhone, followed by Facebook.

Of course we will still build a website, and there will be other widgets and applications to come. The WeJay is the first, expressive of the commons in form and function and making our project real by putting our commercials for the commons out there.

We have already begun to work with outreach partners. Corporate Accountability International supplied advice and footage about the commons of water for our commercials for the commons. The Long Now Foundation informed our ideas for the commercials for the commons through their Rosetta Project’s effort to preserve the world’s languages, and, thus, traditional and indigenous knowledge. We have attended numerous gatherings and conferences on the commons, forging valuable relationships with people and organizations connected to every commons one can imagine. Indeed, the people behind the site you are on right now convened many commons gatherings that have helped us develop our ideas. The next gathering for me is the International Association for the Study of the Commons in England where there will be plenty of opportunities to network with a global array of commons protectors. Our short list is a long list of nearly 250 organizations with which we hope to partner. This will provide our outreach director and team a guide and set of relationships when they begin their work.

I welcome your thoughts, comments and ideas. Thanks for reading.

I was unfamiliar with Rovics, but after browsing his website, it is clear that he has paid some serious dues as a self-published songwriter, a constantly touring performer and a progressive activist. Thanks to a YouTube video that Kim Klein recently brought to my attention, I discovered Rovics’ stirring song and video, The Commons. It’s a succinct and spirited affirmation of the commons against the corporate enclosures of our time.

Rovics works in a time-honored tradition. Several years ago, when researching my book Silent Theft, I came across a folk poem that railed with wit against market enclosures:

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the commons.
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.

Rovics builds on this sturdy poetic tradition, puts it to music, and adds some animation behind him on a green-screen. Check out the video for the full effect, but here’s a sampling of the lyrics to The Commons:

You build your fences, and say there’s nothing we can do.
Say the world around us belongs purely to the few.
But about six billion people no doubt will agree
This world is our home, not your property.

You claim to own the harvest with your Terminator seed.
You claim to own the genome with every animal that breeds
You claim to own our culture and the music that we play
And with each song that we download to your copper we must pay.

You’d even own my name and say it’s for the best
Maybe you’ll let us on the radio if our songs will pass your test.
You own country, you own western, you say you’ve given us a choice,
You may own the airwaves But you’ll never own my voice.

It’s the commons, our right of birth.
And you who would enclose the land all around the earth
Our future is your downfall when we cut this ball and chain.

The song is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA).

You can check out Rovics’ upcoming gigs and albums at his website

CC license NC, SA by wYnand! from Flickr

“We now have 380 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, compared to 280 before the industrial revolution. Even if we stopped all emissions today, which is a long way from happening, it would still be 345 a century from now,” notes John Wick, echoing the sobering conclusions of a report released last year by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore.

Wick—who owns this ranch in the hills of Marin County north of San Francisco with Peggy Rathmann, author of the classic picture book _Goodnight Gorilla_—goes on to outline the climate crisis in terms all-too-familiar to anyone paying attention to the issue. But he then offers a solution that would astonish most people, especially green activists: “Eat a local grass-fed burger.”

“It will take carbon out of the air and put it back into the soil,” chimes in Abe Collins, the Vermont dairy farmer.

This idea is shocking on two counts:

First, the cattle industry and meat eating are targeted as a leading cause of global warming, up there with autos, jet planes and coal-burning power plants. The animal rights group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for instance, recently launched an ad campaign declaring, “Meat is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.”

Second, efforts to stop global warming have been focused almost entirely on reducing emissions, not in taking existing carbon out of the atmosphere (a process known as known as carbon sequestration).

Carbon sequestration is not a new idea. It figures prominently in the popular carbon off-setting programs in which people pay a firm to plant trees—which absorb atmospheric carbon in their trunks, branches and roots—to compensate for their carbon emissions from air or auto travel. Coal companies and the Bush Adminstration have also floated the idea of massive engineering projects to sequester carbon underground, which have been greeted with intense skepticism by most environmentalists due to the cost and the unproven nature of the technology.

But initiatives to sequester carbon in soil through growing crops and grazing animals are less common, but perhaps more promising than planting trees since croplands and grasslands cover more of the earth’s surface than forests and they grow at a faster rate.

Scientists agree that organic matter in topsoil is on average 50 percent carbon up to one foot in depth, and bumping that upward by as little as 1.6 percent across all the world’s agricultural land, according to John Wick and Abe Collins, would solve the problem of global warming. Soil scientists studying the issue are more measured in their predictions, but still enthusiastic about the potential of soil sequestration of carbon to reduce the threat of global warming.

The central idea of carbon farming is to move the animals frequently—as once happened with wild herds chased by predators—so grasses are not gnawed beyond the point of natural recovery and plant cover remains to fertilize the land and sequester carbon. The sequestration process works like this: The grass takes in carbon from the atmosphere; the animals trample the grass into the soil, where the carbon is absorbed; new grass sprouts and the process is repeated over and over again, absorbing more and more carbon.

This was the natural cycle before the enclosure of the commons. Bison roamed the great American plains, as did other large herds in wild lands throughout the rest of the world. Even in places where livestock farming prevailed, the grazing lands were still held in common and animals wandered freely under the watch of shepherds or small farmers. With the privatization of grazing land, this ecological system was disrupted to the point where today raising livestock is rightly seen as one of the most environmentally destructive industries.

Carbon farming is an attempt to recreate the natural conditions of a commons even under the structure of private property in order to reverse the effects of global climate disruption.

The idea of soil sequestration is still under the radar,” notes Soil Science Professor Chuck Rice of Kansas State University, a member of the IPCC panel who directs a joint project of nine American universities and the U.S. Department of Energy studying the potential for reducing greenhouse gases through agricultural practices. “There is more carbon stored in the soil than in the atmosphere. If we can make a small change in managing that carbon in the soil, it would make a big difference in the atmosphere.”

Rice suggests adopting a wide range of carbon sequestration strategies, ranging from planting more trees to cultivating crops using no-till agriculture (which minimizes plowing) to raising animals on grasslands instead of feedlots—the idea that excites Wick and his fellow ranchers in California. In Canada, a group of power utilities has already signed an agreement with Saskatchewan farmers practicing no-till agriculture to offset the carbon produced by their power plants.

“This isn’t wishful thinking down the road,” Rice asserts. “It’s being done right now and we can do a lot more.”

Professor Whendee Silver, a biogeochemist in the Environmental Policy and Management department at the University of California-Berkeley concurs. “Absolutely I think it’s possible to sequester carbon in the soil. This is a hot topic of research right now,” she says. She just began a study of 36 agricultural fields in California—including John Wick’s and Peggy Rathmann’s ranch—that are being managed in ways that boost the soil’s capacity to absorb carbon.

Wick and Rathmann are running 180 head of cattle on 340 acres using an intricate grazing system designed by Abe Collins to mimic the ecological conditions that occurred when wild bison and elk thundered across the grasslands of North America. They restrict the cattle to a few acres of grassland at a time, moving them as many as four times a day to minimize the effects of overgrazing and to maximize the carbon absorbed by native grasses into the soil—a technique called “carbon farming” or “holistic management”. This is based on a theory devised by African game rancher Allan Savory, who believes soil is healthiest and best able to absorb carbon when grasslands are managed in a way similar to the natural cycles created by huge herds of hoofed animals feeding on and trampling grasses for short periods and then moving elsewhere to avoid predators.

Whendee Silver will do extensive chemical analysis of the soil to test the results of these practices. “Many believe the soil has a large potential to sequester carbon—especially degraded soil, which should be able to recoup lost carbon. This could really be a win-win situation, because these soil practices almost always improve the agricultural capacity of the land. And think about the amount of degraded soil around the world.”

Silver, Chuck Rice (whose research often takes him to South America) and other researchers see hope for fighting global poverty as well as global warming with these new farming techniques because tropical climates and degraded land, frequently found in the world’s poorest nations, have the most potential for sequestering carbon.

Soil Science Professor Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, notes, “The best places are Africa and Asia. But that is where it is hardest to do right now.” In an article published in Science (Jan. 30, 2008) he and associates say, “Aid programs should place far greater emphasis on subsidizing and providing technical and other assistance for soil restoration.”

Lal, a native of India who spent18 years at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria before coming to Ohio State in 1987, advocates an international trading system that would offer lucrative incentives for people in the developing world to undertake no-till farming, sustainable forestry and managed grazing projects that return carbon to soil in significant quantities. “Carbon should be a farm commodity people can buy and sell like any other commodity, then poor farmers would have another income stream,” he says.

Abe Collins has launched a trading program along these lines in the U.S. through Carbon Farmers of America, a group he co-founded after seeing remarkable results with carbon farming at his organic dairy farm in Vermont.

Outlining the new trading program, Collins says, “What we are proposing is to pay farmers for their important services that we as a society need— climate regulation, healthy soils.” The organization sells offsets for carbon sequestered into the soil (known as a carbon sink) at $25 a ton on its website). Nineteen dollars goes to the farmer, five dollars to public education about carbon farming, and one dollar for the organization’s administrative costs.

He estimates that $45 billion in annual payments to farmers sequestering carbon would make the U.S. carbon neutral—not such a high pricetag, Collins muses, when you consider that U.S. taxpayers bailed out the Wall Street trading company Bear Stearns for $30 billion and fork over $31 billion in agriculture subsidies every year to continue current farm policies which degrade the environment and fuel global warming. The $45 billion would also represent an investment in improving soil quality and promoting sustainable agriculture.

Collins originally took the idea of soil carbon trading to the Chicago Climate Exchange—a leader in the idea of organizing financial incentives for businesses practices that reduce greenhouse gases—but they found it too experimental at this point. However soil carbon credits area now being discussed in Australia, according to Collins, which makes sense because carbon farming is more advanced in Australia than anywhere else according to most observers.

A lifelong environmentalist and social justice activist, Collins, 35, grew interested in land restoration while working on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He returned home to Vermont seven years ago to put his ideas into practice, eventually renting a small farm near St. Albans and joining the Organic Valley dairy cooperative.

A major influence for Collins has been the work of Allan Savory, a trained biologist and game rancher in Zimbabwe who noticed decades ago that land roamed by large herds of antelope or other hooved animals was generally healthy while land managed by farmers or government agencies was often in danger of becoming desert. Savory, who now divides his time between Africa and the New Mexico, formulated a new method of grazing he calls Holistic Management (the foundation of carbon farming), which he says is now practiced on about 30 million acres of grassland in Africa, Australia, and North America.

Following Savory’s suggestions, Collins sows native grasses such as timothy, brome, red clover, and ryegrass, which grow as high as two feet tall, on his 135 acres of pasture. He moves his herd of 65 dairy cows to different spots around the pasture five to eight times a day. “The effect is that animals trample the grass onto the land, where it feeds the soil,” Collins says, estimating that he has created at least six inches of prime topsoil capable of sequestering substantial amounts of C02 in just three years of carbon farming.

This flies smack in the face of conventional agricultural thinking, which holds that intensive grazing ruins lands and the only way to restore it is by removing animals for a long period of time. “We have land that has been rested for decades and it is still degraded,” responds Collins, citing his experience working in the American Southwest.

The central idea in carbon farming is moving the animals frequently—as once happened with wild herds chased by predators—so grasses are not gnawed beyond the point of natural recovery and plant cover remains to fertilize the land and sequester carbon. But many farmers, especially those with large operations, are skeptical of this practice because of the extra labor involved. A major research effort led by Cornell University Professor David Pimentel studying Collins’ operation and 19 other farms in New England, Iowa, Nebraska and California to test the claims and explore the potential of carbon farming is set to slated to begin this summer.

In addition to running his farm, Collins has become a leading advocate for agriculture’s role in solving problem of global warming. He’s helping John Wick and Peggy Rathmann map out a grazing management plan for the new cattle herd on their California grassland and he’s advising the Marin Carbon Project, a new initiative to promote carbon farming as way to lower Marin County’s high carbon footprint.

That’s what brought Collins to the meeting last February at the California ranch, where he and Wick heralded the hamburger as a savior of the planet.

“The hamburger makes a good symbol of what can be done with carbon farming,” Collins says. So he reasons that eating grass-fed beef from sustainably-managed herds will contribute in a small way to reversing global warming. Any large hoofed animals like sheep, goats, bison, elk, antelope or horses can be used in carbon farming, and raising meat isn’t essential to the process. Collins after all is a dairy farmer.

But what about the argument that meat-eating is a major cause of global warming due to massive emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from livestock operations? John Wicks answers immediately and forcefully, “That’s absolutely correct about feedlots and absolutely wrong about grass-fed livestock. Sustainably-raised grass-fed beef is a natural system and the methane and other greenhouse gases are mitigated by the carbon sequestration in the soil. We see this as a way to phase out feedlots.” Collins adds that nitrous oxides are in huge part the product of chemical fertilizers, which don’t make any sense in a farming system based on restoring the soil and halting global warming.

On The Commons’ Peter Barnes is looking into the idea of carbon farming. “We saw the Arctic melt last summer and Greenland glaciers slide into the ocean,” he says, “and scientists realize that climate change is happening faster than in their models. We seem to be a tipping point right now, and that’s the context for ideas like carbon farming and planting trees. Sequestration is not a marginal idea but central to any effort keep the planet from tipping into disaster.”

One reason why carbon farming and other sequestration methods have gotten far less attention in the fight against global warming than efforts to reduce emissions is because they represents something new in environmental policy—the idea that solving our ecological crisis means not just stopping human interference with nature, but also on humans taking positive steps to undo the damage already here.

“The days of hands-off environmentalism are over,” declares John Wick. “Humans are part of nature, we are part of ecosystems. We can be part of the solution.

“If the solution to global warming involves large herds of hoofed animals moving through landscape in ways that take carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil, we can do that.”

Wick notes that when he and Rathmann first bought their ranch, they stopped leasing the land to neighboring cattle farmers in the belief that livestock was an unnatural element imposed upon the land by humans, which threatened the healthy ecosystem of these fragile, rolling hills. “We are environmentalists and thought the best thing to do was kick the cows off, and when we did that we watched the coyote bush—a natural plant that takes over when there are no animals to eat it—kill all the other vegetation on our hills.”

In late March, they welcomed cattle back to their ranch and within a week reported enthusiastically that their brown hillsides were already turning green.

More information:

carbonfarmersofamerica

carboncoalition

soilcarboncoalition

managingwholes

amazingcarbon

This is expanded from an article appearing in Ode magazine (June 2007). Ode an international news magazine with offices in both the Netherlands and California.

Self-Defense needs to pick up enough passengers to cram the 14-odd seats, making the trip around the island to the capital Roseau worthwhile. It’s the main way to get around in Dominica if you don’t have your own transport. Vans with names like ‘Roundabout’ and `Too legit to quit’ or `White diamond’ climb up and down plying the island’s endless switchbacks and try to evade the worst of the minefield of potholes. While the scenery is spectacular it doesn’t pay for a driver to lift their eyes from the road.

Today I have to take the drive in to Roseau to do attend to some chores. The scene in the van depends on the driver and the chemistry between the different passengers who put in an appearance on route. Self-Defense is this morning piloted by a large, lugubrious fellow who is preoccupied by the engine overheating. We stop at his house in Calibeshie so he can pour one of a long series of jugs of water over the excitable engine. Then he decides to head out hoping to pick up more passengers on the road.

Roadside vendors on the island of Dominica.

It’s just coming on 6:30 and the sun and the wind are pushing the night clouds back into the peaks of Morne Diablotin that hovers nearly 5,000 feet over sea level. Diabolotin is the largest of Dominica’s dozens of peaks, most of which are covered by lush green volcanic jungle. It makes the shorter trip across island a lot more strenuous than heading for the longer winding coastal road. As we start out Self-Defense’s radio keeps me awake. It’s the talk radio show “Matt in the Morning” and the subject is a hot one – the agreement of the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit to build an oil refinery on the Caribbean coast of the island.

The refinery is the brainchild of the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela who is gradually spreading its influence into the Eastern Caribbean. The refinery is meant to provide oil to the other islands in the region. Matt is virulently opposed, critical of the lack of discussion and dubious of the employment and other benefits. One of my fellow passengers, an older gentlemen dressed for town, pokes me in the back and asks what I think. White passengers are a bit of a rarity in these vans so I represent a good chance to get an off-island opinion. Not being one to hold back I tell him that I think the plan is crazy and Dominica will regret it. I ramble on about how hypocritical it is to market Dominica as the Caribbean’s Nature Island, a paradise of eco-tourism, and then turn around and build an oil refinery. A couple of spills either coming in or out and you have a major cleanup on your hands and a reputation in the tank. My van mate nods and holds his counsel.

Later when another elder gentlemen, an acquaintance of the first man, climbs into the van I learn my inquisitor’s opinion is exactly the opposite of mine. He tells our new arrival that he is totally frustrated with Dominicans and their inability to embrace progress. He points out the beautiful passing landscape and proclaims: `Look at all this useless land! We could put factories up on so much of it.’ Perspective, I guess. While he doesn’t change my view it leads to a certain modesty on my part. All very well to embrace eco this and eco that but if you live in a place like Dominica (the poorest island in the region next to Haiti) giving people more opportunities in life must seem always worth the throw of any dice available.

We pass on down through Portsmouth, Dominica’s second town. The French territory of Guadeloupe looms as a backdrop to Portsmouth Bay and the old British fort at Cabrits. In the foreground are a number of rusty old freighters thrown up against the oceanfront – victims of the second to last hurricane but just too expensive to bother towing away. I think of asking my friend what would happen if they had been oil tankers. But it’s my turn to hold my council. I doze off as we make our way down the Roseau road along the Caribbean coast. But I receive a sharp poke in the back from one of the old man and a reprimand that this is my first trip on this road and I should be paying attention. Self-Defense fills up with schoolgirls and market women heading for town.

Using this form of `transport’ is a good way to get a sense of what Dominicans are like and what matters to them. Sometimes it’s a full of conversation one-on-one but more often it’s the rapid fire repartee, one-liners and wry observation that are thrown up along the way. The driver is often commanded to stop so a message or greeting or package can be passed to someone along the route. You get a taste of the dozens of little deals and arrangements that go into survival on an island where more than a quarter of the population have no official employment. “I went all about the place looking for a steering wheel.”…”We all got to stand up for one and other”….”the ocean is dead these days”… “bananas are all gone, like the song says yes we have no bananas”…` The last a reference to the World Trade Organization ruling that has dramatically cut the export price of Dominica’s precious banana crop. Mostly you come away from a van ride with a sense of the bonhomie and fierce democratic spirit that makes the Caribbean such an attractive part of the world.

Richard Swift, for many years a mainstay of the New Internationalist magazine, now freelances from Canada and the Caribbean.

As we climb out of Roseau one of the Mummies gives out a distinctly girlish squeal as we teeter on a section of cliff road that mostly isn’t there anymore. On one switchback we pass a well-heeled Rasta and his glamorous girlfriend in a fancy convertible and Soeu leans out the window and yells “Be careful Rasta Man”. As we approach a hamlet in the centre of the island a great cry goes up for the driver to stop so we can buy bags of Dashin – a staple of the Dominican diet. The ubiquitous tuber is available here and its a deal for just $5 EC for a big bag, about a third the price of the Roseau market. Soeu greets the attractive young woman who dispenses the bags with a wistful “I’d love to wake up every morning to that beautiful smile.”

As we ride across the island the large woman beside me amiably crushes me each time we hit a new switchback corner. Press On’s radio belts out the latest calypso music. Its carnival time and in Dominica calypso rules the roast. It’s an intensely political music coming from every possible perspective. Trina Simons, last year’s carnival contest star, has a new song “Contradictions” to answer criticisms that her songs are altogether too positive. A sycophantic song presents Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit as a “political magician”. While a third lays out a complete program for a single federated state in the Eastern Caribbean. The 14-year-old daughter of the deceased Dominican singer the Mighty Spider has come up with” In the Footsteps of my Dad”.

We now pass back down to the Windward (Atlantic) coast of Dominica and pass through Marigot and Woodford Hill. Idle men gather at roadside tables to play dominos – the island’s favorite game. The conversation inside Press On turns to food and prices. Dominica is the most food self-sufficient island in the eastern Caribbean and exports fresh produce to other islands. An old Rasta farmer calls for his stop and leaves with the parting shot: “I have lots of provision at home. Once you start to buy food that is when you get selfish.”

As we approach my stop I must leave behind a fascinating conversation about island psychology. A well-dressed middle aged man is sounding off to a woman who has been complaining about the selfish young. “Attitude! You have an attitude. I have an attitude. Everyone on this island has an attitude. I have my bags already packed.” Perhaps he does, I reflect, but so many of the Dominicans who leave the island in search of opportunity end up returning. Something attractive about attitude I guess.

Richard Swift is a former editor with the UK-based New Internationalist magazine who is currently a freelance writer in Toronto. He avoids the Canadian winter in the Windward Islands. Email: rswift@web.ca

As Marty Tenenbaum and John Wilbanks put it, the current system is plagued by “debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration…. Biomedical knowledge is exploding, and yet the system to capture that knowledge and translate it into saving human lives still relies on an antiquated and risky strategy of focusing the vast resources of a few pharmaceutical companies on just a handful of disease targets.”

Tenenbaum and Wilbanks are two of the champions behind an ambitious new project, Health Commons, which aspires to build a new ecosystem for scientific research.

Photo by shareski, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/465487261

Even though huge advances have been made in decoding genes, it takes 17 years to go from gene to cure. Scientists and their institutions send too much time with lawyers, negotiating how to retain control over their work, and too much time doing research that someone else had already figured out was a dead-end. What if researchers could more easily pool their research data, share their tissue specimens, and use computers to search more efficiently through the journals in adjacent fields of research? What is there were a much larger, open platform for collaboration?

Health Commons is a new spinoff of Science Commons, which itself was spawned by Creative Commons in 2005. Health Commons aims to re-imagine and reinvent the ways in which health scientists carry out their work. John Wilbanks, vice president for science at Creative Commons, and Marty Tenenbaum, an Internet commerce pioneer who founded CommerceNet and CollabRx, lay out the case for Health Commons in an excellent paper, “Therapy Development in a Networked World,” You can also watch a six-minute video explaining Health Commons here. The project is a partnership among Science Commons, CommerceNet, CollabRx and Public Library of Science.

A key goal of Health Commons is to establish “a collaborative ecosystem of knowledge and research services that can be rapidly assembled to develop new therapies with unprecedented efficiencies and economies of scale.” Although Tenenbaum and Wilbanks do not allude to Wikipedia, free/open source software and social networking websites, Health Commons clearly has in mind exploiting the same kinds of “value-creation” that occur on open platforms. This would be a stark contrast to, and huge advance over, the stodgy, conventional ways that scientists tend to work.

Getting science to exploit the Web’s potential is more difficult than the “Social Web,” however, because science can’t just look to the “wisdom of crowds” or “smart mobs.” It has developed some elaborate systems of hierarchical, highly specialized knowledge, and so the Web platforms must take account of these realities, discipline by discipline. Here is how Tenenbaum and Wilbanks envision the operation of Health Commons:

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

So, for example, participants in Health Commons would agree to standardized legal contracts and pre-negotiated licenses that will make it easier to access and share data, knowledge and physical materials. They would adapt their research to a “uniform platform architecture” so that scientists could readily share their private information and resources – “initially to one’s lab, then to collaborators, and ultimately to the greater research community.” Scientists would agree to use common digital information standards so that different databases, for example, could share datasets.

Over time, Tenenbaum and Wilbanks hope to change the very business models for developing new therapies. Instead of everyone working on their own, on in short-term, ad hoc partnerships, collaboration would be the rule until it became clear that there was something of potential value to commercialize. At that point, participants could negotiate their proprietary interests.

No one in the fashion industry owns the color pink or the pleated trouser – and yet everyone can still assert a proprietary interest (through trademarks of their brand name and logo) and make money. So, in science, it would be far more sense to exploit the radical efficiencies and economies of scale of “an ecosystem of shared knowledge,” and then develop new sorts of business models “on top” of that ecosystem. The music industry is itself undergoing an analogous transition right now, as it discovers that “owning the music” is a losing proposition for the industry . It can thwart the development of a more robust creative ecosystem and hardier business models.

The vision that Tenenbaum and Wilbanks sketch is particularly exciting in how it might transform research funding. “Some 2,500 foundations invest hundreds of billions annually seeking cures to hundreds of diseases,” they write, “yet there is little coordination, resource sharing or cross-learning among initiatives and no effective processes for moving research into the clinic.” Similarly, the current system makes it too costly and complex to do research on more than 5,000 rare, orphan and neglected tropical diseases. The new Health Commons could help ameliorate both of these structural flaws in health research.

If there is one problem that I have with the Health Commons, it is its unexamined assumption of health as an object of technological solutions – pills, treatments, expert-driven interventions. We surely need these approaches; they can do a world of good. But it would be a shame if the Health Commons’ vision of health as something that is delivered through scientists and drug companies were to eclipse the social dimensions of health and well-being. Besides better, faster, cheaper research, we also need a health commons that reintegrates human beings into communities of meaning and support. It hardly needs adding that we could also use a “health insurance commons” that can socialize the risks of disease and injury, much as Social Security socializes the risks of old age and disability. I’d be happier if the new project were called the “Health Research Commons.”

This is a quibble. The Health Commons is attempting something extraordinarily significant and transformative. It will be fascinating to watch the evolution of this ambitious project in the coming months and years.

In 1988 the physicist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies first sounded the warning that global climate change was coming—soon. Speaking before Congress, he testified that global climate change was not a potential problem for the distant future. It was happening all around us.

He spoke to Congress again this week, 20 years to the day of his famous testimony, and took the opportunity to discuss what can be done to curtail climate change.

Conservatives, who have long vilified Hansen, were outraged that a scientist would dare offer policy proposals to lessen the environmental, social and economic devastation of an international disaster. Presumably they also believe that doctors should be limited to making a diagnosis, leaving the prescribing of medicine to politicians, oil industry lobbyists and the Heritage Foundation.

Hansen endorsed a phase-out of all coal use, except where carbon emissions are sequestered below ground. He forcefully rejected efforts to find more oil through off-shore drilling and tar shale projects.

And he advocated a commons approach in moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy, modeled closely on the Cap-and-Dividend proposal promoted by On the Commons Senior Fellow Peter Barnes.

“Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction,” he said, citing Barnes’s book Who Owns the Sky? in his footnotes… “The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children.”

“Carbon tax with 100 percent divident is non-regressive,” he continued. “On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses.

“Demand for low-carbon high-efficiency products will spur innovation, making our
products more competitive on international markets. Carbon emissions will plummet as energy efficiency and renewable energies grow rapidly. Black soot, mercury and other fossil fuel emissions will decline. A brighter, cleaner future, with energy independence, is possible.”

Put simply, the water commons means that water is no one’s property; it rightfully belongs to all of humanity and to the earth itself. It is our duty to protect the quality and availability of water for everyone around the planet. This ethic should be the foundation of all decisions made about use of this life-giving resource. Water is not a commodity to be sold or squandered or hoarded.

There are perhaps thousands of campaigns taking place around the planet that draw on shared principles and advance the water commons, although likely not using that language. The water commons (not always in common parlance) can be a powerful, unifying principle drawing together our diverse but inter-related efforts.

Photo by Dennis Collette, via Flicker, licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/deniscollette/2496074214

This is the firm conclusion made by a diverse group of leaders from many fields and nations who gathered in late spring at Blue Mountain Center, amid the lake-dotted Adirondack Mountains of New York State, for a conversation exploring the theme of “Water For All.” Brought together by On the Commons, the Blue Planet Project, and Grassroots International, the group included a public health researcher, an economist, a filmmaker, lawyers, community organizers, authors, professors, NGO directors, and foundation officers from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Germany and India.

Maude Barlow, prominent Canadian social activist and author of the international bestseller Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, offered a wide-ranging overview of what’s at stake from a paper she had specially prepared for the conference.

• It’s a well-known fact that one-third of all Africans have no regular access to clean drinking water. But what’s not known is that this number is poised to rise to one-half due to increasing pollution and water privatization.

• In the United States, Pentagon officials are already being advised by defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin about securing new sources of water outside American borders—an eerie parallel to the oil politics that has driven U.S. foreign policy for decades.

• The stranglehold that multinational corporations hold on global water supplies has intensified since she published Blue Gold six years ago. General Electric is now the largest water company in the world, and many others view the sale of water as a key growth industry for the 21st Century. Bechtel Corporation went so far as to try to charge people in Bolivia for the rainwater that fell upon their roofs.

• The hydrological cycle—the natural process of precipitation and evaporation that governs ecosystems—is being permanently affected as we alter landscapes by damming, draining, paving, deforestation and other large-scale disruptions. This results in severe unintended consequences such as droughts, flood and desertification.

• The global warming crisis is tightly intertwined with water issues but rarely discussed by government panels and NGOs seeking climate change solutions.

“Every human activity now needs to be measured by its impact on water and the water commons,” Maude Barlow declared. “It is a flagrant violation of human rights when only the rich have access to clean water,” she added.

_Particpants at the Water for All meeting at Blue Mountain Center. Back row: Alberto Villarreal, David Bollier, Julie Ristau, Jay Walljasper, Harriet Barlow, Octavio Rosas Landa, David Mears, V. Suresh, Alan Snitow. Middle row: Maude Barlow, Adelaide Gomer, Juliette Majot, Johanna Miller, Cindy Parker, Paula Garcia, Wenonah Hauter, Rajendra Singh. Front row: Anil Naidoo, Chuck Collins, Daniel Moss, Ingrid Spiller, James Harkness._

In her wide travels studying and speaking out on these issues, Barlow sees signs of an emerging water commons consciousness. The efforts at this point are largely local, but when added all together she sees potential for a global movement to press claims to water as fundamental right for all.

• Uruguay amended its constitution to recognize the right to water free of charge as a basic principle. Colombia is considering a similar measure.

• A backlash against private operation of public water supplies is growing; it started in South America and has now spread to Africa and even the United States. The World Bank and UN have both been forced to back off from their touting of privatized water as the only way to ensure safe drinking water.

• Norway has refused to fund any further World Bank project that promotes water privatization.

Rajendra Singh, founder of Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, or Young India Association), told a personal and at times very amusing story of his work in Rajasthan, India. Trained as a doctor in traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine, he had always wanted to be a farmer and soon after university he moved to the Alwyn district to test some ideas he’d long had in his head. The Arvari River had dried up during the 1940s when the surrounding hills had been stripped of trees. It flowed only during the monsoon season. This meant that over the decades people had left the villages to seek a livelihood elsewhere, and when Singh arrived in the early 1980s the area was populated by only the oldest and poorest residents.

Drawing on indigenous Indian knowledge of geology, hydrology and ecology, he began building tiny dams and johads (reservoirs) on streams flowing to the river in the hopes of reviving the natural water flow. The local elders chuckled as they watched him do backbreaking work with very little results for two years. They then decided he was sincere in trying to help them so offered tips on the right spots to place dams and johads. It worked. Within four years the water captured in the johads during monsoon season was rejuvenating natural vegetation and refilling the aquifers.

The Arvari River now runs all year and people who abandoned the district are now moving back. Villagers are creating their own “river parliaments” to sustain this precious water commons; each is governed by two leaders—one who is responsible to the community, and one who is responsible solely to the water and nature.

“Water is a very emotional, spiritual thing,” Singh explained, noting that the once-lost river is now as sacred to local people—many ask before they die that their ashes be sprinkled into the Arvari rather than the Ganges.

Johanna Miller, outreach director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, recounted how environmentalists and water activists passed state legislation limiting the amount of groundwater that can be pumped for commercial uses. This was a noteworthy political victory in an era when “property rights” and “takings” still ring across the U.S. as a fierce rallying cry. But Miller noted that the simple question, “Who owns the water?” sent an even more powerful message to many citizens, who showed their support for the bill.

Paula Garcia, executive director of the New Mexico Acequia Association, explained how this centuries-old example of cooperative water management works. Found throughout Latin America, acequias are communal irrigation systems shared by dozens or even hundreds of families living along the same stream. In New Mexico, they have been functioning for 400 years and survived many attempts at privatization. Garcia credits the ethic of querencia, expressed by many Hispanics and indigenous people in New Mexico, as key to the preservation of the acequia commons. Querencia means a deep love for the place where you feel most at home and safe. It’s related to quere, the Spanish word for “to want, to desire.”

Octavio Rosas Landa, an economics professor and activist from Mexico City, outlined how many Mexican peasants are losing longstanding water rights as the government aggressively pursues a strategy of clearing peasants from the land in the name of economic progress. Twenty-two million of the country’s 25 million campesinos are targeted, according to Rosas Landa. Control over who gets to use the water is one of the most effective tools wielded by the government and corporations to make this happen.

Cindy Parker, co-director of the Program on Global Sustainability and Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, noted how issues relating to the water commons, and environmental protection in general, get increased attention when discussed as health issues. “It’s still easy for a policymaker to distance themselves from a purely environmental issue. But it is much harder for them to ignore a public health issues.” Health itself is a commons, she said, because everyone has a right to health.

V. Suresh—director of the Rights Research Centre of the Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies in Chennai, India—surveyed a world where even industrialized nations must respond to water shortages. Australia now places restrictions on washing cars with drinking water and last year London’s mayor banned lawn sprinklers.

The World Bank and other agents of water privatization claim that their policies promote conservation of the water supply, ease the burden of women (who in traditional cultures often carry water long distances), and expand access to clean water. Yet in reality, the results of water privatization is that poor people are cut off from access to safe water.

Suresh declared there is absolutely no evidence to support claims that water privatization boosts conservation. Cooperative water sharing systems, on the other hand, like those used for generations in Latin America, have a proven track record in preserving scarce water resources. He added that the recent emphasis on technological and free market solutions actually diminishes people’s own creativity in addressing these problems. “Fifty years of development have wiped out local knowledge and skills about conserving and cooperating around water.”

V. Suresh has effectively organized water utility workers – those often written off as spiritless bureaucrats – in radically reforming Chennai’s water utility.

Harriet Barlow, director of Blue Mountain Center—who convened the Water for All meeting with Anil Naidoo of the Blue Planet Project, Daniel Moss of Grassroots Inernational and Julie Ristau of On the Commons—stressed that the point of the gathering was not to launch one more activist organization, but rather to explore something that might look more like a network of networks. “We’re already part of many networks and campaigns. We’ve come here in a state of inquiry. How do we make a water commons revolution?” The stimulating conversation at Blue Mountain Center marks the first step toward that goal.

Canadian activist Maude Barlow and U.S. filmmaker Alan Snitow, both authors of prominent books on the water commons, enjoy a canoe ride on Eagle Lake at Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York.

A sampling of ideas about the commons and about water from the Blue Mountain Center meeting

• Every religion says water is the origin of life. Rajendra Singh—Founder Tarun Bharat Sangh (Rajasthan, India)

• You can’t simply look at one sector of the commons in isolation. All are interlocking and must be looked at holistically. The water commons relates to the public service commons, the tax commons, the public health commons, the environment commons. Harriet Barlow—Senior Fellow, On the Commons

• The commons is a framework for reconstruction. Until now we have spent more time on resistance than on reconstruction. Alberto Villarreal—Co-founder, REDES (Social Ecology Network, Uruguay)

• Why is it so difficult to describe to the world something we know intuitively in our hearts? Commons poets and artists can help us do this. Juliette Majot—Consultant and former Executive Director of International Rivers

• The World Bank and other international agencies know how to spend $1 billion in one place, building a dam, but they do not know how to spend $1000 in a million places that will make a positive difference by using local resources and knowledge. Maude Barlow—Chairperson, Council of Canadians

• In thinking about how legal frameworks can be used to protect the commons, its worthwhile to consider the extent to which the law grew out of local commons and customs. David Mears—Director, Environmental and Nautral Resources Law Clinic at the Vermont Law School

• The idea of pricing water did not originate with the environmental movement. It came out of right-wing think tanks in the 1970s. Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food and Water Watch

• Challenging the ownership of water was off the table as a credible mainstream issue for many years, but the framework of the commons is an opportunity to raise it again. Alan Snitow —Director of the film Thirst and author of the accompanying book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water.

• There is a sense of abundance when we let water follow its natural course. Jim Harkness—President, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy”:www.iatp.org

• Two themes that are very helpful in focusing people’s attention on water: Water is a human right. And who owns the water? Johanna Miller—Outreach Director, Vermont National Resources Council

• Pete Seeger may well have saved the Hudson River by floating a boat up and down it singing songs. Harriet Barlow—Senior Fellow, On the Common

• The commons is a worldview, not an ideology. It allows us to say some things are not for sale. David Bollier—Fellow, On the Commons

• Water is a leading edge to understanding the commons. Neither climate nor local food activists have stressed how closely water is linked to these issues. I look forward to opening discussions with those groups. Chuck Collins—Fellow, On the Commons

• We are not going to get climate change right unless we look at the role of of water. Maude Barlow—Chairperson, Council of Canadians

• A spirit of reciprocity is essential in working with existing groups, including those in the developing world, on water commons issues. Daniel Moss—Director of Development and Communications, Grassroots International

• Anil Naidoo noted the word commons does not directly translate into Spanish even though there is likely a greater sense of it in Latin American countries than the developed world.

• Paula Garcia offered a lyrical Spanish phrase _una vida buena y sana_—“a good and wholesome life“—that might loosely translate as commons.

• Ingrid Spiller of the German Heinrich Boll Foundation’s Latin American Office noted there is a good equivalent that describes the commons in German, which means nearly the same thing as in English.

• David Bollier noted that each culture will come up with its own ideas and vernacular language for the commons.

• The commons is a way of life that respects life. V. Suresh—Human Rights Lawyer and Director of the Rights Research Centre (Chennai, India)

Now a countervailing storyline is starting to get some traction in real life: the increasing citizen use of technology to “watch from below.” The practice has been called “sousveillance,” a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word “viller” (to watch). Instead of Big Brother using a panopticon of surveillance to exercise total, unquestioned control, the commoners are using cheap, portable technologies to monitor and publicize the behavior of Power. The commons is sprouting its own eyes – and its own means of self-defense, political organizing and reclamation of democracy.

Photo by —-Sandy—-, via Flickr, licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/fastestsuitintown/2192584891

The concept of sousveillance has been around since at least 1998, when Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, coined the term. The term has gained greater currency over the past ten years as the cell-phone camera, digital tape recorder, handheld video camera and many other mobile devices have become ubiquitous. The spread of cheap communications technologies is changing the power equation between the surveillers and ordinary citizens.

Sousveillance is commonly directed against police as a way to document their (anticipated) abuses. The classic example is the amateur video footage of LA policemen brutalizing Rodney King in 1991. Now that lightweight cameras are everywhere and footage can easily be posted on YouTube and other websites, sousveillance videos have documented police abuse in Malaysia, gay-bashing in Latvia and union-busting in Zimbabwe, as one account describes.

A British website concerned with surveillance has taken note of “FitWatch” – “the tactic of filming the Met Police Forward Intelligence Teams and sharing photos, badge numbers and names.” In the United States and Canada, there is a network of volunteer organizations called Copwatch that monitor the police and host a user-generated database of police misbehavior.

Sousveillance is not just about watching the police. The Web site HollaBackNYC.com invites women to post photos of any man who tries to harass them. In Sierra Leone and Ghana, people used mobile phones to monitor for irregularities and intimidation during elections in 2007.

Politicians are increasingly monitored by citizen-videos, a practice that allows citizens to bypass the mainstream press and present their own unvarnished accounts of campaign activities. The most famous example may be the videotape of George Allen, the GOP candidate for Senate in 2004, who had the bad judgment to utter an ethnic slur, maccaca. The sousveillance video arguably tipped the election in favor of Allen’s opponent, James Webb. The British newspaper, The Guardian, once enlisted its readers to help take photos of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair at a time when the Labour Party was trying to insulate him from press coverage.

The fascinating thing about sousveillance is how people with power – whether policemen, politicians or corporate officials – get supremely agitated at the idea that anyone would try to photograph, tape or videotape them. They find sousveillance quite threatening. For good reason: their behaviors can now be held to public account. The very possibility that official behaviors might be documented and publicized is unsettling to those who have previously enjoyed an unchallenged right of top-down surveillance against us.

A British website, Ideal Government,, recognizes the need for police to protect ordinary citizens from crime and anti-social behavior, but goes on to say:

Wouldn’t it be better if….the police accepted or were taught that transparency is mutual; that they should be prepared to accept it if they are conducting themselves correctly; that the police vs. demonstrators encounter was less us v them against a Kafkaesque legal background that no-one understands and more a case of both police and demonstrators conforming to laws that all understand and generally respect.

The equalization of power relationships is not the only good thing to flow from sousveillance. It also opens up the possibility of a more community-based management and sanctioning of free-riders, which are familiar aspects of the classic commons paradigm. (See an excellent paper on sousveillancehttp)/sousveillance.pdf by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, all professors at the University of Toronto.)

An excellent Wikipedia entry notes that an equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance may have positive effects. “Equiveillance theory” argues that sousveillance may reduce or eliminate the need for surveillance:

In this sense it is possible to replace the Panoptic God’s eye view of surveillance with a more community-building ubiquitous personal experience capture. Crimes, for example, might then be solved by way of collaboration among the citizenry rather than through the watching over the citizenry from above. But it is not so black-and-white as this dichotomy. Rather, there is a simple shift in the equiveillant point, as, for example, more camera phones enter widespread use, we might be able, as a society, to be more self-reliant, on our own communities to keep an electronic neighborhood watch. This variation of sousveillance (“personal sousveillance”) has been referred to as “coveillance” by Mann, Nolan and Wellman.

I must admit my discomfort at the possibility that all public acts might be subject to recording, whether from the top or down, not to mention private acts. This is not necessarily an advance for humanity. Raw evidence is not necessarily reliable evidence, and one cannot discount the risk of hoaxes.

But as a way to hold Power accountable at a time when Power has aggressively fortified itself against accountability through new concentrations of wealth, legal manipulations, advanced technologies and political alliances, sousveillance does serve as a provisional, imperfect antidote.

It is customary for innovations that emerge from the commons to be regarded as aberrant epiphenomena before they are finally named and publicly recognized by mainstream authorities (the surveillers), at which point the practices are in fact even more pervasive than suspected. For me, this about sums up the status of sousveillance. It is more widespread than we may imagine. Although I harbor some misgivings, it is liberating to realize that the simple act of transparency – a tactic pioneered by the Freedom of Information Act and open-meetings laws of the 1970s — can be so transformative. Except that now, we don’t need no stinkin’ lawyers or press agents. Sousveillance is decentralized, self-enacting and remarkably powerful.

The bad news is that proprietary drug makers are using all sorts of subterfuges to extend the life of their patents in order to prevent their high-cost drugs from entering the generic marketplace. It is a rank ripoff of consumers that reneges on the patent-monopoly deal that the public makes with drug makers in the first place: the patent term is limited, after which it belongs to any safety-certified competitor.

Photo by rodrigo senna, via Flickr, licensed under a CC BY license. http://flickr.com/photos/negativz/74267002/

There are many ways that big drug companies use to thwart generic competition. They make some modest alterations to an existing drug in order to obtain a new patent. They try to require that generic manufacturers submit generic drugs to new rounds of clinical testing, ostensibly because of the safety risks to consumers. (Funny thing, Big Pharma isn’t in favor of stricter testing for first-time approval of new drugs.) Proprietary drug makers also make sure that the brand-name drug has an easy-to-remember name, while the generic is invariably a tongue-twister that only a linguist can pronounce.

Generic drug makers, for their part, are no longer as scrappy and competitive. The industry is consolidating, which means that competition in the generic marketplace is decreasing. Generic companies are also mimicking their proprietary adversaries in lobbying for legal privileges that are hugely profitable. For example, the first maker of a drug that has “gone off patent” has a six-month right to be the exclusive generic marketer. During this time, the price remains close to the brand-name price, so that the consumer savings are minimal but the profits are huge. Generic price savings generally don’t kick in until that six-month period of exclusivity expires.

The latest example of the enclosure of the generic commons involves Lipitor, a cholesterol drug made by Pfizer. It made quite the splash in the news a few days ago. Pfizer announced that it had struck a deal with the Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. to delay the sale of a generic version of Lipitor by 20 months. Since Pfizer is making about $13 billion a year from Lipitor, this privately negotiated delay is a boon for the company – and a unmitigated ripoff of consumers.

It’s against the law for a proprietary drug company to make payoffs to stifle generic competition, of course, but that’s what lawyers are for: to meet the strict letter of the law while avoiding its intent. The prohibited practice is called “reverse payoffs.” A Pfizer antitrust lawyer primly called the deal with Ranbaxy “simply a compromise on the time of the patent.”

The Federal Trade Commission has said it will “take a very close look at this deal,” but nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we already know the likely result. In this second Gilded Age, don’t expect our government, and especially this administration, to protect consumers from corporate predators. The fix is in.

The whole generic drug marketplace illustrates how government-managed commons are vulnerable to the stealth corruption of corporate influence. There’s the political contributions and lobbying of Congress. There’s the arcane language of the law that only insiders can decipher, let alone take action against. There’s the murky regulatory review process by antitrust officials, who are themselves creatures of politics. And there are the generic manufacturers, who are adept at gaming the system to maximize their returns, as well.

At the retail level, this is what proprietary meddling with the generic drug market means: Lipitor now costs from $2.50 to $3 a day, while the generic equivalent could cost one-tenth of that sum. Another anti-cholesterol drug, simvastaitin – a generic version of Zocor – went off patent in 2006. It now costs 75 cents to $1 a day. At some discount pharmacies, it sells for as little as 10 cents a day.

Now that Pfizer has struck a deal with the leading would-be generic maker of Lipitor, other generic makers will likely fall into line and wait their turn to compete. That should come six months after Ranbaxy starts selling a generic version of Lipitor in November 2011 — 26 months after the drug will have gone off-patent.

In the meantime, just pray that you don’t have high cholesterol and need to take the Pfizer drug. You’ll be coerced into paying a kind of privately imposed tax to Pfizer, a small portion of which Pfizer will then use to buy a round of gauzy, feelgood advertisements extolling its deep concern for human health and well-being. It’s time for our legislators to bolster the generic drug commons so it can deliver the benefits it was intended to provide.