We can only promote the commons as a new narrative for the 21st century if they are identified as a common denominator by different social movements and schools of thought. In my point of view, enforcing the commons is not only possible, but strategically intelligent. Here are fifteen reasons why:

1. The commons are everywhere. They determine our quality of life in great many ways. They are present (even though often invisible) in the social, natural, cultural and digital sphere. Think about the things we use to learn (read and write), the things we use to move (land, air and sea), the things we use to communicate (language, music and code), the things we use to feed and heal (land, water, medicine) or the things our reproduction depends on (genes, social life).

The commons are about how we share and use all these things. They are a vivid way of reproduction of our social relations— at any time. Therefore, they are better described with a verb (“commoning”) instead of a noun (commons). The commons are a special kind of practice of use and production of knowledge and material goods, where use value is privileged over exchange value.

Commoning is a practice which allows us to take our lives in our own hands, and to protect and widen what is common to us instead of witnessing its enclosure and privatization. Commoners’ rights are independent from formal convention and positive law. We just have them without having to ask anybody for permission, and we share them with others. The commons offer a different kind of freedom than the market. So the good news is — when we focus on the commons, we focus on how to shift things from the market sphere to the commons sphere, we focus on how to shift authority and responsibility from state bureaucracies to the many possibilities for users to “govern the commons,” and we focus on many issues and resources — as 75% percent of the world’s biomass — which are not yet commodified. This is encouraging.

2. The commons bridge sectors and communities, and offers a frame for the convergence and consolidation of movements. The issues we have to deal with have gotten overly complex. In order to reduce complexity, we have fragmented what belongs together. In the public political debate, there is a division into different realms of knowledge and authority. There are those who discuss issues related to natural resources (“the ecos”) and those who discuss cultural and digital issues (“the technos”).

The result is (overly) specialized communities for each of the hundreds of problems we are confronted with and many missing links. For the very diversity of the commons, this fragmentation will continue to a certain extent, but it also contributes to a loss of our common ability to keep track of the ongoing economic, political and technological processes and changes. This diminishes our capacity to react to theses changes and to carefully forward coherent alternative proposals. The commons can unify disparate social change movements, even those that have profoundly different dynamics, because they permit us to focus on what all common pool resources and all commoners have in common and not what separates them. Water is finite, knowledge is not. Atmosphere is global, a park is not. Ideas grow, when we share them, land does not. But all are common pool resources! Therefore none of them can be exclusive property of only one person. All are linked to a community. All are governed best if the rules and norms are self-determined or considered highly legitimate by the people how have to rely on those resources.

3. The commons recasts the ownership debate beyond the (sometimes fruitless) framing of public versus private. The claim for public ownership remains important, but have nation states really served as conscientious trustees of the commons? No. Do they protect traditional knowledge, forests, water and biodiversity? Not everywhere. There is much more than “public” and “private.”

A common pool resource can be possessed for short-term use (to reproduce our livelihoods), but we cannot do with it what we want. It is important to remember that the concept of possession for use is very different to the dominating conventional property. Possession doesn’t allow for alienation. Property does. And property allows for abuse and commodification, maximum monetization and the “externalization of costs” onto the commons — an ongoing process at the end of which all of us are worse off — even the richer among us who flee to gated communities.

4. The commons perspective is not a digital way of thinking. Its mode is not binary, 0 — 1, either — or. Nor does it focus on bottom lines like a single number of “success.” Our search is for solutions beyond opposite poles and beyond numerical metrics of “success.” It’s not simply private versus public, neither right versus left, cooperation versus competition, “invisible hand” of the market versus the plan of the State, pro-technology versus anti-technology.

From a commons perspective the focus is on the forgotten third element. It deepens our understanding about the commonly owned and the universal principles which work for people and protect their common pool resources. In the commons sector we privilege learning, and it is more about cooperation than about competition. The commons enhances self-determined rules and commonly developed and controlled open technologies instead of proprietary technologies which tend to concentrate power within elites and enable them to control us.

5. Talking about the commons means focusing on diversity. In the words of former Governor Olivio Dutra (Rio Grande do Sul) during the “World Social Forum: 10 Years Later” conference: “[The commons] enables unity within plurality and diversity.” The default but not defensive position is: “One world in which many worlds fit.” Doubtlessly, one of the strengths of this approach lies in the idea that there are no simplistic solutions, no institutional patterns, no “one size fits all” panacea, only universal principles such as reciprocity, cooperation, transparency, respect for diversity and others. Each community has to determine appropriate rules for how to access, use and control a common pool resource system based on such principles. This is complex — as the relationship between nature and society is — especially when we talk about global commons. There, the “community” is the whole of mankind, which refers us to the very necessity of a new multilateralism based on a commons approach.

6. Focusing the commons brings three “big C’s” into a new balance: Cooperation, Command and Competition. There is no cooperation without competition and vice-versa, but in a commons based society the recognition is gained by those who perform best in cooperation and not in competition. The slogan is: Out-cooperate instead of out-compete. The specific rules for cooperation in a commons system vary from setting to setting. Nobody can command them from above. From commons research and practice we learn, that all over the world many commons governance systems are self-regulating, that means: they are creating their own monitoring systems. Or they are self-regulating and coordinate at different institutional levels.

As far as “command” is concerned: Nobel Price laureate Elinor Ostrom advises: “It is better to induce cooperation with institutional arrangements fitted to local ecosystems than to try to command from afar.” At the same time “the systems from above” — governments, law, international bodies — can be critically important in empowering and facilitating the commons. But for doing this, they need a commons perspective inscribed into their logics and polity architecture as well.

7. The commons does not separate the ecological from the social dimension as a Green New Deal focus does. To a certain extend, it may be helpful to make the “economic value” of natural resources visible and it is certainly necessary to internalizes ecological costs of production into the whole production process. But it is not enough. Such a focus does not address the social dimension of the problem, it tends to deepen the market biased structures, linking the solutions with access to money. So who has, can afford the cost-internalization. Who has not, is worse off. Instead: the ecological and the social dimension find a common explanation in the commons. There is no such thing as a solution based on a commons perspective where those who haven’t are worse off.

8. The commons concept integrates different world views: There are attractors for socialist thinking (e. g. the common possession), for anarchists (the self-organisational driven approach), for conservative thinking (which values the protection of the creation), obviously for communitarian and cosmopolitan ideas (integral, diversity driven approach) and even for liberals (distance to state accountability, respect for individual interests and motivations in joining a community or a project). But it is quite clear that the commons cannot be a single political party program. That is its strength, and that is why mainstream political players so often misunderstand the commons or even try to co-opt the commons. If we care for a coherent commons discourse (see #9), they won’t succeed.

9. The benchmark for the integration of different political ideas within a commons paradigm is clear and threefold: (a) sustainable and respectful use of resources (social, natural, and cultural including digital), that means: no overuse and no under-use of common pool resources. (b) Equitable sharing of common pool resources as well as participation in all decision making processes about access, use and control of those resources and© the free development of creativity and individuality of people without sacrificing the collective interest.

10. The commons don’t have one, but many centers. Their governance structures are decentralized and varied as well. In other words: it is characteristic to the commons to be polycentric, which stands for a deeply democratizing approach both politically (principles of decentralization, subsidiarity and sovereignty of commoners and commoners rule making) and economically (the “commons mode of production” point makes us less dependent on money and market).

11. The commons strengthens an important core belief about human beings and behavior. We are not only, not even mainly the “homo oeconomicus” they made us believe we are. We are much more than selfish creatures looking for our own interest. We need and enjoy being embedded into a social web. “The commons are the web of life,” says Vandana Shiva. We enjoy to contribute, care and share. The commons strengthens the confidence in the creative potential of people and in the idea of inter-relationality, which means: “I need the others and the others need me.” They honor our freedom to contribute and share. This is a different kind of freedom than the market is based on. The more we contribute, more things we have access to. But note: it is not simply “access to everything for free.”

12. The commons offers analyzing tools that arise from categories different to those of capitalism, therefore the concept helps to “decolonize our thinking.” (Grzybowski) Commoners redefine “efficiency.” They ask how to “efficiently” cooperate and how to encourage and enable people to do so. They claim for (short term) usage rights to reproduce their livelihoods instead of limitless property. They honor traditional ways to protect the commons as well as traditional knowledge systems.

In short: the commons shed new light on many old political and legal regulatory processes. It makes a big difference whether I see the environment as a commons or as a commodity to trade with. It makes a difference whether water is understood as a commons, that means closely linked to the communities needs, or not. Or take seeds; conceive seed-diversity as a commons, means: harvesting self-determination and food-security. If society would recognize regional diversity of seeds as a commons, the State would put all available resources into independent, organic seed breeding and in protecting small farmers to continue their traditional way of seed-development instead of wasting taxpayers money for genetic manipulation and seed engineering.

13. In the commons sector, there is a great diversity and quantity of actors. Over the past several years, international interest in the commons paradigm has quickened. Several organizations and commoners now have significant transnational constituencies (Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Free Software and Free Culture Movement, sharing platforms, the anti-mining organizations, the alliances working for a Bem-Viver approach, the worldwide movements for sustainable agriculture, the Water Commons, community gardening, citizen communication and information projects and many others). Actually, it is a spontaneous, explosive growth of diverse commons initiatives. Since Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Price in Economics (October 2009) many universities have rediscovered the academic interest in the commons.

14. The commons is an alternative mode of production. The problems we are confronted with are not problems of resource-availability. They are problems that arise from the current mode of production. Fortunately, in some areas, we are witnessing a shift from the capitalist mode of production (based on property, command, value exchange via money, resources and labor exploitation, dependent on growth and striving for profit) into a commons mode of production (based on possession, contribution, sharing, self interest and initiative, where the GDP is a negligible indicator and the aim is a “good life” (bem viver).

Many “Commons-based Peer Production” projects are developing successfully. This is especially true for the production of knowledge (Wikipedia, Free Software, Open Design). But there is a thrilling discussion going on about how principles of commons based peer production can be transferred to the production of what we eat, wear and move with, at least to a certain extent. I believe that this is possible. Firstly because knowledge makes up the lion’s share of each kind of production. All goods are latent knowledge products. There is no car production or egg production without a concept and a design behind (which make the lion’s share of its “market value”).

Secondly because there are many kinds of commons sectors (care economy, solidarity economy) which have not been commodified yet and where commons values and rules are deeply rooted. Those sectors are evidence that every day many of the things we need to live are produced outside the market.

15. The commons discourse is a discourse about cultural change. It is not a mere technological or institutional approach. Instead, it offers a new frame for political and personal thinking and acting.

Why now? Because the moment is ripe for the commons.

1. Given the historical moment of change, the commons are currently being rediscovered in many contexts. Market and state (alone) have failed both in the protection of common pool resources and in satisfying peoples needs. Actually, free market fundamentalism that now prevails is under siege. Its system of economic analysis, public policies and worldview is losing its explanatory value, not to mention public support. More and more people realize that it is not for the market that we enjoy biodiversity, cultural diversity and social networks!

2. New technologies enable new forms of cooperation and the decentralized production of what up to now have been monopolized core technologies of the industrial age. Today, we can relocate even energy or electricity production into the social commons (citizen solar power stations, home-power stations). We can decide which are useful news and information for the community and reproduce them ourselves with “the biggest copy machine” that ever existed: the internet. The ongoing major revolution in production allows for a change of rules. This is a major threat for monopolies.

3. The ongoing processes put the individual in a position to engage in a wider context. A modern commons perspective is not headed “back to the past.” The perspective is not one of mere re-localization, but the horizon is: local, decentralized and horizontal cooperation in distributed networks, so that people can self-enable to create things together, available for them and others — if they want. The aim is to widen the commons sector and commons based production as far as possible and lesser depend on the market.

This is only possible, if the new mode of production is able to solve even complex problems, if it is able to “peer-produces” artifacts even large companies would have difficulties to prepare for logistically, financially and conceptually. And it is! Just think about Wikipedia or an open source car. Maybe we would have developed VIPs (vehicles for individual transportation) based 100% on recyclable materials, which consume only a liter/100km if corporations would not have enclosed technologies and controlled the market. In a world where a commons-mode-of-production is general, there is no more centrer and periphery.

4. There are new legal forms to protect collective use rights and free and/or equitable access to the commons: the General Public License (GPL), ShareAlike licenses, ownership models for natural resources with an built-in mechanism to protect for speculation and avoid over-exploitation, stakeholder trusts on single common pool resources, the acequia water management systems in Mexico or the Johads water management systems in India or the Allemansratten (rights of each person) in countries of Northern Europe. Those are powerful tools we have to learn more about and develop further. It is an area where we need a great deal of creative legal thinking and innovation, and we need respect for the great variety of formal and informal rules to protect the commons worldwide.

5. Last but not least: once you put your nose into the commons, you discover astonishing new things. You connect with hundreds of dynamic communities. You have unexpected insights, you learn about encouraging projects and ideas and you multiply your networks. It’s energizing.

Did you know, that there is an OpenCola project? Or that the biggest lake in New Zealand, Lake Taupo, is full of trout? In the very touristic Taupo region, there is much “pressure on the ressource”, but the trout population continues enjoying the lake because the New Zealanders follow a simple rule: Fish what you need to eat (for doing so, you get a fishing permit from local authorities), but don’t sell the fish. So, you won’t find any trout on the menus of the hundreds of restaurants in the region. Remember: The commons are not for sale.

Or did you know something about open source biology and participatory medicine? Have you heard about the countless local seed banks — especially in the South — and the sheer incredible treasures they care for us? Do you know where the growing international open-access scholarly publishing movement is at in its effort to make sure that we will have free access to what has been publicly funded — knowledge production. Are you aware of the intercultural and the community gardens movement or of the commons regimes used by lobstermen in Maine/USA to prevent over-fishing of lobster? And what to think about the crisis commons, where hundreds of volunteers contribute their expertise and collect information using modern information technologies in support of disaster relief for post-earthquake Haiti?

The commons are something that brings enthusiasm back into political debates. Young people are all ears when they learn about peer-to-peer-production, because that’s what they do. The “ecos” are all ears when they learn about the copyleft principle which enables the viral reproduction of software and content. They learn that “this complicated license stuff” is to defend our freedom for access to knowledge and cultural techniques. That is precisely what they claim for in their field. The “technos” get motivated to use their amazing abilities for helping to manage complex natural resource systems. In other words: The commons widen the horizon, they bring a fresh breeze of non-dogmatic and dynamic collective thinking and practicing along.

The commons are a powerful, self-enabling and self-empowering concept to constantly recreate a dignified life. It is what we need to build a diverse and irresistible movement based on a coherent political and conceptual thinking.

Silke Helfrich
Porto Alegre (RGS), January 28, 2010

The manifesto has already garnered endorsements from thousands of people and dozens of organizations. It has also been translated into seventeen different languages, including French, Czech, Chinese Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, Serbo-Croation and Turkish. This powerful show of support is helping to mobilize the many constituencies that depend upon the public domain. It also puts the corporate armies of copyright maximalists on notice that their attempts to enclose the public domain will be actively resisted.

At one time the public domain was regarded as a wasteland for dusty government documents and cultural curiosities from the 1920s and 1930s — a place of virtually worthless junk. Now that the Internet and digital technologies enable us to build our own commons and therefore share and re-use the music, images, writing and other works that we make, the public domain is properly seen as a rich cultural legacy and reservoir of shared value. It is a vital foundation for civic life, education and culture. We actively need to protect it.

As James Boyle put it in his 2008 book, The Public Domain, “Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.”

It’s nice to be reminded: Just because are no price tags associated with the public domain does not mean it’s worthless. In this sense, understanding the public domain means developing a deeper insight into the serious limits of “market valuation.”

The manifesto is no windy set of platitudes, but rather a substantive statement about why the public domain matters. I liked the five key principles of the public domain cited by the document:

1. The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.

2. Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. From neither the perspective of the author nor the general public do any valid arguments exist (whether historical, economic, social or otherwise) in support of an exceedingly long term of copyright protection. While the author should be able to reap the fruits of his intellectual labour, the general public should not be deprived for an overly long period of time of the benefits of freely using those works.

3. What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works must not be reestablished by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or using technical protection measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works.

4. The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify such work. The Public Domain status of a work does not necessarily mean that it must be made accessible to the public. The owners of physical works that are in the Public Domain are free to restrict access to such works. However once access to a work has been granted then there ought not be legal restrictions on the re-use, modification or reproduction of these works.

5. Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and re-use of Public Domain works must not be enforced. The Public Domain status of a work guarantees the right to re-use, modify and reproduce. This also includes user prerogatives arising from exceptions and limitations, fair use and fair dealing, ensuring that these cannot be limited by contractual or technological means.

Please consider adding your name and/or organization to the list of endorsers. The website can be found here. You may also be interested to learn that there is now a Public Domain Day every year, on New Year’s Day. The site helpfully identifies hundreds of authors who died 70 years ago (in 1939) whose works are therefore expected to enter the public domain in 2010. (Copyright terms for individual authors are the lifetime of the author plus 70 years.)

It will take some time before the public domain is given its full due as a matter of law, but it is encouraging to see vigorous new types of support for the public domain.

Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia is an impressive collection of essays and hundreds of sound recordings, photographs and manuscripts documenting traditional uses of the mountains in the Big Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia. The materials — from the American Folklife Center’s Coal River Folklife Project — are a wonderful tour of all sorts of commons in that region. (A tip o’ the hat to Michael and Carrie Kline, of Talking Across the Lines: Worldwide Conversations LLC, for alerting me to this remarkable collection of materials.)

Over generations, the people of West Virginia have forged their own distinctive commons in the forests there, which are the world’s oldest and biologically richest temperate zone hardwood system, according to ecologists. The region hosts all sorts of distinctive plants and animals, which in turn has shaped how people live. For example, people in southern West Virginia are familiar with harvesting greens in the spring, berries and fish in the summer, and roots, nuts and wild game in the fall. The Tending the Commons website also documents storytelling traditions, baptisms in the river, cemetery customs, and the spring “ramp” feasts based on native wild leek.

I was fascinated by the discussion of ginseng as a commons. Gingseng is big in the Coal River area because it is one of the few places in the U.S. where the root grows wild in significant quantities. The wild ginseng of West Virginia is considered a real prize because it has higher concentratiions of ginsenocides — the substance that both stimulates and soothes — whereas “tame” ginseng, which constitutes some 90% of U.S-grown ginseng, has much lower concentrations.

Not surprisingly, there are lots of “diggers” who know the special uses of ginseng and where to find it. Wild ginseng can command as much as $450 per pound compared to $30 for domesticated versions. But ginseng is not just a “market.” It is a commons — because a regional culture has grown up around it. A wonderful essay on the “Tending the Commons” website writes:

A linchpin in the seasonal round of foraging, ginsenging is….essential to a way of life. “I’d rather ginseng than eat,” said Dennis Dickens, eighty-five, of Peach Tree Creek. “Every spare minute I had was spent a-ginsenging.”

“If you can’t go ginsenging,” said Carla Pettry, thirty, of Horse Creek, “it totally drives you crazy.”

“The most prolific spreads of wild ginseng,” writes Val Hardacre, in Woodland Nuggets of Gold, “were found in the region touched by the Allegheny Plateau and the secluded coves of the Cumberland Plateau.” Through centuries of interaction with this valuable and elusive plant, residents of the plateaus have created a rich and elaborate culture, a culture of the commons.

Tending the Commons helps highlight the real meaning of the commons — our ongoing interaction with the local resources that we depend upon and come to love, and the shared culture that sustains us as we common with each other.

On October 24, 2009, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe came together for the 350 Day of International Climate Action, asking their governments and nations to embrace a more sustainable way of life. They shared the same purpose, but interpreted it in their own locally relevant way all around the world, from Sydney to Hanoi to Mumbai.

Then in December, thousands of individuals and groups converged on Copenhagen for the UN’s Climate Change Conference, meeting each other again or for the first time, engaging in conversations and debates that are unprecedented in human history.

The event made it clear that we still have a ways to go: the social movements that came to Copenhagen don’t yet have a unified or coherent alternative to present, except for a generalized devolution to re-localized economies, and a demand for “system change, not climate change.”

And yet these days of action gave a global voice to tens of thousands of local efforts that have had a hard time being seen or heard, but are unmistakably giving shape to a new, shareable way of organizing both society and daily life.

2. Facebook Membership Exceeds Population of the United States

When Shareable first launched in October 2009, Facebook had roughly 300 million members, equivalent to the population of the United States. By December, that number reached 350 million-if Facebook were a country, it would be third in population, right behind China and India. That same month, the number of tweets passed 6.8 billion, exceeding the world population.

Why does the rise of social media matter?

Let’s start with concrete examples. Social media helped get President Obama elected, and in 2009 politicians started announcing their candidacies to their “friends” and followers over Twitter and Facebook first, in advance of news conferences. In Iran, social media enabled anti-government activists to bypass state-controlled media and speak to the world; indeed, mainstream media around the world relied on Twitter and Facebook as sources, and the U.S. State Department actually asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled service outage so that Iranian voices could continue to be heard.

The democratic possibilities suggested by social media are influencing the possibilities we see in other spheres of life. “The people who create Facebook not only believe in what they’re doing but are on the leading edge of Generation Open,” writes open source activist Chris Messina in Shareable.net.

“It’s about having all your references come from the land of the internet rather than TV and becoming accustomed to-and taking for granted-bilateral communications in place of unidirectional broadcast forms. But it’s not just that the means of publishing have been democratized and the new medium is being mastered; change is flowing from the events that have shaped my generation’s understanding of economics, identity, and freedom.”

3. The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive

In recent years, the Government 2.0 movement has advocated for local, state, and federal agencies to adopt social media and open source technologies.

The movement’s ideas didn’t get much traction with the Bush administration. Then the new Obama administration appointed Vivek Kundra as the White House’s first information chief.

“My first approach coming into the public sector here in D.C. was to take as much data and put it out in the public domain as possible,” said Kundra. “I had three goals in mind: No. 1 was to drive transparency; No. 2 was to engage citizens; No. 3 was to ensure that we were lowering the cost of government operations.”

Under Kundra’s leadership, the White House took small steps like putting 216 real-time feeds on its website and switching to open-source platform Drupal.

But on December 8, 2009, the administration took a giant leap, issuing the “Open Government Directive,” which ordered executive departments and agencies to identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets; create an Open Government web page, and respond to public input received via that page; and to develop and publish an Open Government Plan that will describe how they will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities.

Will the directive be followed and its promise fulfilled? It’s certainly a step in the right direction.

4. The Pirate Party Emerges in Europe

The Swedish Pirate Party was founded in 2006. Its goals: to open up copyright and patent laws, strengthen the right to privacy on both the Internet and in everyday life, and foster transparency in government.

By May 2009, its membership surpassed those of the Green Party, the Left Party, the Liberal Party, the Christian Democrats, and the Centre Party, making it the third largest political party in Sweden. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the Pirate Party received over seven percent of the total Swedish votes, which gave it 18 seats in the Swedish parliament and two seats, filled by Christian Engstrom and Amelia Andersdotter , in the European parliament.

“We are very strong among those under 30,” said Engstrom. “They are the ones who understand the new world the best. And they have now signaled they don’t like how the big parties deal with these issues”-meaning issues of Internet sharing and privacy.

Pirate Parties have emerged in 33 other countries-including the United States-cooperating through the Pirate Party International.

Outside of Europe and North America, citizens voted decisively for a shareable society in Bolivia, where “buen vivir,” or well being, has been enshrined in the new constitution; battled to “Leave the Oil in the Soil” in Ecuador; and advanced “free culture” politics in Brazil.

Even if every one of these efforts ultimately fades away, they have already succeeded in pushing twenty-first-century ideas of transparency and sharing into their governments.

5. The Complete Streets Movement

For most of human history, everyone shared the streets. They were a commons where kids played and neighbors chatted.

Today, legally speaking, the streets still belong to us all; but in reality they have become the exclusive property of motorists. And when traffic proliferates, streetlife disappears and our lives suffer, too-crime rises, pollution increases, social connections decline and we have fewer transportation options.

Thankfully, the Complete Streets movement has emerged to reclaim America’s roads for everyone: pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, the disabled, old people and children, as well as drivers.

Local organizations and the National Complete the Streets Coalition are pushing for new policies that make streets safe, accessible and convenient for all. The Complete Streets Act is now before Congress, and nine states and many localities have recently enacted complete streets legislation. Meanwhile, in 2009 the Obama administration quietly infused cities with funds for public transit, green building and retrofitting, inter-agency sharing, and education, creating new possibilities for renewing the urban commons.

6. Rise of a Sharing Industry

This year saw the founding of services like Rentalic, Share Some Sugar, and Neighborgoods-all of which rely on the web and mobile technologies to facilitate neighborhood-level sharing. In 2009, the ridesharing service Zimride allied itself with the carsharing service Zipcar, both making extensive use of social media and mobile technologies.

Similar synergies emerged in citywide bikesharing programs: The Spanish company Onroll, for example, runs bike rental and return in 28 cities through text messaging. A company called PlanetMetrics created software that allows “retailers, product manufacturers, and consumer packaging manufacturers to see their supply chain carbon emissions and easily identify ways to reduce the footprint of their products or services”-often by sharing resources.

Meanwhile, architects, urban planners, and real estate agents are starting to talk about “open source” homes and streets, and they’re using social media tools to open up planning processes. Writers and publishers are experimenting with a range of shareable platforms, from Cory Doctorow’s Creative Commons book launches to one project (launched this year by former Punk Planet editor Dan Sinker) that shares short stories on cell phones.

Zipcar founder Robin Chase sees cross-platform, cross-industry sharing as the wave of the future. “Thanks to technology, sharing transactions are easy and low cost,” says Chase in a Shareable.net Q&A.

And the demand for sharing is rising as prices go up and budgets fall or stagnate. Innovators are working every day at exploiting the possibilities offered by mobile technologies to meet the needs and solve the problems of the market.

7. Elinor Ostrom Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

Sharing is widely seen as a virtuous trait on the personal level, but naive and impractical on the larger scale of economics. For decades, the most influential economists have championed private property and the individualized pursuit of wealth as the path to progress.

So it came as a shock this year when Elinor Ostrom-a political science professor at Indiana University whose work examines how people collectively manage natural resources-shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Her research refutes the long-held theory (“The Tragedy of the Commons”) that private property is the only way to protect finite natural resources such as grazing lands, water resources or forests from overuse and degradation. Ostrom’s field work in Switzerland, Nepal, Kenya, and Guatemala proves that communities routinely create their own systems to preserve common resources.

Her prize is a ringing endorsement that cooperation for the common good is a legitimate economic strategy.

8. The Emergence of an Equally Shared Parenting Movement

Most items on this list involve governments, technology, business: big-picture, traditionally male domains.

What about sharing at home? The idea of shared parenting is not new; for decades, feminism has pushed men to do more around the house.

But Father’s Day 2009 saw the emergence of a new generation of fathers promoting the shared parenting ideal along with women. Through a blizzard of media coverage in outlets that ranged from USA Today to NBC News to NPR, male writers and activists asked other men to share the joys and burdens of parenting with the women in their lives-not out of guilt, but because they have found sharing at home to be a more meaningful and healthier way of life.

The number of 2009 books that tackle this topic from both male and female perspectives is staggering: Manhood for Amateurs, Bad Mother, The Daddy Shift, DadLabs: Pregnancy and Year One, Home Game, One Big Happy Family, Men and Feminism, and Getting to 50/50, to name a few. And the shared parenting ‘zine Rad Dad won Utne Reader’s 2009 Independent Press Award for best ‘zine. (Coming next month: Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents, by Shareable.net contributors Marc and Amy Vachon.)

This was also the year that social scientists (such as Steven Greene and Laurel Elder) discovered new links between sharing at home and shareable social attitudes, suggesting that how we structure our family lives and raise our kids might be key to gradually building a more shareable society.

9. The Health Care Debate

Everyone agrees that the health care situation in America is a mess. Among industrialized nations, we rank at the top of wealthy nations for health care costs and near the bottom for health care quality.

But the 2009 debate about health care reform revealed deep fissures in American ethics and morality, pitting shareable, commons-based thinking against its opposite. In our view, it was an uneven debate-Republicans articulated a clear philosophical vision of heath care as privilege that each individual is responsible for obtaining, while Democrats were too often muddled in saying why we should expand health care to include the approximately 46 million Americans who don’t have it.

What was missing in this debate? The idea that health care is commons, something all people should share, just the same as air, water or other things essential to life. Looking at the health care debate from a commons perspective would have made a number of things very clear:

1) We have a moral obligation to ensure that all citizens have access to quality health care, whether through for-profit companies, non-profit cooperatives, or government programs.

2)Government funding for health research should not become the private property of pharmaceutical and other companies; it should be offered to the public at low costs.

3)In the age of H1N1 and SARS, our health depends upon the health of everyone else, so we imperil ourselves when others can afford to see a doctor.

Looking ahead to 2010, the challenge now is to articulate the idea of health care as something that everyone should share, like police and fire protection, parks, transportation facilities, and schools. This is a slow, even glacial process, one that involves building a sharing mindset on the ground level, in our daily lives, and then works its way up, from the ways we design our streets and institutions to how we run our businesses and government.

10. The First Global Meetings for a Shareable World

Around the globe in 2009, people met to discuss how to build a culture and economy based on sharing.

In January, 2009, participants of the World Social Forum in Belem do Para, Brazil, launched “an international mobilization campaign to reclaim, protect and re-create the commons,” complete with manifesto that has been translated into seven languages (and they’re looking for more, FYI!).

The following July, leaders came together in Germany for the Crottorf Consultations on the Global Commons.

In September, the World Commons Forum met in Salzburg, Austria.

In October, participants at the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona created the “Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge.”

In December, James Quilligan and Lisinka Ulatowska initiated the creation of a UN lobby for global governance of the commons, a which they intend to repeat May 3-14 in 2010.

And at a conference in Manchester, England, on November 3, participants discussed new distributed infrastructures for manufacturing, based on shared designs.

Will all these meetings add up to a new global movement for sharing and the commons? It’s too early to say, but we hope so.

CONTRIBUTORS: Compiled with the help of Rachel Botsman, Chris Carlsson, Neal Gorenflo, Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, and Jay Walljasper.
 
 
This first appeared on the website Shareable.net

Critical Commons is a new nonprofit advocacy coalition for “fair and critical participation in media culture.” Its self-stated goal is “to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.” The “tag cloud” for the site suggests the lit-crit predilections of the site’s hosts. Among the key words are “Deleuze,” “narrative structure,” “transverberation,” “ideological analysis,” “gender,” “VR “ [virtual reality”] and “TV.” [Deleuze was an influential French philosopher.]

What really caught my eye about Critical Commons, however, was its fantastic promo video on YouTube. The five-minute clip ingenious remixes scenes from Downfall, a German film about Hitler’s last days in his underground bunker, as the Allies close in on Berlin. The trailer for the film includes a clip in which Hitler’s secretary exclaims, “The Fuhrer has lost all sense of reality. He moves divisions that exist only on his map. It’s insane!”

Critical Commons makes brilliant satiric use of these scenes from the film — showing Hitler sweating and fuming at his desk, surrounded by his top generals — by overlaying English-language subtitles that transform the scene into a mad man trying to stop academic scholarship that relies on the Internet.

As a Hitler aide points to a map of Berlin and troops closing in, he says, “Digital scholarship is showing up in tenure files, not just on the Internet. Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, USC.” Hitler replies imperiously, “I want Internet access shut down immediately!” “But sir,” a German general nervously respond, “The Internet is used for research and publication. We would be cut off from the world…irrelevant.”

The rest of the video plays as a darkly hilarious tale of a madman in his bunker furiously holding out against all forms of digital scholarship. Hitler goes into a mad rant, “Blogs! And don’t tell me it enriches cultural discourse. We might as well allow them to digitize all our books…like Google! We were great once. A proud institution. We controlled knowledge; we told everyone what and how to think…” Well worth watching!

Another great new commons website, recently launched, is the Crisis Commons “an international volunteer network of professionals …[who] create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world.”

The site is a common space in which people with diverse sorts of tech expertise who want to help out in emergencies can self-select for jobs and work with others to make a difference. The website ingenious combines the principles of Meet-ups with voluntarism, crisis relief and open source and social-networking collaboration to create something new and potentially powerful.

For example, in response to the Haiti earthquake, Crisis Commons has convened a number of “Crisis Camps” in various cities or regions such as Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, Brooklyn, Denver and London, England. Before the “camps,” the organizers ask government and relief agencies what sorts of technological needs they have — and then at the camps, people self-organize into teams to respond to those specific requests. The camps also solicit ideas from the volunteers.

When the Crisis Commons learned that Haitians could use a software application that could collect real-time data regarding capacities of local hospitals, it sent out the word to its community of tech volunteers. Another project seeks to develop a simple user interface for the Government of Haiti so that it can gather information about earthquake damage from a variety of sources — aerial photos, on-the-ground local reports, etc. — and organize them all into a single database, so that the government can made a rapid and reliable visual assessment of the situation on the ground.

“What we create is open-source,” the Crisis Commons website explains, “meaning that it’s free for anyone to use, the labor has been donated, and the user community is encouraged to take it and build on it, and to make it work for them.”

The idea for Crisis Commons got started at a March 2009 conference on Government 2.0 when attendees realized the potential of applying social networking technologies to crisis situations. Some attendees pointed out how mobile technologies were helping to deal with issues of health services and alternative power supplies in Africa. Others explained how “the cloud” (Internet based services) could help aggregate data to help people — often in other parts of the world — and to synthesize information to make it more useable to people.

The Crisis Commons website says that it

uncovered a dividing line between international humanitarian relief and domestic crisis response. We saw common themes across all efforts including: the use of mobility, the Internet as a common coordination platform, the need for volunteers and the ability to provide alternative community communications access areas. By the end of the tweet-up, we had 40 volunteers sitting around in a circle with an agreement that there should be a forum to exchange these ideas. And it was there, where a common goal brought government, NGOs, private sector, hackers and activists together to create CrisisCamp.

The Crisis Camp model suggests how centralized bureaucracies, whether in government or the nonprofit world, would do well to transform themselves and become more open, networked and flexible, along the lines of the Crisis Commons.

Finally, another clever video shows how commons-based advocacy is becoming more stylish and international in scope. Readers of this blog may recall the treachery of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is essentially a Trojan horse treaty that is being negotiated in absolutely secrecy and that would bypass national legislatures and traditional international treaty processes, to impose a regime of absolute control over intellectual property and the Internet. More on ACTA here.

The new video, Save Jim, is a clever satire about a fictional treaty negotiator, Jim, a French-speaking lawyer and schemer, who speaks frankly about his personal role in the nasty subterfuge that is ACTA. Although the video is in French, it has English subtitles, allowing the video to go viral globally. Political advocacy is moving well beyond slogans and propaganda, and into a captivating new realm of creativity and political demystification.

Funny, if corporations are persons, why don’t they have the same kind of affirmative moral and legal responsibilities that real people have?

The Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ratifies its previous holding that money is equivalent to speech. But now paid speech (on behalf of market interests) is privileged over people’s speech in electing our political leaders. “We the Corporations….” Corporations may now drown out the speech of real, live human beings for whom the First Amendment was designed. A copy of the decision can be read here.

The perversity of the Court’s warped, soon-to-be notorious ruling can be seen in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to the decision: “For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process. With today’s monumental decision, the Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups by ruling that the Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until Election Day. By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers. Our democracy depends upon free speech, not just for some but for all.”

Yes, “some” have been excluded from full participation in our democracy, but it ain’t been those poor corporations. Yet the Court finds otherwise. And so twenty years of Reagan, Bush and Bush II have yielded the poisonous fruit of this ruling. Can anything be done?

The decision is likely to galvanize Congress to take some modest steps to limit corporate contributions to campaigns, within the terms of the decision. But more sweeping citizen pushback is needed.

Two initiatives have already been launched. People For the American Way has announced a campaign to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would nullify the worst part of the Court’s decision by granting Congress the authority to limit corporate influence in elections. You can sign their petition here.

Another response is called Move to Amend organized by a project of “the Campaign to Legalize Democracy.” Its citizens’ petition declares, “We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

The petition already has about 4,000 signatures.

The Citizens United case was notable for taking a rather limited set of circumstances and delivering a sweeping constitutional ruling. Such actions are usually called “legislating from the bench” — unless you happen to be a Republican. Only six years ago the Court had declared the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation constitutional, along with other rulings stretching back 100 years. Now, it guts the law.

“Essentially,” Justice Stevens wrote in a strong dissent which he read from the bench, “five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” He noted that the Court majority overturned acts of Congress dating from 1907 as well as “the overwhelming majority of justices who have served on this court.”

Judicial activism, anyone? Many commentators have noted that Chief Justice Roberts had pledged at his confirmation hearings to act as an “umpire.” So this one is straight down the middle?! Baloney. Robert has tarnished the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by handing down this reckless, highly political ruling that will accelerate corporate enclosures of democracy, make American politics something for the rich alone, and breed further cynicism about government. Robert’s insane response: The Constitution requires more corporate money in political campaigns.

That brainstorm sent Reetz foraging through dumpsters, literally, to find the materials to build his own inexpensive book scanner. It took three days and $300 in out-of-pocket expenditures (for the cameras) but in the end Reetz put together an ungainly apparatus that can scan a 400-page book in 20 minutes. It consists of two lights, two Canon Powershot cameras and a few pieces of wood and acrylic.

He had to find a way to synchronize the flash of the two digital cameras and he had to get a Russian programmer to write an open source application that can edit and format page images into a single file. But Reetz’s DIY (“do it yourself”) breakthrough worked! What happened next is a stunning demonstration of the viral capacities of the Web and the power of self-organized commons.

Reetz prepared a 79-step instruction manual that describes in meticulous detail how to build your own book scanner, and in April 2009 posted it to instructibles.com. Within weeks the manual had attracted more than 400 comments that suggested improvements in the device. This spurred Reetz to start a new website, DIYbookscanner.org., which in only eight months has attracted a worldwide community of amateur book scanners.

Historically, one problem with book scanning is that it is so darn expensive and cumbersome. Only professional libraries or blue-chip projects like Google Print can afford a $50,000 book automated scanning device. It’s true that anyone can buy a cheap flatbed scanner to scan photos or documents, but such machines are exceedingly slow; they could take up to three hours to scan a single book. They also require you press the book flat and damage the book spine.

A new global commons of DIY bookscanners is now innovating where markets decline to go. “Our community has developed a whole ecosystem of scanner designs ranging from crude and expedient to polished and highly sophisticated,” the group’s website explains. “We’ve also helped develop and document free, Open-Source software to post-process the images. Our members include programmers, mechanical engineers, historians, book lovers, copyfighters, and people who’ve never handled a soldering iron.”

Actual participants on Reetz’s website explained that they got into DIY bookscanning for:

• Saving family history documents
• Format-shifting for the print-disabled
• Archiving rare books
• Shrinking the space that a huge collection of physical books occupies
• Saving on the price of college text books
• Increasing access to out-of-copyright works from libraries
• Seeking a cheaper, more book-friendly method of scanning
• Seeking a mobile alternative to hundreds of pounds of reference books

Reetz raves that “digital books change the landscape” because it makes “hard-to-find, rare and out of prints books” more accessible. Digitization makes possible “a greener future with more books rather than fewer books. More access to information, rather than less access to information. And maybe, years from now, a reformed publishing/distribution model (but I’m not holding my breath…).”

There are now 280 members in the fledgling global commons of DIY book scanners; some 30 to 50 of them have built their own scanning devices. Volunteers have made a variety of “post-processing” software programs that help format and edit scanned pages. Some have developed special “de-warping” algorithms to compensate for pages that scan at funny angles (because the scanned page is not flat, for example). Another friend wrote a program that can convert page images into a pdf file.

Some people in the publishing trade are quaking in their boots that this is a “Napster moment” for books. Home-made book scanners can only be about ripping off books, they fear. But under existing copyright law, the “first sale doctrine” declares that you can do what you want with a legitimately purchased book or DVD. The first sale doctrine is what enables libraries and video rental stores to exist. Most personal, noncommercial uses of a book or DVD – including copying – are similarly legal. It’s what allows us to copy our DVDs to use them on our iPods or car stereo (“place shifting”).

It’s also true that the DIY book scanner could be used for illicit purposes, as Reetz concedes. But those are not the purposes to which he and his web community are dedicated.

Like the film and record industries, publishers are likely to argue that any unauthorized uses of their copyrighted works amount to “piracy.” What if we make “personal scans” of our hard-copy books to read on our Kindle or Apple Tablet, which may thereby undercut the emerging market for e-books? Piracy?

A new sort of cultural and political battle may be brewing about the legal rights of the commoners versus the proprietary rights of publishers. Will the F.B.I. start going after DIY scanners as if they were a kind of moonshine still? Will publishers attempt the scorched-earth strategy against its customers that the record industry has used?

The enlightened alternative would be for publishers to recognize that they need to “add value” to digital books if they want to develop a market for them. They can’t just re-publish existing books in digital form and expect people to forfeit all rights to share, copy and re-use works. That is the essence of culture, after all, and e-publishers had better get used to the fact that digital products thrive on being shared. That’s how they circulate; that’s how new markets are generated and sustained. The record industry willfully ignored this reality, and look what happened to it.

Publishers are not likely to concede these facts without a fight, however. Textbook publishers, especially, have grown fat and happy by shamelessly charging exorbitant prices to their captive clientele, students. Even after eliminating most of the costs of physically producing and distributing books (through e-books), they will still want to charge top dollar.

Which is why a robust commons of DIY book scanners can act as a healthy counterbalance to a seller-dominant market and as a practical and cheap way of providing what the market declines to provide. One must be careful not to jump to conclusions about how the commons of DIY book scanners will evolve. I consider it a healthy development that will empower readers and extend access to information, especially for uses that publishers regard as too insignificant (i.e., not profitable enough) and especially for developing countries.

For now, a hearty salute to Daniel Reetz and his merry band of innovative commoners! We will be watching your progress with enthusiasm.

What is less understood is that our collective abuse and displacement of fresh water is also a serious cause of climate change and global warming. If we are to successfully address climate change, it is time to include an analysis of how our abuse of water is an additional factor in the creation of global warming as well as solutions that protect water and watersheds.

There are two major factors. The first is the actual displacement of water from where it is sustaining a healthy ecosystem as well as healthy hydrologic cycles. Because humanity has polluted so much surface water on the planet, we are now mining the groundwater far faster than it can be replaced by nature. New Scientist reports of a “little-heralded crisis” all over Asia as a result of the exponential drilling of groundwater. Water is moved from where nature has put it in watershed and aquifers (where we can access it) to other place where it is used for flood irrigation and food production – where much of it lost to evaporation – or to supply the voracious thirst of mega cities, where it is usually dumped as waste into the ocean.

AUTHOR: Maude Barlow, former senior advisor to the UN on water issues, is co-author of the bestseller Blue Gold (New Press) and chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Water is also lost to ecosystems through global trade – water used in the in the production of crops or manufactured goods that are then exported (known as virtual trade in water). Over 20% of daily water used for human purpose is exported out of watersheds in this way. Water is also piped across long distances for industry leaving behind parched landscapes.

The second factor is the removal of the vegetation needed for a healthy hydrologic cycle. Urbanization, deforestation and wetland destruction greatly destroy water-retentive landscapes and lead to the loss of precipitation over the affected area.

Slovakian scientist Michal Kravcik and his colleagues explain that the living world influences the climate mainly by regulating the water cycle and the huge energy flows linked to it. Transpiring plants, especially forests, work as a kind of biotic pump, causing humid air to be sucked out of the ocean and transferred to dry land. If the vegetation is removed from the land, this natural system of biosphere regulation is interrupted. Soil erodes, reducing the content of organic material in the ground, thus reducing its ability to hold water. Dry soil from lost vegetation traps solar heat, sharply increasing the local temperature and causing a reduction in precipitation over the affected area. This process also destroys the natural sequestration of carbon in the soil, leading to carbon loss.

Of course, these two factors are deeply related. Just as removing vegetation from an ecosystem will dry up the soil, so too will removing water from an ecosystem mean reduced or non-existent vegetation.

Taken together, these two factors are hastening the desertification of the planet, and intensifying global warming. Even if we successfully address and reverse greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels, Kravcik says, we will not be able to stop climate change if we do not deal with the impact of our abuse of water on the planet.

Unless we collectively address the crisis of fresh water and our cavalier treatment of the world’s water systems, we will not restore the climate to health.

Restoration of Watersheds

The solution to the water half of this crisis is the massive restoration of watersheds. Bring water back into parched landscapes. Return water that has disappeared by retaining as much rainwater as possible within the ecosystem so that water can permeate the soil, replenish groundwater systems, and return to the atmosphere to regulate temperatures and renew the hydrologic cycle. All human, industrial and agricultural activity must become part of this project, which could employ millions and alleviate poverty in the global South. Our cities must be ringed with green conservation zones and we must restore forests and wetlands – the lungs and kidneys of fresh water. For this to be successful, three basic laws of nature must be addressed.

1) It is necessary to create the conditions that allow rainwater to remain in local watersheds. This means restoring the natural spaces where rainwater can fall and where water can flow. Water retention can be carried out at all levels: roof gardens in family homes and office buildings; urban planning that allows rain and storm water to be captured and returned to the earth; water harvesting in food production; capturing daily water discharge and returning it clean to the land, not to the rising oceans.

2) We cannot continue to mine groundwater supplies at a rate greater than natural recharge. If we do, there will not be enough water for the next generation. Governments everywhere must undertake intensive research into their groundwater supplies and regulate groundwater takings before these underground reservoirs are gone. This may mean a shift in policy from export to domestic and local production.

3) We must stop polluting our surface and groundwater sources – and we must back up this intention with strict legislation. Water abuse in oil and methane gas production and in mining must stop. We must wean ourselves of industrial and chemical-based agricultural practices and listen to the many voices sounding the alarm about the rush toward water-guzzling bio fuel farming. We need to promote “subsidiarity,” whereby national policies and international trade rules support local food production in order to protect the environment and promote local sustainable agriculture. Such policies also discourage the virtual trade in water. Countries should also limit or ban the mass movement of water by pipeline. Government investment in water and wastewater infrastructure would save huge volumes of water lost every day. Local laws could enforce water-harvesting practices at every level.

Toward a Water Secure World

Clearly, for this rescue plan to be successful, governments around the world must acknowledge the water crisis and the part the role water abuse plays in the warming (and drying) of the planet. This in turn means that a nation’s water resources must be considered in every government policy at all levels. Nations must undertake intensive studies to ascertain the health of watersheds and groundwater reserves. All activities that will impact water must conform to a new ethic – backed by law – that protects water sources from pollution and over-pumping. This will likely mean a strong challenge to government policies that favour unlimited global economic growth.

Nearly two billion people live in water-stressed regions of the earth. Until now, the UN has addressed this terrible reality with a program to give them access to groundwater sources. But current levels of groundwater takings are unsustainable. To truly realize the universal right to water, and to protect water for nature’s own uses, means a revolution in the way we treat the world’s finite water resources. There is no time to lose.

After constant harangues about the sanctity of their “private property” and the scourge of “piracy,” it was refreshing to experience World Fair Use Day in Washington, D.C. on January 12. The event — hosted by Public Knowledge, the defender of the public’s stake in the Internet and copyrighted works — brought together some two dozen artists, lawyers, scholars, journalists and others who care about our untrammeled right to use and re-use our own culture.

The evening before the conference proper, two films on remix culture were shown. Both deserve large audiences. RIP: A Remix Manifesto, by Brett Gaylor, is a tribute to remix in video and film, featuring performance artists like Girl Talk and commentators like Lawerence Lessig. Kembrew McLeod’s film Copyright Criminals documents the history of sampling and its importance in hip-hop culture. The film will air on PBS on January 19.

It was great to see such cutting-edge artists showcase such works in the stodgy world of Washington politics and policy. It reminded me of a story I once heard about U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters, who upon seeing a certain video mashup, exclaimed how fascinating it was — but quickly added, “Of course, it’s totally illegal!” That was the cultural frontier explored at World Fair Use Day, where many artists told how their imaginative new works — many with tart political or cultural statements — ran up against the legal roadblocks of copyright law.

For example, Dan Walsh of Dublin, Ireland, came up with an inspired way to remix the cartoon cat “Garfield.” By eliminating Garfield from the comic strip, leaving only the character Jon and his “dialogue bubbles,” the resulting strip reveals Jon as a terribly lonely suburbanite living with deep existential angst. “Garfield Minus Garfield” became a hugely popular Web remix of the cartoon — a fact that started to alarm Walsh because he realized he could be sent to jail for five years for copyright infringement.

Fortunately, Garfield’s syndicator realized that “Garfield Minus Garfield” was a great way to rejuvenate an aging, no-longer-popular cartoon strip, and collaborated with Walsh in releasing a new book of the revised cartoon strips. A nice ending, but should Walsh have needed to earn the approval of the Garfield syndicate for his non-commercial uses of the strip?

I was also captivated by Nina Paley, a filmmaker, animator and cartoonist who created an award-winning animated film Sita Sings the Blues, The 70-minute film is a musical and a personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana, in which the two gods Sita and Rama can’t make their marriage to each other work. It is a story that spoke to Paley because it mirrored her personal breakup with her husband.

What makes the film notable — beyond its stylish, mesmerizing re-telling of an ancient story — is the copyright problems that Paley encountered. She wanted to use songs by a virtually forgotten singer of the 1920s, Annette Hanshaw, which were in the public domain. But it turned out that the compositions of the songs (as opposed to the recordings) were still under copyright — 80 years after the fact! The company that owned the rights wanted $20,000 for each of eleven songs used in the film, or $220,000.

Paley went ahead and used the songs anyway because she considered them so indispensable to the film. As she explains on her website:

The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another ancient Indian epic to me. I was feebly connecting this ancient epic to my own experiences in 2002. But the Hanshaw songs were a revelation: Sita’s story has been told a million times not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American Blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic; but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctively 1920’s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture.

Despite the risks of being thrown in jail for copyright infringement, Paley released the film for free on the Web under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. So she is not making any money directly from the film. But Paley has found that she is actually making more money, indirectly, by sharing the film on the Web. It has generated lots of publicity that in turn has helped her sell merchandise related to the film. It has also given her considerable visibility and acclaim.

Paley took the risk of being prosecuted because “I saw what happened to Annette Hanshaw’s beautiful recordings: they got locked up so no one could hear them. I didn’t want that to happen to my film. My first concern is Art, and Art has no life if people can’t share it.”

Needless to say, Washington doesn’t usually hear from these sorts of artists. They are more likely to be lobbied by rock stars and film celebrities, who are presented as the epitome of artistic achievement. Earth to Washington: There is a big, wide universe of artists out there who have little to do with Big Media, and who nonetheless need the right to be as creative as possible. They need robust fair use rights, access to the public domain and limits on the term and scope of copyright law.

There were lots of other artists at World Fair Use Day explaining how their creativity is running athwart copyright law — and how fair use and Creative Commons licenses are indispensable to their work. Check out the entire program at the WFUD website and watch the webcasts. I’m already looking forward to the second annual World’s Fair Use Day. It’s about time that these perspectives were heard on Capitol Hill and in the White House directly from artists.

The activity of commoning is conducted through labor with other resources; it does not make a division between “labor” and “natural resources.” On the contrary, it is labor which creates something as a resource, and it is by resources that the collectivity of labor comes to pass. As an action it is thus best understood as a verb rather than as a “common pool resource.” Both Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ and the environmentalism of Rachel Carson were attempts to restore this perspective.

Commoning is primary to human life. Scholars used to write of ‘primitive communism’. ‘The primary commons’ renders the experience more clearly. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth which has not had at its heart the commons; the commodity with its individualism and privatization was strictly confined to the margins of the community where severe regulations punished violators.

Commoning begins in the family. The kitchen where production and reproduction meet, and the energies of the day between genders and between generations are negotiated. The momentous decisions in the sharing of tasks, in the distribution of product, in the creation of desire, and in sustaining health are first made here.

Commoning is historic. The ‘village commons’ of English heritage or the ‘French commune’ of the revolutionary past are remnants from this history, reminding us that despite stages of destruction parts have survived, though often in distorted fashion as in welfare systems, or even as their opposite as in the realtor’s gated community or the retailer’s mall.

Commoning has always had a spiritual significance expressed as sharing a meal or a drink, in archaic uses derived from monastic practices, in recognition of the sacred habitus. Theophany, or the appearance of the divine principle, is apprehended in the physical world and its creatures. In north America (“turtle island”) this principle is maintained by indigenous people.

Commons is antithetical to capital. Commmoners are quarrelsome (no doubt), yet the commons is without class struggle. To be sure, capital can arise from the commons, as part is sequestrated off and used against the rest. This begins with inegalitarian relations, among the Have Lesses and the Have Mores. The means of production become the way of destruction, and expropriation leads to exploitation, the Haves and Have Nots. Capital derides commoning by ideological uses of philosophy, logic, and economics which say the commons is impossible or tragic. The figures of speech in these arguments depend on fantasies of destruction — the desert, the life-boat, the prison. They always assume as axiomatic that concept expressive of capital’s bid for eternity, the a-historical ‘Human Nature.’

Communal values must be taught, and renewed, continuously. The ancient court leet resolved quarrels of over-use; the panchayat in India did the same, like the way a factory grievance committee is supposed to be; the jury of peers is a vestigial remnant which determines what a crime is as well as who’s a criminal. The “neighbor” must be put back into the “hood,” as they say in Detroit, like the people’s assemblies in Oaxaca.

Commoning has always been local. It depends on custom, memory, and oral transmission for the maintenance of its norms rather than law, police, and media. Closely associated with this is the independence of the commons from government or state authority. The centralized state was built upon it. It is, as it were, ‘the pre-existing condition.’ Therefore, commoning is not the same as the communism of the USSR.

The commons is invisible until it is lost. Water, air, earth, fire — these were the historic substances of subsistence. They were the archaic physics upon which metaphysics was built. Even after land began to be commodified during English Middle Ages it was written,

We distinguish ‘the common’ from ‘the public’. We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism. The commons has always been an element in human production even when capitalism acquired the hoard or laid down the law. The boss might ‘mean business’ but nothing gets done without respect. Otherwise, sabotage and the shoddy result.

Commoning is exclusive inasmuch as it requires participation. It must be entered into. Whether on the high pastures for the flock or the light of the computer screen for the data, the wealth of knowledge, or the real good of hand and brain, requires the posture and attitude of working alongside, shoulder to shoulder. This is why we speak neither of rights nor obligations separately.

Human thought cannot flourish without the intercourse of the commons. Hence, the first amendment linking the rights of speech, assembly, and petition. A moment’s thought reveals the interaction among these three activities which proceed from lonely muttering to poetic eloquence to world changing, or

Bing! Bing! the light bulb of an idea
_Buzz! Buzz! talking it over with neighbors or co-workers
Pow! Pow! telling truth to power.