In the late 1980s I arrived in Liverpool to deliver a speech.  Finding my hotel room tv on the blink,  I asked the front desk for a replacement.  About 10 minutes later two strapping lads carried one in.  Encountering an American, they wistfully envied the significant choice of channels available in the States.  I readily agreed that we do have many more channels, but told them their envy might be misplaced since our programs are interrupted about every 10 minutes by several commercials.  They looked at each other for a few seconds.  Then, reluctantly, decided their system may be preferable.

There was a time, a few days ago in human history, really, when people spent a lot of time looking at the sky at night.   To read Greek mythology, and Shakespeare’s plays, one might guess that people were as familiar with the constellations, as they are with corporate brands today. Or close at least.   Of course, it was possible back then to see the sky at night.  As David Owen pointed out in a recent New Yorker piece (August 20th), in Galileo’s day – about 400 years ago –people thought the Milky Way was a continuous ooze, so densely packed were the heavens to the naked eye.

Today we can see only a fraction of what was easily visible back then.  We are enclosed in a visual cocoon, and the cause is not just the smog and fumes that fill the sky.  Even more it is the light.  “Today a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night,” Owen writes, would see “less than one percent of what Galileo would have been able to see.” We emit so much illumination – if that’s the word – down here below, that we have lost the capacity to see above.

I was born and raised in La Castellana, a coffee producing town in the province of Negros Occidental, in the Philippines. Our town is well known for its special blend. In fact, a string of coffee shops in Bacolod City, the provincial capital, serves coffee grown here.

Nearly half of the residents are coffee drinkers, and there are 42 kapehan (coffee shops) in the town proper. About a third of these are located in the public market and each can accommodate 20 to 50 people at a time. The rest are in the residential areas where each block (about 3 acres) has one or two coffee stalls. Roughly, there is one kapehan for every 100 households.

One of the many tragedies of the conventional economic mind is the grip that the “tragedy of the commons” has upon it.   Among other things, the “tragedy thesis,” as it is called, feeds the economist’s arrogance about modernity itself.  Traditional societies all were stupid and programmed for destruction, it says implicitly.  Only we moderns, with our market mechanisms and technological wonders, can save the world.  

This is, of course, total bunk.  Most traditional societies did far better jobs of managing their resources than we moderns, or post moderns, have been able to do.  An example is the remarkable water sharing organizations in the Northern Philippines called zangera. These embody a native genius in husbanding the water commons in such a way that everyone gets a just share.  They also show how to arrange a system – “incentivize” it in the econ parlance – so that leaders work to that end rather than to their own aggrandizement and gain.  

Last April, about fifty of my classmates came to celebrate the 40th anniversary of our graduation from St. Vincent’s High School, which was founded here in La Castellana, in the Philippines,  by the Columban Missionaries. .  It was a one-day affair of fun and nostalgia, the Lettermen and the Beatles.  We remembered the intramurals, the prom, the Friday night “jam sessions”-- and also, with sadness, our departed classmates.

Many of the remaining now live far away and seldom return. So some of my classmates stayed on for a few days to visit the places of our growing up – the orchards,  the river, and town plaza, among others. My classmates were sad to see the sparse “laguerta” (orchard) and the degraded state of the river where we spent so many happy days. The plaza brought out both sorrow and resentment. “What have they done to our plaza?’ they said when they saw the disordered structures on what used to be a grassy park.

Three decades ago, the Dirty Harry movies gave shape and license to the revenge fantasies that fed the law-and-order politics of the era. Is it possible that dramatic acts of resistance to enclosure could help launch a new politics of the commons today?  That thought comes to mind with news reports from Manila, where Mayor Alfredo S. Lim has ordered the bulldozing of the bars and clubs that had encroached upon the famed Baywalk along Roxas Boulevard in that city.

Lim has a reputation as a straight shooter.  When he was police chief in Manila he put down a Right wing coup attempt against Corazon Aquina, who took office in the peaceful revolution against Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator.  He actually was known as “Dirty Harry.”  He did have reasons to eliminate the bars that were not solely environmental.  They had been approved by the previous mayor, and were months behind in their concession fees. In the Philippines, such facts are suggestive in a way that is all too familiar there.

When I lived in New York City I walked everywhere, and all the time.  It wasn’t just because driving there is insane and I didn’t have a car anyway. The city calls you forth.  In decent weather you can walk for miles and hardly be aware of it. As a walker I was not alone. New York is a city of them.  On visits upstate I’d see a great many hefty people. At malls I'd get stuck in aisles behind matching double-wides.  In the city there wasn’t much of that.

People often think of New York as a decadent and unhealthful place.  I began to wonder if in fact the opposite was true. I made some calls but couldn’t get anywhere.  This was about fifteen years ago.  Apparently, some researchers have been on the case in the years since.  The current (August 15th) issue of New York magazine has a feature story called “Why New Yorkers Last Longer.”  Residents there, it turns out, live on average nine months longer than Americans do generally. Their life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate. Walking is a major reason why.

In one of my travels, I saw a cluster of trees near the ridge of a bald mountain and a strange idea came to my mind.  If only this mountain was on a computer screen, I thought, I could copy the green spot and paste it to the brown spaces.  This thought led my mind to a series of questions. Why can’t this one patch of trees be spread to the entire mountain?  If one family can rehabilitate a portion of the mountain, why can’t others do the same?  

I started to think about my own experiences working with upland farmers, particularly those who live in or near grass-mantled mountains.  The story of Socias Valentin is the one I like best.

Social sanction is a force that our policy makers, in the thrall of economic thinking, have neglected for too long.  It really is effective.  I once visited Calgary, in Canada, and on my first day experienced a “chinook,” which is a balmy wind that raises the temperature into the fifties in winter.   The temperature dropped from there to about ten below in about two hours.  I was downtown, waiting to cross the street, and freezing to my bones.  The signal said “Don’t walk” but there were no cars coming.  Of course I crossed.

Did I say “of course”?  The people waiting patiently on the other side did not feel that way.  In Calgary, I grasped quickly, you do not cross against the light. Their stony disapproving glares cut through me like the artic wind.  Nobody said a word.  For the rest of my visit, which was about a week, I waited patiently along with everyone else.  (I also paid my fares on the city’s transit system, which was on the honor system.)

One of the best ways to stimulate competition, innovation and lower prices is for participants in a market to honor the commons (a shared pool of resources, a minimal set of safety or performance standards) and then to compete "on top" of the commons.  Instead of being able to reap easy profits from monopoly control over something everyone needs -- say, a computer operating system like Windows -- a company must work harder to "add value" in more specialized ways. 

My son Sam Bollier has been looking into the drive by some state governments to require their agencies to adopt OpenDocument Format.  Here is what he has found:

Am I the only one who thought of Huck Finn and the Mississippi when I read Efren Gerardino’s post about the river of his youth in the Philippines?  There was the absence of fences and boundaries, the openness and sense of possibility – an American story but also the story of childhood everywhere.  Efren remembered “the good life” even though he and his friends had very little, materially.  Childhood is a commons. Where it is abundant, children can feel rich so long as they have food to eat.  

The commons of my own childhood was abundant in its own way. We lived in an old, close-in Boston suburb, with meandering streets that followed the contours of the land.  We played in the old aqua-duct, and at the swamp that formed a wooded basin behind the houses.  By unspoken agreement, the entire neighborhood was open to us kids.  We played football in one yard, wiffleball in another.  We didn’t know the owners, and no one seemed to care.

Most of that world has gone the way of Efren’s river. People with chemically enhanced trophy lawns aren’t the only problem.  Kids now are caught in the temporal rhythms of their parents’ business lives: classes, schedules, day-calendars even.  When they aren’t marching to the clock they are locked into commoditized entertainments.  A woman from England observed to me not long ago, “The children here – they don’t know how to play.”

Early this year, a boyhood buddy of mine visited our hometown of La Castellana, which is a municipality in Negros Occidental province, in the Philippines.  My friend had been  away for almost 3 decades in the United States.  After calls on family and friends, he asked me to go with him on a “sentimental excursion” around town.  One stop was the river junction where we used to swim and play when we were kids.

My friend saw what I see almost daily – murky waters, scattered wastes, a cluster of houses where trees once stood.   “This is not the same river that I knew”, he said with sadness. He started looking for things that were not there anymore – the big mango tree with branches that drooped over the river; the sandbank at the river bend which served as our main playground; the forest trees and bamboos that lined the river banks; the fish and other freshwater life; the edible water plants; the birds; and a lot of other things.

A new report from Grassroots International and Food & Water Watch, "Towards a Green Food System," shows how food sovereignty “will not only benefit small farmers all over the world, but will also give environmentalists and consumers what they want—a clean environment and healthy food,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch.

This is a tale of two, three, four movements – small farmers, environmentalists, foodies, consumers – all coming together to radically transform our corporate food system and win equal access to precious resources: land, water and food. Steward those resources for the common good and you have the makings of a healthy, edible commons.

Minneapolis is a river town.  The mighty Mississippi begins as a stream somewhere near Itasca in Northern Minnesota, a sacred place to the Anishinaabeg people who preceded us, and winds its way through Minnesota woods, flatlands and valleys, farms and towns, gathering volume and strength until it reaches us here, the northern-most place navigable by commercial barge and boat.

The River here has been a source of life for creatures and of transportation and prosperity for humans over time. Eventually this river, our river, becomes everybody else’s too and empties into the Gulf at New Orleans. It is a commons of massive proportion and importance in the United States.

Are you ready? Or are you still tallying up the costs to the commons from the first Green Revolution? I invite you to listen in on a fascinating debate between farmer advocates and the money behind the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). 

The Green Revolution describes a technical package of pesticides, fertilizers, seeds and research institutions introduced in many parts of the world in the 50s, 60s and 70s to increase crop yields. In some quarters, the Green Revolution has drawn considerable praise for increasing productivity. In other quarters it has been sharply criticized for its high social, environmental and economic costs. Critics point to the fact that in a poster child of the revolution’s purported success, India, during 2003 alone there were 17,107 documented cases of indebted small farmers committing suicide – often by drinking the new pesticides themselves. 

It is perhaps a sign of the times that the value of a commons goes unrecognized unless it can be expressed through market economics. So, for example, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey have been assessed to provide “ecosystem services” worth $1,476 an acre while freshwater wetlands provide $11,568 worth of eco-services per acre. Such valuations may or may not help protect the commons in question; certainly the practice of monetizing the commons is much-debated, on both philosophical and empirical grounds. But I worry that market valuations – even if justified for tactical reasons – can shift the terms of debate in troubling ways. The presumption becomes that all you really need to do to solve a problem is perform a rigorous cost/benefit analysis.

There was a time, long ago, when the concept of “property” was a bulwark against an oppressive and arbitrary state. But the supposed bulwark has turned into a means of infiltration; and the latest evidence is the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General who used the election laws to try to keep Democrats from voting, now wants more authority to wiretap our phones in the name of protecting intellectual property.  He seems oblivious to the alarms that raises.
 
Everything is in some sense an idea.  We name things, hold images of them in our minds. All we know of anything, ultimately, is our idea of it.  So the concept of intellectual property has a boundary problem from the start.  Congress and the courts have fed this tendency through constant expansion of the copyright and patent laws.  Where property rights go the powers of the state follow, as the Administration’s enforcement proposal demonstrates.