Commons

Thank you for joining us.

Welcome to this new edition of our podcast on Commons from a Planetary Perspective.

Today, we're very happy and privileged to talk to two members of an organization called Indigenous Commons.

They are Suzanne Bowles and Jason Jacobs.

Suzanne is co-founder and executive leader of Indigenous Commons, and she works at the intersection of regenerative economics, indigenous governance and philanthropic innovation.

She focuses on the shifting resource flows towards Indigenous-led stewardship.

And Jason is co-founder of Indigenous Commons, too.

But you can correct me if that's wrong.

I think I mentioned the writer, but I didn't mention the name of the essay.

Silence is a Commons.

And one of the interesting things he does is shows his rhetorical skill and think in turning this tale about technology analysis of basically a Western technology history, Western technological history, and making irrelevant to his current audience in Japan at the Asahi Symposium, Science and Man, the Computer Managed Society.

And I'll read a little bit more about Mr. Illich's From the biographical note, we're actually using an Internet source, the publication of this short speech essay in the Co-Evolution Quarterly in winter 1983.

When today in Europe, I'm now reading from, I'm commencing reading on second page.

When today in Europe with university students, I use the word commons.

That's one of the, and another prescient thing, right? Way before Hardin Negri, way before commons became, I would suppose ever since 9-11, Commons has been a kind of favorite trope of the left and of radicals.

And thinking about environment and ecology, as Michael already mentioned, is another key word.

But my great-grandfather, and I'm quite proud of this and want folks to understand this, he experienced the tragedy of the settling of the West.

And by that, I mean the tragedy of the story of the commons, the tragedy of the commons, Boston Commons.

And this is 1600 settlement, of course, but Everybody put their milk out on the Boston Commons.

They overgrazed it and then realized that you had to have private property ownership to have accountability.

Because the Congress chose to disregard John Wesley Powell and his plea to Congress on how the West, the rules and regulations that should be set up for settlement of the West, we experienced, he did, my great-grandfather experienced the tragedy of the Commons all over again with the use the the settlement came into the western united states you could claim 160 acres or one at the latter end it got up to 640 acres but none of that was uh was adequate to have a sustainable you know and raise a family on and so all of this the public land that was around it that hadn't you know, that wasn't converted to prior property, which was the vast majority of it, was subject to whoever had the most livestock and would get to the feed first.

And so the overgrazing of the West that has been spoken of was in part a causative part.

It was not the fault of the people who were doing it, although...

now through civilian means.

This is how ECOMUNE, Economía Sociales del Común, or Social Economies of the Commons, came to be in 2017, a federation comprising approximately 6,200 peace agreement signatories and 154 organizations across 26 of Colombia's 33 administrative divisions.

I attended its governing council assembly in 2024.

What I found most significant about ECOMUNE was that none of its cooperatives— for coffee, cattle ranching, fish farming, textiles, rural tourism, to name a few, were composed exclusively of ex-combatants.

And so the Diggers were actually a later version.

The enclosure had started hundreds of years earlier, right? Robin Hood could be even tied to the enclosure of the Commons.

Oh, well, this will have come out by the time, but do you know what's going on with The Uprising?

Oh, the movie? Yeah,

Rather than forming a single uniform Asian concept, these localized responses exposed the limits of Western Universalism, offering rich foundations for how we understand local initiatives in combining art today.

the authors of combining art activating potential of commons in art distinguish combining art or transforming the inner mechanics of art-making how we divide labor make decisions handle conflicts and care for one another From Art for the Commons and Art as Commons.

While Art for the Commons refers to art that raises awareness about public or political issues, Art as Commons views creative expression as a shared heritage belonging to everyone, rather than private property behind copyright or paywalls.

Mapping Asian Thought on European Concepts of Care To think through this, I found curator Ileana Fukianaki's concepts of the collective of care incredibly useful.

She breaks care down into three dimensions, responsibility, pleasure, and cure.

Ruin, he says, is the destination toward which all men rush.

Now, obviously, the tragedy to Commons is not just about sheep.

It's a threat.

Whatever the smart strategy for each reasonable person separately is not the best strategy for all reasonable people together.

Nathaniel needs this.

Whether we can find the will and the wisdom to work our way as communities out of the trap of the tragedy of the commons has everything to do with the world that Nathaniel is going to live in and grow old in.

Cedar Rapids Commons hangs by a thread.

And on that very same thread hangs the future of my grandson.

Uh, what, what's this community they're called?

This community is called the Sacred Commons.

Mm-hmm.

With the idea that like, you know, in Europe, the commons is like the place where everyone would come to bring their animals to graze and stuff like that.