Up to 30 million people will take to the streets and parks, with no one calling the cops. Indeed, local police departments help organize this evening of block parties, neighborhood festivals and music performances. The idea is that when people step out of their homes to meet the neighbors, communities are safer. People who know one another are more likely to work together to prevent crime in their community.

For most people, neighborhoods are a form of the commons that is most familiar. Nearly every one of us lives in one, and they are important to our lives whether we realize it or not. If your home is burglarized while you’re away, it’s your neighbor who calls the police. Even more likely, your neighbor’s presence strolling down the sidewalk or keeping on her porch light discourages hoods from breaking in at all.

That’s why police want to mobilize the power of the commons for fight crime. Spending many years out on the streets, they have come to understand that government and the private sector can only do so much to assure public safety. A lot depends on people themselves, working together in informal but powerful ways to protect their community from violence, theft and vandalism.

But crime is only one of many serious problems that can be effectively addressed at the level of the neighborhood commons. So can issues related to the environment, economic decline, and social alienation.

All of us are more likely to pitch in on causes that affect our own backyard. Destruction of the rainforest upsets us, but a threat to beloved trees a few blocks away will get us off the sofa to circulate petitions, organize protests and negotiate with the folks wielding chainsaws.

And when we can see the direct effects of our actions, we are much more likely to stay involved and broaden our focus from local to global issues. Saving the trees in our neighborhood can inspire us to save the rainforest, too.

The notion of the neighborhood as an important social institution might seem old-fashioned (as is the idea of the commons itself) to some, like nostalgic memories of the corner soda fountain. Yet it’s actually as up-to-date as an internet café, where you find people communicating with New Zealand and Morocco at their laptops but also striking up conversations with someone at the next table.

The mark of the 21st century person is to step out into the world on one foot but have the other squarely planted in his or her community. Even as our intellectual and economic horizons expand, the local community is still where we lead our lives, where our toes touch the ground, where everybody knows our name. Being rooted in the neighborhood of your choice (which may be far from the neighborhood where you grew up) offers not just comfort but a prime opportunity to make a difference in the world.

When you add up the people all over the world who are working to change things in their own neighborhoods—the results are impressive:

• In Porto Alegre, Brazil, (population 1.3 million), local officials enlist the wisdom of neighborhood residents in figuring out how to best apportion their tax money. Citizens gather in neighborhood assemblies to decide what’s needed in their part of town, and then elect representatives to advise the city council on budget priorities. This “participatory budget” has been credited with lowering unemployment, improving sanitary conditions and revitalizing Porto Alegre’s poor neighborhoods. More than 1,200 cities across the world have now adopted the idea.
• A group of frustrated neighbors in Delft, Netherlands, finally took action about autos speeding down their street. They dragged old couches and tables into the middle of the road, strategically arranging them so that motorists could still pass—but only if they drove slowly. The police eventually arrived and had to admit that this scheme, although clearly illegal, was a good idea. Soon the city was installing its own devices to slow traffic, and the idea of traffic calming was born—an innovative solution that used across the globe to make streets safer.

• Grandmothers at the Yesler Terrace public housing project in Seattle drove drug dealers from their community by camping out in lawn chairs at street corners notorious for crack traffic. They simply sat there knitting, and the dealers soon cleared out, proving that frail old grannies willing to speak up for their neighborhood can sometimes accomplish more than cops in squad cars.

Neighborhood activism is often cast as a narrow, even selfish pursuit. People are starving in Africa, critics charge, and you’re obsessed with starting a farmer’s market! But that ignores two of our chief assets for social change in the 21st century.

1. Thanks to our amazing global communications networks no good idea stays local for long.

2. And when a citizens group or social movement is infused with the spirit of the commons, they naturally make the connection to similar efforts elsewhere.

There’s no better time in history, as the old saying goes, to think locally and act globally.

This article is based upon research for The Great Neighborhood Book, a guidebook of practical ideas and success stories from around the world created with Project for Public Spaces

Enjoying the pleasures of a mixed-use neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Photo by Ethan Kent/Project for Public Spaces

These zoning codes also represent a direct assault on long traditions of the commons. From the town pump and market squares of the Old World to Main Streets and corner business districts in North American. cities, communities are enlivened by local gathering spots where people can meet one another while shopping or running errands. Such places provide the common ground out which the life of community grows.

The legacy of these misguided zoning laws is that today many communities are alarmingly dull— with no place to go, nothing to do, and no one to see. But more and more people are coming to appreciate the advantages of being able to shop and work the same place they live—especially now that most workplaces and stores are far more benign than at the height of the industrial age.

As anxiety mounts about worsening congestion, proliferating sprawl, rising gas prices, global warming and our expanding waistlines, it only makes sense to arrange our lives so we can meet many of our daily needs without climbing into a car. That was the natural pattern of human settlement throughout history until about 1950.

All great neighborhoods the world over function as villages, which means a place where many of our basic needs—a grocery, a school, a café, a hardware store, a park, a childcare center, a transit stop and perhaps an ice cream shop, library or video store—are within a short stroll of home. Look around your own town, and you’ll find that neighborhoods with these qualities are usually the most desirable places to live.

One trend helping improve our cities is that local shopping districts are springing back to life. What were once soda fountains and haberdasheries, and later vacant storefronts or makeshift apartments, are now restaurants and shops once again. Entrepreneurs, many of them recent immigrants or young people, are leading this charge to revitalize commercial streets in inner cities and inner suburbs coast-to-coast. But these entrepreneurs depend on the help of local citizens, as customers and as advocates. Often it’s necessary for the neighbors to turn up at zoning hearings or for neighborhood leaders to lobby the city council to overturn regulations that stand in the way of community revitalization.

There are many archaic laws that prohibit the kitchen expansion necessary to turn an old delicatessen into a new bakery, or that demand a bookstore provide a parking lot even though the vast majority of its customers walk there. These kind of out-of-date laws can be a huge deterrent to the revitalization of urban neighborhoods, and it’s important for neighbors to pull together to fight them.

A prime place to see this trend in action is Brooklyn, which once took a definite back seat to the dazzling excitement of Manhattan. But no more. Stroll down the commercial streets of the borough today and you’ll encounter a cornucopia of ethnic restaurants, bistros and boutiques alongside the locally-owned groceries and taverns that have always been these neighborhoods’ lifeblood.

The same goes here in Minneapolis where I live. Coffee shops, vintage clothing stores and funky gift shops have popped up in corner business districts across town. At first these business owners had to work hard to get variances from zoning laws to open up for business—and I logged quite a few hours at planning meetings speaking out in favor of their existence. There was an old guard around town that thought the best, safest neighborhoods were strictly residential with no shops in sight and no people populating the sidewalks. But those days are long gone. Nowadays people in Minneapolis couldn’t imagine life in without their local coffee shop down the street.

This is adapted from the Great Neighborhood Book(New Society Publishers).

I lament this ongoing loss of the cultural commons. Once more, when times are bad and the potential pot of contributed dollars shrinks, the arts are dying on the vine. However, it is not the economy that needs fixing—but the arts system that is dependent upon and trapped in a tenuous relationship with it.

Christina Baldwin (Carmen) © 2003 Michal Daniel

We need a vital arts sector. Artists are symbol creators who tell stories and create images that bring meaning to our lives. They show us beauty and evil. Through metaphor and narrative they expose and challenge the status quo. They have the courage to speak of unspeakable wrongs. They express what is complex, controversial, contested and timeless. And they also have the ability to help us envision a better world.

Yet here are the economic pressures placed on arts groups today and it is no wonder they falter. Cut staff. Trim expenses. Do more with less. Earn more income. Diversify your contributed income. Hone your brand identity. Target your audience. Get out there and “sell” corporate sponsorships. And in the meantime you better know how to comply with the IRS, foundation guidelines and state and local tax rules. The business side of the arts grows fat to keep up with all this complicated revenue raising and reporting while the creative side grows thin. Seasoned and wannabe arts workers fork out tuition for colleges and universities that offer degrees in “arts administration.” Service organizations hold filled-to-capacity workshops on donor relations and audience development—as if there is some secret to prosperity that the professionals know. If only we were in on it we could roll in the dough.

How long can we continue to erode the base and tinker with the system of (non)support for the symbol makers, the truth tellers, and the seers among us? Whenever the economy goes south so do government and private funds for artistic work, never to return to previous levels. Economist Ann Markusen, in her studies of the arts labor force, art centers and regional economies has shown the significant “arts dividend” reaped by arts rich communities. However, the sector depends on discounted labor by artists. The human capital they invest, by working other jobs to support their creative work, is never fully compensated. Flagship institutions’ costs, both the bricks and mortar and their ongoing operations, might be adequately supported by civic and philanthropic sources with the Herculean efforts of elaborate and specialized staff. However the community dividend doesn’t make it into the pocket of most artists—most certainly not the edgy, the grassroots, the hard to define or the locally based ones.

Theatre de la Jeune Lune – FISHTANK – Conceived by Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, and Dominique Serrand, Created and performed by Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, Dominique Serrand, and Jennifer Baldwin Peden, February 16 – March 22, 2008. Photo © 2008 Michal Daniel

In a report on the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, City Pages, a Minneapolis/Saint Paul arts and entertainment weekly, says “[artistic director] Dominique Serrand’s eyes widen in consternation when he describes how administration-heavy arts organizations have become, with the grinding apparatus of raising donations essentially becoming a monster that feeds on itself.”

Theatre de la Juene Lune is a groundbreaking Minneapolis based theater troupe—not your average regional repertory company. Founded in France in 1978 by Parisians Dominique Serrand and Vincent Gracieux and Minneapolis native Barbra Berlovitz, they began by splitting the season between countries. Minneapolitans Robert Rosen and Stephen Epp joined later and eventually the group settled permanently here in 1985. They created significant new works and unique adaptations of contemporary and classic plays. Known for originality, humor, razor sharp satire and a tempestuous creative process, they are a zany, zesty, very serious artist collaborative of stature. Of course they had their financial ups and downs. The scuttlebutt about money trouble was there on and off, especially after they stuck their necks out to buy and renovate a large warehouse space. The plays, however, were consistently first rate. American theater is much the richer for their existence. Now the building is up for sale. The staff is laid off. And a few board volunteers are left to pay off debts and close the operation down.

This system of nonprofit arts organizations dependent on contributed support is an invention of the 20th Century. In Industrial America the non-amateur arts were commercial proprietorships and/or patron supported—mostly homegrown. Artists could make a modest if perhaps second class living performing, teaching, touring, composing, conducting, publishing or otherwise selling their work.

Times changed. Popular art and fine art parted ways with popular art mainly following the commercial path of new technologies like sound recording, film, television and the entertainment business. The era of private, tax deductible and government subsidy for museums, orchestras, dance companies and the like began. The beast called the arts grant, initiated to grow the “high art” sector, started big time with the Ford Foundation in the 1950s, followed thereafter by a flood of other foundations, corporations and government agencies looking to invest, leverage and increase output of arts organizations. The National Endowment for the Arts (a Kennedy Administration idea to propel the country into a position of world class cultural prominence) began in 1965 and seeded a network of state and local government grant makers focused as the Ford Foundation was on leveraging other contributions and growing the arts infrastructure.

The nonprofit arts sector (indeed all nonprofits) grew exponentially—for many reasons including the baby boom, societal changes like embracing free expression, and a good economy. Three side effects of all this philanthropy and taxpayer benevolence run deep in the current nonprofit arts system and are evident in the final story of Theatre de la Jeune Lune and many others.

One, the spread of the arts grants phenomenon started the professionalization of both the grant giving and the grant getting. In the past (and still sometimes today) an arts patron would support an individual artist or group of artists in a personalized way. Patrons and artists found each other somehow. No “development department” or “grants officers” needed. A proprietor of one’s own arts concern was unfettered with regulations and reporting. Not so in the nonprofit world today. Getting and managing contributions is hard work.

Two, labor and art products were devalued even further than before. Arts offerings for the public exploded but the growth was and continues to be dependent on the willingness of individuals (with the exception of a few “stars”) to work for a fraction of the worth of their labor and sell their goods for a fraction of their cost.

Three, the hole in contributed support that was to be filled by leveraging Ford Foundation-style and NEA matching grants never manifested to the degree needed to support a full grown sector. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not, like a shell game—turn over the shell and look for the coin. Ooops. Guess not. Now we are hooked and just keep playing the game.

Some people apply a supply and demand model and say the attrition of nonprofit groups during tough times is a necessary adjustment. We have all heard someone sometime say: “ if these artists can’t earn enough from their work then nobody wants it and they should just give up.” This free market logic denies the intangible, priceless value of the arts to society. It perpetuates the abuse of human capital that artists contribute to keep art alive and available. And it provides little or nothing to effectively replenish the collective well of human creativity.

We are at a crossroads of the commons today in many ways, including the arts. We have ourselves to blame if, complicit in our martyrdom and blind in our ignorance of the systemic flaws, we continue to claw for the same resources in the same old way. The economy has failed the arts, not vice versa. There is more dying to come.

Again from the City Pages article: “Our mistake was flirting with the existing system. It backfired,” he [Serrand] says. “What we need to do at a national level, if we want to have artists and real art, is look at the system. We’d be better off taking a portion of taxes and public money to fund art. Because the amount of bureaucracy that it takes to fundraise for an organization is a gigantic effort. And it takes away from the work, from the purpose of the work, and the results. Nationally right now the business is more important than the art, and that’s wrong.”

If we don’t start treating the arts differently who will be the risk takers and visionaries tomorrow? Many young people don’t see themselves following their elders’ footsteps into the enclave of the nonprofit arts—too much work for too little reward and they aren’t falling for it. Plus the division between commercial, entertainment, pop culture and the nonprofit arts seems arbitrary to them. In fact some don’t see a division at all. They move freely between both kinds of venues as musicians, spoken word, media and visual artists taking advantage of whatever opportunity they find in their quest to express themselves. Life, art, streaming music, hanging out at a street front gallery and YouTube meld together for them. I find such young people to be hopeful harbingers of change.

Theatre de la Jeune Lune – Amerika, Or the Disappearance – inspired by Kafka, originally produced with the American Repertory Theatre, text by Gideon Lester, adapted for Jeune Lune by Steven Epp and Dominique Serrand, featuring Sarah Agnew, Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, Luverne Seifert and Suzanne Warmanen. Photo copyright 2006 Michal DANIEL

The creators of the nonprofit theater organization formerly known as Theatre de la Jeune Lune give me hope also. They are aware of a system crumbling of its own weight around them and ready to start again in a new way. Here are the farewell remarks from their website:

Starting today, we begin imagining a new way of working. What should a theatre-generating organization of the 21st Century look like? How can artists create truly groundbreaking art in a fast changing world? Times have changed and so have we. Building upon our artistic legacy, and facing a different future, we are exploring ways to reinvent an agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre with a new name. One that can embrace the concentric circles of artists we have worked with over the years. Together we will create essential and innovative theatre for today’s changing audience. It’s an exciting new journey and we hope you’ll join us with your support, with your presence, with your belief. Fear not: the art is alive and coming soon to a theatre near you. Keep in touch.

****
Notes: For an overview of the rise of the nonprofit arts see “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era” by John Kriedler. This 1996 article is available to download from In Motion magazine

Many thanks to Professor Ann Markusen at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs for introducing me to a world of research and scholarly writing about the arts economy. She opened my eyes to the big picture.

Thank you to Theresa Sweetwater, Artistic Director of Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, and soon-to-be new mom, for discussing and working through this theme with me.

Thank you to Mankwe Ndosi, Marcus Young, and Rachel Breen for back and forth dialogue also.

CC license NC, SA by wYnand! from Flickr

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

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

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

This idea is shocking on two counts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information:

carbonfarmersofamerica

carboncoalition

soilcarboncoalition

managingwholes

amazingcarbon

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

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

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

Roadside vendors on the island of Dominica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC license, ND, NC by The Voice of Eye http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturesubculture/325861306/sizes/o/

Climate Change and the Social Contract

I am sorry to say that I am about to confirm my marginal status in the economics profession by digging into a most unpleasant aspect of the already far too scary matter of climate change. I am going to consider why climate change will inevitably shred the contemporary American social contract – that evolving mix of markets and violence that creates knowledge and wealth, billionaires and prisoners, opportunity and social death in ways that fascinate and horrify the rest of humanity. I want to explain why climate change will force the United States, and every other market society, to abandon the practice of creating disposable classes of persons whose primary function is to serve as blood and bone buffers who absorb the risks of life at the cost of their bodies and souls. I am suggesting that the market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the inspirational twin intellectual dynamos of the profession for the past three decades or more, will soon slip into oblivion because climate change will push all of us to understand that unlimited capitalism is, in the end, inextricably connected to the disposability of human beings.

First, climate change destroys market fundamentalism by showing why market based inequalities necessarily lead to hierarchies of pleasure and suffering where the well-off regularly sacrifice the well-being and lives of the poor and vulnerable. Second, climate change poses such severe collective risks to societies that polities must explicitly choose whether to reorient national and local economic policy in ways that share these risks in an egalitarian manner or to deliberately shift these risks to the bottom of society, even at the cost of escalating the degree low-intensity civil conflict by broadening the American race/poverty/prison complex beyond the hard black/white color boundary.

Consider the by now well known and ominous predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change that changing weather patterns and rising sea levels will destroy the lives and livelihood of millions of poor people in Asia, Africa and Latin America. 1

Many analysts and activists from threatened societies have noted, with great politeness given the dire nature of the forecast, that the rich world of Europe, North America and Northeast Asia, which grew rich by emitting the vast bulk of the greenhouse gases that are raising the Earth’s temperature, is now imposing the costs of filthy production methods on the world’s weakest people. Citizens of the rich world can hardly deny these facts – try as they might – nor can they justly object to billions of people seeking to become rich themselves by following the same dirty road to wealth in the absence of an explicit transnational deal about how to share the world’s atmosphere in ways that avert, or at least minimize, the climate crisis.

The public in the rich world will soon have to face up to the fact that its wealth has been purchased at a vast human cost as well as choose whether or not to resist changing their methods of production and habits of consumption in the interest of reducing the mortality and morbidity they impose on the rest of the world. In other words, the hierarchy of pleasure and suffering on a global scale is slowly becoming quite plain to citizens in rich societies, just as their willingness to either accept or resist change will soon tell the world whether fighting or negotiation will be the mechanism for allocating the right to use high concentrations of GHG’s to drive the growth of national wealth. The danger for market fundamentalism is crystal clear: once citizens of rich societies realize that they have purchased their well-being at the expense of the lives and well-being of others living far away, they may become curious about whether this system of pleasure and suffering exists closer to home. Imagine what would happen to white middle class America’s faith in markets if enough of them were to honestly ask if their pleasures required the suffering of others in their country?

Why Philosophy Matters for the Economics of Climate Change

We must dig a bit deeper into the logic of market fundamentalism to expose the radically destructive core of this doctrine that somehow became synonymous with liberty.

The central claim of the Hayekian vision is that a just society is one that treats all of its members equally with regard to the rule of law by specifically disavowing redistributive policies that would transfer resources from the rich to the poor or from the strong to the vulnerable. Justice is concerned with establishing a system of rules that respects each person’s freedom – especially how owners choose to make use of their property – without discriminating in favor of any particular person, group, region, race or set of purposes. Therefore, both the free market system, especially the distribution of economic benefits and burdens generated by markets, are just so long as these are the result of the unregulated activity of self-interested parties. Since the results of competition are the unintended outcome of market activity rather than the goal of any particular person or group, the pattern of rewards and suffering, including the allocation of risks, may be unfortunate but cannot be unjust. By contrast, public policies that attempt to alter the outcomes of market processes by either redistributing resources or by deliberately altering the balance between the costs and benefits of economic activity so as to encourage some actions while discouraging others are necessarily unjust. 2

This elevation of Pareto Optimality from the status of an observation about the nature of tradeoffs in market economies under very restrictive conditions to a quasi-ethical bar to all forms of redistribution has become the de facto standard by which economic policies are judged in my country and around the world over the past thirty years. While almost no government actually follows the Hayekian injunction against public action in economic matters – except to justify regressive policies that injure poor and working people while favoring elites – the market fundamentalist vision has so reshaped policy discourse that there is now a presumption against acting on behalf of poor and vulnerable people unless such actions benefit the non-poor as well. While we can all think of a few public policy moves that can improve the well-being of everyone is society, most policies are inherently redistributive to the extent that these impose costs on the better off members of society while delivering benefits to the worse off. Modern public policy discourse has recast the Hayekian bar to redistributive policy as a “universalist” policy standard that seeks to raise the well-being of all persons and groups in society in the interest of avoiding social conflict – this in a market society where (hopefully) nonviolent fighting via prices, quantities and technological change is the source of both wealth and poverty.

Amartya Sen has taught us, with grace, humor and the infinite gentleness of a teacher conveying a most difficult and upsetting lesson, that the fatal flaw in the Hayekian project is its elevation of an exceedingly limited number of formal rights over substantive capabilities to exercise these same rights. 3 Sen’s point in the context of climate change takes on an especially lethal character: the market fundamentalist’s concern with property rights insists that society refrain from protecting its weakest members from climate risks because such actions are inherently redistributive and unjust on their face. So when the City of New Orleans warned its citizens that Katrina was coming, and urged everyone to leave, it had more than done its Hayekian duty. Further, the city, state of Louisiana and the Federal government were under no obligation to help the city’s poorest residents to escape because any such action would have required the use of resources gained via an ever so mildly progressive tax system that injured the well-being of high income and wealthy citizens for the benefit of poor people.

By contrast, Sen’s capability approach to justice insists that government must not only respect all persons by promoting equal treatment before the law as well as refraining from favoring one set of private projects over others, but that society is obliged to make sure that its members are capable of exercising rights on a roughly equal basis if rights are have any substantive meaning. So, any substantive view of freedom-as-capability would insist that governments guarantee that all citizens have an equal chance of escaping disasters, including redistributive actions providing the poor with publicly provided means to leave New Orleans as Katrina bore down on the region.

But Sen’s analysis of freedom-as-capability exposes the brutal heart of the Hayekian vision by showing why the latter is not only indifferent to the capability of citizens to exercise their rights, but indeed requires that a perhaps sizeable portion of the community be barred from becoming capable. Freedom-as-capability is, like Rawls theory of justice, an analysis of the nature and content of justice in a liberal society. 4

One of the requirements of a really free society is that its members be capable of exercising their freedom by being granted access to crucial developmental resources in childhood – like health care, education, nutrition, personal safety, parental care or at least care by adults in conditions of affection and commitment (if possible) and other essential goods. Societies that regularly and deliberately fail to invest in the human capital of the children of the poor or members of outcast groups are systematically destroying the capability of future adult citizens to exercise their freedoms. Also, societies that regularly and deliberately neglect the development needs of the children of the poor or outcasts are also creating ether castes who will themselves be unable to provide for themselves or their children on their own, or to defend themselves and their children from the animus of the larger or richer community.

Philosopher Harry Brighouse reminds us that parents are only the first among many adults who share ethical responsibility for the development of the young since communities are to be judged by how well or how badly they fulfill their stewardship role vis-à-vis children as future free citizens. 5 Malignant societies that regularly and deliberately cripple the capacity of some of their younger members to grow into self-reliant and economically competent adults – like New Orleans, the state of Louisiana and the Federal government by virtue of each government’s high tolerance for and in many case active participation in the well documented racial discrimination in jobs, education, housing and medical care afflicting black New Orleans – create social classes that are incapable of protecting themselves from even the most obvious harms, to the point where they are too poor to leave a region on the brink of destruction.

The foregoing remarks suggest that a really free society will, at a minimum, do all it can to make sure that its weakest members are capable of exercising their rights, including their right to survive harm by having means of escape. Of course, a decent and free society will do much more than make sure that all of its members are capable enough to escape oncoming disaster. The facts of human development recommend a substantial degree of redistribution in the interest of developing a non-trivial level of economic capability for all citizens, at least enough so that someone can pay for a bus ticket to get themselves and their families out of town when a hurricane is on the way. 6

Sen’s move beyond procedural to substantive justice extends far beyond the predatory character of the Hayekian project by insisting that equal value of lives – as a nexus of embodied rights and capacities contained in human beings – is the object of liberal statecraft, not the equal treatment of persons as abstract bearers of an extremely spare slate of rights whose physical survival is of no importance.

Climate Change and the Common Good

Climate change will, in time, push even the most market-obsessed societies to see the ethical and practical sense of Sen’s analysis of freedom, discrediting the Hayekian nightmare as the radical, nearly predatory mantra of a dangerous cult. But will the close of the Hayekian system have any practical impact on public policies for dealing with the costs of climate change – beyond the considerable benefits of so marginalizing market fundamentalism that sensible redistributive policies can be developed and implemented? The following remarks consider two areas – insurance in risky regions and how society might price greenhouse gas emissions – where the freedom-as-capability approach to economic policy and climate change can shape practical policies in important ways.

The vexing problem of climate and insurance along the Gulf coast of the US offers a chance to test the practical utility of freedom-as-capability. The best work on climate change suggests that structural change in the climate system will impose severe common risks to life, health and property over large populations, such large risks that markets will shy away from providing affordable insurance to middle class populations who could once count on being able to protect themselves. Professor Kunreuther’s piece on the opinion page of the New York Times this past August put the point quite starkly: private insurers will not be able to provide affordable property and liability insurance for homeowners and businesses. Kunreuther suggested that the federal government make flood insurance mandatory for all property owners – particularly home and apartment owners, as well as all local governments managing public housing units. 7 Further, the National Flood Insurance Program should set premiums based on actuarially sound calculations of losses, without any regional cross-subsidies. Kunreuther also suggested that the resulting substantial increase in the cost of owning a home be partly offset by a well-designed subsidy program that cushioned the blow for low to moderate income homeowners.

Kunreuther’s proposal is an example of how to “get the prices right” in the matter of pricing risk along the Gulf Coast without barring low and middle class home ownership along the Gulf. Yet, this sensible proposal, which is sure to be resisted by realtors, contractors, mortgage brokers and all others in the Gulf region with a keen interest in building and selling homes – but not necessarily in protecting moderate income homeowners – does not take adequate account of the brutal logic of dependence and domination inherent in market inequality. Many thousands, perhaps millions of poor people living in dreadful conditions will still flock to the Gulf region, and any region facing disaster risk, because living under the threat of disaster is still their best alternative. Decent market societies will find a way to prevent local enterprises from exploiting poor populations by exposing them to climate risks from which better off citizens are protected – especially undocumented populations pushed into risk by poverty and their lack of papers.

One viable approach might be to incorporate the vulnerability of poor people into the risk pricing mechanism. Contemporary computational economics and actuarial science are as capable of estimating the risks that climate change poses to the lives and well being of the uninsured as the risks facing the insured – but do not for obvious reasons. The National Flood Insurance Program as well as other agencies in the federal government should first calculate the frequency and severity of property and human losses that extreme weather poses to poor people and then impose an insurance surcharge on both wind and flood premiums that reflects the vulnerability of poor people to weather risks. At a minimum, the proceeds from this “poverty weather risk tax” should accumulate in a special fund, managed by regional consortia monitored by the Federal government, which can be used to finance investments in infrastructure that increase the weather security of the poorest residents in an area.

This policy would accomplish three goals. First, it would force all property owners to take account of extreme weather risks as they make location and business decisions on the basis of prices that accurately reflect near and longer-term losses. Second, these policies price an important but neglected negative externality – the exposure of vulnerable poor and outcast populations to weather risk – flowing from the self-interested behavior of consumers, producers and governments in societies with high degrees of economic inequality. Third, a sharp and permanent increase in the price of insurance in more risky relative to less risky regions would force local and regional governments to invest in and maintain water and weather infrastructure as a condition of economic survival in a competitive national and global economy.

There is little doubt that local elites and their publics will object to the proposed regulations because this portfolio of policies will so raise the cost of doing business in risky regions that population centers will move to safer ground. Indeed, the policy portfolio offered above is distinctly anti-populist to the extent that beautiful shorelines in risky areas will become so expensive that only the rich can afford to pay to protect themselves from disaster – so long as an anti-tax, anti-government ethos limits public investments in protective capital capable of providing real climate security for large populations of middle income and poor people. Yet, economic reason and the principle of the equal worth of citizens compel the federal government to impose an expensive regime of market-based risk pricing, large-scale infrastructure investment and tough building codes on localities and states all too willing to allow racial animus and economically illiterate forms of greed to result in large concentrations of vulnerable persons and property. Rare though it may be, this is one instance where government policies can promote both equality and efficiency by “getting the prices right” and forcing communities to address the ways that ordinary business activity and racial/class fighting expose the most vulnerable populations to dangerous weather. Above all, the federal government can never again allow nor assist local concentrations of power and hatred bent on using natural disasters as mechanisms for racial “cleansing.” 8

Solidarity and Carbon
Most economists agree that the best way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is to assign a price to GHGs that reflects the current and future environmental and social costs of this atmospheric filth. At present, the useful debate between those who favor imposing a carbon tax and others favoring a “cap and trade” system is inspiring excellent work on the connection between economic activity, GHGs and the environmental costs thereof. For instance, a recent working paper by Professor James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts estimates both the connection between the distribution of income and the resulting burden that families place on the environment as well as the increase in costs that families across the income spectrum must bear once GHGs are priced. 9 Boyce’s findings include the unsurprising observation that higher income families generate higher levels of carbon and other GHG emissions (though this “demand” for GHGs appears to be slightly income inelastic) as well as the more surprising estimate that the average family will see their costs rise about $1,500 per year if GHGs prices were set at $200 per metric ton. Needless to say, this underscores the fact that pricing carbon and other GHGs will surely cut into the living standards of all Americans, and especially families with modest incomes, thereby dampening whatever limited support the public may have for dealing with GHG emissions.

One way of handling with this matter – apart from the ongoing fuss over whether the nation should impose a tax or implement a cap and trade system to price GHGs – is for the receipts of GHG pricing to be recycled to families, either on a per person, per family or progressive basis. Boyce’s analysis suggests that such a policy of equal per family payments from GHG pricing will actually boost the real incomes of more than 60% of families, thereby reducing opposition to the policy of pricing GHGs on the grounds that this regressive tax will ultimately cut living standards. Note that distributing the receipts from GHG pricing on a per family or per capita basis takes a bit of the bite out of the usual Hayekian snarl against public policy – all families in exactly the same way, which is not the same thing as being treated equally – though a die hard might still complain that any form of GHG taxes is an affront to freedom.

One might think that the proceeds from pricing GHGs might best be applied to financing technological developments and investments in cleaner energy sources, thereby reducing the cost and increasing the pace of innovation as well as the transition to a low GHG economy. While a policy of recycling revenues in the form of subsidies to those enterprises investing in new technologies is better than nothing, it still offends against equality to the extent that it actually blunts the impact of pricing GHGs on polluter profits. Filthy production processes have generated a vast amount of wealth, in turn contributing the obscene rise in economic inequality that warps American life and is the source of so much avoidable suffering. It makes little sense to first impose costs on producers whose choice of technologies is the source of GHG emissions, only to then offer these same polluters a bribe to change their ways – a bribe which will in any case cushion the costs of GHG pricing on the returns to those who own filthy enterprises. The demands of distributive justice suggest that people should not be rewarded for doing what they are obligated to do by ethics and morality – there is no good reason for polluters to be rewarded for refraining from poisoning the planet in ways that threaten the lives and well-being of millions of poor people via climate change.

Also, the demands of retributive justice suggest that the owners of filthy enterprises whose actions have contributed the climate crisis should bear the costs of repairing the problem, thereby transforming a substantial portion of their ill-gotten gains into cleaner, safer technologies.

Restatement of Principles

Safety and equality are tightly connected in liberal democratic societies committed to the principle that all lives are of equal value and are therefore worthy of equal protection against extreme weather risk. The structural inequalities in economic opportunity, political power and social status that are the source of unequal exposure to weather risk must be corrected by forcing stratified societies to both recognize the role of markets, customs and raw political power in creating vulnerable populations, and force dominant social groups in these communities to extend the circle of protection to include all of the community’s members.

Notes
1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

2 Marcellus Andrews develops a detailed critique of Hayek’s formulation of justice under conditions of liberty as these are developed in Fredriech Hayek, in Andrews, “Liberty and Equality and Diversity?: Thoughts on Liberalism and Racial Inequality after Capitalism’s Latest Triumph?” in Race, Liberalism and Economics, edited by David Colander, Robert E. Prasch and Falguni Sheth (Ann Arbor, MI: University. of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 205-237. Hayek’s critique is in Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice: Volume Two of Law, Liberty and Legislation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

3 For evolving formulations of and support for this crucial point,
See Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-Examined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 31-56; “Equality of What?” in Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 307-330; and Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1998).

4 See John Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority”, in Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values, editor Stephen Darwall (Ann Arbor, MI: University. of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 105-189.

5 Harry Brighouse offers a powerful and creative analysis of social justice in the context of education that brushes past the usual constrictions of contemporary debate to open up new areas. For instance, Brighouse makes a convincing left-liberal social justice case in favor of Milton Friedman’s proposal for school vouchers, on the condition that all educational systems must enhance individual autonomy and equal educational opportunity. The first two chapters of the book contain a useful synthesis of the implications of liberal political theory for education and the rights of children that most economists – particularly those mesmerized by the Hayek/Friedman project – might want to consider in some detail. See Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

6 Avishai Margalit develops a harsh yet compelling theory of the ethics of public policy that is informed by the author’s sense that justice is a utopian and therefore hopeless ambition in the world as we now it. Instead, Margalit suggests that the best we can hope for in society is to craft collective institutions that do not require the humiliation of large numbers of persons or social groups – like the poor or racial outcasts – thereby limiting the extent to which the ordinary routines of economic and social life inflict injury on the weakest members of society. By this definition, there can be little doubt that markets under American economic and racial conditions are deeply humiliating institutions, not least in a situation like that facing thousands of New Orleans’ poorest citizens on August 29, 2005, where thousands of people were too poor to evade an oncoming hurricane. See Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

7 Howard Kunreuther’s proposal is summarized in a New York Times opinion piece, “Who Will Pay for the Next Hurricane?” August 25, 2007. A detailed analysis of the economics of compulsory natural disaster insurance as part of a comprehensive national natural disaster is developed by Kunreuther in “Has the Time Come for Comprehensive Natural Disaster Insurance?” in Daniels, Kettil and Kunreuther (2006). See also Kunreuther “Has the Time Come for Comprehensive Natural Disaster Insurance?” in On Risk and Disaster: Lessons From Hurricane Katrina, edited by Ronald Daniels, Donald Kettl, Donald and Howard Kunreuther (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 175-202; and “Linking Insurance and Mitigation to Natural Disaster Risk” in Handbook of Insurance, edited by Georges Dionne (Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 593-618.

8 In passing, one can almost hear the protests of the Friedmanians and Hayekians as they cry out against policies that end up costing jobs and depriving the most vulnerable people in society of economic “opportunity”. We are all so used to Chicago-esque pap about how regulations end up hurting the people they are supposed to help, in this case by boosting the cost of producing and living in regions exposed to extreme weather risk, that we fail to see the predation at the heart of this argument. The Chicago mantra against regulation in this instance, and in most instances, is not unlike the kidnapper who claims that the death of hostages is the responsibility of family members who refuse to submit to ransom demands. We would all object (or should object) to the claim that the death of hostages is the fault of those who refuse to pay ransom rather than the kidnapper. Similarly, the Chicago mantra is all too frequently an excuse by the strong to overlook their role in creating the lousy and frequently deadly roster of choices facing weak people. Policies that allow prices to “tell the truth” about climate risk may well reduce employment and growth in risky regions, as well as bar persons of moderate incomes from ocean views and the presumed benefits of the culture of the beach. Of course, another way to improve the well-being of poor people is to reduce their poverty directly – perhaps by forcing dominant castes and classes in society to invest in the capabilities of the weak on the principle that all citizens deserve genuine equal opportunities to achieve a good life. As the saying goes, “freedom isn’t free.”

9 James Boyce, “Cap and Dividend: How to Curb Global Warming While Protecting the Incomes of American Families,” Working Paper 150, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts (November 2007).

Tevereterno, multidisciplinary art project, Rome Italy, by Kristin Jones, photo by Mimmo Capone

It is perhaps an inescapable part of the human condition to “divide up the world” into mental categories. The categories may be immensely useful, but they are also partial and misleading. Philosopher and scientist Jacob Brownowski has described the process of science—the process by which we gain empirical knowledge—as that of decoding a “completely connected world.” This decoding requires dividing that completely connected world into what is relevant and what is not relevant to the matter at hand, in order to create a meaningful context for study.

But this division, Bronowski warned, does violence to the actual, organic nature of the real world. We must always bear in mind that we are “certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that [we] have made about dividing the world into the relevant and irrelevant is in fact a lie.” Thus, we must be careful of the actions we take as a result of our often-necessary world-dividing activities.

The creative personality, according to Bronowski—whether an artist or a scientist or an activist—is “one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change.” She understands that the world she paints or studies or acts on is but a fragment of a connected whole. The integrity and truth of her creative act—her survival in fact—depends upon operating and acting within the truth of that connection.

To the extent possible, then, our actions must arise out of an integral structure of consciousness, one that moves from the connections we are able to see—while bearing in mind that there are certainly connections we are not yet aware of. If we return to a linear way of thinking, one that ignores the completely connected world, as Brownowski warns, we will get it wrong. Alas, we frequently do.

The Commons and Integrative Thinking
To me, the commons provides an overarching organizing principle that can help begin to heal some of the artificial divisions that we have imposed upon the world and ourselves. It is a conceptualization that can help us create the world we want to live in. It is consistent with the emergence of an integral structure of consciousness, a way of thinking that is fundamentally connected and relational.

Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who studies memory and how it works, has said, “It took us a year to realize what should have been obvious from the start: the cellular mechanics of learning and memory reside not in the special properties of the neuron itself, but in the connections it receives and makes with other cells in the neuronal circuit to which it belongs.”

His point is that memory exists only within a field of relationship. Solitary, disconnected neurons, isolated from the larger system of the brain, could not be the repositories of memory. Memory, Kandel realized—and I would extend this to consciousness itself—exists not in a place, but in the connections. Memory, consciousness itself, seems to be a sort of personal commons.

Our “personal commons,” in turn, blend into the memories of everyone else, giving rise to a kind of cultural commons. The “commons” refers to all the things that we inherit and create jointly for universal use. They are the things that we inherit or create that we must protect for the benefit of generations to come. The commons include gifts of nature like topsoil, biodiversity, DNA, the sun, the wind, oceans and rivers. They include civic and social inventions like roads, museums, blood banks, sidewalks, medicine, jazz and social insurance. The commons includes many inventions of the mind and culture, too, such as mathematics, democratic governance, law, languages and art and jokes.

These lists are merely suggestive, not exhaustive. To function as commons, resources must be accessible to everyone in a defined community, and governed with fairness and the future in mind. A resource should be treated as a commons if it belongs to all of us—which itself may be an important moral and political question.

There is a functional reason for treating something as a commons, too. To privatize a resource and treat it as capital or sell it in the market—a process often called “enclosure”—can impede the liveliness of a resource and limit its evolution and development. Too much development can destroy an ecosystem; too much copyright protection can shut down the sharing and re-use that creates culture; too many patents can thwart new scientific research.

Not everything comprises the commons in the most encompassing sense. But those things that are essential to our existence—physically, spiritually, and intellectually—certainly belong in the commons. Natural resources and realms of knowledge, for example, need to be treated as shared wealth available to all. Enclosing these resources is not only inequitable, it is ultimately self-defeating because it can imperil their physical or cultural survival, and preclude the possibility of their evolving or adapting.

This is perhaps a good analytical tool for helping evaluate whether a given resource should be managed as a commons: Does enclosure destroy the sustainability of a resource? Even if we ignore this rather extreme standard, rules for collectively managing and sharing resources are needed to ensure that they can remain open and available now and in the future.

The meaning of ownership of cultural expression has become quite complex in recent years. The art world, for example, is hotly debating the ethical rules for acquiring, owning and exhibiting antiquities. Who is the proper owner of a work—a museum that once “discovered” and seized an ancient sculpture or vase, or the modern nation-states that now represent the people who live where a long-deceased civilization once flourished?

Another example of disputed ownership is The Grey Album, by DJ Danger Mouse, a remix album that took a multitude of unauthorized samples from the Beatles’ White Album and combined them with rap lyrics from Jay-Z’s Black Album. EMI, copyright holder of the Beatles’ albums, ordered Danger Mouse to cease distributing the album (though it continues to be available on the Web). Yet the creative achievement of The Grey Album is undeniable; it was hailed by critics as one of the best albums of the year even though it was totally illegal to distribute it.

Of course, artists have a right to protect their works and to sell them. And people have a right to own art and display it in their homes. But there are inevitably tensions when we put a culturally significant artwork into a tight envelope of private property rights—because the vitality and meaning of any artistic work inheres in it being part of a larger culture.

Consider the social significance of a painting like Picasso’s Guernica. It would be a wonderful thing to own, and the law certainly sanctions its private ownership. But the power and significance of that painting comes from its installation in a public place, the United Nations. The image affects countless thousands of people, and is a constant reminder to the people charged with creating a peaceful world of the horrors of war.

Artworks that Point to the Commons
I would argue that we need a continuum of laws and ethical rules for determining what should be available to all—and what should be legally sanctioned as private property to protect the artist’s economic and creative interests. But to make wise decisions—to take proper account of the commons—we need to understand how artworks are indispensable tools for helping us see the world whole. They can help us integrate our consciousness with emotions and insights beyond our immediate grasp. Artworks can be instruments for developing a commons consciousness.

A good example is a public art project called Tevereterno, which its creator, Kristin Jones, describes as “a multidisciplinary art project beginning in Rome: for the revival of rivers internationally.” As Jones describes the project on her website:

In the center of Rome, suspended between sky and water, a river arena beckons. This symbolic site, immersed in history yet isolated from the city, is the inspiration for visionary collaborative projects that bring artists and the public together for greater environmental awareness in the urban context.

TEVERETERNO (Eternaltiber) is a symbolic project, a resonant vision for rivers in an urban context. The City of Rome, where Western Civilization began, and its source the Tiber River, are the inspiration.

Motivated by the conviction that art is a potent catalyst for environmental awareness, TEVERETERNO aims to establish a vibrant river piazza: The Piazza Tevere.

Here innovative contemporary art will bring the river to life by drawing the public to a new experience of the Tiber. Each year, an evolving program will invite international artists to create site-specific, multi-disciplinary installations inspired by the river.

The vision is optimistic: it begins with a single drop of Tiber River water, and is founded in the hope for rivers worldwide.

Each year, an array of new multi-disciplinary projects spanning environmental, artistic, and educational interests will activate the river site. Invited participants will consider and interact with the context and dynamic elements (air, water, light, sound, stone) to create innovative works that transform the entire space. The public becomes an active participant; their experience is part of the work.

TEVERETERNO operates outside the traditional context of gallery, museum or theatre. Each program creates an intense, visceral experience of the present, amplified by the eternal flow of the river.

Jones did not set out to create art of the commons, and indeed, she never uses the word. But Tevereterno is a magnificent manifestation of a consciousness working from that place. Tevereterno exists in the commons because it is about engaging ordinary people to join in preserving a timeless piece of nature, the Tiber River, while invigorating their shared culture. The project uses classical motifs and images, particularly the she wolf, which is deeply embedded in the history and identity of Rome and Romans. The project is collaborative and interdisciplinary and it evolves over time.

Another fascinating conceptual work of art that grapples with the commons is Amy Balkin’s Public Smog. The idea of the piece is for the public to create “a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. The park is constructed through financial, legal, or political activities that open it for public use.” By purchasing and retiring emission offsets in regulated emissions markets, for example, the public can make the atmosphere inaccessible to polluting industries and help create “a park” in the air. Balkin writes on her website: “PUBLIC SMOG only exists through use and continual action. Passive use such as breathing is encouraged, as are activities for taking back the air. Add your ideas, events, or activities to the database by sending an email to: info@publicsmog.org.”

My own current project, A Catalog of Extinct Experience, is a collaborative multimedia installation about the experiences in the natural world that are extinct or becoming so. Seeing stars in the sky and being able to drink water directly from a stream are two examples. In our increasingly urbanized world, most kids have never felt dirt under their feet; they have never experienced a world not built almost entirely by human hands.

Such experiences provide an essential perspective on our place in the universe—on the one hand, how small we are, and on the other, an awareness of the significant consequences of our choices and actions. These experiences offer a visceral sense of the interdependent and interrelated nature of existence that is common to every human. They have been central to my own personal development, and should be available to others. It is my hope that The Catalog of Extinct Experience will catalyze the action necessary to re-integrate our bodies and our consciousness with nature, and in so doing, promote integrative thinking and a concern for the commons.

Integrative thinking—commons consciousness—is not only reflected in collaborative or environmentally oriented art. The paintings of Joy Garnett spring from such a place. Her paintings are based on photographs culled from the Internet, an artistic practice that has entangled her in copyright disputes and debates about the necessity of appropriation in creativity.

Garnett describes her work as depictions of “apocalyptic scenes that evoke romantic landscapes. My sources include military archives, journalistic photographs, tourist snapshots, scientific and pseudo-scientific artifacts, news images of current wars, and the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the recurring California wildfires. Pulled from their contexts and reinterpreted as paintings, the true implications of these images become more elusive. Completed in a single session, the paintings strike a visceral chord while examining the grey area between the mass media’s packaging of current events and the open-ended narratives of art.”

Garnett regards the re-contextualization of images as indispensable to revealing their meaning. But this practice has provoked at least one photographer, Susan Meiselas, to threaten legal action against Garnett for appropriating her copyrighted photographs. Again, the tension between property rights and the cultural commons is made manifest through art. (For more on the issues raised by artistic appropriation, see a blog post by artist Christopher Reiger at his blog, Hungry Hyena.

Emily Jacir has performed one of the more imaginative uses of art to emphasize our common humanity in the artificial and dangerous borders. Jacir asked Palestinians from around the world, “If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” She then used her American passport and its accompanying “freedom of movement” status to realize the desires of people who have limited or no access to their own nation.

Jacir’s exhibition documented the artist’s fulfillment of Palestinians’ requests in text, photography and video. The presentation is simple and straightforward: photographs of a visa denied, a family separated, a bill paid, an historic district obliterated. A text in Arabic and English records each request and its outcome. (Some requests have been impossible to fulfill).

There are undoubtedly many other artists whose work is helping to promote integrative thinking and commons consciousness. I think of the layered paintings of Julie Mehretu,, and,
the integrative expression of Andrea Zittel, and the imaginary maps of Benjamin Edwards. To me, these works seem to arise out of a consciousness of the commons.

Art and Our Mental Organization of the World
Whether making art or engaging in the practical, day-to-day work of social change, there are critical moments, and needless to say, this is one, where it is wise to step back and consider our work in the most capacious context. Massive global change is upon us—the already felt impacts of global climate change; the depletion of global fisheries; increased desertification in Africa; and the surge in immigration activism in the U.S. and Europe are but a few significant indicators.
Our responses to this must come from all social sectors and disciplines, and from all realms of human endeavor.