David Bollier

Isabel Carlisle is a leading figure in bioregional education and action who has a great term for describing the planetary eco- mayhem now underway -- “Gaia on the move.” As climate change intensifies and humankind disrupts ecosystems, Gaia is causing ice caps and glaciers to melt and the atmospheric jet stream to skitter and shift course. The Amazonian forest becoming a net emitter rather than absorber of atmospheric carbon 

As these system-changes disrupt local ecosystems, through coastal flooding for example, Carlisle sees cues for how to move forward. The disruptions “reveal where the fragility is,” said Carlisle, and that’s where to focus attention.

“By working into those points of fragility, we think we can flip them around and make them leverage points for change,” she said. “We can start to demonstrate the value of bioregioning and what it is.” 

Carlisle founded and now directs the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, England, in 2017. Over the past eight years, she and a modest team have taken a leading role in mobilizing bioregional action at practical, strategic, and policy levels. One sentence nicely captures the group’s mission: “We generate trust through partnership, resource others, lay out pathways for practical action, inspire and demonstrate.” 

The Bioregional Learning Center (BLC) is chiefly concerned with improving the resilience of its own regional ecosystem in southwest England. But it has also become an important node in the global network of bioregional activists. BLC hosted a major virtual conference on bioregioning in 2022, which helped re-energize a field of activism that had been somewhat dormant since its  heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. 

Most of us don’t give much thought to the arcane technical protocols that make the Internet and its various platforms work. Yet these invisible architectures of code profoundly affect how we can interact with others. They determine what sorts of information we can receive and even how our worldviews and identities are shaped.

Sometimes tech protocols empower us to govern ourselves as commoners and freely collaborate with each other. Think open source software, wikis, and collaborative websites. More typically, network protocols are used to create closed, proprietary corporate platforms that turn us into dependent consumers and victims of data-surveillance. 

To learn more about how network protocols can foster digital commoning, I recently talked with the activist-minded programmer Evan Henshaw-Plath, perhaps better known as Rabble (pronouns they and them). Rabble has long been a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and champion of decentralized, open technologies. Our conversation can be heard here, as Episode #65 of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning. (It is also posted on Rabble’s podcast, Revolution.Social.) 

What makes Rabble so interesting is their priorities as a programmer, which differ significantly from those of venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tech firms. Rabble’s ambitions are to build platforms that allow “everyone [to have] access to authentic, private online communities built on care, connection, and sustainable relationships.” 

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers.  Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results.

For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture:  legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South. 

To explore the current state of seed-sharing movement and its battles against proprietary seed, I spoke with Jack Kloppenburg  of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #63).  

As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1985 (he’s now a professor emeritus), Kloppenburg has been at the forefront of seed-sharing issues for forty years. His 1990 book, First the Seed, was a pioneering look at the political economy of plant biotechnology, a theme that he later explored in Seeds and Sovereignty, about the corporate capture of genetic resources. 

Fifteen years ago, the American group Shareable filled a huge void in public consciousness when it began reporting about creative forms of sharing. Its web magazine introduced people to tool libraries, mutual aid networks, food-sharing systems, “sharing cities,” social co-operatives, tiny houses, and other neglected forms of collaboration.

Based in the Bay Area, Shareable is a worker-directed “news and action hub” that, in its words, “promotes people-powered solutions for the common good.” Despite a fairly small staff, the nonprofit has been a catalytic force nationally in promoting commoning and progressive change.

Around 2018, however, Shareable became a victim of its own success in its reporting on commoning. Commercial news outlets stepped up their coverage of Shareable’s themes, expanding social awareness of organized cooperation (hooray) – but that mainstream attention also began to eclipse Shareable’s visibility as a changemaker (boo). Meanwhile, Google and Facebook revamped their digital algorithms to steer Internet users interested in sharing to more popular, mainstream websites, siphoning away a big chunk of Shareable’s followers.

These circumstances pushed Neal Gorenflo, Shareable’s then-executive director, Tom Llewellyn, then-partnerships director, and several staff and board members to realize: Maybe the most urgent priority should be to organize people.