Providing care to people in need is usually seen as supremely humane and ethical. But look more closely and you'll find that "care" is often a vehicle for self-serving social and political control. It's often considered acceptable to withhold care from people who don't have the "right" citizenship, skin color, cultural background, or gender identity, or who don't have money to buy the care they need.
For an illuminating deep dive on the politics of care, check out a new book, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press). I interviewed two of the co-authors -- Italian activist Valeria Graziano, now living in London, and Croatian activist Tomislav Medak -- in my latest Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #58). The third co-author is Croatian activist Marcell Mars, now living in Coventry, England.
Valeria Graziano and Tomislav Medak
Pirate Care is an omnibus term coined by the authors to describe acts of care that defiantly challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene in situations to show organized compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people.
In the process, they also aim to show how the state, markets and patriarchal families are the ones decided who is deserving of care, and on what terms. Certain types of care are seen as unpatriotic, a threat to business revenues, or unacceptably kind to marginalized people.
I've always been fascinated by the striking affinities between commoners and Indigenous peoples, as well as their significant differences. Both are keenly aware of life as a deeply relational phenomenon -- one that Western capitalism, science, and market culture don't really understand. Both see commoning as a baseline for mindful living and presence, a process that can help transform the world in positive directions.
And yet, while Western and Indigenous commoners share many values and practices, native cultures have subtle traditions and understandings that go back centuries, often millennia. They've grappled with some very different and dire challenges, including generations of horrific settler colonialism, genocide, and other traumas. Not surprisingly, Indigenous cultures are determined to reconstruct their cultures and, with the help of moderns willing to listen, heal the Earth.
So while ancient and modern commoners may share a disdain for capitalism, ancient wisdom traditions bring much more gravitas and insight to the challenges we face than, say, politicians and political parties. That's certainly hopeful because personal transformation and cosmological narratives can be catalytic and lead to much-needed, broader transformation. There's a need for new bridges between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. Humans will need to ground themselves in the Earth if they're going to learn how to arrest the planet's climate breakdown, and live more fully.
Look behind the glitz and glamour of global fashion, and you will find an ecologically harmful, anti-social industry largely unable to shed its capitalist dynamics. Its factories generate huge amounts of pollution and rely on underpaid, abused sweatshop labor. Fast fashion fills up landfills with mountains of cheap clothing discarded after a few uses. To keep consumption and sales going, fashion's relentless marketing machine peddles fantasies of luxury, rail-thin bodies, and sex appeal.
While this juggernaut may seem unstoppable, a brave and hardy band of creative insurgents is pioneering entirely new models of textile production, garment design, production and distribution. Their goals are to rehumanize and relocalize garment production, and to escape the hamster wheel of endless consumerism and economic growth.
Zoe Gilbertson, fashion ecologist and textile systems designer
To get a better sense of what this grassroots global movement looks like, I recently spoke with British designer/ecologist/activist Zoe Gilbertson on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #56).
Gilbertson has worked in the fashion industry for more than 20 years -- for an athletic shoemaker in Germany, a major outdoor clothing brand in Canada, and eventually at her own startup company. But it slowly dawned on her that the ecological performance of major fashion houses was painfully modest if not an outright marketing deception.
Inspired by climate activists, coursework at Schumacher College in Devon, England, and by her father -- who helped start the fair trade movement -- Gilbertson decided to take a deeper plunge. With support from a Churchill Fellowship, she began an in-depth research project to explore the feasibility of bioregional fiber production. She wanted to figure out ambitious, practical ways of transforming fashion from the ground up (literally!).
I didn't know Stephan Harding well, but the fruits of his work -- especially his books and Schumacher College -- have influenced me a lot. It is with sadness that I'd like to note that Harding, a brilliant zoologist and ecologist who pioneered many novel ideas about a living Earth, passed away on September 2 at age 71.
Harding was often mentioned in the same breath as James Lovelock, the environmental scientist and Gaia theorist with whom he closely worked. Dr. Harding was also revered as the "wisdom-keeper and guardian" of Schumacher College's vision and mission, as a Wikipedia entry notes, no doubt because he showed a quiet resolve, courage, and imagination in his scholarship and teaching.
Dr. Stephan Harding of Schumacher College
Harding helped found Schumacher College in 1991 with Satish Kumar and other progressive activists and scholars. Based in Devon, England, the College was a storied hothouse that hosted legendary thinkers such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, Vandana Shiva, Jonathan Porritt, Charlene Spretnak, George Monbiot, and Helena Norberg Hodge.
Over the course of more than three decades, the College produced more than 20,000 alumni who learned about, and helped develop, the fields of ecology, philosophy, climate science, economics, design, art, and sustainability. A wonderful video from 1994 shows Harding explaining the mission and ambitions of Schumacher College.
Why is the commons a useful perspective for thinking about urban design and architecture?
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and at the same time more accessible than most national or international policy venues.
"The history of urbanization is intricately entangled with the history of industrialization and capitalism," said Gruber, citing thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. "Cities provide access to a high concentration of labor and production, infrastructure, trade, finance, and consumption markets."
Yet even though cities have contributed to capitalist growth, Gruber noted, "they have also been the arenas where the contradictions of capitalism, such as inequities, the environment, and class struggle, have played out most visibly." Much of Gruber's work has therefore focused on urban zones where the struggle between capitalism and commons is playing out, with an eye toward learning how commons can prevail, sometimes through commons/public partnerships.
Professor Stefan Gruber
Gruber explores these themes in a course that he teaches, "Commoning in the City," which examines how transitions towards just, regenerative, and self-determined communities in the city might develop, beyond the paradigms of the market and state.
With six co-curators, he has also helped launch a traveling exhibit called An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production,which showcases notable urban commons projects. The Atlas, now on a ten-year international tour, is part of an ongoing visual archive of initiatives that use participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public collaborations to reinvent city life. The Atlas is a collaboration with the German cultural organization ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+, a German magazine for architecture and urbanism.
In a few days, the exhibition will have a major opening in Tbilisi, Georgia, a place where "the notion of commons is intertwined with the historical legacies of Soviet collectivism and traditional community practices," and then by rapid urbanization and privatization of public spaces following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary grassroots initiatives have therefore focused on reclaiming shared (non-state) stewardship of communal spaces, cultural heritage, social practices, and the environment.
The ambitious goal of the Atlas of Commoning is "to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of 'us' as a concept." As the book's preface explains:
As human beings, we are both individuals and members of a community at once; we are interconnected, and that interconnection needs to be given expression—we need places that are dedicated to communal life and that we shape together, conscious of our shared responsibility for them, places where community becomes a lived reality.
The author of the preface, Elke aus dem Moore, cites a Hamburg, Germany, project in the 1990s, "Park Fiction," which invited citizens to articulate their wishes for a future park in pictures or words. The initiative became a participatory art project and then a political vehicle for asserting the needs and desires of residents, eventually defeating the plans of privileged commercial interests.
In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #55), I talk with Stefan Gruber about the Atlas of Commoning, special challenges of stewarding commons in cities around the world, and his philosophical approach to the topic.
One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication.
A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California. The area encompasses more than 750,000 square miles of old growth rain forests, volcanoes, and wild habitats for salmon, wolves, bear, whale and orca – and 16 million people.
Brandon Letsinger, Cascadia Department of Bioregion
Cascadia activism is part of a larger global movement that wants to reinvent markets, cultures and identities to sync with regional ecosystems. It's a bold, long-term effort to persuade modern societies to honor their ecological gifts and mindfully inhabit the distinctive places in which they live. It’s also about trying to transcend arbitrary political boundaries and global markets, building instead a world that revolves around a region's particular hydrology, weather, plants, and wildlife, and to develop economies, cultures, and ways of being that complement that landscape.
As the renaissance of bioregionalism gains momentum, I wanted to learn more, especially about the most promising strategies and challenges. I turned to Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer who was founding director of CascadiaNow! – an incubator of grassroots, community-centered projects – and more recently, cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion. Our conversation is featured in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #54).
The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves.
More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection.
The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.
So what if humanity instead were to begin to see itself as an integral, engaged part of nature – a force that could engage respectfully with more-than-human life and even restore and regenerate it?
Bram Büscher, cofounder of Convivial Conservation Centre
That's the vision that Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in The Netherlands, has for reinventing conservation. As Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, he wants to move beyond the extractive logic of capitalism itself to develop a more commons-based approach that changes the very premises of how land is protected.
Büscher's vehicle for this mission is an ambitious, newly launched international project, the Convivial Conservation Centre.
A growing legion of renegade conservationists, ecologists, farmers, activists, and academics have joined him in rejecting the idea of "fortress protection" for land, through wilderness preserves, as well as the idea of converting landscapes into money-making "natural capital." Convivial conservation wants new practices and policies that can reintegrate people with nature in constructive ways, nourishing wholeness, while addressing the eco-pathologies of capitalism itself.
To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates.
Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert. "The idea is to maintain the moisture," said Azouzi, explaining that oases require three distinct layers of vegetation –the palm tree layer, which produces shade for fruit trees, which in turn provide a layer of shade for growing vegetables.
Safouan Azouzi
With these mutually reinforcing layers of plants, oases are able to evolve into food forests to sustain human settlements. In modern terms, they embody the principles of permaculture. Oases are engineered systems in a sense, but not in the modern, mechanical sense of the term. They are instances of co-development and co-stewardship with nature itself – a collaboration that yields a rich, self-replenishing catchment area of moisture and luxuriant growth in the desert.
"The local Arabic word for moisture is richness,"said Azouzi. We talk about an oasis effect. If it's 40° Celsius [104° F.] in the desert, it would be like 30° C. [86° F.] in the oasis….The idea behind oases is to grow as much as possible in the smallest area possible because of the scarcity of the water."
To Western scholars, oases as commons may sound like an arcane topic. But in this time of climate collapse and ecological crises, oases hold many important lessons about how societies can work with ecosystems and develop cultures that support that challenge.
Urbánika is an international collective of tech commoners that calls itself an "immersive activism school." Led by Humberto Besso-Oberto Huerta of Mexico, the group wants to help build peer-governed, climate-resilient smart cities and communities, especially in Latin America. For this ambitious goal, Urbánika has nearly finished kitting out a climate-positive "SolarPunk Bus." The amazing vehicle will serve as a mobile learning center as it tours Latin American cities in coming months. More about that in a moment.
But first, some news about another innovative Urbánika initiative: an educational video series, "PostCapitalism and the Commons." This course consists of fifteen short videos in which I introduce the commons and commoning in its many dimensions.
The course starts with a brief history of the commons and a survey of contemporary commons, and then moves on to discussing the Market/State and many anti-social, anti-ecological enclosures of commons.
David Bollier in Urbánika video course
The series also discusses commons as a relational social system that helps people carry out their own provisioning and peer governance. This challenge requires people to understand the need for making an OntoShift – a shift of worldview in understanding what a commons entails, namely, new types of relationships, social practices, and ethical commitments. The last segments of the video series address bioregionalism, land, and urban commons. More episodes are planned in the coming months.
The course is meant for changemakers, especially for those who are already aware of the serious limitations of the Market/State system and the need for developing new ways of life. You can find the entire series online here.
There are many reasons why constitutional democracies around the world are faltering and authoritarian nationalism rising. Professor Camila Vergara, a Chilean political philosopher and scholar of constitutional law, has one powerful, audacious explanation: Constitutions offer no meaningful political role for ordinary people in democratic governance, and so oligarchic institutions take root that privilege the domination of the few over the many.
It is the conceit of liberal constitutionalism that the will of the people will be robustly expressed through elections, for example, and representative legislatures. Such systems, in theory, will express the popular will and give the state legitimacy and stability.
Professor Camila Vergara
But as Vergara brilliantly argues in her book Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic(Princeton University Press, 2020), corruption is inherent in representative democracy. Oligarchs and other political elites nearly always capture modern republics unless ordinary people have substantive constitutional powers of their own.
Professor Vergara boldly argues for new/old types of "plebeian republicanism" such as citizen assemblies with real authority. This is the only way that constitutional systems can renew themselves and banish systemic corruption.
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