David Bollier

With the release of my significantly revised, new edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons, I've had a chance to start some new conversations and engage with different communities of practice. Recently, the Garrison Institute, a retreat center for contemplation and social action in the Hudson Valley of New York State, invited me to write a short essay about the interconnectedness of all living beings and how commons can serve as vehicles for manifesting that idea. Below is my piece, "Crossing the Commons: From Inner Change to Systemic Change," which first appeared on the Garrison Institute website.

“Be the change you want to see in the world!” is the familiar counsel of great social movements. The advice echoes the lyric from the great African-American song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” 

But how, exactly, might our inner epiphanies and transformations catalyze systemic change? We may individually develop new insights and values from wisdom traditions and contemplative practice, but how might they radiate out into something larger, collective, and consequential?

At this particular moment in modern civilization, as societies grapple with climate change, savage inequalities, and authoritarian rule, the pathways for bringing about change seem terribly murky. Our political life seems stuck at philosophical and practical impasses and paralyzed by failures of the imagination. It’s not clear what organizations, movements or cultural voices may actually have the capacities to fulfill our yearnings for a better world.  What strategies and approaches might be effective?

What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? 

I recently learned a lot about this topic from a workshop of international artists convened in Amsterdam. Most of the artists are associated with the so-called Lumbung Practice collective, an interdisciplinary group experimenting with how to cultivate a commons-based art economy. 

The artists come from Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, transqueer-migrant disaporas, and other geographies and circumstances, so they have some very different experiences and talents. And yet they have a deeply shared interest in commoning. What has brought them together is the Lumbung Practice master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, directed by Gertrude Flentge. It's an arts program dedicated to commoning in the arts! 

Lumbung is an Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, which is a space in which farmers contribute their harvests, collaboratively manage its storage and distribution, and share a social space of interdependence. It’s a culturally resonant practice for describing a community based on trust, generosity, sufficiency, endurance, place-based work, ethical dealings, and humor. 

The term Lumbung got a huge burst of visibility a few years ago when an Indonesian artist collective, ruangrupa, was selected to curate documenta 15, a prestigious international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. The group boldly decided to run the high-profile exhibition as an experiment in commoning, inviting dozens of artists from around the world to collectively curate the art. Suddenly there was a more recognized term for the contextually based, relational practices of artists.  Flentge joined the ruangrupa team to help develop the documenta 15 exhibition in 2022, so she learned a great deal about the ethic and practices of Lumbung during that time.

In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures," but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts. 

At Future Natures, an important focus is what it feels like to experience our crisis-wracked modern life, especially enclosures, and to illuminate the inner and social satisfactions of commoning. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like? What experiences and emotions are necessary for social collaboration and solidarity? How can such subjectivities be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?  

To learn more about the brave scholarly experimentation going on at Future Natures, I spoke with Amber Huff on the latest episode of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #59).

“Storytelling is really the universal in human experience,” said Huff, noting that even anthropologists, biologists and other academics, as they study the world, are in the business of creating narratives. “We thought storytelling might make a really good anchor for a transdisciplinary approach that focuses on breaking down hierarchies of expertise [in the academy], and communicating stories in accessible ways,” Huff explained.

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.

For all these reasons, I was excited to talk about these topics with Yuria Celidwen  on my latest episode of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #57). Celidwen is an Indigenous scholar whom I met two years ago at the Garrison Institute, a center for contemplative practice in the Hudson Valley in New York State that also seeks to spur transformative social action.