David Bollier

One point of using a Creative Commons license is to make a book (and other creative works) as widely available as possible. To that end, I’m thrilled to announce a new stage in the life of Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition, published last year by New Society Publishers. 

The printed text of the book is now posted online, for free. Here’s the weblink: https://thinklikeacommoner.com/second-edition/read-it. Like the printed book, it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  

The license essentially means that the work can be copied and shared so long as credit is given to me as the author (BY). Noncommercial uses are allowed without permission, but any commercial reuses require my permission (NC). Any derivative uses of this book, including translations, new printings, and excerpts, are permissible so long as they also use the same license requiring sharing (SA). 

I’m also happy to announce that an audiobook version of the book is now available, at https://thinklikeacommoner.com/audiobook. 

Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet.  It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains.

And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or deflection. The Trump administration is savaging climate science, environmental regulation, and international treaties, while saner responsible adults are at least focused on energy efficiency and renewables. But few people dare to name, let alone tackle, the real driver of climate collapse – the capitalist economy’s demand for relentless economic growth.

To take stock of this quandary, I decided to have a long talk with a leading degrowth scholar and activist, Federico Savini. An associate professor in environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, Savini has spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring market activity into ecologically sustainable limits, an agenda often known as degrowth. As a co-editor of the book Post-Growth Planning: Cities Beyond the Market Economy, Savini has suggested how cities, agriculture, energy, and transit need to change, and how affordable housing, better land stewardship, and infrastructures for social care and eco-resilience could help reduce climate impacts.

I recently interviewed Savini for my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #72) to get a keener sense of the state of the degrowth movement today. What are the strategies it’s calling for, the hotspots of degrowth advocacy, and the challenges the movement is facing?

In the US, of course, degrowth is a rarely heard term. In hyper-individualist, consumerist American culture – the world citadel of modern capitalism – few people want to hear brutally honest accounts of what needs to be done. Curb the drivers of growth? Respect ecological limits at the expense of profits? Foster social equality by curbing the power of oligarchs and corporations? Change who makes key investment decisions? In most cases, the answer is no. 

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.

Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace. 

These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm. 

After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #70). I wanted to see how his and my perspectives of gift economies and commons may have evolved over the years, and what topics may be in his field of vision today. (One is AI.)

We also spoke about his classic 2010 book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, which explores how creativity and culture have always functioned as commons. The US Founding Fathers recognized the importance of freely available knowledge and creative works in the late 1700s, for example. Hyde spent an entire chapter in the book describing how Benjamin Franklin – otherwise celebrated as a commercially minded individualist and entrepreneur -- is more accurately called a “founding pirate” for insisting that the free flow of ideas and inventions should override expansive patents and copyrights.

This is the fourth section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining section will be published tomorrow. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; and 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative. 

4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets

If bioregions are going to become more economically self-reliant and culturally self-directed, they must be able to insulate themselves from the neocolonial workings of global finance and markets. This means that bioregions must be able to assert their own investment priorities and become more self-reliant by intensifying their intra-regional commerce. Their basic challenge is to fend off outside commercial control and extraction (while obviously continuing many commercial dealings) so that the regional economy can benefit from the “multiplier effect” of locally circulated money while ensuring strong ecological stewardship and regional identity and culture. 

Without some deliberate strategies for consolidating market activity within bioregions – making enterprises more interdependent and regionally focused – the priorities of capitalist businesses and global capital will override regional eco-stewardship and self-determination. Attempts to build a coherent regional economy and identity will be subordinated to “free market” imperatives and everything they privilege

It is impossible to prescribe a single strategic template for addressing these issues, however. An agenda this broad, ambitious, and long-term will necessarily vary from one bioregion to another. That said, in conjunction with commons, bioregional market structures and strategies could prod commerce to become more place-committed and socially embedded. These bioregional strategies include:  

A.  Community-designed infrastructures for bioregional production. Community participation in creating and managing small, shared infrastructures can be catalytic for the bioregional economy in general (commercial, commons-based, social, ecological). Shared bioregional infrastructures can reduce overhead, transport, and retail costs. It can make essential services like WiFi access, solar energy, water systems, grain milling, information-sharing, and databases -- more accessible and shareable, all while strengthening social cohesion and bioregional identity.

B.  Inalienable shared assets. Assuring that major bioregional assets like arable land, groundwater, housing, forests, and other “natural assets” remain inalienable – off-limits in perpetuity to private purchase – makes a bioregion more stable and secure. It prevents companies and private equity funds from acquiring essential infrastructure through which they would extract exorbitant rents, siphoning money away from the bioregion. Keeping shared assets inalienable also addresses social inequity by making essential equity assets free or lower-cost, and available in perpetuity. For example, groups like Agrarian Trust (US) and Terre de Liens (France) rely on community land trusts to make land inalienable and stewarded as commons, which has all sorts of salutary effects: farmland for a younger generation of farmers, reduced equity costs that enable organic, local agriculture, and meaningful long-term employment for local residents.