books

About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time.

I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated. So much had happened in the Commonsverse over the past decade that was not in the book! Also, my own perspectives on the commons had evolved dramatically. So it felt important to update and revise the book so that it could speak more powerfully to the current moment.

With the van Willenswaards' keen interest and encouragement from New Society Publishers, my publisher, I set out to rewrite the book last March. In the end, about half of the new edition became entirely new text. The book's length grew by 50 pages, and all sorts of subtle issues of tone and point of view were adjusted to reflect contemporary politics, life, and culture.

I'm pleased to report that the second edition of Think Like a Commoner will be published on March 11, and in Europe and UK in mid-May. I see the book as an opportunity to open up some new conversations and expand many existing ones. 

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.

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. 

We moderns are so self-important that we’ve even named a geological epoch after ourselves, the Anthropocene. Sure, human civilization has massively transformed and destabilized the planet’s ecosystems. But Anthropocene is ultimately a misleading moniker because it implies that we humans are the driving force on Earth.  

How self-regarding! As a parade of wildfires, floods, droughts, and extreme heat are showing, it’s Gaia who is calling the shots. She’s making her own fierce, non-negotiable demands on us. She’s bursting the frames of order that humans have long used to shape civilization, capitalism, the state, and culture. That’s why Mihnea Tănăsescu, a brilliant Romanian-born, Belgium-based academic, urges that we instead recognize this geological era of Earth as the Ecocene.

Locked in our anthropocentric bubble, we humans have failed to see that we are deeply entangled with nature and not separate and superior to it. If humanity is to survive, it will have to learn how to get in sync with natural systems, culturally and economically, and actively contribute to the flourishing of earthly and human systems in tandem.

Hence the title of Tănăsescu’s 2022 book, Ecocene Politics. Our epoch is “characterized by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life,” as the book puts it. If you can recognize this reality, it becomes clear that our politics, economy, and culture must actively learn new post-modern ways of being and doing, and adapt appropriately. That is the task ahead. Trying to shore up or restore the collapsing edifice of modernity is a fool’s errand.

Impressed by the precision and passion with which Tănăsescu addressed these issues, I spoke with him in Episode #43 of Frontiers of Commoning about his book. Tănăsescu is Research Professor of the Fund for Scientific Research at the University of Mons, Belgium, where he writes extensively about human relations with nature, drawing deeply on anthropology, sociology, politics, and law.

To celebrate the publication of the French edition of Free, Fair and Alive, I recently had the pleasure to visit Tunis and Paris to give the commons, and Silke's and my book, some visibility.

Tunis is a country with a long history of commoning in various contexts – agriculture, water in desert oases, learning, social cooperation – but modern culture often dismisses this history as premodern or backward. The Heinrich Boell Foundation-Tunisia is attempting to change this by launching a new program that showcases Tunisian commons and commons discourse. How refreshing that people can consider post-colonial options that move beyond capitalism, socialism, and autocracy!

I was pleased to see the keen interest in Le Pouvoir Subversif des Communs, which was translated into French by Olivier Petitjean and a small team of commoners-translators. Print versions of the book can be bought via Editions Charles Léopold Mayer or read online for free at https://freefairandalive.org/fr/lis-le.

To glimpse an inspiring vision of farming in a post-capitalist environment – one that is in communion with the Earth and its aliveness – look no further than Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley of New York. The 80-acre farm, run by a remarkable Afro-Indigenous-centered community, has pioneered a socially minded agriculture dedicated to regenerating the land and empowering African-Americans and Indigenous cultures. It's a vehicle for training new farmers, feeding people who don't have access to healthy food, and "rabble-rousing for systems change." 

Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol activist-farmer, cofounded Soul Fire Farm in 2010.  She described her journey from science teacher to farmer in her 2018 book Farming While Black -- a manifesto and practical guide to "liberation on the land."  Now Penniman moves beyond some of the practical "how to" issues of farming to explore the cultural and spiritual wisdom that has sustained African American agriculture for generations.   

Her new book, Black Earth Wisdom, describes itself as "love songs for the earth and its people."  It consists of sixteen captivating conversations between noted Black elders in a variety of fields, including author Alice Walker, ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, attorney Savi Horne, farmer Chris Bolden-Newsome, and musician Toshi Reagon, among many others. 

Even though the oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface and provide half the oxygen we breathe, they tend to be "out of sight, out of mind," especially in landlocked nations or regions. It's therefore important to recognize that the market/state system is hard at work ravaging this sector of the natural world, too. Industrial-style fish trawlers are overexploiting fisheries, pushing many to the brink of collapse, and mining companies are chewing up the ocean floor in search of oil, gas, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare-earth minerals.

How might the commons address these horrific market enclosures? In my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #28), Guy Standing, an economist and scholar of the commons at SOAS University of London, offers some specific, practical answers. Standing has just published  The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea, a book that synthesizes vast amounts of complicated maritime histories, international law, and ecological science to explain how commoning could curb the market/state's irresponsible, life-destroying treatment of oceans.

Standing sees the ecological destruction of the seas as the predictable result of 'rentier capitalism'. This is the economic system that privileges expansive property rights, financialization, and industrialized exploitation of "resources" over all else. Corporate interests working with governments like to call its rip-and-run practices "blue growth" -- but it is actually a story about the tragedy of the market. 

Companies systematically attempt to "de-commons" coastal fishing communities, claim patents on deepsea lifeforms, and exploit offshore mineral deposits. The South African company De Beers Group, for examples, uses a fleet of specialized ships to scrape the sea bottom in search of diamonds, leaving deep scars and disruptions in marine ecosystems.

It's been more a year and a half in the making, but I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead ! 

Inspired by the format and sensibility of The Whole Earth Catalog of the early 1970s (subtitle: "access to tools"), this Catalog has a similar goal: to help people can build a new world, on their own terms, against the grain of a dominant culture that cannot yet see or understand the rising world of commoning. 

The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working. But the good news is….Commoners are building a new world of possibilities right now. There are scores of system-change projects a-borning, but mainstream politics and media regards most of them as too small, local, and trivial to matter....and commoners themselves often do not have a larger sense of the whole of which they are a part. The Commoner’s Catalog seeks to remedy this problem.

The Catalog explains the grand, transformational power of social collaboration – in agricultural commons and digital spaces, in care collectives and gift economies, in urban settings and finance, among many other realms.

The Catalog's many profiles and stories are loosely grouped in 25 thematic sections spanning 114 artfully designed pages. There are sections on water, land, rethinking economics, law and the commons, the more-than-human world, urban commons, peer production, artistic commons, and many others.

I was thrilled when a French commoner-friend received an advance copy and exclaimed, "This is super-cool!" He was responding to the great cover art that illustrator Hugh Dunford Wood made to show the joy and excitement of commoning.

But he also loved the beautiful book design by Angela Lorenzo and the vivid diversity of projects described (great research support from Cameron Conner). I share my friend's reaction. The Commonsverse is a surprising, hopeful world and, and -- when seen in its eclectic glory -- amazingly cool.

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is the publisher of The Commoner's Catalog, and Chelsea Green Publishing is the distributor. The book was released this week in the US. Copies should be available in the United Kingdom and Europe by mid-February. 

To help maximize its reach and impact -- and ensure open access -- I have posted The Commoner's Catalog online as a free "flipbook," licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can read it, and find weblinks for buying it, at commonerscatalog.org.

Ivan Illich is one of those rare, seminal thinkers to whom I keep returning, again and again, because he fearlessly grapples with core themes that otherwise go ignored.  He addressed, for example, the totalizing power of modern institutions, the corrupting influences of capitalism on spiritual life, and the power of vernacular practice to build more wholesome, insurgent cultures.    

In my latest podcast (Episode #21), I had the pleasure of interviewing David Cayley, a close friend and colleague of Illich’s who recently published a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his thought, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Cayley is a former broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and independent scholar and author who has written numerous books on topics literary, political, and ecological.

Illich was an iconoclastic social critic, radical Christian, and cultural historian who soared to international fame in the 1970s with searing critiques of Western modernity, Christianity, and the professionalization of care in healthcare, education, and social services. An Austrian-born Catholic priest who often clashed with the Vatican, Illich eventually left the priesthood to become an itinerant speaker, public intellectual, and best-selling author. His thinking was sprawling and eclectic, but much of it focused on how we might pursue deeper, more meaningful spiritual lives in a modern world that seems designed to deny our elemental humanity.

While some of Illich’s perspectives now seem rooted in their time, mostly the 1960s and 1970s, his thinking remains highly relevant to contemporary life in developing a rich, detailed perspective that dissents from modern economics and politics. His work is perhaps even more relevant now that neoliberal capitalism, over the past forty years, has intensified its disempowerment of ordinary people.  

Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist, has long been involved with the Transition movement; with climate change activism; and with a titanic effort to popularize the work of his former mentor, David Fleming. On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #20, I speak with Chamberlin about these issues as well as the fragility of capitalism and our post-capitalist future.

Chamberlin is arguably the leading authority on David Fleming’s work. Fleming was a British polymath, political economist, and cultural historian involved with the Green Party, Transition movement, and climate activism, who unexpectedly died in 2010.

He left behind an unpublished manuscript that he had been working on for 20 years, which few people had read. It fell to Shaun Chamberlin, Fleming’s long-time colleague, to turn the manuscript into Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. The book was published in 2016 and promptly showered with awards and acclaim.

Lean Logic consists of some 600 pages of “dictionary entries,” or mini-essays, on such topics as “Climate Change,” “Reciprocity and Community,” “Debt,” and “Systems Thinking” as well as “Religion,” “Death,” “Presence,” and “Play."

Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, believes it can. He has just published a brilliant new book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property that explains how a new class of property rights and trusts can help protect common assets and generate revenues for everyone in the process.  You can hear Barnes explain his ideas in my latest podcast episode (#19) of Frontiers of Commoning.Frontiers of Commoning. 

The book Ours amounts to a capstone of twenty years of Peter’s thinking – and I should know: Peter and I were close colleagues twenty years ago in the start up of the Tomales Bay Institute, later renamed On the Commons. Together with journalist and policy expert Jonathan Rowe, we set out to develop a new, activist-minded discourse about the commons. From different perspectives, each of us shared a deep concern about reckless enclosures of shared wealth and sought to develop novel ways to protect the commons.

Peter’s inquiries into this topic had begun years earlier with research into protecting land. In 2001, he took a new direction with his book Who Owns the Sky?, which offered one of the most serious and coherent early proposals for dealing with climate change. He proposed the Sky Trust, a new nongovernmental institution to set limits on carbon emissions and charge polluters for the right to emit carbon into the atmosphere.

The Sky Trust would manage the funds collected, which in turn would generate dividends to be paid to every citizen equally. The premise is that we collectively own the atmosphere as a commons, and so should have some reliable means to protect it and benefit from it. Under Barnes’ elegant proposal, market forces would deter carbon emissions (by making  polluters pay) while directing those revenues to all citizens. This would both help reduce inequality and incentivize lower carbon usage.