Claim OwnershipFrontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier
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A monthly conversation with creative activists pioneering new forms of commoning.
67 Episodes
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What might the world look like if capitalist growth and carbon emissions continue, and modern civilization collapses? Chris Smaje, a small farmer and writer in England, extrapolates from existing trends to sketch a vision of post-capitalist social economies. His new book, 'Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft,' envisions a world that is largely rural, decentralized, and grounded in local ecosystems and self-reliance. The book is neither a doomer nor survivalist tract, but rather an intelligent, speculative inquiry into models of collective organization, bottom-up governance, and ethical belief that will shape "local livelihood communities."
As climate change and other crises makes the economy and everyday life more precarious, innovative forms of bioregional action are needed to respond to 'Gaia on the move," says Isabel Carlisle, founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in Devon, England. Carlisle describes the importance of building local ecological expertise, participation, and institutions to build community resilience in the years ahead, especially because centralized nation-states will not be able to do the job. The BLC is part of a growing worldwide interest in 'bioregioning' -- activism, projects, and philosophical shifts to build a new type of socio-ecological economy. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, is a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and decentralized technologies. Here, Rabble explains how network protocols are critical infrastructure for enabling -- or impeding -- commons and open markets, not to mention privacy, free speech, and community control. Their ambition is a future in which everyone has "access to authentic, private online communities built on care, connection, and sustainable relationships.” [More on commons at www.Bollier.org.]
Gustavo Salas describes the remarkable culture of commoning at Cecosesola, a federation of 30 rural and urban cooperatives in Venezuela that serves hundreds of thousands of people with fresh produce, healthcare, funerary services, and many other goods and services. Cecosesola's priority is to create spaces of trust, togetherness, and self-improvement for its 1,300 associates while meeting the everyday needs of low-income families. Market prices and norms are secondary. For its work in escaping the transactional, capitalist-driven mindset and pioneering forms of provisioning that are fair, personally enriching, and much more affordable, Cecosesola won the Right Livelihood Award in 2022.
Jack Kloppenburg has been a leading figure in the fight to protect seed-sharing commons over the past forty years. It's a struggle that began in the 1980s as large ag-biotech companies have sought to make seeds privately owned and proprietary using all sorts of legal, technological, and market restrictions. Kloppenburg has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison since 1985 and a founder of the Open Source Seed Initiative. OSSI leads a movement of farmers, breeders, gardeners, and small seed companies dedicated to building a culture of openly shareable seeds and breeding innovation.
Tom Llewellyn, Executive Director of Shareable, describes the countless varieties of organized sharing that it supports through its journalism, organizing, and partnerships. In recent years, Shareable has helped amplify the work of mutual aid networks, expand the Libraries of Things concept, championed new forms of urban commoning, and develop new infrastructures of sharing. Its work on creative, bottom-up collaborations also showcases dozens of vanguard ideas, such as peer-to-peer lending, DIY bike lanes in cities, emergency battery networks for neighborhoods, and "Permablitz" conversions of suburban backyards into micro-farms for vegetables.
What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? This episode hears from artists' collectives in three countries to learn how they organize their commoning practices. The three collectives are the "-" (dash) collective in Iran (with an artist who goes by the pseudonym "M" for political reasons); Papaya Kuir, a lesbo-transfeminist collective for Latin American migrants in the Netherlands (with Mexican-born Alejandra Maria Ortiz); and Indonesian artists who practice 'nongkrong' (Angga Cipta, aka "ACip," on left in photo, and MG Pringgotono, founder of Serrum and Gudskul, on right). More on commons at www.Bollier.org.
Radio Kingston host and executive director Jimmy Buff interviews David Bollier about his new, updated and revised edition of 'Think Like a Commoner,' originally published in 2014. This popular introduction now includes material on the commons as a living, relational organism, bioregionalism and the relocalization of economies, governance of digital commons, legal hacks to support commons, and new ways for state power to facilitate commoning. More about the book at https://www.thinklikeacommoner.com. More on Bollier and the commons at https://www.Bollier.org.
Anthropologist Amber Huff, coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures at the University of Sussex in England, explains how popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, podcasts, and video, among others, can illuminate contemporary commons, enclosures, and the disorienting crises of capitalist modernity. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like, and how can subjective experiences and emotions be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?
Pirate Care is a term used to describe creative, public acts that challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene to show compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people. Pirate Care also highlights how the state, markets, or patriarchal families have politicized particular types of care by declaring them unpatriotic, a threat to business revenues, or unacceptably kind to people of the "wrong" citizenship, race, or gender identity. In their new book, 'Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity' (Pluto Press), activists Valeria Graziano (Italy; England) and Tomislav Medak (Croatia) explain the varieties and logics of pirate care. (The book's third coauthor is Marcell Mars (Croatia; England)).
Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous researcher in the Department of Psychology at University of California Berkeley, discusses how contemplative practices in Indigenous traditions can expand mindfulness, heartfulness, compassion, and planetary flourishing. Her new book, 'Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Well-Being,' argues that relationality lies at the heart of Indigenous cultures, as seen in seven key principles. Celidwen explains that happiness is "only possible in community, when we cultivate our relationships toward all kin, from human to more-than-human, and to our living Earth." Learning to listen mindfully to life is an essential process in healing the Earth, the alienation of modern, Western cultures, and Indigenous cultures traumatized by genocide and other colonial traumas. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Zoe Gilbertson is a British fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up, literally. In an effort to curb the ecological harms of fast fashion, global supply chains, and relentless consumption of clothes, Gilbertson is figuring how fiber crops like hemp and flax could be grown bioregionally to produce textiles and, in the process, catalyze localized garment design, production, and distribution as well as bioregional clothing cultures. This vision is part of a larger, expanding movement of fashion innovators who are incubating "seed to closet" initiatives, traditional clothing crafts, mending and upcycling projects, and other types of fashion commons. More on Gilbertson: https://liflad.substack.com. More on the commons: https://www.bollier.org.
Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and therefore an important incubator of just, regenerative, self-determined communities that move beyond the market/state paradigm. The traveling international exhibit, 'An Atlas of Commoning,' which he helped curate, and his course on 'Commoning in the City', study how participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public partnerships are reinventing urban life. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org.
Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, discusses the history of bioregional activism in Cascadia and current challenges and strategies. Cascadia consists of three watersheds in the Pacific Northwest extending from British Columbia to northern California. For more than 40 years, Cascadia activists have been in the vanguard of a larger, now resurgent global movement. Its general goals are to reinvent markets, cultures and identities in ways that foster bioregional self-reliance and responsible stewardship of watersheds, energy, agriculture, wildlife, and other living systems.
Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in sociology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, has launched an ambitious international project to invent noncapitalist forms of land conservation. He calls it "convivial conservation." Instead of locking up land as wilderness or using it to make money through ecotourism and genetic patents, "convivial conservation" is about enabling humans to become integral, respectful co-creators with nature. The new Convivial Conservation Centre, with staff in five countries and many allies worldwide, champions constructive, symbiotic human relationships with local ecosystems and the bridging of the deep divide separating humans from nature. More on commons: www.Bollier.org
Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world. For the Global South, long victimized by colonialism and capitalist extraction, oases culture embodies an eco-friendly, alternative vision of development. For the industrial West, oases reveals the importance of commoning in building stable, regenerative economies in sync with ecosystem needs. More on the commons at www.Bollier.org. A PDF transcript of Episode #52 can be found here: https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Safouan_Azouzi_Ep._52_transcript.doc.pdf
Chilean political philosopher Camila Vergara boldly argues in her book 'Systemic Corruption' that decay and corruption are inevitable even in liberal, representative systems because oligarchs end up capturing state governance and law. Ordinary people rarely have their own plebeian institutions to express their interests and curb the abuses of the elite. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman history and four modern political philosophers, Professor Vergara makes an audacious case for constitutionally ordained plebeian institutions such as citizen assemblies through which citizens could propose and veto legislation and political appointees, among other powers. More on the commons: https://www.bollier.org.
The artistic duo known as Cooking Sections -- Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the Royal College of Art in London -- use their virtuoso visual, performance, and installation artworks to jolt people into new understanding of local ecosystems, capitalism, and food. Their work, shown at prestigious venues around the world to great acclaim, dramatizes how modern diets are products of "a globally financialized landscape," ranging from artificially colored farmed salmon to eco-destroying monoculture crops. But Cooking Sections also uses its art to work closely with farmers, restaurants, schools, politicians, and citizens to reinvent local foodways through commoning. (Photo by Aman Askarizad, IHME)
To counter the "implicit feudalism" that is the norm on the Internet, activist-scholar Nathan Schneider explains the potential of democratic governance in online life and its importance to "real world" democracy. A professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Schneider argues that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radical and democratic renaissance." But this will require progressive activists to heed the lessons of various social and decolonial movements throughout history, and to find the resolve to use the technologies in creative ways.
Will Ruddick, development economist and founder of Grassroots Economics, has spent the past 16 years in Kenya developing innovative "community inclusion currencies" for dozens of poorer communities. By combining ancient mutual aid practices with credit vouchers (circulating as a kind of money) and digital ledger technologies (to expand the scale of exchange), people are able to develop their own economic commons to meet everyday needs. Ruddick credits the success of the currencies to "commitment pooling" protocols that have long been used by Indigenous and traditional communities. Blog post: https://www.bollier.org/blog/will-ruddick-commitment-pooling-build-economic-commons
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