Commons

This note is about multispecies commons.

Commons in History

Including a chapter on ecological commons:

Wall, Derek. The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027212.001.0001.

Urban Commons

Derya Özkan and Güldem Baykal Büyüksarac, eds., Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics, Space, Materiality and the Normative (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

For the introduction, including considerations of more-than-human commons, see:

David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2014).

Beyond Human

Kinetic or metabolic communism or commoning.

Nail, Thomas. Theory of the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021.

On nature following the rules of the commons, ascertain

Weber, Andreas. ‘The Economy of Wastefulness: The Biology of the Commons’. In The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, edited by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. Amherst: Levellers Press, 2012.

History of evolution is characterised by the growth of freedom, where the agents are autonomous subjects bound together in mutual dependence.

The organism is as a subject who interprets external stimuli rather than being governed by them. Organisms negotiate their existence with others under conditions of limited competition and “weak causality.”

Freedom evolves. So does the complexity and depth of relationships.

In the natural world there is no (or no dependence on)):

  • Efficiency
  • Growth
  • Competition
  • Scarcity
  • Property

Commons

Three types of relationships:

  • property
  • ownership
  • possession

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. ‘The Universal Commons: An Economic Theory of Ecosystem Ownership’. Ecological Economics 208 (2023): 107822. https://doi.org/10/gshcd3.

References

Weber, Andreas. Sharing Life: The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity. India: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2020.


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