Astra Taylor 00:08
I think the Commons is a really, kind of wonderful, flexible concept. You know, I think we see little experiments all over the place.

lmre Szeman 00:16
And if we faced it together, we would come up with different ideas.

Speaker 00:18
It's been important to me to at least experiment with how you might write something together, how you might share ideas along the way.

Astra Taylor 00:27
I spend a lot of my time trying to build the infrastructure so that ordinary people can make change. How do we do this? What are the tools of change making?

Carolyn Lesjak 00:35
What a new commons would look like is an experiment in how do we bring together people.

Bill Ayers 00:43
It's used in our country all the time, in our society, is the freedom to drill, the freedom to make war on other people and so on and so on. This is my freedom, and we need to interrupt that narrative, and we need to challenge it with the social and the collective and the commons.

Joel Westheimer 01:18
Welcome back to our podcast, Commons Sense, that's Commons with an S. In this series, we ask how common sense, and the idea of the commons relate to the climate crisis. I'm Joel Westheimer.

Barbara Leckie 01:31
And I'm Barbara Leckie. In the last episode, we heard about the entangled inheritances of the commons. We're trying to use the commons as a lens to imagine a more collective approach to living together. But this idea does not come without baggage. Most importantly, it's colonial history and dispossessing land from Indigenous peoples.

Joel Westheimer 01:50
In this episode, we're talking about commons experiments already happening and imagining possibilities for new ones. These aren't only theoretical thought experiments. They're community radio stations, they're energy cooperatives, they're shared gardens and shared governance and shared struggles.

Barbara Leckie 02:06
Real world practices that challenge individualism, resist enclosure by private interests, and open up new ways of living together. When we started this podcast, we knew we wanted to push back on neoliberal assumptions about common sense.

Joel Westheimer 02:20
Right, especially those that put profits before people.

Barbara Leckie 02:25
Yeah. And with each episode, we've been adding a new layer to what we mean by the commons.

Joel Westheimer 02:29
A kind of composite portrait, not one fixed definition, but a living, growing set of practices and possibilities.

Barbara Leckie 02:36
So, today's episode adds another layer by gathering together experiments in commons, big and small, that begin with collaboration and a shared commitment to care.

Joel Westheimer 02:46
And that care is political. Because each of these experiments, whether it's a commons-based energy project, a cultural network or an actual shared pasture, is a refusal of the idea that everyone's on their own, that the only way we can do things is in competition with others.

Barbara Leckie 03:01
We'll also talk about obstacles, because as much as these experiments exist, creating them was not easy. For example, one obstacle that runs through our interviews for this episode is what Bill Ayers calls toxic individualism—the idea that we're on our own, that success means independence, that asking for help or building something shared is a weakness.

Joel Westheimer 03:22
It's a powerful narrative, and it gets in the way of imagining alternatives, alternatives like the commons as possible or even desirable.

Barbara Leckie 03:31
But the good news is that they do exist, and we're going to hear about some of them today. We'll begin with the writer and activist Astra Taylor, who we've met in previous episodes. She helps us think through how the idea of the commons can expand to include public education, public media, and democratic infrastructure more broadly.

Joel Westheimer 03:52
Astra sees democracy not just as elections or institutions, but as something we do—in classrooms, libraries, organizing spaces, and on public airwaves. And in places as unexpected as the management of debt, which she discussed in episode two.

Barbara Leckie 04:07
The Debt Collective—an idea to turn debt from a private burden into a collective lever for change. She puts forward all these different ideas of the commons and their importance for a flourishing democracy.

Joel Westheimer 04:19
And she picks up where Candis Callison left off in the last episode. How do we imagine alternatives?

Astra Taylor 04:26
Because we think of democracy as elections, and we think of democracy as politicians and sloganeering, you know, but when you think about democracy as a mode of self-governance that can be extended beyond the ballot box, that very sort of limited sense of democracy—it can be extended into all of the spaces, arenas, institutions, and resources that we need to have flourishing lives. And that's another way of describing the commons, right? The commons are things that we share so that we can live well and live with a sense of community.

The idea of the commons is very much historically rooted, and you actually have to understand the history of the commons to understand the history of the modern world and to understand the history of our modern-day capitalist economy. When we're talking about the commons, we are talking about something that is rooted in a mode of collective land ownership and that we shouldn't idealize, necessarily but as English feudal traditions were transitioning and capitalism was emerging, those forms of communal land management were replaced with private property—with a different mode of organizing and owning scarce resources. And that causes there to be a kind of association between the commons and material things, right? So, water, land, air, but we can extend that metaphor, I think—and lots of people do, I'm not original in this—to other domains, other things that we need as human beings. Education is, I think, a really important thing to think of as the commons. I think that we could, if we restructured our media system massively, think of media as the commons. I think that that's an important field. Certainly, there's a strong case to be made that art is a kind of commons, that these are things that no one person or one corporation should control entirely and restrict access to.

And education, I think is especially important because we need people to know things—we live in incredibly complex society with eight plus billion people on this planet, and we should want other people to be educated, which means we should want them to have access to the commons of education. In fact, a lot of my organizing focuses on that. It focuses on the urgent need to renew the promise of free public education that's accessible to anybody who wants it, not just those who can afford increasingly expensive tuition, and not just those who have merit by some certain academic standards. But rather those who are keen and curious and who, you know, want to actually learn things whatever stage of life they're in. So, I think the commons is a really kind of wonderful, flexible concept to think about just everything that extends beyond the self. Some of those things are easier for private actors to try to hold and control and hoard, and some of them are more difficult. So, you can trademark words and phrases and brands, but you can't trademark all language at this point. I think language really is a commons, but certain kinds of specialized knowledge are—are very restricted, because the pathways to be able to get the credentials, get the education required are very difficult for people who come from low-income families or families that don't have those educational backgrounds to access. But I think the commons is such a—it’s just such a good idea.

Barbara Leckie 07:57
I love that your book, The Age of Insecurity, was first broadcast as a series of lectures on Ideas—the CBC, Canada's public radio broadcast service—and I'm wondering: I think CBC and public radio can itself be seen as a kind of commons when we think of it broadly understood. But do you have a sense of who was listening to you and what sort of impact you had?

Astra Taylor 08:21
First, I'll say I totally agree that the radio, when it is publicly operated, can be thought of as a kind of commons, and that's actually the theme of my first book, The People's Platform, which is about the cultural commons and ways to actually reconceive culture as a public good in that spirit. And what I felt from people was a profound desire to act and to figure out how to act with impact, to act with intention, and to address the intersecting crisis of our time. I came away from those lectures almost feeling that at the end they were organizing 101 sessions. And I think I do have a lot about organizing in my book, because it's something I spent a lot of my time doing. I spend a lot of my time not just writing and analyzing, but actually trying to build the infrastructure so that ordinary people can make change. And I felt that people, after hearing my talk, they really wanted to know, okay, well, how do we do this? What are the tools of change making? And that's because that's something that's not taught to very many people.
The normal avenues for political action really are usually electoral, you know, come out and cast a ballot, maybe you could dream of running for office in a local or provincial or federal race. Only some people, but a diminishing number of people, have the opportunity to join labour unions, but a lot of people don't. I think we have to do a lot of work rebuilding associational culture, rebuilding different forms of community organizing and what I felt from people once they read this book, was that it resonated and they wanted to know what to do.

The more concrete feedback that I got that was also striking to me, came after the book was excerpted in The New York Times. I got to publish a rather long essay about insecurity in The New York Times that reached a very large audience, and I got a huge amount of feedback from men. I thought that was really interesting. And I've written for The New York Times before about canceling debt and progressive social policies, and typically, men write me emails, and they're very angry, and they're telling me that I'm an idiot and I'm a progressive, I'm a socialist, and, you know, I should get a job, take a shower, whatever sort of attack they've got for me that day. This was really different. It was more about being seen by the piece. And I think it was partly because I put emotions into this material context, right? And so, therefore, instead of it seeming as though I was saying you're weak because you feel insecure. I was saying you feel insecure because of these structural conditions, because there are people manipulating and manufacturing insecurity, in order to advance their own power and their own agenda. And there was a kind of outpouring of appreciation for that—that I had never received in that venue before.

Barbara Leckie 11:15
You mentioned, when you were talking about the trip to England, how lovely it would be if we had more commons, like a commons kind of updated for this moment. I'm wondering if you see any examples, either in your immediate community of commons that kind of work, that aren't those owned spaces where our rights are limited, but that have more freedom and also more collective deliberation? Or if you see it more widely, maybe in North Carolina?

Astra Taylor 11:44
I think the fight for the commons today mostly manifests as a fight against privatization and private forms of ownership. And so even if it doesn't necessarily meet the ideal of the commons all the way, I do think fighting for public goods, for public things, is really important. So that can be fighting for libraries, I mean, right now libraries across the United States are having their hours cut and their budgets trimmed, their staff reduced. I think fighting for libraries, for public schools, public universities, also things like public jobs, public health care, these are all sorts of commons, and those are in the public, sort of governmental state domain. I think those are incredibly important. And I would like to see not just those services sort of shored up but democratized in a way, right? How can we actually make those services not just accountable to people but actually invite more public participation and management from citizens, from ordinary people. I think that's one realm, but then there's also the building of alternatives to, sort of capitalist economics. So, we see this in the movement of worker cooperatives, and also in things like community land trusts and
alternative ways of, for example, structuring housing that are not just private home ownership, or you know, renting from a corporate landlord, or living in government owned housing.

One example is actually funded by a group called Seed Commons in the United States, which is a funder of cooperative initiatives. And in North Carolina, for example, Seed Commons has funded the collective ownership, collective management of a trailer park where mostly Latino immigrants live, and these are folks who were living under very exploitative conditions, in a trailer park that was privately owned, and trailer parks have the image of being affordable, but actually the profit margins are really high. They're usually owned by very exploitative landlords. And these folks were able to not just buy their community, but to transform the way it is operated. And so now it's more than just a resource that they possess together, but actually a way of actually living together, of building community, taking care of each other, of really having a commons.

And it means all sorts of things. It means that they won't be evicted when the landlord decides to raise the rent arbitrarily. It means that they know their neighbors and have a higher quality of life as a result. It means that they can feel secure that they're going to be able to stay in a really swiftly gentrifying part of the world right now. So, you know, I think we see little experiments all over the place but that these two domains broadly are kind of where I think it's at. So one is, again, fighting for public goods from the state and changing the way what we think of as government goods operate. And the other is intervening in what are typically market goods and transforming those.

Joel Westheimer 14:44
Let's pause our interview with Astra for a moment. Barbara, what really struck me is her reminder that democracy and the commons are two sides of the same coin, and that if we want people to act, they need time. They need space. They need tools. Basically, they need a context that makes action possible.

Barbara Leckie 15:01
She also points to something we'll hear again and again in this episode—the importance of infrastructure, not just roads and bridges, but social infrastructure, the stuff that makes collective life possible. As she puts it, she wants ordinary people to have the infrastructure to be able to make change.

Joel Westheimer 15:18
Yeah, it reminded me of a point that Bill McKibben made that he also wants to ensure that the conditions are in place so that change is possible.

Barbara Leckie 15:27
Let's continue with Astra, where she describes a walk she took through the English countryside.

Astra Taylor 15:33
In 2019, I think it was—no actually, I guess 2018, I was traveling around and showing a version of my film, What is Democracy, and I was invited to the Sheffield Film Festival in the United Kingdom. So, I traveled, I showed the film, and everyone recommended that I take a train out of town and go take a walk in the beautiful hills, you know? So of course, I was like, well, where do I walk? You know, is there some kind of nature preserve that I'm going to, or some kind of destination that I'm going to, or some sort of name I should look for? And people said, no, actually, there's just paths everywhere, and you can just walk on them. And I said, well, what do you mean there are paths everywhere? They said, those are the commons. There are these pathways that anyone has permission to walk. And they're, you know, you'll be walking
around peoples' fields, you'll be walking around peoples' properties, but those paths are for you, those paths are common.

What I didn't know then is that those paths were literally remnants of the commons of the pre-capitalist sort of feudal mode of organizing property rights, when people, the peasantry had what were considered customary rights to access fields and forests in order to support their own livelihood. So, widows had the right to gather kindling, and people had the right to fish or gather herbs for medicine or to glean after the harvest; they had rights to the commons. And so, what is the remnants of that much larger system that has since been transformed, are these beautiful walkways.

I went walking through them, and I have to admit that for the first like hour or two, I felt really strange, because if it had been the United States, if it had been Canada, I would have been trespassing, you know, walking on these paths through people's yards or their fields. And instead of looking at me and waving a finger and telling me to get off their land, they just sort of waved and said hello. And I passed other folks, and they were walking. And I walked up to this old church and was looking at the old gravestones, and one caught my eye, and it said that it was the grave of Little John from Robin Hood. And I had never thought that Robin Hood was anything but a children's story. I mean, I sort of watched the Disney animation a lot as a little kid. And I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I went home and did some reading. It's not clear to me, I have to say, whether Robin Hood was actually real or not, but certainly it's a name for a tendency that was very much a real thing centuries ago. When people were fighting to protect the commons usurpation by the landlords.

And so that also changed my sense of that history, because then what you learn is actually that people were fighting back, that the commons weren't just taken without resistance from people. In fact, people fought for centuries and improved their lives by doing so in order to hold that access. And I learned also that that that sort of spirit of protecting the commons that flourished in the 17th, 18th, 19th century continued into the present day in a more modest way, when in 1865 the Commons Preservation Society was formed, and those individuals are the people who fought for the protections of those footways that I was walking on a few years ago. And so, the commons are very much still with us. But those paths were so lovely; it makes me think, well, wouldn't it be great if we had the fields?

Joel Westheimer 19:11
What Astra Taylor says there is so true. Wouldn't it be great if we had the fields?

Barbara Leckie 19:16
In our next interview, Heather Menzies is also interested in the expansive possibilities of the commons.

Joel Westheimer 19:23
You may recall that Heather's a writer and social justice activist. She's very involved in the Gabriola Commons on Gabriola Island. It's part of British Columbia's Gulf Islands. Gabriola is 26 acres of protected land specifically zoned as community commons. It serves as a hub for various community activities, agriculture, and social gatherings. Shared stewardship is at the center of the experiment.

Barbara Leckie 19:53
They have community gardens, shared space for public events, music gatherings, environmental education, a poetry yurt, meeting and kitchen facilities, a pottery and woodworking workshop. It's fantastic. It's really amazing. If you're interested, photos and further information about the Gabriola Commons are available on our website: commonspodcast.com

Joel Westheimer 20:17
This segment begins with Barbara asking Heather a question about the experimental nature of the Gabriola Commons.

Barbara Leckie 20:23
So, you describe the Gabriola Commons as a living experiment and a living laboratory, and I love those images. But I'm guessing that, like all experiments and laboratories, things don't always go perfectly. I'm wondering, can you indicate to us or illustrate any problems you've encountered with trying to put the commons together, or any downsides that have emerged in this journey of 20 some years?

Heather Menzies 20:51
Well, the big downside is—you would, in your early correspondence, use the term common sense—people are very much ingrained, embedded, and hostage to the common sense of our time. That is a highly individualized sense of yourself, not a relational sense of yourself, highly conceptual and intellectual, so that you're always thinking in categories and statistics and rules and plans. And that's almost the antithesis of the historical commons’ practices of listening, changing your mind, forming a common mind around what the situation is and what needs to be done, and then finding a way through your leadership from within, in the moment. Often it's the person with the appropriate skills, the appropriate knowledge to respond to whatever it is that is going on, be it, you know, like up in the—here [Heather gestures to the image on her Zoom screen] I've got in the background a upland Commons pasture, which I've wandered around in, and there's still sheep there.

Well, back in the day, there'd be somebody who would be collecting all the information. Is there a part of this pasture that's being overgrazed? In which case they would have these, they were called hurdles, these little woven fences that you could instantly put—it was called heening, to section off a piece of the pasture so that it could recover. Now, this kind of notion of working together, listening, etc., it's a hard learning for many, many people, because you've had a lot of people become part of the commons who retired from government jobs, corporate jobs—they’re used to who's the boss and they want to be volunteers. The notion of being a commoner, which is that you're sharing responsibility, is a very, very hard culture to nurture into creation. But it shows you that that's the kind of work that needs to be done.

Barbara Leckie 22:58
Yeah, and common sense. I mean, it really sounds like it articulated an idea knitted together of common sense that didn't actually need to be spoken out loud—like it kind of was shaped by the actions and what people were doing, which is sort of how I think of common sense today. It's usually what we don't make explicit, but that we understand, and that dictates how we move about the world. And so, when we have the common sense that you refer to at the beginning of basically being in a market economy where we're autonomous, we have free choice, so-called free choice, and make decisions without consulting others, you don't have to question that, because it's the air we breathe. And I think part of what we're interested in is actually the commons sense, which is what you've described in the second part of commons sense, the commons with an "s" sense that emerges from life on the commons. It's really an interesting model for thinking about how we live differently. However, super hard to do in our modernized world, where very few people are living as you do, and where those opportunities don't abound. Do you have any thoughts on how we can live the commons where we are in—because you can't impose common sense from above—you have to, as you keep pointing out, live it and experience it and then it becomes part of your experiential knowledge.

Heather Menzies 24:25
I think people can create community. Because really at the heart of commons is community in shared place. But that place can be an apartment building, it can be a senior's residence, and you need a common space, like some kind of common room where you can gather, over time. And then you start to—like there was an example I gave in the book, Reclaiming the Commons, because part of it is a bit of a kind of addressing this; how can we do this? And I talk a lot about the capacity rebuilding, the capacity to listen, you know, all kinds of organizing, self-organizing, and the disciplines around that. And there was, I think, a low rental public housing unit in Toronto, and a portion of the budget—the public, you know, government budget—was given over to the tenants so that they could make their own decisions. And this gave them an incentive to work together. And out of that, they developed skills, and there were people who actually regained enough sense of themselves as agents in a society, not just personal individual agency, but agency as part of a collectivity that, I believe one person ran for city council and won in Toronto. So, it's an example, you build slow, and you need the smaller units in order to do that. And I think as long as people break out of their isolation and they move towards something that connects them with each other, hopefully also with the land.

Joel Westheimer 25:55
That work. It's hard.

Barbara Leckie 25:56
It is, but Heather also gives us a sense of the possibilities that are there.

Joel Westheimer 25:59
And those possibilities include not only drawing on what's useful from the history, but re-envisioning what we might create in future collective work.

Barbara Leckie 26:08
She's extremely thoughtful about it. She's visited old commons in Scotland, helped create a commons here in Canada, and offered a kind of blueprint of what that work could look like going forward.
Our next guest is Maggie Helwig. She's a Canadian poet, novelist, social justice activist, and Anglican priest at St. Stephen's in the Fields in Toronto's Kensington Market. Her recent book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, is a moving account of the encampment that began in the churchyards of her church during the pandemic and continues on to this day.

Joel Westheimer 26:44
The Occupy encampments and the more recent encampments protesting the war in Gaza on many university campuses could also be understood as kind of spontaneous protest encampments.

Barbara Leckie 27:04
But as Maggie notes, there are also encampments for the unhoused. And we're interested in thinking about all forms of encampment in relation to the commons.

Joel Westheimer 27:06
They're not the same by any means, but they both inspire us to think about new possibilities for collective living and collective action. This interview begins with Maggie describing the church encampment.

Maggie Helwig 27:17
There's not a clear point where the encampment at the church began, exactly. The church, it's a small Anglican Church on the edge of Kensington Market. It's been a poor church for a long time, and it's been a church that has seen itself as having a very clear calling to serve the neighborhood in whatever the neighborhood's needs are, which have changed over time. But that service to the community, and particularly to the most vulnerable and most marginalized people in the community, has been a big part of our identity for a very long time. I've been at the church for 13 years, but it was part of the identity of the church long before me. So, there have always been some people who slept in the churchyard. There's never really been a time that there weren't at least one or two people sleeping on the steps or on the bench.

I think, as people are aware, homeless encampments grew dramatically in Toronto and in a lot of other cities when the pandemic started and a lot of supports were closed down, shelters reduced capacity, a lot of economic factors created more homelessness. So, for all kinds of reasons, encampments, which had tended to be in very remote and hidden areas and not very visible to most people, moved into much more public areas, and there was a backlash against this of course. There were the, I think, pretty well-known violent encampment clearings in Toronto in 2021 which cleared people out of most of the parks. In the spring of 2022, more tents started going up in the churchyard. And in fact, I went away to Prince Edward Island for 10 days, and I came back, and the number of tents in the churchyard had kind of exploded in my absence, and there were tents everywhere, and I'm like, well, this is what we're doing now, and it has ebbed and flowed in size since then. In particular, in November '23, as I talk about in the book, the city made a significant attempt to clear everybody out. And the—there was a point when only, once again, only two people were living there. Although they were much more built up, people used to be much more—a lot more structures, but it has, as again, people have moved into parks, people have been cleared from parks, it just goes on and on, we do have a significant number of people living in the yard again at this point.

Barbara Leckie 29:55
You make a distinction in the book between protest encampments and survival encampments, and I think that's an interesting thing to think about. But you also note there's a gray zone where the two are kind of linked and maybe talking about that a bit would be helpful to us.

Maggie Helwig 30:01
I think one of the things that a lot of people don't know about homeless encampments, which have, of course, existed for a very long time, though less visibly, there is an informal understanding, quite broad and general understanding of how an encampment functions. It's not just a bunch of people living separately in tents. It is a community. It is always a community. And in any encampment, there is going to be somebody who functions as the mayor. It's not an official position. You don't get elected to it. You can't declare yourself either. You need to spend some time in the community to understand who the mayor is. The word may or may not be used—some encampments, it'll be very clear X over there, they're the mayor. Other times, it's something you need to figure out. But there will be one person who's kind of setting the tone, one person that you go to if you need help.

In most encampments, there are people who are highly vulnerable, who have really intense mental health struggles. And I've seen the community sort of cohere around people to support them, to say, like, this person needs extra help, this person needs extra support, extra friendship. We're going to form a little
circle around this person. This person is especially vulnerable, and we're going to make sure they have the support that they need. I don't want to make it sound perfect. It's not perfect. No human grouping is perfect. People get thrown out of encampments and things happen. There are fights, there's sexual assault, there's the things that happen whenever human beings are living in, a living in a tight situation, but it absolutely is a community. There's always sharing of food and resources that's just taken for granted that food and other resources are going to be shared. It's taken for granted that everyone is on overdose watch for everyone else, and if anyone overdoses, the whole encampment is going to be there for them.
One of the things that bugs me about the city is that when they use the word encampment, they mean a single tent. So, they say, you know, oh, well, right now there are seven encampments at St. Stephen's. There is an encampment at St. Stephen's with seven tents. And it is an organism. It is a society. It's not seven isolated individuals living in their tents, not paying any attention to each other. There's a very active society and community there.

Barbara Leckie 32:30
There are also so many things happening there that I don't see happening in other places, that I feel can be models for association and working together and so on.

Maggie Helwig 32:39
I think that's true. I mean, no one should have to live out in a tent in cold or heat or rats or anything else, but people have created a society, and a society that functions in many ways. In some ways, much better than the society around it, where there is a real ethic of mutual care, and lots of problems too, and lots of people being people, which we always are. And I think it's been—it’s been a privilege for a lot of us in the church to be, in a way, a part of that community. You know, we're not, we don't live there. We have a level of privilege that the people living in the yard don't, and we're not as intensely part of the community as they are but, but there is a real sense we are we're not different from each other. Going back to people being changed by time living in shorter lived encampments, I think a lot of us at the church would say that we have been significantly changed by working with the encampment in the churchyard. I think it's been a really deep, informative, and meaningful experience for a lot of us.

Barbara Leckie 33:50
I also think when we're talking about Occupy, and I guess it's not the case for the church encampment, but when encampments like have a short lifespan, sometimes people will argue that they nevertheless instill habits of working collectively together for the good of the whole—the whole group. And I'm wondering if you feel that's the case in the context of the encampment?

Maggie Helwig 34:14
I think it is different. But I think it is different partly because the people who live in encampments have learned about community as a basic need for survival, like if this is, if you know, activists come to short lived protest encampments and learn about having to be in communities or survive, that's something homeless people already know. So, they're not learning it in an encampment. They're learning it by their whole lives, they're learning it because it is the only way they survive. Because they have been struggling for survival for however many months or years, and they all know that community is the only thing that gets you through.

Barbara Leckie 34:56
So, my last question actually goes to the last page of your book, where you describe a story about building a ship with Jeff, and I'm wondering if you could share that story with our listeners?

Maggie Helwig 35:09
One Saturday in early August, as we were setting up for an outdoor service in Bellevue Square Park, Jeff asked me, do you remember that ship we built, like the time we built that ship in the churchyard out of wooden skids, remember? I didn't remember exactly such a thing. But Jeff had created any number of constructions, so, I nodded. Well, he said, almost whispering, I heard that they dug it up 2 million years in the future, and it was completely the same. It was perfect. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? It is, I said, it really is, 2 million years in the future. Just think about it, that ship we built, completely the same. And while we may not have built a ship out of wooden skids exactly, we did build a little ark in the yard for a while, a place of refuge against the flood, a place where we preserved what we could. In some unimaginable future, somewhere the other side of the coming floods and the fire next time, will someone remember it? Will someone dig it up and find it still perfect? I cannot say that this may not be true.

Joel Westheimer 36:14
That was Maggie Helwig. Her focus on mutual care is also mentioned by many other guests, but I like the way she emphasizes how it goes both ways. We help each other, but that also changes us.

Barbara Leckie 36:27
It's almost as if it creates the habits or practices for living differently. Habits that, as Maggie notes, are already a part of life for people living in precarious situations. And that vision of building a ship that defines a different way of living is really beautiful.

Joel Westheimer 36:41
It is.

Our next guest, Carolyn Lesjak broadens that conversation while also reimagining what the commons could look like in the context of global capitalism, settler colonialism and, of course, the climate crisis.

Barbara Leckie 37:06
Carolyn is an English professor at Simon Fraser University. You'll hear my voice first asking Carolyn a question.

Your book is about retaining the notion of the commons but also reimagining it. What would you retain, and what would you reimagine?

Carolyn Lesjak 37:23
Well, retain, I do think it's important to retain the connections between political rights, land rights, and common rights. This is a summary, in a sense, of Peter Linebaugh, when he brings together Magna Carta, which we all knew about, right, the charter of political rights, but the rediscovered in 1217, charter of the forest, which is all about the right to commoning. And so, I think there can be a tendency, or I worry about the move sometimes, to make the commons a metaphor or to de-link it from economic—a change in the economic system altogether. And so, I think it has to involve, but I think there's the desire there for a change in like the mode of production, which again, would have to occur in the context of the climate crisis. But maintaining the economic component of the commons, I think, is crucial, and also the idea of self-management of one's space and one's social and political activity.

So, right, again and that kind of goes back to the false notion that these were just—that the literal common lands were just unused and ungoverned and just waste, right? Which was then the rationale for enclosing them and making them useful. So, I do think that needs to be retained. And I guess in reimagining, I've talked about this a little bit but, but just that sense that there's no going back. So, what a new commons would look like is an experiment in how do we bring together people, right? If this was already a challenge, when structures that determine your everyday life are not where they're visible to you, right. They're already offshore in Jamaica or other resource rich colonial holdings, etc., and now where we're in this fully globalized economy the means to think about how we can articulate and evoke our commonness is a real challenge, I think. And I think it's a very, it's just a very, very hard thing to think about, and I think of it as an ongoing political necessity.

Barbara Leckie 40:05
Yeah, and in that context, are there any examples that come to mind of reimagined commons in existence today that you can point to?

Carolyn Lesjak 40:15
Well, most recently, I would say I've been incredibly, well when we were talking about Jameson's language of being gripped, I've been gripped by my own work in reading Indigenous thinking about the land and about the commons, although, caveat—there’s some hostility and critique for good reason within Indigenous writing about the commons, because for them, much of what the left refers to as the commons is stolen Indigenous land. So that's, you know, that's important to keep in mind, but the idea itself of a different way of living in relation to the land and in relation to others.

I've also written recently about Saidiya Hartman's book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and I think her notion of a form of communal luxury that she unearths in, you know, black girls lives in the turn of the century is also incredibly compelling and a way of seeing again how in the midst of structure predicated on violence towards African Americans, on seeing, specifically her, she calls them joyous, joyous black girls as impoverished and so on, and seeing in the midst, midst of that this kind of rebellion in living itself and in living, right, in two fast girls living the way they're living, to me, is another incredibly, incredibly compelling example of something that exists. And she, you know, she has the lovely line, which might encompass a lot of what we've been talking about, which is just their radical hope of living otherwise, and the fact that that is a revolutionary approach or stance or belief, and that that's been incredibly moving and important to me as well.

Joel Westheimer 42:30
I like the way that Carolyn points to the commons as an experiment in how to bring people together.

Barbara Leckie 42:37
Yeah while also noting, as other guests do too, how difficult it is to change anything when so many of the structures that shape our interactions are invisible to us. Oil and gas companies, for example, where does our energy come from? So many of us don't even think about it.

Joel Westheimer 42:52
And that's a topic that our next guest, Imre Szeman, also discusses when he turns to the energy commons. Imre is a cultural theorist and professor at the University of Toronto.

Barbara Leckie 43:02
He's done a lot of thinking about how universities can contribute to experiments and collaboration.

Joel Westheimer 43:06
This part of the interview begins with a question from you, Barbara, about whether his collaborative approach to scholarship resonates with the idea of the commons. We should also note here that Imre will be discussing a project called After Oil that was a multi-year collaborative endeavor, and listeners can find more information about it on our website.

Barbara Leckie 43:29
So many of your projects and so much of your work has been collaborative and collective. And I'm wondering if that collaboration and that sort of impulse toward collectivity. If you see that as a practice that's consistent with the commons or the common?

lmre Szeman 43:52
I certainly do so, absolutely, I'm not sure what other answer I could have to that. But I will say this: so part of the common sense that I have strongly tried to reject in academic practice, in the humanities—I’m still a humanist, I would say fundamentally—is the idea of how you produce knowledge, and that knowledge is fundamentally an individual act at the moment you come to write the final thing. Now, I'm as guilty as the rest of us, and it's impossible not to do work on one's own, given the systems that we're in. But I also have the luxury, or the capacity or the opportunity to not do that, because I have tenure, all those kinds of safeties that exist. And so it's been important to at least experiment with how you might write something together, how you might share ideas along the way. The After Oil projects are really not about the outcome, they're about the working together through an idea for a long period with the people involved and they're always different kinds of experiments.

The most recent one is just wrapping up, and for that one, we did it over several meetings, over three years now, and always various kinds of experiments, people teaching us how to generate knowledge. We bring in people to do writing sessions with us, or to teach us how to do an effective podcast—we had one, one session about that. They're always about, why do we do knowledge production the way that we do it? Why do we consume it the way that we do it. The work that you're doing with this podcast is also that kind of unnerving, I think, of common sense.

It's also telling, I think, that for people that are so attuned to the limits of a practice, the way in which tradition can weigh things down, that we, we're very hesitant, and it's very difficult institutionally to shift that. And so that is happening with, say, types of research that involve communities now in a fundamental way. So not research on communities, but that involve communities. Some of my colleagues are doing, it takes an incredible amount of time to do that. So, years and years and years.

One of my colleagues at University of Toronto, Scarborough, Patty Romero Lankao, is doing an energy transition project with communities in different places in the world, but in the GTA, she's doing it in equity deserving, equity seeking communities that are then working with her to do the research work, to think about what energy transition would mean for their communities. So that might be a commoning of knowledge that would lead to an idea of how you produce an energy commons for those communities. And that might be as simple as, hey, we actually don't have to depend on energy from government systems. We now have the capacity to produce our own energy with relatively limited costs.

So, I guess it is part of that kind of whole project of, how do you make knowledge? Why do you make it? Who do you make it for? And then doing with a lot of people is a challenge that I have found worth doing. I'm opinionated, for sure, I try to be very democratic and open, and I struggle still. It's kind of like I want my way, but I think I've learned more from doing it then I have almost doing anything else, because what those projects are always about is bringing together people that are—the idea is always there, we're all talking about sort of the same thing, and so why don't we talk about it together? But we all come from it, from enough of a different perspective that we learn things we wouldn't have known.

So, the first After Oil, there's been three now, the first After Oil involved academics from different places in the world and different disciplines. It also involved a number of artists, visual artists, musicians. It also included the then liberal opposition leader of Alberta, and who seemed to do as well as the rest of us with the questions that we were looking at. He might not have the citations, but then we kind of try to talk ourselves out of the anxiety of citationality. The second After Oil involved, I think 70 people, a crazy experiment in commoning, but we then had more participants. We had people from First Nations communities, we had representatives of NGOs, from academic communities, we would involve engineers and people from business schools. And so, the whole thing was a total mess, total, total, mess, but in a way that had we not done that, the outcomes would not be what they were.

Barbara Leckie 48:42
I want to shift to your idea, and others, of the energy commons. Do you think the energy commons and this idea in general, of shared resources, which is so linked to the commons could be the sort of vision that you could suggest in place of criticizing all of the positions of the right?

lmre Szeman 49:05
This is one that I think is appealing. There is the energy commons when I use this on people, it's a winner, because you can do the myth part first, which is lots of resources, why are some held in common? Why are some not? So, there are decisions made about that. The big division being between water and power, between water and energy. Then you can easily point to different types of energy ownership. So, you can then show people these are just decisions. There's private companies, but certainly there's lots of nation-based, state-based energy systems, so there's already a politics at play. It's easy to kind of show that. If every single oil company was private, it'd be more difficult.

And then the question becomes, if this is so important to us, why don't we just have access to it? Why is it limited in North America, in Canada, to certain companies that extract and then sell to us? If this is so, as I and others insist, if energy is so important to every part of our everyday life, why should it be something that some control and others have to consume? Why, at a moment now, when we will need air conditioning? Why, when we need heat? Why, when we need ways to regulate what we can do? This has so much impact energy and what we can do and what we can't do has an impact on where one sits socially? Why exactly should this not be part of a decision making that a government undertakes for the purpose of people?

Joel Westheimer 50:41
That was Imre Szeman. Navigating those different political demands sounds tricky.

Barbara Leckie 50:45
it does, but there's something both pragmatic and visionary in what he's saying. That the idea that energy could be reimagined as a shared resource rather than a private commodity.

Joel Westheimer 51:04
Yeah, and that the commons isn't just a thought experiment. It's something we can build, whether it's in how we govern or how we power our homes. We'll now turn to Bill Ayers. Bill brings it back to the everyday, elder care, daycare, even traffic jams in Chicago. And as we noted before, he's also deeply concerned with what he calls toxic individualism.

Barbara Leckie 51:26
What he means is that everyone is made to feel that social problems are really their own failings.

Joel Westheimer 51:30
That if they worked harder or tried more or were smarter, that then they would be fine.

Barbara Leckie 51:35
But of course, structural problems like endemic poverty, racism, and inequality can't be solved by the individual. He shows how problems we treat as individual burdens are actually collective ones.

Joel Westheimer 51:41
And that's where the commons comes in. As you know, Barbara, Bill and I have known each other for a long time. We met when he was doing his Ph.D., and I was a middle school teacher at IS44, a public middle school in New York City. Bill's most recent book: When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer. This clip starts with me asking Bill about the commons.

While I don't think you draw on the concept of the commons directly, I feel like all your work relates to it. Do you think so?

Bill Ayers 52:14
I do, in fact. I think the subtitle of my latest book Reflections on Collective Liberation, is all about the commons. It's about the idea that we live in a culture that has been increasingly characterized by toxic individualism. And this has been something that, you know, every society struggles with, the question of me versus the question of we, that's a natural contradiction, it's a contradiction that exists in social life as we know it. But in the United States, certainly, and in many ways in the west, the question of me has been kind of subsumed and overwhelmed, and we is, is a foreign concept. It's socialism, or it's communism, or it's anarchism, or it's something foreign and alien. But in reality, of course, if you stop and think about it for a minute, there is no me without we, and that's the kind of struggle that I that I try to address.

So yes, the commons, for example, just to go back to the question of toxic individualism, everything in our political life in the United States is reduced to the individual and the personal, and everything has a social and a collective aspect, but that is erased or disappeared or fought against in the interest of the individual. So, when we talk about freedom, and this, incidentally, is foundational to the American project, freedom for the conqueror, is always murder and mayhem for the conquered. That's always true. And so, our vaunted American freedom rests on a kind of pyramid of bodies of enslaved Africans, of conquered Indigenous peoples and so on.

We can be very proud of our freedom, and we fight for our freedom, and we think we should impose our freedom on everybody else. But the reality is that our freedom is built on the unfreedom of many, many others, and that's where I think I enter, because that's foundational to the United States experience. And I think that if you take any minor thing—I’ll give you two examples—and you can see there's both a personal, individual aspect and a collective social aspect. Take daycare, childcare. Childcare, everybody's facing the same problem, who has a kid under five, but each of us approaches the problem as if it's my personal challenge. And it's not true, it is true, I should say it is true, but it's also not true in the sense that we're all facing it, and if we faced it together, we would come up with different ideas.

Joel Westheimer 54:42
Yeah, it doesn't—doesn’t need to be true, right?

Bill Ayers 54:52
That's my point. And the same is true of elder care. You know, everybody who has parents of a certain age faces the problem of, how do we take care of our parents? And there's no social answer to that. And so, we all struggle, struggle individually, to come up with the best we can do, but it's always kind of jerry rigged and put together spontaneously, instead of addressed as something that's common. And again, even in your daily life, you see this. You know, what drives me crazy somehow in Chicago is that traffic continues to get worse and worse and worse, not just during rush hour, eight o'clock at night, 10:30 in the morning, you can't drive anywhere. And you say to yourself, why don't we have public transportation? Well, because everything goes into my car, my individual experience with driving where I'm free to drive, the fact that we're all clogged on the same freeway is a paradox that we don't—we choose not to address. You know, I'm free to go anywhere I want, I just happen to be going where a million other people are going, and we could be going together, but we're not.

And then what's the answer to the problem? Build more freeways, self-driving cars and Ubers. There's nobody in Chicago who's saying, why don't we use all that engineering skill, all that capital, to build a world class public transportation system, trains, busses, shuttles. We could do it, but we don't do it.
As I said, freedom for the conqueror is murder for the conquered. But the way we're using—it’s used in our country all the time in our society, is the freedom to drill wherever I want to drill for oil, the freedom to build a pipeline, the freedom to make war on other people, and so on and so on. This is my freedom, and we need to interrupt that narrative, and we need to challenge it with the social and the collective and the commons.

Joel Westheimer 56:47
Bill made me think of a quote from the critic, Amitav Ghosh. I'm going to read it: "In an ironic twist, the individual conscience is now increasingly seen as the battleground of choice for a conflict that is self-evidently a problem of the global commons requiring collective action."

Barbara Leckie 57:05
I really like that. He reminds us of how important it is to reorient our focus away from the individual. In this episode, even though it's longer than the others, we've only been able to cover a tiny fraction of the little experiments in commoning that we see all around us, but we've listed many more on our website, commonspodcast.com

Joel Westheimer 57:25
In our next and last episode of the season, we'll turn to that question of collective action, and also, finally, turn to the topic that has informed all of our conversations to date, climate change. So, join us in episode six of our podcast, CommonS Sense, that's Commons with an S.

Barbara Leckie 57:52
Support for CommonS Sense comes from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the shared online projects initiative at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. And from Re.Climate, Canada's National Center for Climate Communication and Public Engagement.

Special thanks to our producer Mary Stinson, our sound producer Rhianna Philip, and to CKCU 93.1FM