Episode 3 of CommonS Sense

Hosted by Barbara Leckie and Joel Westheimer

​

"The Earth Has the Final Say"

[Trailer]

 

Astra Taylor 00:03

The Commons refers to something that is commonly managed, commonly held, commonly owned.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 00:09

All the open fields in Britain were gone. 

 

Heather Menzies 00:13

There's a place for everyone. The land is shared. There are no fences. . . . It's an alternative that involves people and where responsibility is shared, and democracy can be revived.

 

[End Trailer]

 

Joel Westheimer 00:27

Welcome back to Commons Sense. A series where we ask how common sense, and the idea of the commons relate to the climate crisis. I'm Joel Westheimer. 

 

Barbara Leckie 00:37

And I'm Barbara Leckie. Last time we discussed an idea that most people have some familiarity with– common sense. As in, “it's just common sense.” What passes for obvious or self-evident.

 

Joel Westheimer 00:48

In this episode, we're going to take on an idea that may be less familiar to some listeners. The idea of the commons. But before we get to that, Barbara, I wanted to talk just briefly about the title of this episode: “The Earth has the Final Say.” 

 

Barbara Leckie 01:03

“The Earth has the Final Say.” I really love that phrase. It's a comment that the poet and activist Rita Wong makes in our interview with her, and it's a beautiful reminder of the power of Earth. 

 

Joel Westheimer 01:14

The idea that we can endlessly treat the earth as a resource to extract from–that's just an illusion. No matter how much we privatize or commodify, nature doesn't ask for permission. I mean, right now, we're experiencing wildfires and rising seas and droughts and floods. The earth always has the final say.

 

Barbara Leckie 01:33

And Rita's comment also makes us think about the kinds of relationships we want to form with the places we inhabit, and whether those relationships are based on control or reciprocity.

 

Joel Westheimer 01:43

And that brings us to the commons. To me, the commons evokes not just our relationship to the land and natural resources, but our relationships to one another. And another thing, the commons is also a term with its own long, tangled history. At first glance, it sounds simple enough, things we hold in common, shared resources. But really, the commons is just as contested and complicated as common sense that we talked about in episodes one and two. But listen, maybe we should start at the beginning. What exactly is the commons?

 

Barbara Leckie 02:16

The commons refers to shared resources like earth, water, air, and it's also evolved to include, for some public institutions. All of which are collectively managed and sustained for the benefit of all, rather than owned or exploited for private gain.

 

Joel Westheimer 02:30

Yeah, but it's more complicated than that, right? 

 

Barbara Leckie 02:34

Yes, much more complicated. And our guests will get into a lot of the tricky issues, and I've left out a lot in that very quick definition. But for now, I'll note that there is a distinction between the commons and the common singular, and another distinction between the commons and the public, and we're not going to go into either of these distinctions here. I'll also note a comment from Malcolm Ferdinand's book Decolonial Ecology. Ferdinand's an environmental engineer at the University of Paris, Diderot, and he writes that the Earth “can become not only what we share, but what we have in common without owning it.” And that phrase underpins a lot of what we'll be thinking about.

 

Joel Westheimer 03:20

Okay, we'll go deeper into all that later in the episode. There is one thing we should discuss now, though. It's easy to celebrate the idea of the commons as egalitarian and democratic. But it's also been critiqued, especially from Indigenous perspectives. I mean, long before the commons in pre-enclosure England existed, Indigenous peoples had systems of land stewardship and relational governance. And when we use the European version of the commons, it risks erasing all that. After all, what's often described as shared or common land was, in many cases, land taken from Indigenous peoples through colonization.

 

Barbara Leckie 03:57

And so, we try to avoid talking about reclaiming the commons. Who are we reclaiming it from, after all? And who was there first? And instead to think about, what, if anything is useful in thinking through the lens of the commons now. For example, on the one hand, as you said, the commons is a European concept that is related to colonization and in tension with Indigenous ideas of land stewardship. But then, on the other, it's a model for a shared economy, and it's grounded, literally grounded, in the land and an invitation to think and imagine otherwise, a point that many of our guests make. And what we want to do here, ideally, is gesture toward an expansive blending, a kind of conversation between these two ideas and two tensions and see what we can arrive at in that context.

 

Joel Westheimer 04:41

Yes. We want to think about how it might point us toward alternative ways of thinking about property or responsibility and care when it comes to living together on this planet. And some of our guests in not just this episode, but the ones that follow, talk about the commons in relation to land. Others point to water, air, community centers, public libraries, even poetry. But they all return to this idea that the commons isn't just a thing, it's also a practice. 

 

Barbara Leckie 05:10

It's what the Italian feminist scholar Silvia Frederici calls “commoning.” A way of living with others, human and more the human in a shared relationship. 

 

Joel Westheimer 05:19

It's more verb than noun. 

 

Barbara 5:21

And we want to emphasize that. We want to be thinking of the commons as both a place and, as you noted, a practice, and that the two are inseparable and really active together.

 

Joel Westheimer 05:29

So, let's talk about some history of the commons, but also about how turning to the commons might offer tools for reimagining things like democracy, environmental stewardship, and public life. Let's dive in. We'll begin talking about a bit of that history with Carolyn Lesjak, a professor at Simon Fraser University. You may recall that we first met Carolyn in episode one.

 

Barbara Leckie 05:52

That's right. Here we'll play a brief clip where she discusses what happened to the commons in the 18th and 19th centuries, when lands that had previously being collectively managed and open to others, were enclosed and privatized.

 

Carolyn Lesjak 06:06

It's a big question, but I would say, in a nutshell, the commons was enclosed and privatized through parliamentary acts and simple land theft. And for me, one of the important ways of framing the 19th century is to understand that this was a centuries-long process and involved thousands of acts of enclosure, but also, importantly, numerous forms of resistance and nothing short of the destruction of an entire way of life. So, between 1750 and 1830 there were over 4000 acts of enclosure that resulted in over 21% of the land being enclosed. And significantly, by the end of the century, virtually all the open fields in Britain were gone. 

 

Now to me, one of the most significant results or consequences of enclosure and the loss of the commons entailed the loss of common right, or subsistence rights, which had provided labourers with a modicum of independence by protecting them from dependence on a wage or compulsory labour and its structures of time, leisure, value, the list goes on, community consumption, and especially property relations. And I think that's an idea that it's very hard for us to understand, in a world today dictated by compulsory labour. In the case of the commoners, in the 19th century, the common land which was managed and used—it wasn't just there—provided access to a range of resources, from the pasturing for livestock, fishing, gathering of wood and turf and so on, all of which allowed for a level of autonomy. And one of the nice ways I think that the historian J.M. Neeson puts this, is that it allowed labourers to say no, to refuse to work. So that, I think, is probably the most significant aspect of what was lost with the loss of the commons. And clearly connected to that is the depopulation of the countryside and the movement of labourers into the agricultural and industrial proletariat.

 

Joel Westheimer 08:52

That was Carolyn Lesjak.

 

Barbara Leckie 08:54

So, what we hear from Carolyn is that enclosure isn't just about land. It's about reshaping daily life, how people feed themselves, work together, and understand their place in the world. And once land is privatized, those communal practices of daily life can often get criminalized. What was once a practice of cutting trees for firewood, for example, can suddenly become illegal.

 

Joel Westheimer 09:16

Right. And the effects of that shift from shared access to private ownership still echo today, not just in economics, but in how we imagine responsibility and community. And I don't know, I would say even freedom. Barbara, let's take a pause here, because so often, when someone mentions the commons, the first thing everyone goes to is that phrase: tragedy of the commons. 

 

Barbara Leckie 09:38

The tragedy of the commons. That's a phrase that, in fact, when we were making this podcast, we wanted to avoid altogether. That quickly proved impossible. The ecologist Garrett Hardin is the one who popularized “tragedy of the commons” in an article he wrote. And there he privileges competition over collaboration– assumes that people pursue individual well-being over the good of the whole or the group. And also assumes that property has boundaries that don't spill over.

 

Joel Westheimer 10:05

The problem is that Hardin assumed in that formulation of the commons that there was no governance at all, like essentially a free for all, and then he concluded that they would fail.

 

Barbara Leckie 10:13

But real commons are rarely unmanaged like that. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how in communities around the world, people actually do manage common resources, most of the time, at least. Here's what she has to say.

 

Elinor Ostrom 10:29

Garrett Hardin wrote a very stirring article in 1968 published in Science, and he imagined a pasture open to all, and posited that if that were the case, then everyone would bring their animals on, and they would keep bringing more and more and more, and they would eventually overuse the commons. What he went on to say was that they were trapped and could not themselves get out of it. And what our theoretical work and empirical work has shown is that in many instances, but not all, people have found ways of agreeing on their own rules and extracting themselves from the problem.

 

Joel Westheimer 11:12

It's also important to note that many argue that Hardin was a white supremacist and a racist who used faulty logic to justify enclosure and privatization. So, we can also question his motives.

 

Barbara Leckie 11:23

And even question whether he's talking about the commons at all. I think sometimes that capitalism, or at least neoliberal versions of it, might better describe his position, and then we would get the tragedy of capitalism. The commons, in other words, is about regulating shared goods and lands. And capitalism, in its current versions, is an experiment in what happens when those sorts of checks and balances are removed, and the market and profits instead dictate what should be done.

 

Joel Westheimer 11:50

We're now going to turn to Rita Wong, a Canadian poet and a professor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. Rita has written several books of poetry, for example, beholden: a poem as long as the river. She wrote it with the Canadian poet and novelist Fred Wah. It's a beautiful book that helped us to think about water as a commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 12:20

Before we listen to our conversation with Rita, I wanted to bring in our producer, Mary Stinson, who conducted the interview with Rita and has been helping shape this podcast from behind the scenes. Mary, thanks for stepping in front of the mic for a moment.

 

Mary Stinson 12:38

Yeah, happy to Joel.

 

Joel Westheimer 12:41

In your interview with Rita, she has such a powerful way of weaving together poetry, politics, and ecology. I want to ask you what stood out when you talked with her?

 

Mary Stinson 12:52

Well, in terms of overall impression, it's how thoughtful Rita is, how carefully she weighs a question, not just here in our conversation, but in the larger world. And she doesn't assume or presume anything, including anything about our relationship to Earth. And I appreciated her aversion to the term “resources.” And something else I admire about Rita is that she has the courage of her convictions, both in her art and her activism. And her peaceful participation in protests, has resulted in prison time, but Rita is willing to risk that for her beliefs. She comes across as lowkey and unassuming, but I think listeners will hear her deep commitment in our conversation.

 

Joel Westheimer 13:43

Really interesting. One of the other themes that kept surfacing in your conversation with Rita was reciprocity, our relationship with water, land, and Earth as something mutual and not extractive.

 

Mary Stinson 13:56

Yes, very much so Joel. And another thing that stayed with me is her suggestion that we can change the narrative we're in. And we often talk about narrative, but she makes it almost tangible, something you can actually be part of. So that if you see yourself as a player in a story, it gives you a different perspective, and your actions might actually help to change the course of that story, because you're an active part of that, which is something that Rita herself exemplifies.

 

Joel Westheimer 14:29

Okay, that's really helpful. Let's listen to Rita.

 

Mary Stinson 14:33

First, I'd like to ask you what the commons, the idea of what the commons means to you. 

 

Rita Wong 14:39

Well, I think the commons for me, is a European concept. I think about the Enclosure Acts that Raymond Williams wrote about in Britain, for instance, and the taking away of lands that were shared in common and then privatized. And I'm not sure if I would use that term in North America. I think that it does have an important reference, but I also think that the land here has already got its own terms and its own languages and its own reference points. So, we could perhaps bring it as an analogy or a way of thinking about moving into a transition back into Indigenous ways of being and doing. I have a personal affiliation or appreciation for the idea of the commons and the work of Elinor Ostrom, and just like the way in which a commons only works when people respect its principles and take care of it, and think about each other alongside the resources that people, I don't even like to use the term resources, but anyway, alongside the land that is being stewarded. 

 

So, for me, the commons, if I contextualize all that first, represents a way of acknowledging that there's enough for everybody if we don't take more than we need. Just that sense that we are part of a life force and that we have responsibilities to that. And so, yeah, I think I also want to situate myself, I don't ever want to be speaking for Indigenous peoples, but I feel it's really important for those of us who are not Indigenous to speak alongside and with Indigenous people who've been speaking very clearly for a long time and need to, I think, it would be good to acknowledge that they've been heard and that we're learning and acting on what we're learning. So, it's in that spirit that I offer those reference points, I guess. There's something about the commons that, for me, speaks of governance from the ground up, that governance isn't something that's imposed hierarchically by an authority or colonial power, but that it stems from the life on the ground and the people, but not only people on the ground.

 

Mary Stinson 17:00

When did you start becoming aware of water as a source, not only in sort of general terms, but in very specific terms, a life source?

 

Rita Wong 17:14

Pretty late in my life, I would say. Back in I think, around 2007 my friend and colleague, Dorothy Christian and also Denise Nadeau, they had organized a gathering called Protect Our Sacred Waters. And the purpose of that gathering was to bring together people from all four directions, for the sake of water, which is also for the sake of ourselves. And I was living in Miami at the time, so I wasn't able to attend because this was in Vancouver, but I had forwarded the invitation on to other folks in the Chinese and Asian community, none of whom showed up. And I realized at that point that I needed to take this on myself in a deeper way. So, I started thinking through what it means to be connected to water and how to be in reciprocal relationship with the waters around us and in us and through us. So yeah, that impetus came from Dorothy, I would say, and I've been responding to that call ever since. 

 

Mary Stinson 18:23

And by reciprocal relationship, can you tell me a little more about what you mean by that?

 

Rita Wong 18:29

I think that we forget at our own peril that the Earth is constantly giving us life and to be grateful for that life and to give back in ways that might have to do with respect, with gratitude, with care, also with healing places that have been damaged or harmed or polluted. So, there's a lot of steward work that I would say comes, should come from, not just a place of self-interest, but also a place of gratitude for what we've been given, the time and the beauty of the lives we've been given. Oh, and I wanted to add also that that phrasing comes to me from various places, but one of the important places to acknowledge is Reuben George. He's from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. He just recently, last year, wrote a book called It Stops Here, about standing up for the lands and waters. He's writing from a Tsleil-Waututh perspective. And Reuben speaks very powerfully about people's reciprocal relation with the earth. So, I think that I didn't grow up with those teachings in that language, but once I encountered those teachings, they made a lot of sense to me, and I tried to carry them as best as I can in my life today.

 

Mary Stinson 19:53

A few moments ago, you were mentioning Indigenous influences and practices, and your appreciation and support of Indigenous practices where humans live in relationship with the land. I'm wondering what other cultures, both social and economic cultures, can learn from those Indigenous practices.

 

Rita Wong 20:11

I have a few, kind of, initial thoughts about it. I teach an environmental ethics class, and we read a little bit about the work of Dara Kelly, who's a Stó:lō professor at SFU, Simon Fraser University, who's been doing work around the revitalization of Stó:lō coastal economies. And I think it's important to remember that there were already economies here. There were already laws here. There was a thriving culture here prior to colonization. And so, the principles that Kelly writes about include, I think, a sense of reciprocity, but much more as well. And I think that kind of grounding and an ethics of care for each other and also for the land is really important. You know that saying sometimes, does the economy work for us, or do we work for the economy? I think the Indigenous peoples here had a very smart economy that was working for them, as opposed to having to work just for the sake of keeping the economy going, which is, I think, a colonial trap that too many of us are caught in. 

 

But I also wanted to go back to the ocean. Epeli Hau‘ofa wrote this beautiful collection of essays, We Are The Ocean, and there's many perspectives around the ocean and the economies of the ocean that existed prior to colonization, that were almost in some ways eradicated, but have not been eradicated, and form, I think, really important principles as well as knowledge for us to work with as we navigate the climate crisis. I would also maybe want to acknowledge, as well the work of Leanne Simpson and Robin Maynard in their beautiful book, Rehearsals for Living. They point out, as do other thinkers like Amitav Ghosh, how the crisis that we're in isn't new. That's it's an unfolding and a logical outcome of 500 years of colonization and industrial scale exploitation and extraction of the land and its resources. So, you know, that question of what time frame are we in, and what narrative do we see ourselves part of, and what narratives do we want to be part of? Those are all sorts of things that I'm trying to work through in poetry, in language, but also just in real time as I'm living.

 

Mary Stinson 22:37

In terms of public participation and activism, you've said that your poetry led you to what you needed to do in your life, to live with yourself and live honestly. How did poetry take you there?

 

Rita Wong 22:53

There's so many ways, but one thing that comes to mind, in my first book of poetry, Monkey Puzzle, there's a poem for the Yangtze River. And I had traveled, I'd lived in China for a year teaching English back in the early 90s, and I had traveled along the Yangtze River before it was dammed by the Three Gorges Dam. And I wrote a poem at that point for the river and opposing the dam. And it was like, once I wrote that poem, I had to, as, you know, as you were saying, live by and act by those words. And so that's a very concrete and specific example that comes to mind. It wasn't like I could just ignore all the devastation that was going around. Once I took the time to be with it and in it, it called for me to not remain silent about it and to try to live a life that refuses that violence. It's really heartbreaking to see the amount of violence and devastation that is happening. But it's also important to keep in mind the timeline of the earth and of the earth cycles is much longer than our small human reference points, and so in that vein, to try to keep aligned with the Earth. With regards to the commons and its appropriation by corporate interests, that we're living at a very scary time for me, in terms of the corporation's idea that they own everything and can commodify and privatize everything, when that is like a huge theft. And I guess the only thing I would say that's more powerful than the globalized economy and our corporations is, of course, the Earth has the final say. Erica Gies wrote a book called Water Always Wins that I find also emphasizes this, right, like that, we could try to fight these natural cycles, or we could try to learn from them, respect them, and coexist with them. And the latter, I think, offers a way more viable future for humanity than the former.

 

Joel Westheimer 24:57

That was Rita Wong talking with our producer, Mary Stinson. Barbara, I hope everyone heard it, the Earth has the final say. That's our title for this episode.

 

Barbara Leckie 25:07

Yeah. And Rita grounds the conversation in something that's often missing– a deep recognition that land isn't just a resource to be managed, but also a relationship to be honoured. And when she says the Earth has the final say, she’s not just being poetic. She's pointing to the real consequences of breaking that relationship.

 

Joel Westheimer 25:26

That deep sense of reciprocity runs through Rita's work, and it echoes with what we're about to hear from Heather Menzies. Heather is a writer and activist, and here's a cool thing, she's a longtime member of the Gabriola Commons on Gabriola Island, one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. With 26 acres of protected lands, it's one of the few active commons in North America. Can you situate where we are in this part of the interview?

 

Barbara Leckie 25:51

Yeah. At the beginning of this clip, when Heather talks about oral culture, she's referring to the 18th century commons in Scotland, where her ancestors are from. She also gives us some background on Garrett Hardin, who we talked about earlier, and discusses one, to me, charming and unexpected aspect of the Gabriella Commons, the poetry yurt. Let's listen to her.

 

Heather Menzies 26:13

I love the fact that I've talked about how the commons is cultural. There were all these proverbs. It was a very oral culture, and proverbs were nice and small. You could just, you know, tuck them away in your head. And one of them that I loved is, no matter the shape of the peat, the turf of peat, there's always a place for it in the peat pile. And I've always thought that was a beautiful image or metaphor for society. There's a place for everyone, and it's a sign of a very unhealthy society that we have so much insider, outsiders, so many people on the margins and left there, not integrated in. And that's why I'm so glad that, at least to a certain extent, on the commons on Gabriola, there is an inclusive space, because the land is shared, there are no fences.

 

Barbara Leckie 26:55

So, the proverb takes me back to the poetry yurt again, and I've been thinking about it also as fundamental to the commons, to ideas of the commons, insofar as poetry--and this goes back also to your to your interest in language and words—poetry is derived from poesis, which means making or creating. And that seems like a part of any approach to the commons, and it made me wonder about introducing the phrase “the poetry of the commons” as a corrective to “the tragedy of the commons” that's too often very prevalent. And I wondered if that made sense to you?

 

Heather Menzies 27:35

Because poetry has come over the years to be seen as this rather rarefied thing, I would have difficulty with that, Barbara. I would choose a simpler word, like the practice of the commons, because part of the reason why I call the original articulation of the “tragedy of the commons” disinformation is because it denied the practice of the commons. Here was this guy, amateur mathematician, William Forster Lloyd, and he was invited to give this lecture at Oxford University, this elite knowledge making place. And he did not go out onto the commons and talk to people. No, he extrapolated from census data, animals and people, and then his argument, which was then published as a pamphlet, that was then used by Garrett Hardin years and years and years, centuries later, his argument was the rational self-interested individual will ineluctably, unavoidably, prefer because of their self-interest, wanting to pasture one too many animals on the commons, and so the commons is going to become a desert–is going to be destroyed. And he denied and denigrated all that practice that was out there. 

 

And that's why I'm so keen to see that revived, and I see it in concert with the researchers of Indigenous knowledge, partly because of the parallel that happened. It was this same guy, John Locke, who is considered the father of modern economics, and he was the guy who motivated people like William Forster Lloyd, who articulated the tragedy of commons, by pushing this new modern utilitarian philosophy of individual self-improvement. And Locke was the one who started it all by his improving thing. And he said, anyone who takes land out of its state of nature, mixes his labor with it to make it profitable and productive, thereby makes it his property. And that was his, it was like a sleight of hand, and then, of course, the philosophy of improvement—look at it, everything's self-improvement. You know how to make yourself thinner, sleeker, whatever. 

 

So again, this common sense we need to challenge, and that's why I call it decolonization, because it's repudiating so much of the thinking and the values behind that, in order to reclaim and pull selectively from a heritage that we all share, because I'm not the only settler Canadian who has a pre-modern, pre-colonial, pre-capitalist past. It’s there for an awful lot of people, and I think it helps to give them a place to stand if they reconnect with it, and that's one of the reasons for the commons, just to give you a sense that there is an alternative. And it's an alternative that involves people and where responsibility is shared, and democracy can be revived.

 

Joel Westheimer 30:39

That was Heather Menzies. What she said at the end there is one of my favorite topics, the commons can be broadened to think about larger political frameworks like democracy. The commons is a democratic practice.

 

Barbara Leckie 30:51

Yeah, I thought you'd like that. It's actually a lot of what you think about in your work on education. And Heather's reference to the revival of the commons leads nicely into Astra Taylor's comments that are up next, and we met Astra Taylor as a reminder in our earlier episodes.

 

Joel Westheimer 31:04

Right. And Astra challenges us to ask: what if democracy isn't just about voting or representation, but about how we live together? It echoes the philosopher and education reformer John Dewey. He said this: “A democracy is more than a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living.” And Dewey and Astra both note that democracy is about how we manage shared life and confront challenges. And in this case, one of those challenges may be the most existential challenge we have, the climate crisis. Here's Astra. 

 

Astra Taylor 31:37

I think democracy is actually implicit in the idea of the commons, because the commons refers to something that is commonly managed, commonly held, commonly owned. And so, you can't really have that without some democratic sensibility, without some sense of people ruling themselves and ruling resources together, which is the basic definition of democracy. Democracy is something I've worked on over the years, and people, of course, always ask, well, what is it, right? In fact, I made a film called What is Democracy? And my pithy answer goes back to the ancient Greeks, to Aristotle, who famously said that democracy is rule of the poor, because the poor are necessarily more numerous than the rich. And you know, the commons, as an ideal, is a framework through which those who lack personal wealth, who lack personal means, can have a say, can have a voice. And so, I think that sort of basic materialist conception of democracy, that is not just about a vote, but about the sharing of resources, is inherent in the concept of the commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 32:41

That was Astra Taylor. To close off this episode on the commons, we're going to turn to the environmentalist and activist, Bill McKibben. This is another interview that our producer, Mary Stinson conducted. Here's more from the call I had with Mary. Mary, how do Bill's comments help to orient us in a conversation on the commons?

 

Mary Stinson 33:00

Well, Bill is a familiar and highly respected voice on everything related to the climate crisis. We've been talking here in this episode about the earth and water commons. And Bill adds air and the atmosphere to that and points out that they're part of the commons too. And he, like Heather Menzies, who we heard earlier, sees the problems with Garrett Hardin's take on the commons. Bill has also been instrumental in putting the urgency of the climate crisis on the map for all of us. And so, his take on the commons brings together the topics of our podcast, and that is how thinking about the commons can help us to address the climate crisis. I began here by asking Bill how he sees the commons in terms of climate action.

 

Bill McKibbon 33:53

Well, you know, it's one of those terms that has this long and interesting history in environmental discourse. Garrett Hardin's essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons” was a kind of viewed by many as a kind of seminal piece about things. I’ve got to say, I've always thought that his view that we were inevitably going to ruin all commons was mistaken, and that there are an endless number of good examples in human history of people taking good care of the common things that they share. That there's nothing inevitable or automatic about it. The atmosphere is the biggest commons that we can imagine. We're wrecking it at the moment. 

 

But when I say we, I mean a very tiny subset of our species, mostly the people who run huge fossil fuel companies and the politicians that they've been able to purchase. Everybody else I know could care less where their energy came from. A solar panel instead of an oil well, they'd be just as happy, more happy, and that's entirely doable now, since power from a solar panel is cheaper than power from an oil well. But if you own an oil well, which is not a commons, which is a reserve that belongs to you, then you're determined to get the billions of dollars out of it that you can as long as we're dependent on those resources. 

 

So like any commons—you know, I grew up in New England, where we have town commons, where people once grazed sheep—one person doesn't get to come in and graze a thousand sheep, and nobody else gets to graze any you know, you need a system to figure out how to control it. And the system that should be able to do that is democracy, informed by science. But our democracies have largely been corrupted at this point, and we fight hard to prevent that from happening anymore.

 

Mary Stinson 35:46

Just going back to the idea of the commons, with our 21st-century concepts of property ownership and individual versus collective rights and identity politics and consumerism, how do we shift to the idea and practice of a shared economy? Or should we even be trying to make that shift?

 

Bill McKibbon 36:08

Well, I mean, we have to move in that direction to some degree. The fantasy, that Ayn Randian fantasy, that unregulated markets would solve all problems, which really became the American mantra, and then, by extension, much of the world's mantra, beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, that fantasy has been given a fair trial now. 

 

And the result is that the Arctic is melting, the Antarctic is melting, the Amazon is drying up, the ocean levels are rising, most of our coral reefs are gone. It doesn't work. It works in the short run to produce more volume of cash, not that it's shared very well, but that doesn't do you any good once you reach these ecological troubles. 

 

So you know, the way back from that is never, is not going to be, I don't think, a kind of immediate overturning revolution, and I don't know what it would produce, even if there was this revolution tomorrow. But it needs to be the rapid, rapid re-regulation of corporate power, so that we no longer have to deal with the idea that they're setting, that they're choosing not just the means, capitalism, but the ends, their own domination and wealth. Those means have to be regulated if we're going to have any other end than the one we're seeing now. 

 

I think that's the job for people my age. I don't know what kind of world or economy people generations younger than me will manage to build and produce in the course of their lifetimes. I think my job is to figure out how to give them as many options still on this planet as possible, by limiting the rise in temperature as quickly as possible, because every tenth of a degree the mercury rises doesn't just doom a lot of people to death and dislocation, it also just cuts off that many more options for what we can do going forward. And so, I think for people my age, that becomes the key task, not figuring out where this all eventually ends, I'm not a wise enough philosopher to know what the right and just society looks like, but I know what it doesn't look like, and I know what we've got to move away from.

 

Joel Westheimer 38:35

That was Bill McKibben.

 

Barbara Leckie 38:36

Bill knows what it doesn't look like. Coming up, we'll explore some ideas of what a right and just society could look like.

 

Joel Westheimer 38:44

In the next episode titled “Entangled Inheritances,” we'll come back to the questions we raised earlier about the tensions between Indigenous land stewardship and the commons.

 

Max Liboiron 38:56

There's some really tangled inheritances around commons. You can be all for like environmental stewardship and still be furthering colonial goals.

 

Stephanie LeMenager 39:04

Commons, at least in the colonial period in North America, the commons of European settlers were some of the most violent spaces of dispossession and wasting of Indigenous land and life systems.

 

Candis Callison 39:17

I do think that considering ourselves as a collective is the only way forward in a climate changed future. And how we do that is still very much up for debate. And I just think there are other possibilities. There are other visions and imaginations, and how we imagine the future actually determines what kinds of decisions we make in the present.

 

Joel Westheimer 39:43

So, join us in episode four of our podcast, Commons Sense, that's commons with an S. The music you hear in this podcast was composed and performed by award winning musician and educator, Jesse Stewart. You can find out more about Jesse's Music by visiting our website, commonspodcast.com. 

I want to remind our listeners that bios of the people we interview are on our website, and you can also find information on any people referenced in the interviews. Again, that's commonspodcast.com.

 

Barbara Leckie 40:20

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 Phillip, and to CKCU 93.1, FM.