SPEAKERS

Joel Westheimer, Barbara Leckie, Max Liboiron, , Stephanie LeMenager, and Candis Callison 

 

Joel Westheimer 00:00

You’re listening to Commons Sense with Barbara Leckie and Joel Westheimer Westheimer on CKCU 93.1, FM. 

 

Joel Westheimer 00:17

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 00:30

And I'm Barbara Leckie. In our last episode, we introduced the idea of the commons. It's a concept with a long history, and part of that history, as Rita Wong noted, relates to its colonial past.

 

Joel Westheimer 00:42

In this episode, we're continuing the conversation on the colonial past, and also asking how the idea of the commons translates to a North American context.

 

Barbara Leckie 00:52

Yeah. I love the way that Rita talked about the land having its own terms here. The land having its own language. 

 

Joel Westheimer 00:58

Yeah. And Rita points out that Indigenous practices also have a long history here. So, what do we gain by bringing in the commons? 

 

Barbara Leckie 01:05

That's the question we'll be turning to. As Max Liboiron puts it in this episode, the entangled inheritances of the commons.

 

Joel Westheimer 01:13

Max is a scientist and researcher in geography at Memorial University. We already met them in earlier episodes.

 

Barbara Leckie 01:19

First, you'll hear my voice asking Max a question about where they live. 

 

Barbara Leckie 01:29 

Usually when people think of the commons, one of the first things they think of is land. Your work puts land front and center. And I'm wondering if we could begin by having you describe where you are.

 

Max Liboiron

Like, literally, where I'm sitting right now and what's out my window? Or, do you mean, like, philosophically, theoretically? 

 

Barbara Leckie

Actually, literally.

 

Max Liboiron 01:40

I am in my house, which I love. I built it with my dad. It's very small. It's on three acres in a very small hamlet called Bishop's Cove, which was renamed from Bread and Butter Cove, when this random minister came by in the 1800s–he was not a bishop. And I love it here. I'm not from the island of Newfoundland, but I'm making a lot of reconnections or connections with the land here, because I live here and do chores here and live in a very rural way. I chop wood, I haul rocks, I crush my toes under those rocks, that sort of thing. So, I shovel with a shovel, a very long way. These sorts of things. I live in the bushes. I live with animals. So yeah, that's where I am. I am home. 

 

Barbara Leckie 02:20

Sounds really beautiful. 

 

Max Liboiron 02:22

It is staggeringly beautiful, which is very handy for gratitude.

 

Barbara Leckie 02:30

Now you’ve piqued my interest with philosophically where you are. So maybe I'll ask you where you are philosophically in relation to land too.

 

Max Liboiron 02:34

Yeah. I talk about different philosophies or approaches to understanding land in Pollution is Colonialism a bit. So, there's different Indigenous concepts of land. The one that I am subscribed to is that land is about, you know, bees and trees and water and air and stuff, but also stars and also kin that you can't see or that you don't like, and events and histories and these sorts of connections that are manifest and say, like the thickness of the air, so climate change is part of land. And that is, even if it's understandable by non-Indigenous folks, it’s not completely understandable by non-Indigenous folks, because it is actually a different cosmology. It is a different paradigm, even if it's appreciated by other folks. 

 

That's why in my book, I put a capital L on that Land, so people know that I'm talking about that stuff. Then there's also like land, landscape, nature, small, not capitalized, small letters, not proper nouns, which a really broad array of people are invested and concerned of. And some of that might overlap with capital L, Indigenous Lands cosmologies, but it has more to do with dirt and bees and trees, and it can be understood through science. And, you know, these sorts of things.

 

Barbara Leckie 03:30

One of my favorite lines—maybe, weirdly, I don't know—in your book, Pollution is Colonialism, is the phrase: “The land is loud here.” I'm wondering if you could describe that loudness. What do you hear? Or is it a philosophical loudness?

 

Max Liboiron 03:49

So, one of the things I really like about the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is that the weather is so extreme that to think that you can make something as common in, say, New York City, which is where I did my Ph.D., as a plan, you can't make plans here, or you can, but they're extremely provisional. So, like, you can't fly out on an airplane, sometimes for days at a time in Labrador. Sometimes I can't park my car where I want to because my gates are frozen shut. You know, like, these sorts of things happen very consistently, where whatever your master plan was, it will change between the weather and the way infrastructure can and cannot work in that no matter what your philosophy or understanding of land is, everyone ends up on the same page in terms of human agency is not as strong as you wish it was, maybe. Or like, control is an illusion, given that, like, you can literally just not do certain things for days or weeks or months because of the weather.

 

Barbara Leckie 04:47

Right. And it's interesting how you're describing land entering our awareness. You feel and see and are either propelled forward or stopped by the land in ways that aren't always obvious in other places, especially when we're in these buildings that are heat and temperature controlled and so on. That's, yeah, that's a great point. 

 

Because the commons is about land, it's about relations, on the one hand, the commons offers a model of kind of collective mode of stewardship. On the other hand, in the North American context, the commons were on stolen lands, and I'm wondering if you could discuss these different sometimes incommensurable, sometimes not relations. 

 

Max Liboiron 05:29

Well, so, it's not just Indigenous lands– what sometimes people refer to as the commons were stolen, like the commons were the, the word common in the sort of practice and philosophy of commons, as you probably know, as a Victorianist, comes out of England, and the sort of shared open space where people could gather wood or graze their sheep and that sort of stuff. And that was also stolen by upper class, sort of capitalist powers that privatized them to benefit the elite and create a proletariat for the first time. So, manhandling the commons and enclosing it and stealing it and reconfiguring relationships at the very base of what makes, you know, a commons a commons, doesn't start in North America, it starts in England. So, yeah, so there's that. That being said, there's stealing, and then there's genocide, and those are actually two very different land relations. And here what happened was genocide, and to enable that theft, because you actually couldn't do it without genocide. 

 

So, they're not commensurate, even if they might have some similitude in other ways. I think there's some really tangled inheritances around commons, when that idea comes to North America and any Indigenous land. The first is that the English idea of the commons has its manifestation here as pioneers, pioneering. And pioneers were literally a tool of genocide, dispossession, Indigenous people off the lands, but also as like vectors for disease. Pioneers were for colonization, like that was and those were commons. And people still understand pioneering, quote, unquote, as a good thing. And sometimes they're like, “Max your work is pioneering,” and I'm like, wash your dirty mouth out with soap. Because, and I think this might go back also to common sense, once we go back there, what seems to be inherently good, isn’t in fact. It actually has histories that come from different things like that that are meaningful. 

 

So anyway, the other thing that happens a lot is that there is, and I think your podcast is part of this movement, where there is a largely settler-based movement in North America to recall the commons as, like you say, collective land stewardship, which requires non-Indigenous access to Indigenous land, to be true. And so, we're like, not so different. Indigenous people are saying, well, that's not so different. There's some really great quotes that different Indigenous scholars have talked about this idea that an appeal to the commons is about the dispossession of Indigenous people for the good of the world, right? This sort of stuff. So, really opposite goods come into play. And I think this is where work as an activist, whether you're an academic activist or a scholar activist or a street activist, or however you want to situate that, gets really complicated, because the clashing goods cause problems. You can be all for, like environmental stewardship and still be furthering colonial goals. And that is complicated and difficult, and causes harm, right? So, that's one of the trickinesses of these kind of conversations, and the coming together part.

 

And I would love to talk about different models of quote, unquote, coming together, or collectivity that also have these roots in these good relations that are other people's bad relations, or good politics that are other people's genocides, like that, I think, is really important. And what's really interesting about the real dominance of the governance of land being conflated with ownership, was that when people hear about Land Back—the Indigenous movement of Land Back—they automatically assume, “oh, Indigenous people want to take ownership of the land and privatize it to Indigenous groups.” And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. That's because the dominant paradigm of land governance, there's not a lot of experience outside of that. And so, we're, no, land back actually means returning Indigenous sovereignty, which means governance, and we're actually very good at dealing with difference. You can see that in our treaties and that sort of stuff, and having settlers live on our land and among us. And so, all I can say about the ownership and control paradigm is that it's very dominant, and it does screw up some of the alternatives out there for sharing, space sharing, land sharing, futures. 

 

Max Liboiron 09:35

So, yeah, I think common, the idea of the common has such colonial baggage that I don't think I can use it in a lot of my work. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in thinking about stewardship of land and guardianship of land and first principles across different groups. But the commons is sort of like– I don't use the word decolonial– it's got too much baggage to not bring all of that with us. 

Yeah, so, sort of being like I know everyone should appeal to the commons. It doesn't matter how good your idea is. Like, you could be Jesus and Muhammad rolled into one, and your big idea won't work everywhere. And just being, okay, what, what might work here? How and whether would that work somewhere else, is actually a very important question for action. 

 

And that’s the difference between universalization, which is sort of a militant again, similitude; this will work for everyone, I have a brilliant idea, everyone should, why doesn't everyone, like those sorts of things come out of this universal bent, while generalization, and Eve Tuck writes about this, being like, well, under what conditions might this move or not? Where might this be beautiful or not beautiful? Who's on first, who's on second? This sort of stuff you have to do, the work you have to do. And that's part, I think, going back to like, testing, does this actually work? That is the work of understanding generalization. Will this generalize? It's another way to think of that is like, will this work and where?

 

Joel Westheimer 10:54

Will this work and where? These are important questions for anyone thinking about the commons, especially when it comes to the idea of universalizing it. 

 

Barbara Leckie 11:02

Max adds to the tricky history of the commons, and also delves more into the way its history is entangled with colonization, land theft, and genocide. But one of the main things they're flagging is precisely that point of entangled inheritances that they raise. Know what the history of the commons is when we talk about it. 

 

Joel Westheimer 11:22

Is Max saying it's not a useful term?

 

Barbara Leckie 11:25

I think they're saying it's not a useful term for them.

 

Joel Westheimer 11:28

Well, one of the questions we want to ask then is, can it sometimes be a useful term, even with this history of stolen lands in a North American context?

 

Barbara Leckie 11:38

Yeah, as many of our Indigenous guests have said, it's not a term they use, and that's something to have on our radar and to explore as fully as we can. That said, this is only the beginning of that conversation. 

 

Joel Westheimer 11:50

Alright. Well, let's keep talking about that then. But right now, we're going to circle back to Stephanie LeMenager. We met Stephanie in the previous episode. Barbara, you did the interview with Stephanie, right?

 

Barbara Leckie 12:00

Yeah. And like Max, she's quick to note limitations with the commons, but she also suggests that the emphasis on sharing and collectivity in relation to the commons can offer a valuable counter to private property relations. I begin the interview by asking Stephanie what she thought of the commons as an idea. Let's listen to her response. 

 

Stephanie LeMenager 12:20

I still think the commons is an incredibly useful heuristic with which to think regarding property forms that move us fairly far from the liberal notions of property that created private property, you know, via John Locke and others, to the exclusion of so many other forms of inhabitation and use. And I do think that the commons, again as a heuristic, as a kind of invitation to think otherwise, has charisma, especially in a time when for many reasons, both because of the climate and extreme weather, and also because of a kind of runaway global capitalism that now seems to be solidifying into a sort of plutocracy in the United States and elsewhere. I think people are, so many more people, are feeling dispossessed and fed up with the world that modernity created, even those of us who benefited from it for the most part and were not on the sort of edge of genocide or territorial theft like so many Indigenous and other communities, start to understand that the dispossession is becoming almost complete, say, for a very, very small percentage of humans on this earth. 

 

So, the commons gives us a way to think otherwise. Like all scholars, when I started to pursue the commons as a kind of imaginary with which to think against private property, against privatization, more broadly, I found myself quickly finding also limitations to the concept. Some of those came directly from people working on anti-colonial or decolonial subjects, and in particular, I learned that 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. And that the commons, because they still imply ownership, although collective ownership and exclusion of some one or some communities, can also still not speak to the loss of territorial sovereignty of various groups of people. I think, of Indigenous peoples, but also in the case of the U.S., so many black Americans and their descendants, who, for variety of reasons, were dispossessed of their land, or never allowed to claim any kind of ownership of land. So, I think the commons has limitations in terms of how it's been deployed and lived historically, but on the other hand, I still think it speaks to a desire for a kind of, how do I want to say, a kind of truly invested, pluralistic sharing of resources that has never been achieved in a democratic culture or are really anywhere in under any modern system.

 

Barbara Leckie 15:45

One of the people we interviewed was saying that democracy, at its most ideal, is a kind of model of the commons, where everyone has a voice, and I thought that was interesting,

 

Stephanie LeMenager 15:57

Yeah, and I would agree with that, I think it's there's always, the possibility within democratic culture. I think we see that in some aspects of democratic socialism that have become very exciting in the U.S., which is surprising for us, because the mere word socialism terrifies so many of us Americans, right? But I mean no, absolutely. I have done work on the public lands here in the U.S., and even though the public lands are fraught with various historical limitations, again, often involving Indigenous sovereignty and access, there are ways in which the public lands have been incredibly powerful as a statement of collective ownership, at the scale of this very messy patchwork nation that we live in, here in the U.S.

 

Joel Westheimer 16:59

That was Stephanie LeMenager. Canada is also a very patchwork nation. The history of dispossession she discusses makes the commons a pretty contested concept, but I think it also creates a desire to get away from forms of possession altogether.

 

Barbara Leckie 17:08

After all, what if nothing were owned? What if it were all shared or collectively managed? What would that look like?

 

Joel Westheimer 17:15

That also brings up, for me, the idea of democracy, and the different economic systems it's associated with. I mean, there are many other ways to think about democracy, not just democratic capitalism. 

 

We now turn to our last guest on this episode, Candis Callison. Candis is a journalist and professor at the University of British Columbia.

 

Barbara Leckie 17:36

We open with me asking Candis a question about common sense. Remember how our first two episodes were about common sense, and then we return to the commons. In her book, How Climate Change Comes to Matter, Candis talks about how communities create meaning. We could say common sense, collectively, and this book also forms a backdrop for our thinking through the different questions asked in this interview.

 

Joel Westheimer 18:07

Let's turn to Candis.

 

Barbara Leckie 18:08

To the best of my knowledge, you don't use the term common sense in your work. And so, I wanted to start by asking how you understand common sense.

 

Candis Callison 18:18

Yeah, it's so funny, like when you sent me an email to invite me to this conversation, I was like, oh, common sense, so interesting to think about, because it's like a third rail, right? You know, as a cultural anthropologist, I think about it as absolutely connected to cultures, to context, to time, and place. And as a former journalist, as somebody who still does a lot of research with journalism, I think about it as, you know, something that can be a whistle call, that can be a cudgel, right for, you know, creating in groups and out groups. And I was thinking a lot about the great history book written by Mark Anderson and Carmen Robertson, Seeing Red, and where they talk about how common sense has been used by journalists through time to demarcate what Indigenous people don't have, right? They don't have common sense. And so absolutely as a marker of in group and out group. And so, I find it a really, an actually, really complex term that is supposed to be inherently simplifying.

 

Barbara Leckie 19:29

So, then the commons is a practice, so shared stewardship of the land and shared goods, there's a long history that's most often linked to England, and England's privatization of land to dispossession of peoples through several centuries of Enclosure Acts. But it's tricky to suggest the commons is anything like a model in Canada, because of our country's own history of land dispossession and theft. So, we're interested in, as one of our interviewees put it, and she was drawing on Donna Haraway, staying with the trouble of the commons. And I'm wondering, if you think there a value still in staying with it?

 

Candis Callison 20:25

Yeah, the tragedy of the commons, right? Is also something that gets used without a strong sense of the really good critique of that concept, right? There's a really good book by Shangrila Joshi about climate policy and global climate policy that starts from that, starts from Ostrom critique of Hardin's concept of the commons, and concludes, much like Ostrom, that we have the capacity, and we have many examples where we have worked as a collective in order to resolve issues of common concern. As an Indigenous person, as someone connected to a First Nation, who absolutely has its own governance and theories about how to work with collective problems and how to work as a collective, you know, I'm a member of the Tahltan Nation, and, you know, very much part of how I was raised was to think in terms of being a part of that collective. 

 

And I still think that way, like it still is a big part of how I, you know, consider my work and what my contributions are as an academic. They can't, in other words, just be simply academic contributions, and I feel held accountable by my family and by my community to do that, right, and specifically stay in good relationships so that I can be held accountable in a good way. And so, to me, those are all aspects of what it means to be in and part of a collective. And I think that's something that, you know, mainstream society really struggles to think in terms of collective. We have these centuries of liberal thought about individualism that dominates, no matter how we try to combat it, but 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, right? As you know, in this current moment where we're watching our next-door neighbor melt down, this is a really interesting moment to be thinking about what and how we navigate a climate changed future.

 

Barbara Leckie 22:55

It's kind of interesting, in the context of the U.S. these days, because our interviews before the November election and after, have had a really different tone. Do you think there are ways to reframe what is now considered common sense through something like the lens of a sharing economy rather than a free market economy?

 

Candis Callison 23:16

I think there's a possibility of doing that. I want to believe there is, I think hope is actually really important, especially in moments like this. And I think back to this book that I wrote. It was 2014 before it came out, but it's based on research at the end of the 2000s and I ended it not with a conclusion, but with an epilogue on purpose to talk about how we collaborate, because that was the main thing that came out of talking with all of these diverse groups who were focused on different aspects of society, different levers for making change, different conversations, different ways of talking about climate change. And so, you know this, this idea of collaboration is also a conversation about power, how we share power, and that often is connected to who has the mic, who's getting to determine how we think about our history, how we think about our current state of affairs, how we define the present. And that informs a lot about how we move forward together. 

 

I am always so hopeful, actually, when I read Indigenous theorists, I think about the late Arthur Manuel, I think about Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua in Hawaii, I think about other thinkers who I have really paid attention to, who talk about our collective as a shared collective. They invite everyone into a vision of the future that is inclusive and a social life that includes non-humans and lands and waters, a way of thinking about a future that supports us all. You know, we are not poor, actually, there are enough resources to go around. It's just we've been living with this system that makes everything feel like there's not enough to go around, and creates hierarchy, 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. And I guess I am ultimately hopeful that there are visions of collectivity, of collaboration, of, you know, recognizing the past as something we don't want to continue to repeat, like all of that is the source of hope for me. 

 

On one hand, there is so much utility to be gained from Indigenous thought, Indigenous approaches, Indigenous concepts, and on the other, you can't separate Indigenous concepts/thoughts from Indigenous people. And this has been an ongoing conversation in the climate discourse as well, where climate scientists and others who work in climate policy want to get the usefulness from Indigenous knowledge, but they don't realize that it actually comes from another system, and you can't separate Indigenous people from Indigenous knowledge. And I think this is the real challenge, at the heart of this is that collaboration requires working with each other. It requires ongoing conversations. It isn't like I can take it and then go do what I was going to do, but do it better, you know? And I think that's the challenge here, is how do we not only share power, transform the systems, but remain in conversation? Because that is what is required to be in good relations. 

 

Good relations don't mean no conflict. It doesn't mean we don't disagree. It means that we figure out how to walk with that, how to work with our disagreements, how to consider what our collective good is, and how to approach it. And that is not friction free, right? That is actually “friction-full.” And so that's something that Indigenous people are also still working out post contact, right? We're still recovering some of our systems, utilizing some of our systems of thought and approaches to conflict resolution. I have people in my nation who are actively working to basically bring in our traditional ways of resolving conflict, into the school system, into our governance structures, because that ends up being a key aspect of how to collaborate, how to work together.

 

Joel Westheimer 29:10

I like Candis’ point on the importance of being able to disagree with each other.

 

Barbara Leckie 29:13

Yeah, I love when she says communication is actually “friction-full.” It's so true. When we're actually communicating, there's almost always going to be friction. The trick is how to handle it

 

Joel Westheimer 29:23

And we could say that the entangled inheritances of the commons are full of friction. On the other hand, there's also Candis’s other point about hope and realizing hope through, as she put it, visions of collectivity and collaboration. 

 

Barbara Leckie 29:38

Along those same lines, she also points to other visions, other possibilities and imaginations, and that's where we're going to turn for the next episode, Little Experiments Everywhere.

 

Joel Westheimer 29:47

We'll talk about several examples of commoning that are happening everywhere. Commoning, remember is the practice of the commons. These are contemporary efforts to build some version of the commons that embrace collectivity, communities that reflect some of the ideals we've been talking about. So, join us in episode five of our podcast Commons Sense, that's commons with an S.

 

Barbara Leckie 28:58

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 Rheanna Phillip, and to CKCU 93.1, FM.