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Wisdom Traditions, Science and the Search for Meaning
Wisdom Traditions, Science and the Search for Meaning Jeremy Lent has taken on an audacious task for himself – synthesizing what he calls the “cognitive history of humanity.” His 2017 book The Patterning Instinct integrates a vast academic and scientific literature to describe humanity’s search for meaning. This “archaeological exploration of the mind,” ranging from hunter-gatherers to […]
Saving Farmland, Supporting Young Farmers
Saving Farmland, Supporting Young Farmers It’s a bit odd that land reform is barely mentioned in most progressive agendas. Maybe that’s because it is seen as challenging the presumed virtues of private property and capitalist markets. Yet secure access and tenure to land is essential for achieving so many progressive goals, from building new sorts […]
Hacking the Law to Open Up Zones of Commoning
Hacking the Law to Open Up Zones of Commoning The following essay is my contribution to the recently published anthology, ‘The Great Awakening: New Modes of Life amidst Capitalist Ruins’ (Punctum Books), published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I co-edited this volume with my colleague Professor Anna Grear of Cardiff University. More about the book at […]
Let the Institutional Innovation Begin! (Part I)
Let the Institutional Innovation Begin! (Part I) In corvid-19, neoliberal capitalism has met a formidable foe. The pandemic has shown just how fragile and dysfunctional the market/state order — as a production apparatus, ideology, and culture — truly is. Countless market sectors are now more or less collapsing with a highly uncertain future ahead. With […]
A Bold Agenda for Treating Land as a Commons
A Bold Agenda for Treating Land as a Commons The privileges of land ownership are so huge and far-reaching that they are generally taken as immutable facts of life – something that politics cannot possibly address. A hearty salute is therefore in order for a fantastic new report edited by George Monbiot, the brilliant columnist […]
Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime
Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime Why are so many zones of the world descending into chaos and confusion? There is no single reason, of course, but the French scholar of modernity, Bruno Latour, has a compelling overarching theory. In his new book, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity), Latour […]
The Commons, Short and Sweet
The Commons, Short and Sweet I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. Here is a fairly short overview, which I think gets to the nub of things. The commons is…. A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources […]
George Monbiot on the Commons
George Monbiot on the Commons George Monbiot, a columnist for the British newspaper and website The Guardian, may be the most prominent champion of the commons that I’ve discovered in mainstream journalism today. He has long been a compelling, out-of-the-box thinker on all sorts of economic and environmental issues. Now he is introducing the commons […]
Affluence Without Abundance: What Moderns Might Learn from the Bushmen
Affluence Without Abundance: What Moderns Might Learn from the Bushmen Where did things go wrong on the way to modern life, and what should we do instead? This question always seems to lurk in the background of our fascination with many indigenous cultures. The modern world of global commerce, technologies and countless things has not […]
What Permaculture Can Teach Us About Commons
What Permaculture Can Teach Us About Commons As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability. It […]
Mary Mellor’s “Debt or Democracy”: Why Not Quantitative Easing for People?
Mary Mellor’s “Debt or Democracy”: Why Not Quantitative Easing for People? Although it is widely assumed that governments are the source of all new money – through “printing it” – the so-called private sector is the source of most new money put into circulation. In one of the most successful enclosures of the commons in […]
Seeing the Forest
Seeing the Forest Seeing the Forest tells the story of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon — how it made a successful transition from timber extraction to ecosystem restoration. Once the epicenter of conflict, the Siuslaw today is an exemplar of cooperation and collaboration. They harvest wood sustainably by thinning overly dense monoculture stands that are […]
Who May Use the King’s Forest? The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons and Law in Our Time
Who May Use the King’s Forest? The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons and Law in Our Time The relationship between law and the commons is very much on my mind these days. I recently posted a four-part serialization of my strategy memo, “Reinventing Law for the Commons.” The following public talk, which I gave at […]
Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious?
Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious? One of the great economists of the twentieth century had the misfortune of publishing his magnum opus, The Great Transformation, in 1944, months before the inauguration of a new era of postwar economic growth and consumer culture. Few people in the 1940s or 1950s wanted to hear piercing criticisms of […]
Property Rights, Inequality and Commons
Property Rights, Inequality and Commons I recently spoke at a conference, “Property and Inequality in the 21st Century,” hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe. They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality. Below are my remarks, “The […]
