Co-Creating Commons with Earth Others: Decolonizing the Mastery of Nature (original) (raw)
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Agriculture and Human Values, 1990
Ron Herring teaches political science at Northwestern University. His concern with environmental issues emerges from work on land systems, agriculture, and land reform in South Asia, some of which has appeared as land to the Tiller (Yale, 1983). He is currently organizing work on the environment through the SSRC.
Awakening to an Ecology of the Commons
2020
We live in a transformative moment in human history, at once on the precipice of crisis and simultaneously awakening into a new awareness of ourselves as commoners and planetary beings. For the individual, this transformative moment in human history feels more like a crisis than a transition— drawn out, full of dangers, obstacles, and growing pains. The moment, however, is the birth of the “planetary” as an element of human experience, and this transition is, according to our perspective, the transition from social orders based on exploitation to social orders based on generative mutuality. In this chapter, we explain the intertwined and integral emergence of the planetary and the commons as complementary fields of experience and their role in the reimagination of who we are.
Introduction: No Place for the Commons
The Minnesota Review, 2019
This article introduces the dossier "Is There a Place for the Commons?" by briefly explaining the concepts of the common (no s) and the commons (with an s) in terms of their philosophical, political, social, and historical trajectories. It examines the tension between the universalizing aspiration of the common as a political project and the particular social situations of the commons. It emphasizes the commons as praxis, that is, as a practice that takes place in the world without being reducible to place. In doing so, it also considers the vexed relationship between the commons and state sovereignty, the way in which the common functions as a placeholder for revolutionary subjectivity, the significance of ecology for the commons and vice versa, and the importance of queer, indigenous, feminist, and minoritarian commons for understanding what it means "to common" within and against capitalism.
Review: The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society
Ambiente & Sociedade
In the book Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: decolonizing nature, economy and society (2020), Franklin Obeng-Odoom proposes a commons based system. His so-called Radical Alternative stands in relation to the dialectic between two fields of readings on the commons grouped as Conventional Wisdom and Left Western Consensus. He denotes that both readings are limited from a decolonial critique. The key to his Radical Alternative is on the centrality of land, autonomy, and justice from the Global South. It presents land in an approximated sense to territory/territoriality, as used in Latin America, and territorializes the political discussion of the commons. He also develops the understanding of universal justice on land and contributes to discussions on contemporary commons, as he affirms the contemporaneity of forms of relationship with the land and persistent material and cultural exchanges on the African continent.
A Commons Perspective on Human-Nature Relations
I offer here some reflections on the commons. In particular, I reflect upon the question “How does the commons, as an alternative perspective, see the relationship between humans and nature?”
"Customs in common": The epistemic world of the commons scholars
Despite the fact that the famous model of natural-resource use espoused by biologist Garrett Hardin, the "tragedy of the commons," has been thoroughly debunked by social scientists of most stripes, the model's assumptions -e.g., that selfish individuals using a common pool resource will overconsume to the detriment of all -have not only survived but fruitfully multiplied, as if driven by higher laws of natural selection.! Its seeds have sprouted, for example, in works of natural scientists who apply biology's behavioral laws to complex social realities. It thrives deep in the soul of most commons theorists, even those fervently opposed to Hardin's model, who ply their trade by identifying, protecting, managing, saving, developing, and making efficient commons throughout the world. 2 This commons-tragedy discourse has also shaped the thinking on the new "global commons," led by academicians and policymakers striving to direct supranational decisionmaking on the gray areas of global real estate: the earth's ozone, deep seas, "biodiverse" reserves (e.g., the Amazon), the North and South poles, the air waves, and so on. In other words, an old, dubious framework once applied to questions of the local commons (i.e., how to stop self-interested shepherds from destroying community pastures), is now being applied to saving our global commons.