The Commons

Degrowth And Its Future

March 2, 2026 David Bollier. Create! climate crisis, Degrowth, Sustainability, The Commons

Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet. It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains. And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or deflection. The Trump administration is savaging climate science, environmental regulation, and international treaties, while saner responsible adults are at least focused on energy efficiency and renewables.

Building Social Wealth Through Mutual Aid

December 6, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Community Wealth, Mutual Aid, The Commons, Time Banks

As market economies become more expensive and predatory, Stephanie Rearick is showing that it’s entirely possible to meet people’s needs effectively through care and cooperation, through a kind of alternative social economy. For more than twenty years, Rearick has championed mutual aid and cooperative economics through such projects as the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and the Dane County TimeBank, both of which she founded. Rearick also works internationally through Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks, a global network of networks dedicated to building mutual aid economy.

The Future Requires A Politics Of Relationality

November 2, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, climate crisis, Liberation, The Commons

At a time when the superstructures of human civilization seem terminally messed up – unable to address climate collapse, authoritarian capitalism, among many other wicked problems – I was thrilled to encounter a book that dares to imagine a fresh and compelling way forward. The book, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, is a big-hearted and poetic yet rigorous scholarly book. On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #68), I interviewed the three authors -- noted anthropologist Arturo Escobar and global studies professor Michal Osterweil, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Kriti Sharma, a professor of critical race science and technology studies at UC Santa Cruz.

A Vision Of A Post-Capitalist Eco-Localism That Works

October 4, 2025 David Bollier. Educate! Capitalism, climate crisis, The Commons, Transformation

What might the world look like if climate change is not stopped? What if societies refuse to, or cannot rein in capitalism and its relentless growth and exploitation of nature? Chris Smaje, a writer and farmer in southwest England, offers some intelligent speculation in his recently published book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Smaje is not a doomer or survivalist, nor given to lurid prophesy. His book is a serious analysis of current macro-political and social trends and how they might play out in everyday life. He extrapolates from existing trends -- the rising costs of fossil fuels, food, and transport, the proliferation of droughts, floods, and wildfires, etc. – to sketch a vision of a post-capitalist, climate-disrupted world that is already arriving.

From Capital To Commons: A Review

September 30, 2025 Bernard Marszalek, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Capitalism, Decentralization, Energy, The Commons

Environmental news, paradoxically, approaches banality as every day a new horror finds resonance in the media we consume and which consumes us. These daily reports enervate us and lead to resignation. Is our passivity the intention? If we refuse to be immobilized, how do we find a route out of our misery? We don’t suffer from a lack of proffered paths for our “engagement.” A multiplicity of them pursue our attention, many illusory, and often provided as a service for a “slight fee.” In frustration, and as a kind of therapy, the most committed rush to clean a beach, while mostly we sign online petitions, or make donations to allay the futility we feel. The complexity of our ecological predicament, when we are methodically informed, clarifies matters.

The Importance Of Network Protocols For Commoning And Open Markets

August 2, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Apps, Digital Platforms, Technology, The Commons

Most of us don’t give much thought to the arcane technical protocols that make the Internet and its various platforms work. Yet these invisible architectures of code profoundly affect how we can interact with others. They determine what sorts of information we can receive and even how our worldviews and identities are shaped. Sometimes tech protocols empower us to govern ourselves as commoners and freely collaborate with each other. Think open source software, wikis, and collaborative websites. More typically, network protocols are used to create closed, proprietary corporate platforms that turn us into dependent consumers and victims of data-surveillance.

Systems Are Breaking And That’s Our Opportunity

July 12, 2025 Jem Bendell, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Strategize! Failed State, Mutual Aid, Solidarity Economy, Sustainability, The Commons

A few months ago, I reconnected with a friend whom I had worked with on an initiative on ‘the sharing economy’. At the time, we were both ‘Young Global Leaders’ (YGLs) with the World Economic Forum. It was 2013, and we had volunteered our time to bring attention to how new technologies could be used to help everyone have a good life with less ecological impact. Personally, we were imagining a future of peer-to-peer resource sharing, community-based production, and cooperative ownership. Meeting up after years, we laughed that our work had oddly contributed to the World Economic Forum publishing the line that became infamous as a globalist’s dystopian injunction: “You will own nothing and be happy.”

How The Commons Can Reach Working-Class Communities

June 24, 2025 Dave Darby, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Strategize! collapse, Empires, Sustainability, The Commons

All civilisations fall in the end. The Roman Empire is long gone, along with the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians. Will the global civilisation of corporate capitalism buck the trend? Of course not, but how long does it have left? In such a complex system, it’s impossible to predict when there will be a sudden shift, but there’s good evidence that the process of breakdown has already begun. Damage to soils, water tables, forests, the oceans and climate is occurring alongside economic and political upheaval. No longer is this a theoretical matter about the distant future, but something we should be preparing for today. But how? I come at that question after decades working on ‘sustainable development’. During the 90s, I was doing that in Eastern Europe, but was dismayed that most saw corporate capitalism as the path to follow.

The Potential For Community Energy And Commons In North Wales

June 16, 2025 Dave Darby, Resilience. Organize! Community, Energy, Local Economy, The Commons, Wales

I’d like to find out more about what you’re doing, your ambitions, the barriers you face. You contacted us, so you know that we’re working to build commons in Stroud – to bring assets into community ownership without debt or giving away equity, but with a reasonable return for investors, strong asset locks, and the ability to federate with other projects around the country, and eventually the world. So after this initial interview, I’d like to bring you together with specialists to see where we might collaborate. So first, before we ask about what you’re doing – why are you doing it? What’s your motivation?

Sharing Seeds In A World Of Proprietary Agriculture

June 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Food and Agriculture, Open Source, Seeds, The Commons

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers. Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results. For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture: legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South.

Money Commons: Review Of ‘Remaking Money For A Sustainable Future’

May 17, 2025 Katja Durrani, Resilience. Create! Alternative Currency, Capitalism, Money, The Commons

“For those interested in how money works, and in how it is made to work, these are lucky times”, writes Barinaga. While it’s up for debate whether these times are lucky in other respects, her statement is certainly true as far as our understanding of money is concerned. The financial crises of the last two decades have led to many good books and articles explaining how money is created and managed, not least a 2014 communication by the Bank of England. For anybody taking a closer look, it’s quickly obvious that our current money system isn’t working for most people, nor is it compatible with a sustainable future. This book does a very good job of explaining why that is so.

Commoning Within Arts Collectives: Three International Stories

April 3, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Art, Collectives, Local Economy, The Commons

What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? I recently learned a lot about this topic from a workshop of international artists convened in Amsterdam. Most of the artists are associated with the so-called Lumbung Practice collective, an interdisciplinary group experimenting with how to cultivate a commons-based art economy. The artists come from Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, transqueer-migrant disaporas, and other geographies and circumstances, so they have some very different experiences and talents.

Welcome To ‘Think Like A Commoner’

March 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Book Review, Local Economy, The Commons, Transformation

About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time. I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated.

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