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The commons, said Wolcher, citing Linebaugh, is not simply a conflict over property rights. It is about "people expressing a form of life to support their autonomy and subsistence needs." The commons is a verb - "commoning." It's about "taking one's life into one's own hands, and not waiting for crumbs to drop from the King's table."

The "tragedy of the commons" is a central concept in human ecology and the study of the environment. It has had tremendous value for stimulating research, but it only describes the reality of human-environment interactions in special situations. Research over the past thirty years has helped clarify how human motivations, rules governing access to resources, the structure of social organizations, and the resource systems themselves interact to determine whether or not the many dramas of the commons end happily. In this book, leaders in the field review the evidence from several disciplines and many lines of research and present a state-of-the-art assessment. They summarize lessons learned and identify the major challenges facing any system of governance for resource management. They also highlight the major challenges for the next decade: making knowledge development more systematic; understanding institutions dynamically; considering a broader range of resources (such as global and technological commons); and taking into account the effects of social and historical context. This book will be a valuable and accessible introduction to the field for students and a resource for advanced researchers.

Keynote by David Bollier at Economies of the Commons Conference, April 12, 2008, Amsterdam.

All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.

This paper focuses on a quite different situation: the role of common forests in an industrialized country. The Swedish common forests have survived for more than one hundred years; no deforestation has been observed and the total amount of biomass is increasing.

Perhaps what is going on here is a new kind of crisis/tragedy of the commons. Unlike the old commons that gets fished-out or over-grazed, the digital commons appears to be this endless supply of storage and bandwidth. However obviously those things do cost money to someone, and while both have gotten cheaper, in the volume being used by YouTube or Facebook, it adds up quickly.

"The most significant connection between land-grant institutions and commons-based organizations and movements exists in their shared interest for the public community. How their interests have been applied or expressed may differ, yet their common theme could be a catalyst for future partnership and collaboration. "

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities.

This blog post continues the one started yesterday - a report on the future of the commons as discussed by the commoners who met at Crottorf Castle in Germany, in June 2009.

Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén offers up an internationally minded, interdisciplinary meditation on the "intellectual commons." Wirtén, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, is developing a sophisticated new frontier of public domain scholarship.

"The real problem is that the State and Market are locked in a symbiotic alliance to the detriment of the commons. This unholy alliance so tenacious because it is embedded in our very phenomenological understanding of life, writes Mattei. We perceive the world as a mechanistic system in which subject and object are separate and distinct, and we supposedly have individual autonomy to do what we wish to act upon the world. As subjects, we tend to pracel out and commodify the world into units that are isolated from the larger whole; thus we see humanity as separate from Nature and the various elements of it (wetlands, atmosphere, genes) as isolated objects. "

"Many people don't recognise that the commons is not just a thing - a physical element of nature or a resource like the Internet - but a distinct metaphysics and epistemology that challenges some deeply rooted premises of contemporary politics and policy. James Quilligan probes this territory with a thoughtful piece in the latest issue of Kosmos magazine. In particular, he explores the "social nature of property"and how its individual, atomistic nature in liberal political philosophy is responsible for "its catastrophic impact on the commons.""

"In this seven-part series of articles on each environmental impact of US militarism, scientist and author Patricia Hynes provides an overview of modern, military pollution and the use of natural resources with a central focus on the US military superpower, a power without precedent or competitor. From Superfund and former nuclear weapons sites in the US to Vieques, Agent Orange, depleted uranium - particularly in Iraq - biowarfare research and the use of fossil fuels in routine military training and wars, Hynes examines the war machine as the true tragedy of the commons."

"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of "green governance"―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"

The Silent Revolution: The Emergence of Commons, Guilds and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe from the Late Middle Ages Onwards

This is the third of a three-part installment of a report on the future of the commons, which is based on conversations at a retreat held at Crottorf Castle in Germany, in June 2009.