Peer2Politics

How will agriculture have to change if we are going to successfully navigate past Peak Oil and address climate change? A new film documentary, Voices of Transition, provides plenty of answers from Transition-oriented farmers in France, Great Britain and Cuba.

How can we construct a right to a healthy and clean environment that is enforceable in today’s complex international legal order? What legal construct would be visionary and ambitious enough to meet the urgent need for environmental justice and protection and at the same time be enforceable in court rather than fall into the category of ‘soft law’?

With so much scholarship focused on commons as “resource management” and the measurement of externals, it’s refreshing to encounter a book that plumbs the internaldimensions of a commons –that is, commoning.  Canadian writer and scholar Heather Menzies has taken on this challenge in her recently published Reclaiming the Commons for the Commons Good (New Society Publishers), a book that she describes as a “memoir and manifesto.”  It is a three-part exploration of commoning as a personal experience, social negotiation and finally, as a spiritual quest.

This is the last in a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared onCSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released. This extract was originally published in bollier.org

The problem with the Commons is that they can be enclosed. – Howard Rheingold

Reposted from the C-Realm podcast, KMO starts off with a discussion of David Graeber’s 2012 essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, part of which we’ve recently featured of the blog.  The bulk of the Podcast comprises a fascinating conversation with G- Paul Blundell on the workings of his Commune.

“The OpenLabTools initiative aims to provide a forum and knowledge centre for the development of low cost and open access scientific tools, with an emphasis on undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. The programme will officially start in October 2013. In order to bootstrap this initiative, a number of MENG projects (4-5 per year) will be offered to establish the core components required for such tools; these include data acquisition, sensing, actuating, processing and 3D manufacturing. Protocols, designs and tutorials will be published on this website. These components will be subsequently combined to establish a documented collection of instruments, to be developed and maintained by a community of undergraduate and graduate students of the University.

Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics” have often lacked historical perspective; discussions, at least online, have tended to degenerate to “Ghandi!” “No, ANC!” Now, however, Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below the fold are slides summarizing the results of her study of 323 non-violent and violent campaigns from 1900-2006. (There are twenty slides, so anybody with a slow connection may prefer to download a zipped file of the original PDF). Here’s one key slide:

This article set out to show, through the Helix_T wind turbine project, two things: first, on a theoretical level, that CBPP is not limited to ICT, but that in conjunction with the emerging technological capabilities of 3D printing, it can also produce really promising hardware, globally designed (with the direct or indirect support of Commons-based communities) and locally pro- duced. Second, beyond its illustrative role as a case study, the Helix_T also contributes to the quest for novel solutions to the urgent need for (autonomous) renewable sources of energy, more as a development process and less as a ready-to-apply solution. And while the Helix_T does not offer huge amounts of energy and suffers from several shortcomings, we showed that it is possible to create a low-cost, DIY wind turbine with 3D printed modules in a cost-effective way to provide individuals with small amounts of clean energy. The illustration has also worked in theory by showing that it is possible to produce innovative hardware based on CBPP. The case shows that for someone with only very partial initial knowledge, it is feasible to start a similar project based on an interesting idea and to succeed in implementing it through the collaboration with Commons-oriented communities while using CBPP products and tools.

We met Rachel O’Dwyer a couple of weeks back, at the Open Everything 2014 Convergence, celebrated in Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland. We really enjoyed talking to Rachel and listening to her contributions in the Q&As and, in fact, we’re hoping to work with her in the near future. Until then, please check out this podcast, originally published as part of a series called “Contemporary Capitalism”

The IASC Commons (International Association for the Study of Commons) has released a series of six short, artfully produced videos, “Commons in Action,” that amount to short advertisements for important commons projects.

It has been called “a radical left sensation”; a “fledgling party” born out of the ashes of the Indignados (“the outraged”) or 15-M movement; and “the new-kid-on-the-block” whose success is yet another example of modern technopolitics or, as some experts have put it, “the power of the connected multitudes.”

We’ve recently featured Coopfunding, an Open-Sourced crowdfunding platform designed to “…promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.”  Today we present a guest article by Enric Duran, one of the developers behind Coopfunding and its parent-project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative, explaining the reasons that led to the creation of Coopfunding. This article was originally published inRadi.MS

The following is an interview with Soma Kishore Parthasarathy from the website of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) on June 6. The interviewer was Ana Abelenda, and the piece is called “Reclaiming the Commons for Gender and Economic Justice:  Struggles and Movements in India.”  It is republished here with permission.

Here’s a very special treat. Originally published on Guerrilla Translation, Movimiento por la Democracia´s “Charter for Democracy” stands out as premier example of citizen-led solution making to the various crises we face. It is a constitution for the commons written by commons.

We are witnessing the outstanding emergence of a new economic model, the collaborative commons, which some have already stated as the End of the Capitalist Era. One of the first analysts shedding light on the importance of these phenomena was Yochai Benkler in  his book The Wealth of Networks. Few years ago I had the honour of being part of the translator team of this book into Spanish within the @Commontrad  project. Leaded by professor Florencio Cabello, it consisted on translating this theoretical essay on the current economic production through collaborative practices by producing a book through a collaborative practice on PiratePad (rarely known tool at that time). Through this amazing experience, I immediately understood that common value generation is so efficient, democratic and socially valuable that would sooner or later supersede current economic model based on close standards and private property. In other words, this is a new reality that will prevail.

“The power and effectiveness of people working together through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.”

Extracted from our friends at Telekommunisten and described as a “Global Pipe Dream Come True”, OCTO is Telekommunisten’s response to the looming fuel crisis which will surely affect the shipping industry, food supplies, etc. Rather than passively wait for the collapse of globalized capitalist production and distribution, or turn to overtly reactive lifeboat-based solutions, OCTO will re-enable physical glocalization to such a degree that we’ll even be able to throw the P2P Foundation’s stance on “keeping what is heavy is near, what is light is far” out the window (as seen in this video). Read on to find out more…

Reposted from the C-Realm podcast, KMO talks to author David Holmgren, co-originator (with Bill Mollison) of permaculture. We want to thank Michel Bauwens for originally contacting Holmgren. Watch for an upcoming trialogue between Bauwens, Holmgren and Josef Davies-Coates.