The Commons

Sometimes, something is so pervasive that you forget it is there. A new book that my wife, Elizabeth, showed me, All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, has given me another way to frame the issue of community building.

The commons is the natural heritage of all life on this planet. It is all the things that we share in common ownership with all other users, human or otherwise. Puget Sound, our creeks, all water, the air, our roads, schools, parks, the Internet, and the broadcast spectrum are parts of our human commons. Our Strawberry Festival is a great example of public/private cooperation in the celebration of it.

It seems that things started to go awry when we started to think in terms of exclusive ownership, with opposing schools of public vs. private ownership fighting tooth and nail ever since. That’s the wonderful thing about the commons: it transcends public and private. Something held in trust to be used as commons can be publicly owned, as in our parks and roads, semi privately owned as in our Vashon Maury Land Trust, or privately owned as in our lovely KVI Beach. As far as I know there is little or no paid maintenance at KVI; we who use it take care of it. There are incidents, of course, but, by and large, we take care of it because we feel that it is ours.

A humble 1970 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, by Garret Hardin, was a big setback. He purported that resources held in common were inevitably degraded by overuse. For most of our history, the commons was so large that no amount of use or abuse could noticeably affect it, so we acted as if it was infinite. This assumption spawned the greed, wastefulness, and arrogant disregard, which Hardin saw as inevitable. He failed to note that smaller, depletable commons resources had been maintained in many places for thousands of years through the use of strong traditions and taboos. Hardin’s failure to mention the successful maintenance of commons resources left us with the conclusion that the idea of the commons was no longer valid. Conservatives conveniently picked this up as a mantra for privatization; i.e., if there isn’t a private owner profiting from the use of a resource, there will be no incentive to maintain it. And that absolves them for abusing our largest commons, our air, water, and the Earth itself, because they don’t own those yet!

Championing either privatization or public ownership to the exclusion of the other is like praising eyes and condemning ears. There are instances where one or the other is clearly more appropriate. It misses the real question, which is: does an activity serve an exclusive group or purpose, or does it serve the common good? If it serves an exclusive group, the users should pay the rest of us for the right to use it. If it serves the common good, it doesn’t matter whether it is public or private; neither is even better. Public and private ownership, government rules and regulations, and private enterprise are all legitimate tools that can be used for good or ill.

Remember KVI beach. The KVI Broadcasting Co. showed incredible foresight and wisdom in leaving their property open to the community. They could have put up a cyclone fence with barbed wire. If they had, many of us would have said that was smart because vandalism would be inevitable and they would be undertaking a tremendous liability allowing people on their private land. I actually think that the vandalism would have taken place because we naturally resent being excluded. An oft-overlooked verse from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” expresses this nicely:

As I was walkin’, I saw a sign there
And that sign said no trespassin’
And on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me!

We have no choice but to live within the constraints of the web of life of which we are a part, but the compacts we can make amongst ourselves are limitless. We can create an intricate web of voluntary, private, interpersonal agreements in our community to share our resources. VashonAll, Vashon Freecycle, and my wife Elizabeth’s new site, Vashon Garden Share, all give you the opportunity to do that. Ten families with ten seldom-used trucks might decide to have one electric truck in common with minimum inconvenience. One landless family with gardening knowledge might ally with a property owner that wants to learn gardening. By pooling our resources, we can have so much more, while building a solid basis of trust and cooperation. Propose your dream; somebody may just take you up on it!

Remember KVI. We’ve taken care of it. No tragedy.

Bicycle advice at Bike o Rama at the Bike Shop this Sat., July 24, 12 – 2.

Comments? terry@vashonloop.com