Excerpt from "Commons, #Libraries & #Degrowth" by Andrewism

"How has the potent alternative present in the commons been so wiped from our collective memory?

"It goes back to the feudal concept of land ownership, the age of European #colonialism, and of course, the rise of #IndustrialCapitalism. The king of England, for example, owned all the land in feudal England but bestowed titles for pledges of loyalty to powerful members of the nobility that allowed them to rule over large estates. These lords leased the land they were given to aristocrats, who also leased parts of their land as payment, for military aid, or for rent. This rigidly hierarchical system of obligation between landed lords and their tenants or vassals reinforced the monarchy’s ability to stake a claim on the land in their kingdom. However, at the bottom of this system were the peasants, who did all the actual work on the common land on the lord’s estate. Many were generationally serfs; legally prohibited from leaving the land they cultivated without their lord’s permission. Lords may have come and gone, but their bondage to the land was basically forever.

"After the #MagnaCarta, the #BlackDeath, the #Crusades, and all the other dramas that brought #feudalism into decline, the nobility initiated a process of #privatisation that laid the groundwork for early #capitalism through acquisitions, settlement, and enclosure of the commons. But even though revolutions and reforms came and went and most of us have gotten rid of our inbred kings and queens and their right to rule, the concept of sovereignty over private parcels of land and the feudal relationship of landlord and tenant has endured to this day, exported globally through #EuropeanColonialism.

"Despite this violent and antisocial theft of our access to even the means of subsistence, some commons have survived and thrived, though they operate within the constraints of the State and the #GlobalCapitalist status quo. Still, there is a lot we can learn from them when it comes to how to manage the commons.

"Why have they succeeded where others have failed in maintaining their commons? All efforts to organise collective action, including the commons, must address a common set of problems: how to supply new institutions, how to solve commitment issues, and how to maintain stability. It’s not easy. And yet some individuals have created institutions, committed themselves to following the rules they’ve come up with together, and assessed their own and others’ conformance to the rules in order to maintain the stability of their shared commons. Again, why have they succeeded where others have failed? External factors seem to play a significant role. Some have more autonomy than others to change their own institutions while others have change happen too rapidly for them to respond and adjust. Regardless, people try their best to solve the problems they face, despite their limitations. What factors help or hinder them in these efforts is a matter of careful study if we wish to succeed in organising and running our own commons.

"But first, we need to clarify some definitions.

"The commons are based on a common-pool resource or CPR, which is a natural or man-made resource system that benefits a group of people, but provides diminished benefits to everyone if each individual pursues their own self-interest. We must draw a further distinction between the resource system and the resource units produced by the system. Resource systems include #forests, #groundwater basins, irrigation canals, #lakes, #fisheries, #pastures, and even #infrastructure like windmills and the internet, while resource units consist of whatever users appropriate from those resource systems, such as cubic metres of lumber harvested and water withdrawn, tons of fish harvested and fodder grazed, kilowatts generated and network bandwidth used. It’s also important to maintain the #renewability of a resource system by ensuring that the average rate of withdrawal does not exceed the average rate of #replenishment.

"The term ‘appropriators’ refers to those who withdraw resource units from a resource system, like a fisher or farmer. Appropriators may use the resource units they withdraw, like residents powering their homes or farmers watering their crops, or they may transfer the resource units for others to use, such as a logger sending lumber to a hardware store for sale. Those who arrange for the provision of a CPR through financing or design are providers, while producers are those who actually construct, repair, and sustain the resource system itself. Providers, producers, and appropriators are often all the same people.

"Appropriators who share a CPR are deeply intertwined in a tapestry of interdependence. Acting selfishly and independently will usually obtain less benefit than they could have had they collectively organised in some way. The process of organising enables us to coordinate and change our shared situations to obtain higher shared benefits and reduce shared harm.

"Some of the commons institutions that endure today are as old as over a thousand years, while others are a few hundred at most. They exist alongside the personal property of the appropriators involved, such as their crops and livestock, but have remained at the core of these communities’ economies for generations. They have survived #droughts, #floods, #wars, #pestilences, and many major economic and political changes. From the alpine meadows of Torbel, Switzerland to the 3 million hectares of Japanese forest to the irrigation systems of Spain and the Philippines, these projects have evolved over time in response to experience and circumstance. None of them are perfect demonstrations of anarchy or anything, nor are they necessarily the most ‘optimal’ by some metrics. But they are successful in establishing a level of #autonomy and #resilience in the people involved in them, and they’ve managed to carefully maintain the ecology of the regions they inhabit.

"These institutions exist in different settings and have different histories, yet they simultaneously share fundamental similarities. Unpredictable and complex environments combined with engineering and farming skills combined with a predictable population over an extended period of time. These fairly egalitarian communities have developed extensive norms that define proper behaviour, involving honesty and reliability, allowing them to live without excessive conflict in a deeply interdependent environment. The perseverance of these institutions is due to the seven, and in some cases eight, key principles that Elinor Ostrom outlines in Governing the Commons..."

Read more:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrewism-commons-libraries-degrowth
#SolarPunkSunday #AnarchistLibrary #ClimateCrisis #Resiliency

I expect a large reason East Coasters don’t ask me about #droughts is that they just never think about them.

When it comes to freshwater resources, the United States is made up of two completely separate countries,
and those countries have very different water problems.

The official dividing line has long been the 100th meridian, which bisects the Dakotas, and runs through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Average yearly rainfall east of the 100th meridian is more than 20 inches per year,
-- while west of the meridian it’s less than 20 inches.

(As the climate changes, this line shifts eastward.
There’s reason to suspect that the current dividing line is closer to the 98th meridian.)

Effectively, what this means is that in the east, water is plentiful.

Farms can survive without major irrigation projects. There are innumerable rivers, streams, inlets, and lakes. There is almost no freshwater scarcity.

That’s not to say the eastern U.S. doesn’t have water problems, only that they’re different.

Fracking and strip-mining pollute freshwater supplies.

Cities and counties refuse to build infrastructure for freshwater delivery to some communities,
especially poor and Black communities.

Aging and ill-maintained infrastructure means that in Flint,
just a stone’s throw away from some of the largest freshwater resources in the world,
people are being poisoned.

And at the same time, eastern water companies have been squeezing poor and especially Black residents
with ever-rising water bills and ever-intensifying enforcement methods,
including foreclosing on people’s homes when they can’t afford to pay for their water.

But these are all management and delivery problems.

The water is there,
it’s just a matter of getting it delivered to people in a safe, affordable, and non-discriminatory way.

The west is a different story altogether.

And if we can’t manage to solve the problem of safe and affordable water in places where water is plentiful,
you can imagine the problems that arise when real scarcity is involved.

Water history in the west is a full-service crash-course in all of 19th- and 20th-century American capitalism’s very worst tendencies.

We encountered a scarce and necessary resource,
understood exactly how scarce and necessary it was,
then proceeded to kill each other for the chance to turn as much of it as possible into profit before all of it was gone.

Now, it’s mostly all gone and the west is burning.

The prophet of water in the west,
the man who foresaw nearly every issue we’ve struggled to deal with in the last 150 years,
is John Wesley Powell.

What’s the best way to describe Powell?

Well, to start, he was an absolute madman.

Imagine a one-armed Civil War veteran turned college professor who,
in 1869, decides to take four boats down the Green River,
into the Colorado, and through the Grand Canyon.

At the time, no one had even come close to achieving this feat.

Some white settlers had seen or boated various parts of the river
—a few had witnessed the Grand Canyon from the rim
—and native communities had lived along some parts of Powell’s route.

But, to the best of anyone’s knowledge at the time, not even the natives had attempted this entire trip by boat.

The rivers were truly unknown and unknowable to Powell.

He could have encountered a waterfall as extreme as Niagara Falls at any point along the way, and died instantly.

And, to compound this uncertainty, Powell undertook the journey in four wooden boats,
never having run a rapid before,
with an entire crew of men who had also never run a rapid before.

Somehow, Powell and most of his crew survived the three-month journey.

Those who didn’t survive couldn’t exactly blame Powell for their fate.

At the top of a truly massive rapid in the Grand Canyon, three men abandoned the expedition,
thinking they’d have better survival odds hiking than trying to run these rapids in their tender wooden boats.

Only two days later, Powell and the remaining crew finished their journey,
having run the intimidating rapids without issue.

The three who’d abandoned them had already harassed a band of natives near the rim of the Grand Canyon and been killed

The journey is what Powell is famous for,
but his later reports are what make him a prophet of water in the west.

Before Powell’s time, many Americans had largely written off the western U.S. as useless.

In one of the best examples of a mislaid prophecy, an Army lieutenant,
on seeing the Grand Canyon, reported:

"The region last explored is, of course, altogether valueless.
It can be approached only from the south,
and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave.
It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way,
shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed"
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/07/water-is-for-fighting