OUR CULTURAL COMMONS

by

Chris Maser

Language is perhaps the first cultural commons, the greater part of which is the eternal silence out of which sound comes and into which it returns. Without silence, no sound is possible. Conversely, without sound, silence could not be recognized for itself. Without sound, words could not exist. Without worlds, abstract thought could not exist. Without abstract thought, meaning and experience in the form of knowledge could not exist. Without knowledge, an idea could not exist. Without an idea, humanity could not so drastically alter the Earth. Without knowledge, humanity could neither understand what is nor create that which is unreal.

I have experienced the eternal silence while camping in the deep snows of winter high in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, while rescuing cattle stuck in deep snow high in a Rocky-Mountain winter of northwestern Colorado, and while conducting research in the Nubian Desert of Egypt. Silence on a still day in deep winter in the high country is so profound that, as a young man, I not only could “hear” it but also could hear the “swishing” sound snowflakes made as they felling through it. In the Nubian Desert, on the other hand, there was nothing on a still day to rupture the silence—not the slightest sound could I detect.

Had I not experienced the eternal silence, would it exist for me? Would I recognize it in our increasingly noisy world? Hence the age-old question: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course it does because mice hear it, and squirrels hear it, as do the creatures living in the tree and below ground, where they feel the vibrations it sends through the soil as it strikes the Earth. I would therefore rephrase that question:  If a tree falls in the forest and there is nothing to hear it or feel the impact of its falling, does it make a sound? Vibrations are, after all, the essence of sound. This being the case, one might ask: What is the essence of silence, if not inaudible vibrations in eternal emptiness?

As I mull over the probable events that led to our modern, human languages, it occurs to me that all words are the names of things, be it a touchable entity (a flower, animal, or tool—each a noun); a definition of quantifiably time (a second, an hour, today, yesterday, tomorrow, next year—each a noun); an action (do, run, sit, speak—each a verb); or something that qualities something else (pretty, ugly, hairy, large, small, fast, slow—each an adjective), in time (now, earlier, later—each an adverb), and as a degree (very, exceedingly, little, much—each an adverb or an adjective). Put differently, words define the mental boundaries of our perceptions. A child points to something, hears the utterance of sound from an adult in response to the gesture, and lo, the rudiments of meaning are born. In fact, parents who simultaneously point to something and verbalize its name have children who not only gesture by the age of 14 months but also develop larger vocabularies by the time they are 54 months old than do children whose parents fail to gesture.¹ With repetition, a boundary of meaning (a definition) is established.

With the invention of each new word (each new name), we humans are doing our best to simultaneously explore, define, and refine the boundaries of meaning attached to our perceptions of the world around us—boundaries encompassed in the names by which we recognize what we see. When we speak, therefore, we are attempting to transfer boundaries of meaning attached to names of things, time, actions, and qualifiers, which is like trying to fence a portion of the sky to own the stars.²

Language is not just about naming things, like objectified islands in a sea of eternal silence. It’s also about stringing those names together in a specific order, a verbal archipelago, as it were, to express a “thought.” But can a thought exist without expression. In other words, can a thought exist in eternal silence? For instance, can a solitary earthworm, deep within the soil, have a thought? If not, how does it function? If so, are an earthworm’s thoughts and an idea synonymous?

This raises the question: Can an idea exist without a thought? Put differently, can either exist without some kind of expression to embody them? But what is an idea?

According to the 1999 Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, an “idea” is: any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity.³ But what does this definition really say? Not much.

To me, an idea is a mural of the evolution of human consciousness through time. An idea, like everything else humanity has given a name to, seems to arise in the universal ethers and infiltrates the mind as an insight, a flash of intuitive understanding, a cosmic recognition—but of what? It’s precisely what that’s the problem with language. Words, those structured sounds we utter in our need to share our search for meaning in life, are merely symbols, metaphors whereby we approach, but never touch or capture, the object we attempt to convey with the words we use.

Therefore, as with the falling tree, one might ask: If a word cannot directly touch the object it is meant to define, does the object exist? By the same token, one might ask: Do I exist, if I do not have a personal name, the sound of which I can hear and recognize? Do I exist, if I cannot write my name and see it as a concrete mark made by my own hand?

If we don’t know where ideas come from or why one person is granted a specific idea and not another, how can any one person “own” an idea—patented an idea and claim it as theirs? As such, ideas seem to be part of the global, etheric commons, or perhaps of the “collective unconscious,” as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung termed it. By that I mean, to be alone with an idea is to visit in silence with every human who in any way helped to shape the precursor of the idea though the collective thought that, in time, led to an expression through language. Without the expression of thought, the world would be devoid of even a single idea. And yet, when I allow things to be what they are without attempting to confine them within the intellectual fence of language, I see them most clearly because there is no preconceived structure through which to filter my relationship with them. They simply are, as silence simply is.

Where could a thought come from except out of eternal silence? Was it necessary to break the silence in order to consummate a thought? Probably not, because the first thought was most likely an unconscious act based on an intuitive impulse that produced a pleasing or perhaps decidedly unpleasing result.

The first time an unconscious act produced a conscious recognition of an outcome, a thought forever left the eternal silence to reside in the human psyche. In that instant, an apparently random act became the building block of an idea, most likely in the form of a question of whether repeating the act would produce the same result. And so a happenstance became an a conscious process of investigation to satisfy curiosity, which led to a thought, which morphed into an idea, even though the idea’s entire existence was confined within the mind of a single individual who possessed no recognizable name or verbal means with which to either examine the idea within or convey it without to another individual.

The first idea was the beginning of a never-ending story—albeit one without title, plot, or final outcome. As such, the simplest embryonic idea began in the silent language of a physical demonstration, which was enough to convey it from one person to another through demonstration. As the first idea gathered unto itself other intuitive gifts from the eternal silence, the ensuing complications became so great there arose the need for some kind of formal communication, of a verbal language, and so began humanity’s search for meaning, with its simultaneous fragmentation of the eternal silence.

Because ideas evolved over millennia with thought and language, it seems to me, they belong to everyone and thus are meant to be free—part of the global commons, a point well made by author Daniel Boorstin, “Languages would become pathways through space and time. While nations would be held together by their new vernaculars, lone readers could seek remote continents and voyage into the faraway past.”⁴ To this notion, the German poet Johann von Goethe would likely add, “All truly wise thoughts [ideas] have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.”⁵

But now, as I enter my seventies, I find ideas take on a reflective glow, and yet, like the oceanic depths, ideas seem fathomless. They appear in one instant to be amorphous, well shaped in another, and diffuse in yet another. In a manner similar to an amoeba, an idea grows here and there, only to withdraw its boundaries somewhere else. I therefore find ideas to be living gifts, the embodiment of the Eternal Mystery from which all things arise, into which all things disappear, only to arise again in some other form.

Like the water of a mountain lake, ideas are an abiding mystery. Precipitation falls into the lake as rain, snow, or hail. It remains awhile as a liquid or a solid. It leaves as a gas to travel the currents of air that circumnavigate the globe. From the salty water of the sea to the fresh water of the lake, the continuous cycle of water has traveled the world throughout the eons, just as ideas traverse the cosmic realm. As the lake could not exist without water, could language exist without ideas? By the same token, could ideas exist without language and a mind to midwife their transformation from the eternal silence into sound as the utterance of expression? Whether a bridge, a building, a medicine, or a musical note, each is the embodiment of an idea. To be honored by—entrusted with—an idea is, indeed, a magnificent gift, one that often leads to knowledge.

Every human language—the master tool representing its own culture—has its unique construct, which determines both its limitations and its possibilities in expressing myth, emotion, ideas, and logic. One of the greatest feats of humanity is the evolution written language—those silent, ritualistic marks with their encoded meaning that not only made culture possible but also archive its history as part of the cultural commons, which is everyone’s birthright.

The relative independence with which cultures evolve creates their uniqueness both within themselves and within the reciprocity they experience with one another and their immediate environments. Each culture, and each community within that culture, affects its environment in a specific way and is accordingly affected by the environment in a particular way. So it is that distinct cultures in their living create culturally designed landscapes, which in some measure are reflected in the myths they hold and the languages they speak. As such, language is the medium with which the condition of the human soul is painted.

The artist, using words to convey the colors of meaning by mixing them on a palette of syntax, composes the broad shapes of a cultural story line. Then, by matching the colors of words to give expression to ideas, the artist adds verbal structure, texture, and shades of meaning, to the story. In doing so, the verbal artist paints a picture or portrait as fine as any accomplished with brush, paint, palette, and canvas; with camera and film; or musical instruments and mute notes on paper. In addition, a verbal picture often outlasts the ravages of time that claim those of paint on canvas, imprints of light on photographic paper, or musical instruments that give “voice” to mute shapes.

So what does it say about Western industrialized society when the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has omitted words of historical significance pertaining to Nature and culture to make way for greater modernity, including such “technobabble” such as:  BlackBerry, blog, voicemail, and broadband? Yet, according to Vineeta Gupta, head of the children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, changes in the world are responsible for these alterations. “When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,” she said. “That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.” Several criteria were used to select the 10,000 words and phrases in the junior dictionary, including how often words would be used by young children.⁶ However, as Elaine Brooks points out, “Humans seldom value what they cannot name.”⁷

Nature words deleted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary include: Acorn, adder, almond, apricot, ash, ass, beaver, beech, beetroot, blackberry, bloom, bluebell, boar, bramble, bran, bray, brook, budgerigar, bullock, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, cheetah, chestnut, clover, colt, conker, corgi, cowslip, crocus, cygnet, dandelion, doe, drake, fern, ferret, fungus, gerbil, goldfish, gooseberry, gorse, guinea pig, hamster, hazel, hazelnut, heather, heron, herring, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, kingfisher, lark, lavender, leek, leopard, liquorice, lobster, magpie, melon, minnow, mint, mistletoe, mussel, nectar, nectarine, newt, oats, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pansy, parsnip, pasture, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, poppy, porcupine, porpoise, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, raven, rhubarb, spaniel, spinach, starling, stoat, stork, sycamore, terrapin, thrush, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, weasel, willow, and wren.

Cultural words taken out of the dictionary: Abbey, aisle, allotment, altar, bacon, bishop, blacksmith, bridle, carol, chapel, christen, coronation, county, cracker, decade, devil, diesel, disciple, duchess, duke, dwarf, elf, emperor, empire, goblin, manger, marzipan, monarch, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, porridge, psalm, pulpit, saint, sheaf, sin, vicar.

Words put in: Allergic, alliteration, analogue, apparatus, attachment, bilingual, biodegradable, block graph, blog, boisterous, brainy, broadband, bullet point, bungee jumping, cautionary tale, celebrity, chatroom, childhood, chronological, citizenship, classify, colloquial, committee, common sense, compulsory, conflict, cope, creep, curriculum, cut and paste, database, debate, democratic, donate, drought, dyslexic, emotion, endangered, EU, Euro, export, food chain, idiom, incisor, interdependent, MP3 player, negotiate, square number, tolerant, trapezium, vandalism, voicemail.⁸

Some languages, as exemplified above, are simply being eroded through the conscious substitutions of words, whereas others cease to exist altogether. Although language is not something we generally think of as becoming extinct, languages are disappearing all over the world, especially the spoken-only languages of indigenous peoples. As languages vanish, so too do the cultural variations of the landscape they allowed, even fostered, because a unique culture cannot exist without the uniqueness of its language to protect its history and guide its evolution.

While it probably took thousands of years for the different human languages to evolve, it can take less than a century for some of them to disappear. As languages become extinct, we lose their cultural knowledge along with their perceptions and modes of expression. Because language is the fabric of culture and the living trust of our identity, when a language dies, the demise of the culture that gave it birth is imminent.

What is lost when a language becomes extinct? How many potential answers to contemporary problems, how much ancient wisdom, will be lost because we are losing languages to so-called “progress,” especially obscure, indigenous ones?

With the loss of each language, we also lose the evolution of its logic and its cultural myths and rituals—those metaphors that give the people a sense of place within the greater context of the universe, because language represents unity within and through time. Temporal unity is the language of memory, those images of experience stored in the human psyche and passed forward from generation to generation in the form of stories, myths, and rituals. Therefore, each time we allow a human language to become extinct, we are losing a facet of understanding, a facet of ourselves—the collective memory of a people archived in their language, a memory that is part of the human hologram, our collective commons of the human experience. As a global society, we are slowly making ourselves blind to our relationships one another, the universe, and ourselves.

I have thought much about the loss of languages as I have traveled and worked abroad over the years. And it seems to me, that languages are in many ways the reflective surface of the human psyche—the living trust of our cultural commons. Therefore, to lose a language is to fracture the mirror and thus progressively distort the image of humanity as pieces of the broken mirror fall into oblivion. What a tragic loss of such a great gift.

Our growing blindness through the extinction of languages is exacerbated by the global spread of such languages as English, which limits the imagination and understanding within the rigid confines of its own intellectual fence. The logic of which each language is born and of which it is the caretaker can be likened to a one-way window through which a person can see the world without from a singular point of view but cannot see themselves within the cage of their own thoughts. Thus it is that the hologram of the human family requires people representing many systems of logic all peering at one another simultaneously in order to see the wholeness of the creature we have dubbed Homo sapiens.

In this sense, a few dominant languages are replacing relatively obscure ones at a tremendous cost of lost cultural identity, history, myths, stories, and human dignity. And to lose one’s cultural myths, which only one’s own language can adequately portray, is to lose one’s sense of place and identity in the human family and in the Universe—one’s temporal unity with every human thought ever formed, every question ever asked, every imagining unveiled, and every spiritual impulse born in that sacred land of the psyche we variously call “innocence” or “ignorance.”

I say this because each language in its own way is a living trust of the cultural commons that reflects the myths by which a people have learned how to cope with life. As we lose languages, we simplify the instructional reflection of humanity’s mythology and so destabilize human society as a whole. We are, in the name of modernity, destroying humanity’s collective, spiritual vitality by relegating to the scrap heap of “useless, obsolete” information of so many of its cultural myths and the rituals that express their essence, the archived lessons they teach about living a humane life, and the transcendent ideas upon which the myths, rituals, and lessons are founded—all of which are part of our cultural commons as a living trust.⁹

Precisely because it is a living trust in both the legal and cultural sense, the commons in all its myriad forms is an open system of biophysical evolution interwoven with cultural mythology. Although people speak today of “closed-loop technology,” there neither is nor can there be a truly closed system of any kind. The closest thing to a closed system is the fossilization of invertebrates in amber, albeit the system in still open in the technical sense because light and the ambient temperature can penetrate the amber.

Insects in amber are an example of true preservation in Nature. Amberization, the process whereby fresh resin is transformed into amber, is so gentle that it forms the most complete type of fossilization known for small, delicate, soft-bodied organisms, such as insects. In fact, a small piece of amber found along the south coast of England in 2006 contained a 140-million-year old spider web constructed in the same orb configuration as that of today’s garden spiders. This is 30 million years older than a previous spider web found encased in Spanish amber.¹⁰

The web demonstrates that spiders have been ensnaring their prey since the time of the dinosaurs. And because amber is three-dimensional in form, it preserves color patterns and minute details of the organism’s exoskeleton, and so allows the study of micro-evolution, biogeography, mimicry, behavior, reconstruction of the environmental characteristics, the chronology of extinctions, paleo-symbiosis,¹¹ and molecular phylogeny.¹² But the same dynamic cannot be employed outside of an airtight container, such as a drop of amber or canning jar. In other words, whether natural or artificial, all functional systems are open because they all require—and respond to—the input of energy in order to function; conversely, a totally closed system is a physical impossibility, which makes governing the commons a difficult task at best.

ENDNOTES

1. Meredith L. Rowe and Susan Goldin-Meadow. Differences in Early Gesture Explain SES [SocioEconomic Status] Disparities in Child Vocabulary Size at School Entry. Science, 323. (2009):951-953.

2. The foregoing is based in part on: Chris Maser. Earth in Our Care: Ecology, Economy, and Sustainability. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. (2009) 276 pp.

3. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Random House, New York, NY. (1999) 2230 pp.

4. Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers. Vintage Books, New York, NY. (1983) 745 pp.

5. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. http://www.great-inspirational-quotes.com/thought-quotes.html (accessed on April 6, 2009).

6. Children’s Dictionary Dumps “Nature” Words. http://www.nextnature.net/?p=3110 (accessed on May 29, 2009).

7. Elaine Brooks. Eco Child’s Play. http://ecochildsplay.com/2009/02/02/nature-words-dropped-from-childrens-dictionary/ (accessed on May 29, 2009).

8. The foregoing three paragraphs on the words deleted and added to the Oxford Junior Dictionary is from: Children’s Dictionary Dumps “Nature” Words. http://www.nextnature.net/?p=3110 (accessed on May 29, 2009).

9. The foregoing is based in part on:  Of Ditches And Ponds: A Journey Through The Metaphors Of Childhood And Maturity. 2006. Woven Strings Publishing, Amarillo, TX. 282 pp. E-Book. 2505KB

10. G.O. Poinar, A.E. Treat, and R.V. Southeott. Mite Parasitism of Moths:  Examples of Paleosymbiosis in Dominican Amber. Experientia, 47 (1991):210-212.

11. Ibid.

12. The general discussion of amberization is based on: (1) George O Poinar, Jr. Insects in Amber. Annual Review of Entomology, 46 (1993):145-159; (2) Enrique Peñalver, David. A. Grimaldi, and Xavier Delclòs. Early Cretaceous Spider Web with Its Prey. Science, 312 (2006):1761; (3) G. O. Poinar, Jr. and B. N. Danforth. A Fossil Bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese Amber. Science, 314 (2006):614; and (4) Anonymous. Scientist: Earth’s Oldest Spider Web Discovered. London. In:  Corvallis Gazette-Times, Corvallis, OR. December 16, 2008.

© Chris Maser, 2009. All rights reserved.

GOVERNING THE COMMONS

by

Chris Maser

Despite how human institutions and their respective activities are organized, carried out, and affect the resilience of the environment, dividing our global ecosystem into human and natural realms serves no purpose since the never-ending consequences of our presence are as ancient as they are pervasive.¹ Accordingly, our social-environmental reciprocity is determined by: (1) cyclical dynamics (although most academic research is linear) with cumulative effects, lag periods, and outcome thresholds—both in time and space; (2) self-reinforcing feedback loops; (3) degrees of resilience to disturbance, (4) variability among the dimensions of time, space, and in cultural myths and perceptions, and (5) unintended outcomes due to the unpredictable novelty of change—legacies we pass forward to those who follow.²

Moreover, governing the commons becomes evermore difficult as the usufruct notion of sharing gives way increasingly to the claim of private ownership and exclusive use of real estate, which includes land and all the natural resources and permanent buildings on it. For example, a 2009 court battle over protecting wild populations of ocean-going Coho salmon (part of Nature’s commons) in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, as listed in the Endangered Species Act, included a series of lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of builders, farmers, and property-rights advocates to remove restrictions on development and agriculture that protect the salmon from extinction.³

Whereas the above paragraph deals with commercial attempts to manipulate the environment in a way that is harmful to a widely used component of the commons (Coho salmon) for personal profit, what happens when it is poor subsistence fishers who are depleting their own source of food and revenue? As it turns out, a study of Kenyan fishers suggests three basic outcomes: First, the number of fishers leaving the fishery as an occupation would increase as the magnitude of the decline in their catch increased. Second, fishers would be more likely to abandon fishing as a livelihood if they were from families with relatively abundant material means and a variety of occupations among family members—in other words, occupational diversification. And third, fishers from poor households would be less likely to give up fishing because they were unable to mobilize the necessary resources to overcome either disruptions to their lifestyle or chronic, low-income situations. Consequently, they would most likely remain in poverty.⁴ Either way, the commons is ecologically degraded. To me, this poses the question: Are we effectively making the commons more finite?

In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin writes: “Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow ‘geometrically,’ or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world’s goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world? “⁵ I would answer “yes.” Our world is functionally finite as far as we humans are concerned for five reasons: (1) the money chase, (2) uncontrolled growth in the human population, (3) the transient nature of today’s human population, (4) urban sprawl, (5) pollution, and (6) gobal climate change.

THE MONEY CHASE

The competitive money chase is wreaking havoc with many of the Earth’s ecosystems. To illustrate, when I am unconscious of a material value, I am free of its psychological grip. But the instant I perceive a material value and anticipate possible material gain, I also perceive the psychological pain of potential loss.

The larger and more immediate the prospects for material gain, the greater the political power used to ensure and expedite exploitation, because not to exploit is perceived as losing an opportunity to someone else. And it is this notion of loss that I fight so hard to avoid. In this sense, it is more appropriate to think of resources as managing humans than of humans as managing resources.

Historically, then, any newly identified resource is inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction. Its overexploitation is based, first, on the perceived rights or entitlement of the discoverer to get their share before someone else does and, second, on the right or entitlement of the investor(s) to protect their economic investment. There is more to it than this, however, because the concept of a healthy capitalistic system is one that is ever growing, ever expanding, but such a system is not biologically sustainable. With renewable natural resources, such non-sustainable exploitation is a “ratchet effect,” where to ratchet means to constantly, albeit unevenly, increase the rate of exploitation of a resource.

The ratchet effect works as follows: During periods of relative economic stability, the rate of harvest of a given renewable resource, say timber or salmon, tends to stabilize at a level that economic theory predicts can be sustained through some scale of time. Such levels, however, are almost always excessive, because economists take existing unknown and unpredictable ecological variables and convert them, in theory at least, into known and predictable economic constants in order to better calculate the expected return on a given investment from a sustained harvest. Moreover, this economic maneuver requires the actual existence of an independent variable—a physical impossibility in any functional system.

Then comes a sequence of good years in the market, or in the availability of the resource, or both, and additional capital investments are encouraged in harvesting and processing because competitive economic growth is the root of capitalism. When conditions return to normal or even below normal, however, the industry, having over-invested, appeals to the government for help because substantial economic capital, and often jobs, are at stake. The government typically responds with direct or indirect subsidies, which only encourage continual over-harvesting.

The ratchet effect is thus caused by unrestrained economic investment to increase short-term yields in good times and strong opposition to losing those yields in bad times. This opposition to losing yields means there is great resistance to using a resource in a biologically sustainable manner because there is no predictability in yields and no guarantee of yield increases in the foreseeable future. In addition, our linear economic models of ever-increasing yield are built on the assumption that we can in fact have an economically sustained yield. This contrived concept fails in the face of the biological sustainability of a yield.

Then, because there is no mechanism in our linear economic models of ever-increasing yield that allows for the uncertainties of ecological cycles and variability or for the inevitable decreases in yield during bad times, the long-term outcome is a heavily subsidized industry. Such an industry continually over-harvests the resource on an artificially created, sustained-yield basis that is not biologically sustainable.

When the notion of sustainability arises in a resource conflict, the parties marshal all scientific data favorable to their respective positions as “good” science and discount all unfavorable data as “bad” or “flawed” science. These kinds of conflicts are thus the stage on which science is politicized, largely obfuscating its service to society.

Because the availability of choices dictates the amount of control we feel we have with respect to our sense of security, a potential loss of money is the breeding ground for environmental injustice. This is the kind of environmental injustice in which the present generation steals from all future generations by over-exploiting the commons rather than facing the uncertainty of giving up potential income.

There are important lessons in all of this. First, history indicates that a biologically sustainable use of any resource has never been achieved without first over-exploiting it, despite historical warnings and contemporary data. If history is correct, resource problems are not environmental problems but rather human ones that we have created many times, in many places, under a wide variety of social, political, and economic systems.

Second, the fundamental issues involving resources, the environment, and people are complex and process driven. The integrated knowledge of multiple disciplines is required to understand them. These underlying complexities of the physical and biological systems preclude a simplistic approach, such as that attempted through resource management—which in reality is attempted product management. In addition, the wide natural variability and the compounding, cumulative influence of continual human activity initially masks the long-term results of over-exploitation.

Third, as long as the uncertainty of continual change engenders fear and thus is viewed as a condition to be avoided, nothing will be resolved. However, once the novelty of change is accepted as an inevitable, open-ended, creative life process, most decision-making is simply common sense. For example, common sense dictates that one would favor actions having the greatest potential for long-term sustainability, as opposed to those with little or none.

Fourth, I believe that the seed of all destructive conflict is a perceived loss of choice over our own individual destinies, which we interpret as a threat to our personal survival. The sense of loss, which usually translates into a life-long fear of loss in some degree, originates in childhood as lessons from parents.⁶

UNCONTROLLED GROWTH IN THE HUMAN POPULATION

There are several factors that contribute to the burgeoning growth of our human population: (1) high birth rates among those segments of humanity in which male-dominated religions enslave women by denying them the right of reproductive choice, (2) the unmitigated abuse of women—such as the sex-slave trade throughout the world (including in the United States) and the violence of rape used in some countries (like Zimbabwe) as a weapon of political intimidation, (3) a higher survival rate among infants than in decades past, and (4) people in general live longer today than at any time in history. Granted, these factors are partly—but not wholly—responsible the growing per-capita demand for Earth’s natural resources. The increasing severity the situation is continually compounded by the wanton destruction of those same resources through the armed conflicts encircling the globe, as well as the emerging effects of climate change.⁷ If, therefore, humanity does not control its own population, Nature will—in ways most unpleasant, if what happens to other species that overpopulate their environment is any indication.

THE TRANSIENT NATURE OF TODAY’S HUMAN POPULATION

There are many reasons for the transient nature of today’s global population—everything from war-created refugees to job insecurity, illegal immigration from poor countries into wealthy ones, and, in times of prosperity, people working in one place but retiring to another, the super wealthy moving into favored places, thereby driving up the costs, which displaces the original residents, and finally, governments and corporations displacing indigenous people in order to exploit coved resources. What does this mean for the commons? It means chronically uneven exploitation of local resources, seasonal over-exploitation of local resources, or both.

Here it is instructive to consider communities of birds in a given area as ornithologists think of them. First, there is the resident community, which is that group of birds inhabiting the area to which they have a strong sense of fidelity all year. In order to stay throughout the year, year after year, they must be able to meet all of their ongoing requirements for food, shelter, water, space, and privacy. These requirements become most acutely focused during the time of nesting, when young are reared, and during harsh winter weather.

Then there are the summer visitors, which overwinter in the southern latitudes and fly north to rear their young. They arrive in time to build their nests, and in so doing must fit in with the yearlong residents without competing severely for food, shelter, water, and space—especially space and privacy for nesting. If competition were too severe, the resident community would decline and perhaps perish through over-exploitation of the habitat by summer visitors, which have no lasting commitment to a particular habitat.

There are also winter visitors that spend the summer in northern latitudes, where they rear their young, and fly south in the autumn to overwinter in the same area as the yearlong residents, but after the summer visitors have left. They too must fit in with the yearlong residents without severely competing with them for food, water, shelter, space, and privacy during times of harsh weather and periodic scarcities of food. Here, too, the resident community would decline and perhaps perish if over-exploitation of the habitat through competition were too severe. And like the summer visitors, winter visitors are not committed to a particular habitat but use the best of two different habitats (summer and winter).

On top of all this are the migrants that come through in spring and autumn on their way to and from their summer-nesting grounds and winter-feeding grounds. They pause just long enough to rest and replenish their dwindling reserves of body fat by using local resources of food, water, shelter, and space, to which they have only the passing fidelity necessary to sustain them on their long journey.

The crux of the issue is the carrying capacity of the habitat for the yearlong resident community. If the resources of food, water, shelter, space, and privacy are sufficient to accommodate the yearlong resident community as well as the seasonal visitors and migrants, then all is well. If not, then each bird in addition to the yearlong residents in effect causes the area of land and its resources to shrink per resident bird. This, in turn, stimulates competition, which under circumstances of plenty would not exist. If, however, such competition causes the habitat to be overused and decline in quality, the ones who suffer the most are the yearlong residents for whom the habitat is their sole means of livelihood.

Here I might anticipate your question concerning what a resident bird community has to do with a resident human community. It has to do with a statement made by Wendell Berry, that a true community can extend itself beyond the local, but only if it does so metaphorically.⁸ This means that if the resident community is rendered non-sustainable by outside influences, such as people from other areas over-harvesting local crops of mushrooms or large absentee corporations clear-cutting forests to the detriment of local water catchments, then the trust embodied in the continuity of a community’s history is shattered, as is the self-reinforcing feedback loop of mutual well-being between the land and the people.

Another, subtler way outside influence can destroy community is transients in its population, where transient means “passing with time.” In a small town in Idaho, where I asked people how they felt about the fairly large number of employees of the U.S. Forest Service living in their community, they replied that they tried not to get to know them.

When asked if they avoided getting to know the folks from the Forest Service because they were transients who felt no sense of place within the community, the answer was only partly in the affirmative. They said it was mainly because it was just too painful to become friends with Forest Service employees and learn to trust them, only to have them leave in two or three years. That kind of continual loss was too much like perpetual grieving for the death of friends and was more than the community could abide.⁹ (Las Vegas, Nevada, had such a transient population in the two years I lived there that the phone company printed a huge, entirely new phone book every six months.)

URBAN SPRAWL

When a community loses (for whatever reason) the cohesive glue of trust embedded in its fundamental values, it loses its identity and is set adrift on the ever-increasing sea of visionless competition both within and without, where “growth or die” becomes the economic motto driving the cultural system.

Such visionless competition inevitably rings the death knell of community and its sense of being a “cultural commons,” and is an open door to absentee developers, who further destroy the once-held sense of being a cultural commons. Developers come in three basic categories: local residents, immigrant residents, and absentee. Nevertheless, developers—and especially absentee developers—work very hard to disallow people’s “emotions” to count as a reason to prevent a coveted piece of land from becoming a housing development or a shopping mall.

The consequences I have observed when long-time residents are forbidden to express their emotions concerning the aesthetics and “feel” of their community and its surroundings are: (1) stealing choice and self-determining government from the people who live in the area of the proposed development; (2) giving preference to residential developers, an increasing number of whom are absentee, even from out of state; (3) forcing local people to accept absentee interests; (4) limiting—even undermining—the scope of a local people’s potential self-determined vision for sustainable community development within the context of their own landscape, especially for the desired future condition of their landscape; and (5) curtailing—or even eliminating—the ability of local people to actively mourn for the continuing loss of their quality of life and their sense of place as outside choices are forced upon them, often by people who will not have to live with the consequences of their imposed actions.

The whole purpose of choice is for local people to guide the sustainable development of their own community within the mutually sustainable context of their landscape by collectively selecting the self-imposed social constraints necessary to fulfill their vision. After all, the local people and their children must reap the consequences of any decisions that are made. To limit their choices is to force someone else’s consequences upon them, often at a great and increasingly negative long-term cost, first socially and then environmentally.

When preferential treatment is given to residential developers, including absentee developers, local people are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to planning for long-term community sustainability within the context of a finite landscape. While the focus of sustainable community development is long term, the interests of residential developers are strictly short term, which usually counteracts long-term planning based on long-term environmental consequences. Furthermore, it is exceedingly unlikely that absentee residential developers are going to have a vested interest in the long-term welfare of the community once they have made their money. So, long after the residential developer has gone, the community is left to deal with the environmental errors, which effectively slaughters the quality of human relationships for the benefit of developers. But emotions, the force behind relationships, are based on personal and collective values, which are the heart and soul of a community as a cultural commons.¹⁰

The above circumstances call to mind a quote by the British historian Arnold Toynbee, “The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.”¹¹ I can vouch for the accuracy of Toynbee’s observation—having watched it played out unabated in my own hometown from the end of World War II until the present day.

The landscape around my hometown was friendly when I was a little boy in the early 1940s. Fields and forest surrounded the town, and swift forest streams that fed meandering valley rivers. I was free in those early days to wander over hill and dale without running into a no-trespassing sign on every gate and seemingly every other fence post.

The code of the day was to leave open any gate that was open and to close any gate after passing through it that was closed. It was also understood that one was free to cross a farmer’s property as long as one respected the property by walking around planted fields rather than through them. If I asked permission, I could wander, hunt, fish, and trap almost anywhere I wished.

Much of the Coast Range and most of the Cascade Range of Oregon that I knew as a youth were covered with unbroken, ancient forest and clear, cold streams from which it was safe to drink. Although the streams were still filled with trout and salmon, the forests and mountain meadows were already devoid of wolf and grizzly bear.

In the valley that embraced my hometown, the farmers’ fields were small and friendly, surrounded by fencerows sporting shrubs and trees, including apples and pears that proffered delicious fruit, each in its season. In spring, summer, and autumn, the fencerows were alive with the colors of flowers and butterflies and the songs of birds. They harbored woodrats and rabbits, pheasants and deer, squirrels and red valley foxes. The air was clean, the sunshine bright and safe, and the drinking water among the sweetest and purest in the world.

When World War II came along, the seeds of change were sown with respect to community. The war effort pushed mass production to new levels and brought the impersonalization of humans killing humans to the fore with such labeling on cartons containing weapons as “mine, one, anti-personnel,” which indicated that the person the weapon was meant to kill was simply a military abstraction.

Although World War II eventually drew to a close, the impersonalization of mass production carried over into the postwar boom years. Gone was the simple wisdom of building communities and neighborhoods within communities for people within landscapes of natural beauty. The simple wisdom that had worked so well in the past was replaced by the strategies of massive wartime production developed in defense factories.

Towns, including mine, started to sprawl rapidly in largely unplanned ways. Cookie-cutter houses were concentrated in developments that were isolated from everything else dealing with community.

Speed rather, than care, began creeping into the building trade, and I watched as houses sprang up in blocks and lines and circles, built for speculation. As speculation crept into the housing market, speed, sameness, and clustering became marks of efficiency and greater profit, setting the tone for the future—a tone reflected in the night sky as the once brilliant stars of the Milky Way disappeared into a seemingly eternal mask of light pollution.

With the stage set by the postwar housing industry, things began to change noticeably as corporate depersonalization commenced its insidious growth into the heart of community. Shopping malls were connected by roads, which became bigger, straighter, faster, and increasingly went through prime agricultural land. Then came larger and larger subdivisions with cheaper and cheaper ticky-tacky tract housing, some of which was constructed in floodplains or on unstable soils.

Centralization had arrived on the landscape as it had earlier in corporations. Driving on superhighways became a necessity, and with it came pollution of air and water, which increased with every extra mile that had to be driven and every additional automobile on the road. The gentle motion and relaxed pace of the traditional street gave way to ever-increasing speed. As author Jean Chesneaux observed: “The street as an art of life is disappearing in favour of traffic arteries. People drive through them on the way to somewhere else.” There is no word in the English language with a positive connotation for going slowly or lingering on streets as a way to participate in community.

People started losing their sense of connection with one another in a familiar face-to-face community as hubs of centralized activity within the growing urban sprawl increasingly altered the landscape within and surrounding my hometown. And so, the sense of community I grew up with in the 1940s and early 1950s began falling apart. A sense of place—of a familiar, friendly community, where everyone left their homes and cars unlocked—gave way to a sense of location, as more and more people became transients, who arrived to chase the dollar and who disappeared when a bigger dollar loomed elsewhere on the horizon.

By the time I was a teenager, it had become necessary to lock the doors to our house and car, and no trespassing signs proliferated across the landscape. A sense of distrust had begun its insidious invasion throughout the once-closely knit human bonds of mutual caring that in days gone by had characterized my hometown.

Outside of town, the forests were being cut at an exponential rate, including the town’s water catchment, endangering such species as the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. The forested streams, where as a lad I drank of their sweet water and caught native cutthroat trout, now have waters unsafe to drink. Clear-cut hillsides began eroding as forests were converted to economic tree farms. Gone are most of the great native trout and the wild salmon that graced the streams from which I drank. Gone are the great flocks of band-tailed pigeons that once greeted me in forest and fen. Gone are the elk and bear that I used to see within ten miles of my house. Gone is the forest of centuries. In its place are acres of comparatively lifeless, economic tree farms, some of which may live but a little longer than I.

At the same time, I watched helplessly as the small, protected fields of the personable family farms increasingly gave way to larger and larger naked, homogeneous fields of corporate-style farms, where fence rows were cleared to maximize the amount of tillable soil, to squeeze the last penny from every field. With the loss of habitat along each fencerow, the bird song of the valley was diminished in like measure, as was the habitat for other creatures wild and free.

Gone are the fencerows with their rich, fallow strips of grasses and herbs, of shrubs and trees, which interlaced the valley in such beautiful patterns of flower and leaf with the changing seasons—the nectar corridors for native pollinators. Gone are the burrowing owls from the quiet secluded fields I once knew. Gone is the liquid melody of the meadowlark I so often heard as a boy. Gone is the fencerow trill of the towhee. Gone are the song sparrows, Bewick’s wrens, yellow warblers, and MacGillivary’s warblers. Gone are the dusky-footed woodrat nests, the Beechy ground squirrels, and the cottontail rabbits.

Today, compared with the time of my youth, the valley’s floor offers little in the way of habitat, other than a great, depersonalized, open expanse of naked fields in winter and a monotonous sameness under the sun of summer, super highways, and sprawling towns. And everywhere around my hometown, housing developments—with the accompanying noise of automobiles, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers—are still encroaching ever farther into what was used to be a landscape wherein Nature held uncontested sway and thus filled it in spring, summer, and autumn with the colors of flowers and butterflies and the songs of birds.¹²

POLLUTION

The money chase, with all of its ramifications, is adding pollution worldwide, which is putting something deleterious into the global commons, rather than taking something out. Pollutants entrained in the currents of air as they circumnavigate the globe, are negatively affecting the quality of the sunlight that reaches Earth and thus having harmful effects on the totality of the commons. These atmospheric pollutants are capable of a phenomenon known as long-distance transport, which simply means that they can travel great distances from their sources on air currents, such as the so-called “Arctic haze” that covers the top of the world in spring. The Arctic haze has been traced to forest fires raging in southern Siberia (Lake Baikal area) and agricultural burning in Kazakhstan (southern Russia).¹³

However, rain and snow scrub many pollutants from the air and deposit them in the soil and open waters, where they begin the journey to the oceans of the world. Acid rain is illustrative because it has long been recognized as a pollution problem in Europe, where statues and gargoyles that once proudly adorned city streets and plazas and guarded centenarian buildings have had their faces dissolved over recent decades. The statues that I remember seeing as a boy, in perfect form and feature, today are often-unrecognizable relics of a past era because acid rain has eaten away the marble much as leprosy eats away the flesh.

Acid rain is not confined to European cities, however. It is also found in forest and fen, in highland and lowland. There, too, it is destroying the essence of life as it joins league with other forms of industrial/technological pollution, where it contributes to a phenomenon the Germans call Waldsterben, which translates to “the dying forest.” (If you want more detailed information on Waldsterben, see “Sustainable Forestry.”¹⁴)

The dying forest syndrome is not exclusively the property of Europe; every industrial country, including the United States and Canada, owns it. Called forest dieback in the United States, it manifests primarily along the eastern seaboard, where declining growth rates and the progressive demise of red spruce and other species of trees, particularly at high elevations, are attributed to atmospheric pollution, of which acid deposition is one of the most widespread components.¹⁵ Here, a primary human source of the precursors to acid deposition is coal-fired power plants, which account for about one third of the nitrogen oxides and about two thirds of the sulfur dioxide produced each year in the United States.¹⁶

A lesser-known case of pollution being washed from the atmosphere by rain occurs in the severely fouled air of southern China, where the nitrogen emissions are not only accruing rapidly but also increasingly being deposited in the subtropical-forests of this warm and humid region. Long-term, high-nitrogen deposition causes elevated leaching in both young coniferous forests and old broadleaf forests, although it is most pronounced in the old forest, where growth is negligible. In fact, the availability of nitrogen even exceeds its biotic demand in the young, aggressively growing forests during the rainy season (March to August). In any case, the increased leaching of nitrogen during the rainy season, especially in the old, broadleaf forest, further augments evidence that it is at least partly hydrologically driven.¹⁷

Clearly, we humans directly affect the atmosphere and both directly and indirectly affect the soil and water—the litho-hydrosphere. However, although the spread of point-source pollution is scientifically predictable, its path of dissemination is not necessarily intuitive. If, for example, we choose to clean the world’s air, we will automatically cleanse the soil and water to some extent because airborne pollutants will no longer exist to be extracted by rain and snow. If we then choose to treat the soil in a way that allows us to grow what we desire without the use of artificial chemicals (and if we stop using the soil as a dumping ground for toxic wastes and avoid overly intensive agriculture), the soil can once again purify water by filtering it. If we then discontinue dumping toxic effluents into the ditches, streams, rivers, estuaries, and oceans, they too can begin to cleanse themselves and regain some of their former health. That said, it’s unlikely the oceans will ever fully regain their previous condition.

With clean and healthy air, soil, and water, we can also have clear, safe sunlight with which to power the Earth. Clean air is the absolute bottom line for social-environmental sustainability and, therefore, long-term human survival within a global commons of excellent quality and high functional integrity. With the eventual repair of the ozone shield, we can enjoy a more benign—and perhaps predictable—climate than we now have. In addition, effective population control can tailor human society to fit within the world’s biophysical carrying capacity.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Regardless of the initial cause of the changing global climate, it is having myriad deleterious effects on life as we know it, such as the often-mentioned, dramatically visible glacial melting. However, some effects of a warming climate are less apparent. One experimental grassland study is illustrative: plant communities with one, three, and nine species were tested for the effects of a warming climate. The production of vegetative biomass decreased both aboveground (by 29 percent) and belowground (by 25 percent) due to the negative effects of the prevailing increase in summer heat and drought stress. Moreover, the data suggest that a warming climate and the associated drying out of the soil could reduce primary production in many temperate grasslands, a condition that could not necessarily be mitigated by efforts to maintain or increase species richness.¹⁸

ENDNOTES

1. David Western. Human-modified ecosystems and future evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (2001): 5458-5465.

2. Jianguo Liu, Thomas Dietz, Stephen R. Carpenter, and others. Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Systems. Science, 317 (2004):1513-1516.

3. Jeff Barnard. Court Upholds Salmon Hatchery Policy. Corvallis Gazette-Times, Corvallis, OR. March 17, 2009.

4. J.E. Cinner, T. Daw, and TR. McClanahan. Socioeconomic Factors that Affect Artisanal Fishers’ Readiness to Exit a Declining Fishery. Conservation Biology, 23 (2009):124-130.

5. Garrett Hardin. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162 (1968):1243-1248.

6. The discussion of over-exploitation is based on: (1) Donald Ludwig, Ray Hilborn, and Carl Walters. Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lesson From History. Science, 260 (1993):17, 36; (2) F.F.H. Allen and Thomas W. Hoekstra. 1994. Toward a Definition of Sustainability. Pp. 98-107. In: Sustainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an Ecological Approach to Land Management. W. Wallace Covington and Leonard F. DeBano (Technical. Coordinators). USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-247, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Fort Collins, CO.; and (3) Chris Maser. Earth In Our Care: Ecology, Economy, and Sustainability. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. 2009. 304 pp.

7. The foregoing paragraph is based on: (1) Chris Maser. The Perpetual Consequences of Fear and Violence: Rethinking the Future. Maisonneuve Press, Washington, D.C. (2004) 373 pp; (2) Khalid Tanveer. 2002. Pakistani tribe orders gang-rape as penalty. The Associated Press. In: Corvallis Gazette-Times, Corvallis, OR. July 4; and (3) Jocelyn Craugh Zuckerman. We Must Stop The Rape and Terror. Parade Magazine, March 22, 2009:6-7.

8. Wendell Berry. Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays. Pantheon Books, New York, N.Y. (1993) 208 pp.

9. The foregoing discussion of transients is from: Chris Maser. Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL. (1999) 235 pp.

10. Ibid.

11. Arnold Toynbee. http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/topics/history_and_historians
    _quotes.html (accessed March 17, 2009).

12. The foregoing discussion of my hometown is from: Chris Maser. Ecological Diversity in Sustainable Development: The Vital and Forgotten Dimension. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL. (1999) 401 pp.

13. C. Warnek, R. Bahreini, and J. Briode. Biomass Burning in Siberia and Kazakhstan As An Important Source For Haze Over the Alaskan Arctic in April 2008. Geophysical Research Letters, 36 (2009):L02813, doi:10.1029/2008GL036194.

14. Chris Maser. Sustainable Forestry: Philosophy, Science, and Economics. St. Lucie Press, Delray Beach, FL. (1994) 373 pp.

15. Ibid.

16. Robert Cullen. The true cost of coal. Atlantic Monthly, December (1993):38, 40, 48-50, 51.

17. Y. T. Fang, P. Gundersen, J. M. Mo, and W. X. Zhu. Input and Output of Dissolved Organic and Inorganic Nitrogen in Subtropical Forests of South China Under High Air Pollution. Biogeosciences, 5 (2008):339-352.

18. H. J. De Boeck, C. M. H M. Lemmens, C. Zavalloni, and others. Biomass Production in Experimental Grasslands of Different Species Richness During Three Years of Climate Warming. Biogeosciences, 5 (2008):585-594.

© Chris Maser, 2009. All rights reserved.

THE ONGOING STRUGGLE TO GOVERN THE COMMONS

by

Chris Maser

A discussion of governing the commons has a minimum of four interactive components: (1) recognizing perception as truth, (2) the degree to which a commons is isolated, (3) the changing biophysical environment, and (4) the need for adaptive principles of governance.

RECOGNIZING PERCEPTION AS TRUTH

Perhaps the major challenge to governing the commons wisely and unselfishly for all generations lies in fact that every person sees and understands the world differently because each person is imbued with a unique story based on individual circumstances. One’s interpretation of that story is informed by personal perception—and that perception is unarguably one’s sense of the truth. This being the case, the notion of right versus wrong can exist only metaphorically because the reality of everyone’s perception is right, right, and different.

The Indian spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, said that, “A votary of truth [a person fervently devoted to truth] is often obliged to grope in the dark.” Our challenge therefore lies in our blind spots, not in our vision. Unlike correcting a blind spot in the rear view of an automobile, which can be rectified simply by adding a different kind or a supplemental mirror, we cannot correct our personal blind spots so easily. To correct them, we must grow in our perception and in our acceptance of what is. “Perceive” is from the Latin percipere, which means “to seize the whole of something, to see all the way through.” Perception, therefore, is the act of seeing in the mind, of understanding.

Although our perceptions grow and change as we mature, not everyone’s perceptions mature at the same rate, which accounts for the widely differing degrees of consciousness with respect to cause-and-effect relationships. This disparity is neither good nor bad; it simply means that each of us have different gifts to give at different times in our lives as we see different versions of the truth.

Truth is absolute, whereas perceptions of truth are relative. Therefore, facts, which are perceptions of truth, are relative. Consider the following statement: The world functions perfectly; our perception of how the world functions is imperfect. What does that mean? We don’t know because our perception is constantly changing as we increase the scope of our knowledge.

Trying to understand this concept is the essence of science. Yet even having worked as a scientist for 40 years or more, I would not know a “scientific truth” derived from testing a hypothesis if I stepped on one, because all science can do is disprove something. A scientific fact is therefore a fact only by consensus of the scientists, which means that a scientific fact or truth is only an approximation of what is. It represents our best understanding of reality at this moment and is constantly subject to change as we learn.

Perception is learning, because cause and effect are always connected. Gandhi had reached this conclusion when he said, “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements, but to be consistent with the truth.” He was consistent in his changing perceptions of what the truth was at different stages in his life. He grew from “truth” to “truth” as his vision cleared and he could see greater and greater vistas. So he said that if one found an “inconsistency” between any two things he wrote, the person “would do well to choose the latter of the two on the same subject.”

As I have grown, I am increasingly struck by the way my perception of what is continues to unfold, like a many-petalled flower. As each petal matures, I see the world anew, and thus perceive it differently. My reality is therefore different.

Truth is perfect understanding of that which is. It is neither the spoken word nor the written word, although these may have a ring of truth to them. Truth cannot be defined; it can only be experienced and lived.

With respect to governing the commons, the flawed assumption made during policy debates is that everyone involved has a similar level of understanding of the problem being discussed. In reality, however, vast differences in knowledge and understanding underpin the resource problems confronting the commons because those in charge are either not understood the issue or ignored it through “informed denial.” When religious, political, or other special-interest ideologies are added to the milieu, uncertainty and contestation over potential solutions is a virtual certainty.¹

In addition to differences in knowledge, understanding, and ideologies, men and women intuitively perceive their respective worlds differently. Men tend to be relatively direct, linear, quantitative, and short-term oriented in their approach to problems, whereas women are predominantly interrelationship oriented based on a familial sense of multiple generations and thus a greater propensity for simultaneously considering an integrative approach in successive time scales.

THE DEGREE TO WHICH A COMMONS IS ISOLATED

In the early days of shared use, governance of a commons was a jointly assumed responsibility of everyone in the hunter-gatherer group who used it. Although most such commons were sustainably used over centuries, that likely began to change with the advent of herding and the beginning of competition for grazing and a more sedentary way of life that led to local increases in human populations. Nevertheless, it took the onset of agriculture to effectively seal the fate of long-term sustainability with respect to Nature’s commons. The rapidly increasing numbers of people and domestic animals in the agricultural areas not only incited and fostered growing inter-tribal competition for arable land and water but also the conflicts it engendered. These conflicts grew in scale and intensity as various tribes coalesced into larger and larger societies, which spread across the landscape and conquered smaller, weaker groups of people. What becomes evident from history is that sustainable governance of a commons collapses more often due to unfavorable influence from without than from within. Ancient Greece is a case in point.

Greece, flourishing under wise agricultural use during the beginning of the Iron Age (12^th century BCE), had nevertheless greatly altered its landscape, in spite of its apparently sound agricultural ethic. But all the human-caused changes, including deforestation, do not appear to have caused the collapse of the agricultural system. It was sustainable in fact, and it might have continued to be so had not been for the effect of outside influences.

Although the Greeks modified their landscape, making it ecologically fragile, their agricultural system was sustainable as long as there was a full human population to tend the terraced fields. The destruction of their agricultural system was not a consequence of the system itself, but rather of Romans raiding the Greek countryside for slaves that reduced the population of workers and left the vulnerable landscape increasingly untended, thereby allowing the terraces to collapse and the soil to wash into the Aegean Sea.

As long as the Greeks maintained adequate cover crops that functioned to hold in place the soil as the forests had once done, their agricultural system was sustainable. Unfortunately, as Roman slavers continually reduced the Greek’s working population, there came a threshold beyond which this labor-intensive agriculture simply could not be maintained, and the system collapsed with the loss of the topsoil.²

Prior to the advent of Greek agriculture, the land had been forested for millennia, making sustainability a moot point. Sustainability arose as a problem not because of deforestation, but because of the inability of a society debilitated by slaving to continue performing the function of the forest, namely soil conservation.

This same kind of dynamic is occurring today in many other parts of the world, but for another reason. While working in Peninsular Malaysia, I observed a number of abandoned rice paddies, some of which were being reclaimed by young-growth jungle, while others were simply eroding away. When I asked why this was happening, I was told that many of the younger people were migrating to the cities, such as Kuala Lumpur.

Growing rice without modern machinery is labor intensive. As long as there are enough young people in the villages to augment and eventually replace the old people in the labor pool, the rice paddies will be sustainable. But as the young people leave the villages for the cities, they diminish the village labor pool just as surely as the Romans did when they captured and removed Greek peasants as slaves. When a village labor pool falls below a certain threshold minimum, the rice paddies are no longer sustainable as part of the village commons.

THE CHANGING BIOPHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

Today every aspect of the commons is increasingly under attack from the global-scale growth in the human population; rampant, wasteful use of resources in the industrialized countries; competition in the global-market money chase, which fosters deployment of advanced technologies for resources exploitation worldwide; the virtually unlimited human access to the once-isolated commons of indigenous peoples, as well as compounding effects of polluting the global ecosystem.³

We humans have jointly inherited the commons, which is more basic to our lives and well-being than either the market or the state. We are “temporary possessors and life renters,” wrote British economist and philosopher Edmund Burke, and we “should not think it amongst [our] rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance.”⁴

Despite the wisdom of Burke’s admonishment, the commons is today almost everywhere under assault, abuse, and degradation in the name of economic development as corporations are increasingly hijacking (euphemistically termed “privatizing”) both Nature’s services and every creature’s birthright to those services. Pollution despoils the air, defiles the soil, and poisons the water. Noise has routed silence from its most protected sanctuaries. City light hides the stars by night. Urban sprawl, the disintegration of community, and the attempts to control, engineer, and patent the very substance of life itself are all part or the economic raid on the commons for private monetary gain. “Corporations,” says author David Korten, “are pushing hard to establish property rights over ever more of the commons for their own exclusive ends, often claiming the right to pollute or destroy the regenerative systems of the Earth for quick gain, shrinking the resource base available for ordinary people to use in their pursuit of livelihoods, and limiting the prospects of future generations.”⁵

This is not to say that all corporations are bad or that the market is inept. It is to say that both corporations and the market must have boundaries to keep them within the realm of human competence and moral limits. “The market economy is not everything,” asserted conservative economist Wilhelm Ropke in the 1950s. “The supporters of the market economy do it the worst service by not observing its limits.”⁶ And it’s by ignoring the moral limits of the market economy that we, the adults of the world, create poverty and increasingly mortgage all the generations of the future—beginning with our own children and grandchildren.

As long as humanity is motivated by fear, of which “greed” is a part, every market economy will be destructive. Although money, which is seen as personal security, is the true object of competition, the ultimate battlefield is the global environment—the commons. The only possible solution for human survival with any sense of dignity and well-being is a conscious reduction of and cap on the human population. Even then, the market economy would remain destructive, but the biophysical carrying capacity for human life would be in better balance with the long-term availability of natural resources.

THE NEED FOR ADAPTIVE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNANCE

Although there is increasing emphasis on the significance of mutual trusteeship of our natural resources, generalized social bounds—while essential—are not enough to shift the entrenched patterns of interactions toward new, adaptive forms of cooperative caretaking and governance of a commons in response to ongoing environmental change. In fact, the more complex a commons is biophysically and the more diverse the segment of humanity that uses it, the more contentious the interactions are likely to be. Under such circumstances, sound, often-strict, local enforcement of predetermined social behavior is necessary to protect and maintain the potential biophysical productivity of the commons.⁷

On the other hand, I have found that the level of consciousness that causes and problem in the first place is not the same level that can fix it. For this reason, I have over the years facilitated the transformative resolution to environmental conflicts, which raises the level of the participants’ consciousness of cause and effect with respect to their decisions and actions. The outcome of this transformative conflict resolution is a shared vision based on the heightened level of awareness whereby the participants negotiate a new standard of behavior—inevitably a personal constraint of some kind—in order to achieve a greater collective freedom with respect to a future condition.⁸

As environmental problems become more complex, however, it is good to identify a complement of guiding principles that touch the heart and soul of people even as they protect the productive capacity of the commons for all generations—present and future. Whereas an interdisciplinary group of 16 people engaged in a discussion that promulgated six principles for the sustainable governance of the oceans as a global commons, it is with humility that I add the seventh: (1) responsibility, (2) matching scales, (3) precaution, (4) adaptive caretaking, (5) full-cost allocation, (6) participation, and (7) shared leadership. As the authors state it, “The [seven] Principles together form an indivisible collection of basic guidelines governing the use of all environmental resources, including, but not limited to, marine and coastal resources.”⁹

I have rewritten the principles in order to engage them as fully as possible in the care we take of all aspects of the global commons:

Principle 1: Responsibility. Access to environmental resources carries with it attendant responsibilities to use them in a manner that is ecologically effective, economically sensitive, and socially just to ensue the continued productive capacity of the commons in question. Individual and corporate responsibilities and incentives must be aligned with one another and with the broad goals of social-environmental sustainability.

Principle 2: Matching Scales. Ecological problems are rarely confined to a single scale in time or space. Therefore, decision concerning environmental resources must: (i) be assigned to institutional levels that maximize their ecological contribution, (ii) ensure the flow of ecological information among all appropriate institutional levels, (iii) be inclusive and take all concerned citizen into account, and (iv) internalize costs and benefits. Appropriate scales of governance are those with the most relevant information, can respond quickly and effectively, and are able to integrate within and among scales in time and space.

Principle 3: Precaution. In the face of uncertainty and the irreversibility of environmental impacts, decisions concerning their use must err on the side of caution. The burden of proof is thus shifted to those whose activities could potentially damage the environment.

Principle 4: Adaptive Caretaking. Given that some level of irreversibility always exists in caring for environmental resources, decision-makers must continuously gather and integrate appropriate—monitoring—ecological, social, and economic information with the goal of adaptive improvement.

Principle 5: Full-Cost Allocation. All of the internal and external costs and benefits of alternative decisions concerning the use of environmental resources, including social and ecological, are to be identified and allocated. For the sake of transparency, education, and social-environmental sustainability, markets must continually be adjusted to openly reflect full costs. As history demonstrates over and over, true economic transparency is the road to social justice within and among generations.

Principle 6: Participation. All stakeholders must be engaged in the formulation and implementation of decisions concerning environmental resources—which means someone must speak for the children of all generations. Full understanding and participation on the part of affected citizens is necessary for credible, accepted rules that appropriately identify and assign the corresponding responsibilities.

Principle 7: Shared Leadership. The sustainable governance of the commons will require an ongoing, participatory, and open process involving all the major stakeholder groups—including someone speaking for the children of all generations. It will also require integrated assessment and shared leadership and to accomplish fully adaptive caretaking.

Shared or revolving leadership comes about in two ways: first, when “subordinates” break custom and become leaders, and second, when someone’s particular expertise is needed and they temporarily assume leadership. Revolving leaders are indispensable in our lives because they take charge in varying degrees, as circumstances require.

Such leadership relies on three things: (1) inclusivity, which presumes that lasting solutions require the participation of all affected parties, including someone speaking for the children of all generations; (2) mutual accountability, which presumes that sustainable solutions depend on all sides taking responsibility for answers (which means mutual blaming is not enough); and (3) cultivating the skills of democracy, which presumes that we are not born knowing how to be effective within a democratic system of government and must be taught the art of participation—from active listening to negotiation and evaluation.¹⁰ When, however, we view government as distinct from civil society, we exempt it from practicing inclusive, participatory approaches to interpersonal relationships.¹¹

Revolving leadership is the basis of day-to-day of the participatory democratic process required in all contexts of social-environmental sustainability. Such participation is both one’s opportunity and responsibility to be accountable through the example of one’s personal behavior, by participating in the democratic process and thereby extending a willingness to accept ownership in the resolution of it society’s problems.

Because no one person can be an expert in everything, the person in the official position of overall leadership must have the common sense and good grace to support and follow the lead of a person whose expertise is momentarily in demand. It is difficult for many people to be open enough to recognize what is best in a given circumstance and to step aside when specific leadership—other than theirs—is required.

In the last analysis, leadership must be shared (but neither given away nor sold) because a time will arise when we must count on someone else’s special competence. If we think about the people with whom we share the commons, it becomes apparent that we must be able to count on one another if our commons is to meet our needs while protecting our deepest values. By ourselves, we are severely limited, but together we can be something truly awesome.

But, you might say, I’m only one person, what can I do? My actions account for so very little. Because so many people feel this way, it might be instructive to consider snowflakes.

When snowflakes begin falling, those coming down first land on the warm soil and melt, entering the ground without a trace. One after another, they come into view out of the sky, fall past our faces, and land on the ground, only to disappear as rapidly as they appeared—or so it would seem.

But each snowflake does something as it touches the soil. Its coolness dissipates the soil’s heat. As flake after snowflake touches the ground and melts, the collective coolness of their beings creates a cumulative effect by which the soil is eventually cooled enough that falling snowflakes melt progressively more slowly until some don’t melt at all. Now, snow begins accumulate, gradually at first, until the land is covered in a blanket of white.

Is one snowflake more important than another? Is the one you see sparkling in the sun more important than the one that melted upon landing? Neither is more or less important than the other. Without those that melted and cooled the soil, the ones that ultimately formed the blanket of winter white would not have survived to do so. Therefore, just as every snowflake (individually and as part of the collective) is important to the whole of winter, so is each person (individually and as part of the collective) important to the whole of a commons.

Just as no two snowflakes are exactly alike, no two people are identical. Thus, each individual has a unique gift to offer, a special talent that in the collective of a democratic council is complementary rather than competitive. Each person’s belief, being a little different from all the others, helps a democratic council of caretakers to see itself when that person’s voice is raised in expressing their particular point of view.¹²

Although I recognize that flawless, ecologically sound, democratic governance of any aspect of the global commons is a wishful illusion, such as the elimination of air pollution, we come closest to achieving our goals by aiming for the ideal. And if we fall short of achieving the ideal, we will at least have accomplished more than if our aim had been lower.

There is a land in the imagination, however, that some call “Utopia,” a land much written about through the centuries as people struggle to find peace and equality in a world that seems designed and governed by conflict. Like the Utopias imagined by philosophers, the Idyllic Isle of my dreams, the possibility I hold fast in my heart, is today still surrounded by a brooding sea of strife and thus difficult to reach, although long ago I touched its shore.

Throughout the years of middle-life, I used to get glimpses of the Idyllic Isle from time to time after strenuous, focused effort. But as I get older, I succeeded more easily in making the journey to that shore of possibility—a land where people choose to love one another; where work is transformed into labors of love that some would call “play;” and where social-environmental problems are untangled with patience, compassion, and ease. Earth, too, could be like this, so the story goes, if only. . .  But here, today, it is one thing to envision a better future, and quite another to pry people loose from their entrenched, habitually negative thinking and drag them, in full resistance, into that better future.

I emphasize negative thinking because Utopias are not imagined perfection, but rather imagined cures for imperfection, and herein lies the problem with most “solutions.” Namely, a solution is conjured in an attempt to move away from an unwanted circumstance rather than moving toward a desired outcome. Put another way, instead of moving toward the ideal, most solutions attempt to cure an imperfection by moving away from it, an action that is neither physically nor psychologically possible because we not only become but also create what we focus on—in this case, the imperfection.

Regardless of how it may seem, I am not intimating the kind of Utopia described by Sir Thomas More, that imaginary isle of perfection in human relationships. But, I am suggesting an ideal because an ideal is all that is worth striving for and thus writing about.

To solve our social-environment problems, we must have a destination in the form of an idealized vision toward which to journey. This ideal can then define an agenda resting firmly on the bedrock of a shared vision that incorporates the collective wisdom, personal courage, and political will needed to inspire true social progress. Although this sounds good, where, in a practical sense, do we go from here?

Despite the usual elusiveness of an ideal, we can each begin our personal journey toward wholeness, toward “psychological maturity,” which, upon attainment, will allow us to both envision our ideal and work toward it as an unconditional gift of love to bestow on the generations of the future by leaving the world a little better for having been here. To those who doubt this is possible, I offer an admonishment by the aforementioned Edmund Burke:  “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”¹³

I know from experience that achieving psychological maturity is no easy task. It requires discipline, self-reflection, a willingness to admit and learn from mistakes, the courage to change with each new insight, and, above all, the courage to purposefully struggle within oneself toward an ideal of being that has as its reward an inner freedom and peace unparalleled in the outer world. “We actually live today in our dreams of yesterday,” mused aviator Charles Lindbergh, “and living those dreams, we dream again.”¹⁴ Thus begins the journey toward the Idyllic Isle.

The extent to which each person achieves psychological maturity is the extent to which society as a whole approaches the shore of the Idyllic Isle—the Isle of Positive Possibility. There is but one time to set sail. And that time is now!¹⁵

ENDNOTES

1. William M. Adams, Dan Brockington, Jane Dyson, and Bhaskar Vira. Managing Tragedies: Understanding Conflict over Common Pool Resources. Science, 302 (2003):1915-1916.

2. The preceding discussion of ecosystem fragility, and the example from ancient Greece, is based on:  Fritz M. Heichelheim. The effects of Classical antiquity on the land. Pp. 165-182. In:  W. L. Thomas (Editor). Man’s role in changing the face of the Earth. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. 1956.

3. Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern. The Struggle to Govern the Commons. Science, 302 (2003):1907-1912.

4. Jonathan Rowe. 2001. The hidden commons. Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Summer (2001):12-17.

5. David C. Korten. 2001. What to Do When Corporations Rule the World. 2001. Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Summer (2001):148-151.

6. Jonathan Rowe. 2001. The hidden commons. Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Summer (2001):12-17.

7. Per Olsson, Carl Folke, and Terry P. Hughes. Navigating the transition to ecosystem-based management of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (2008):9489-9494.

8. Chris Maser. Resolving Environmental Conflict:  Towards Sustainable Community Development. St. Lucie Press, Delray Beach, FL. (1996) 200 pp.

9. The foregoing discussion of principles of sustainably governing a commons is based on:  Robert Costanza, Francisco Andrade, Paula Antunes, and others. Principles for Sustainable Governance of the Oceans. Science, 281 (1998):198-199.

10. The foregoing two paragraphs are based on:  Chris Maser. Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL. (1998) 235 pp.

11. Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Du Bois. A Place for Democracy. Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Winter (1997):37-38.

12. The foregoing discussion of shared leadership is based on:  Chris Maser. Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL. (1998) 235 pp.

13. Edmund Burke. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk100421.html (accessed on March 23, 2009).

14. Charles A. Lindbergh. http://www.mcrecord.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=43777 (accessed on March 23, 2009).

15. The forgoing discussion of utopia is based on:  Chris Maser. Of Ditches And Ponds:  A Journey Through The Metaphors Of Childhood And Maturity. Woven Strings Publishing, Amarillo, TX. (2006) 282 pp. E-Book. 2505KB.

© Chris Maser, 2009. All rights reserved.