PART 3 — SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT FROM CORPORATE DESTRUCTION

Market Failure Imperils Our World; Rights of Nature Are Mandatory

Class 9: THE COMMONS
Privatization, Tapestry of The Commons, Commodification
Solutions: Community Rights, CELDF, and Rights of Nature

Purpose: To explore and understand the importance of The Commons to all of our lives, with a special focus on water. We look at the historical context of The Commons, as well as the threat that corporate privatization of The Commons poses to the well being of all living species.

Materials

Readings: Justice Rising, Spring 2006, Reclaiming The Commons from the Jaws of Corporate Privatization; Summer 2006, Water for Life Not Corporate Profit

Handouts: Questions, Article Rankings, Talking Points, Gifts from Nature, Gifts from Our Ancestors, Water,  A Natural Commons, Books on The Commons, Videos on the Commons

Paradigm: Market-promoting zealots of Austrian Economics seized upon Garret Hardin’s 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” to convince the world that everything should be privatized and that “the common good” is nonsensical. The reality is that well-managed Commons are essential for human survival.

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Context:  We are all part of nature, sharing in common many aspects of the world that are vital to our existence. All elements of our natural environmental commons, from the climate system to the water we drink, provide the physical context for our existence.  The Commons also include the cultural environment our lives are built upon, including socio-economic institutions such as our democracy and our monetary system that we all depend upon for our wellbeing.

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In these days of climate change, resource depletion, global pollution, and species extinction, our need to maintain the viability of our natural environmental systems is essential. In Roman law, The Commons received its own legal classification, res communes, “things common to all.” Two thousand years later, the wealthy, white, property-owning males who wrote our Constitution ignored the special role of the Commons and made everything either a person or property.

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This led our legal system to classify the environment as property. This legal status has given corporations free reign to deplete our natural resources. It also opened the door for the privatization of the Commons, from the commodification of water to corporatization of our parks. Federal environmental laws rest upon the Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution. Classifying the environment as property and commerce leaves nature in a state of jeopardy. The solution to this situation is to pass a constitutional amendment giving rights to nature, or at least creating a legal understanding that nature has rights and should have standing in court. US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas contemplated this concept in the 1970s when the Disney Corporation wanted to put a resort in the Mineral King Wilderness of California. Dissenting in that case, Douglas wrote, “The critical question of ‘standing’ would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we…allowed environmental issues to be litigated…in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced or invaded.”

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More than standing, however, nature needs to have its own rights. The case for the rights of nature has been elaborated in many books and promoted heavily by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). They successfully helped the countries of Ecuador and Bolivia put the rights of nature into their national constitutions.

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Deepening the discussion about the Commons is Jan Edward’s article on the Legal Commons from Justice Rising. It contains a sidebar by CELDF founder Tom Linzey who questions whether nature should be called the Commons because that may infer some sort of property designation.  He points out that nature should be more like a jural person and have its own rights, what we now call the Rights of Nature. So, the framers of the Constitution and Supreme Court got it wrong. Nature should be a legal person, not corporations.

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The battle to ensure that all can share the Commons has a long history. Land is one of the three basic elements of the Commons on which our survival depends. For the vast majority of human history, land was held in common by a largely self-sufficient agricultural population that managed their commons through local relationships. With the growth of international trade, driven by the Italian city-states, concepts of land and property began to change.

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In the 14th and 15th centuries, Venetian and Genoese empires dominated an extensive trading network across the Mediterranean Sea, up through the Bosporus, and into the Black Sea where they connected with Silk Route caravans coming out of East and South Asia. Wool and wool products became the most valuable items the Europeans had to offer in trade. The best raw wool came from sheep raised on the British Isles. Craft workers in the European Low Countries processed most of that raw wool into various products. 

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Simultaneously, prominent families in Sienna and Florence, including the Medicis, developed the first modern banking industry, established offices in major trading cities throughout Europe, and became the financial hub of global commerce. These early bankers developed one of the first exotic financial instruments — a futures contract.

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Realizing that wool was the heart of international trade, Florentine bankers used their offices in London to offer English aristocratic land barons futures contracts for their wool. After capturing most of the English raw-wool output, they moved the manufacturing of wool products to Florence, providing the economic base for the wealth and beauty of that city. In the process, they devastated the wool-processing industry in the European lowlands.

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With wool futures from Italian bankers promising rich rewards for raising sheep, English land barons began privatizing common grazing land so that they could raise more sheep and produce even more wool to sell into the global market. This movement to fence off the common lands caused an uprising by the English agricultural underclass that depended on that common land for survival. Conflict simmered for centuries until direct action broke out during the English Civil War in the mid-1600s. Peasant groups began destroying the fences and digging up hedgerows the wealthy utilized to enclose the former common land. This general peasant rebellion led to songs such as this:

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They hang the man and flog the woman

That steals the goose from off the Common,

But let the greater villain loose

That steals the Common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose off the Common,

And geese will still a Common lack

Til they go and steal it back.

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Hundreds of years later, those fights continue. Just last year, gun-wielding, range land barons descended on a remote public wildlife refuge demanding that public property be handed over to private interests for their personal gain.

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In the 21st Century, water, one of the other basic elements of the Commons in all of our lives, is subject to commodification and privatization. As Jan Edwards points out, “If we could step back from our cultural training and see Water as it really is, we would see one complete cycle — one Water — flowing through every living thing on earth and connecting us all to the whole…Trade agreements and water grabs have changed humans' relationship to Water from one of a gift of nature for all to share — towards a property relationship.”

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Alaska Water Exports Corporation, a partner of World Water SA, came to our remote section of the Northern California Coast in 2002. It had a scheme to fill up huge rubber bladders with fresh water from the undammed, free-flowing and wild Albion and Gualala Rivers for transport by sea to Southern California. It planned to sell the water from our public commons for their shareholders’ private gain. The California Coastal Commission and other state agencies thwarted its plans when the agencies realized that, due to global trade agreements, such a precedent could destroy the State’s public trust responsibilities to protect our water for the common good.

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Ric Davidge developed this water heist as Director of Water at the Alaska Department of Natural Resources where he oversaw the public trust for 40% of the nation’s free flowing fresh water. His long history of revolving through the swinging door between corporate America and public agencies, which are supposed to be protecting our commons, is a typical example of how our commons become privatized while former public servants, now private businessmen, enrich themselves.

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The most egregious schemes for privatizing the water commons come from efforts to bottle public tap water and from the corporatizing of public water agencies. Both of these corporate strategies capture our water commons for corporate gain.

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Soda-drink corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi identified bottled water as a profitable product two decades ago and undertook an advertising campaign to convince consumers that their tap water was dangerously polluted. This fraudulent claim allowed them to sell bottled water to consumers at 300 times the price those same consumers pay for tap water. The truth is that the water they sell is often municipal tap water. The gigantic profits from bottled water sends huge multinational corporations into communities around the world to build bottling plants that deplete local water supplies.

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Luckily there has been a huge pushback to this effort, largely overseen by the Alliance for Democracy helping communities pass community rights ordinances that prohibit corporations from taking local water, deny corporations any personhood rights, and give rights to nature.

This is an ongoing struggle and may impact a community near you.

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Meanwhile, huge corporations like Bechtel are convincing local politicians that the corporations can operate local water agencies more effectively. Once the deal is done, prices rise and corporations are once again profiting from our natural commons.

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Massive popular movements have also pushed back against these schemes. Thousands of people flooded the streets in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Bechtel took over the local water agency and even claimed they owned the rainwater. Citizens stayed in the streets despite facing lethal firepower from government troops enforcing the corporate takeover. When the people won and Bechtel left town, everyone celebrated a brave and powerful victory.

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In many other cities from Lexington, Kentucky to Stockton, California, citizens are standing up to demand public control over their water supply. We the people have to reverse the trend of corporate privatization and protect our commons for all future generations.

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Air is the third vital common we all depend upon. Pollution of the air by agribusiness and the fossil fuels industry is one of the biggest challenges we face as climate change threatens our existence. We have to view this as another battle to control our commons.

Activities: Place The Commons in a historic and current context as outlined above, i.e.,

• Where the concept of The Commons comes from

• Why The Commons are important

• What is happening to The Commons currently

• How concerned citizens can protect them

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If everybody has read the Justice Rising selections, you may be able to present them as a series of questions. Or make a short presentation about them from the above material and then ask some questions. Or you can have the class watch one or two videos from the video list, which includes a piece by Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her work about the commons and collective action.

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With the context established, one of the best activities is to find a local group engaged in protecting your community commons and invite them to talk to the class about their struggle. This could include groups trying to conserve local land or water or environmental organizations protecting nature from corporate extraction operations.

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The Tapestry of The Commons, created by Jan Edwards and displayed at the top of this class section, is another possible activity. The Tapestry of the Commons weaves a tapestry of ribbons wherein each ribbon identifies a different part of The Commons. The various aspects of the natural commons go in one direction and parts of our cultural commons go in the other direction. You can take your class through this exercise by weaving the ribbons together while talking about the common that each ribbon represents. In the end, the group ends up with a strong tapestry, just as we end up with a strong society when all of our commons are accessible to all of us. Or you can take the class in the other direction, which shows how privatization of the Commons destroys a strong society. Do this by starting with the completed tapestry and removing individual ribbons from the weaving, making the tapestry fall apart, much as our society falls apart as the Commons are privatized.

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Here is an article from Justice Rising on instructions for making the tapestry frame and ribbons; here is a transcript for the presentation of the tapestry.  Here is a list of the natural commons and here is a list of the cultural commons we inherit from our forbearers. Here is also an article from Justice Rising on constructing and presenting the Tapestry. Jan also came up with:

• A collection of essays to give you more information on The Commons;

• Links to other groups dealing with The Commons;

  • Talking points and worksheets for starting a movement to protect The Commons we still have and to reclaim the Commons we have lost.

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Jan developed another group activity she calls a spectrogram to help people identify what should be part of the Commons and what should be private property. You can get instructions for that here.

Be sure to take a break at some point and come back to deal with questions on the commons and refer to the notes on the questions to further the discussion. Be sure to pass out the list of further readings on the Commons.  Also make sure you pass out the questions, article rankings and talking points for the next class on Health & Food at the end of the class.

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The day after the class, email the questions and rankings for the next class to everyone and include a current article on the Commons or on health and food as part of our commons.

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The day before the next class, send a reminder email that the class is coming up and again attach the questions and ranking and maybe another piece on corporate power threatening our health and food commons.