This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The post AGRICULTURE 3.0 OR (SMART) AGROECOLOGY? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Within just three months, 42 councils have signed the pledge – representing over 17 million people between them in the UK  – and more than 34 million in the US, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Declaring a climate emergency creates an opportunity to:

1. Involve citizens through citizen’s assemblies and other processes of participation and consultation in setting priorities for ambitious carbon reduction and understanding and engaging with the difficult choices that implies.
2. Create healthier, more resilient and sustainable local communities powered by locally generated low carbon energy, served by affordable and sustainable transport, higher quality and more efficient housing stock and fed by sustainable food and land systems.
3. Un-do business as usual. In a time of cut-backs, reverse costly policies and investments in carbon-intensive infrastructures such as roads or airports and divest council pension funds from fossil fuels.

What does it mean to declare a climate emergency?

For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short timescale; and they must engage with a cross section of the community.

When in ‘emergency mode’, councils must allocate discretionary funds towards climate action. That includes things such as: educating the community, advocating for action from higher level governments, mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of climate change, and funding or undertaking the planning and research needed to implement full state and national emergency mobilisation.

So far, councils’ pledges and aims have varied enormously. For example: Scarborough council has committed to a target of zero carbon emissions by 2030, and will seek up to £80,000 in funding over two years for a sustainability officer to help achieve their goals. Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council deleted all references to declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’ and many of the suggested actions to be taken. Its plan has no stated target, no timeline and no budget. In Lancaster and Oxford a Citizen’s Assembly is being set up as part of their process; this is a deliberative process in which a representative group of citizens selected at random from the population, learn about, discuss, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues.

Local governments are often in the front line of dealing with climate change impacts (such as flooding, fires, storm damage) and the on the receiving end of demands for mitigation action. A key issue is working out what local governments have exclusive control over (as opposed to national and regional authorities): and where the boundaries of responsibility lie, because with climate change they are often very complex and diffuse. Clearly councils also facing funding difficult constraints. Yet, across transport, energy, housing, waste, buildings, people are looking to councils for leadership.

So what can they do?

We are not short of concrete ideas about what to do. Reports such as Zero Carbon Britain show sector by sector analysis of what’s possible in the UK by 2030. Many cities have already taken the lead with emissions reduction pledges and zero carbon targets including commitments from Bristol and Manchester aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030 and 2038 respectively. Across the world, the cities organisation C40 has been calling for fossil free streets: commitments to procure only zero-emission buses from 2025; and ensuring a major area of the city is zero emission by 2030.

Planning is key and so is reducing demand. The services people want, such as heat and mobility, are often those they show the greatest indifference towards. We are often fearful of challenging people’s attachment to their cars, for example. But if safe, reliable and affordable alternatives are provided, people will use them. When affordable and accessible infrastructures are built for buses and bikes and pedestrians, people use them as numerous examples around the world have shown.

Around housing, councils can help to deliver on the government pledge to halve energy use from new build by 2030 and for all new homes to be heated by fossil free systems by 2025. They can promote energy efficiency schemes and exploit other grant funding, promote new carbon neutral housing schemes, either as authority owned projects or with partners and transform council’s own properties to maximise their own potential for energy production and saving.

Regarding transport, councils can promote energy efficiency in local transport, promote cycling and car sharing, consider car exclusion zones or access charges, promote the use of electric cars by providing charging points and invest in EV infrastructure, improve public transport integration (bikes, buses and trains) and consider how transport contracts can be used to promote green travel.

On energy, councils can promote low energy use- smart energy, energy efficiency and conservation. They can consider providing funding for solar energy installations on the basis of shared returns, review the authority’s own energy use and consider setting up ESCOs (energy service companies).

Others areas include waste and food. Councils can review waste and recycling policies- take pressure off land-fill and reduce methane and other emissions. Where possible they might target food consumption through procurement and menus in schools to include less meat and dairy.

In terms of business, they can promote support services for local businesses. Preferential business rates for local firms, for example, as part of much needed regional redevelopment, or creating Local Enterprise Partnerships to set up low carbon enterprise zones with tax breaks to nurture jobs, investment and innovation.

What can we stop doing?

As well as thinking creatively about how to deliver services in low carbon ways, we also need to accelerate the shift away from the fossil fuel economy.

Declaring an emergency permits a veto over actions which are incompatible with radical decarbonisation in line with the Paris agreement, and climate-proofing all areas of policy. This should mean divestment from fossil fuels. Local councils in the UK invest over £14 billion in the fossil fuel industry. Divestment from cities assets from fossil fuels though pension funds sends a powerful signal and makes a major contribution. Of the 1032 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels worldwide, just 15% are governments. But there are now more than 15 UK councils – from Sheffield to Stroud, Brighton to Birmingham –calling for divestment from their pension funds.

Beyond the local

Local council action doesn’t exist in a vacuum of course. Some of the measures described above require a supportive national regulatory environment. Financing could be delivered as part of a Green New Deal. Carbon budgets need to be set and enforced by independent national agencies such as the climate change committee. National government needs to give direction by laying down limits and reversing major decisions that produce carbon lock-in incompatible with 1.5 around airport expansion and fracking for example. Local government can make their voice heard to lobby government on this.

Declaring a climate emergency is just a starting point, and not without its challenges. But the good news is there are numerous policies that can be put in place as well as initiatives bubbling up from below that can be harnessed to scale up and accelerate the pace of change.

So what are we waiting for?

Reprinted from Rapid Transitions Alliance. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Climate Emergency – PeoplesClimate-Melb-IMG_8280. By Takver. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The post What would a climate emergency plan look like? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition.

The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing it to urgent action to tackle the crisis.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. In this time we must go both fast and far, together,” said Colin Cook-Miller, coordinator for the coalition. “Our movement for a rapid Just Transition mobilization must be coordinated, strategic, and unified, with leadership from the most-impacted frontline communities who are at the forefront of change.”

The “Declaration of a Climate Emergency and Requesting Regional Collaboration on an Immediate Just Transition and Emergency Mobilization Effort to Restore a Safe Climate” resolution commits the city to:  an “urgent climate mobilization” to slash emissions, moving towards zero net emissions; building resilience strategies for the coming climate impacts; a just transition, making vulnerable communities central to such a shift; and calling on other states, the federal government, and other nations to make a similar mobilization towards climate action and a just transition.

In a letter to city council members on Tuesday, local organizational leaders including Miller, as well as Greg Jackson of Sustainable Economies Law Center, Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Bonnie Borucki of Transition Berkeley, and Kemba Shakur of Urban Releaf, noted that climate emergency resolutions have already been in the California cities of Richmond and Berkeley passed and wrote that the measure before the Oakland city council  “matches the urgency and scale of the ecological, economic and climate crisis that we face.”

“At this time in history,” they wrote, “a livable future for any of our children is far from guaranteed. We must do everything in our power today to create a safe, just, and healthy world for ourselves, for our children, and for future generations.”

Photo: Takver/flickr/cc

The post Oakland, California Declares Climate Emergency appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Link to Full Paper by Dr. Jem Bendell

Extracted Summary:

and how non-linear (and potentially exponential) changes are of central importance to understanding climate change as they suggest that impacts will be far more rapid and severe than predictions based on linear projections, that multiple forcings beyond carbon dioxide will come into play and that the changes no longer correlate with the rate of anthropogenic carbon emissions. He describes how non-linear changes in our environment trigger uncontrollable impacts on human habitat and agriculture, with subsequent complex impacts on social, economic and political systems. He focuses on opportunities such as agricultural transformation and eco-system restoration. While he mentions climate change having negative impacts on ecosystems, changes in seasons, melting permafrost methane release, temperatures extremes, flood and drought, he doesn’t mention fire.

Geoengineering and natural geoengineering are mentioned and contrasted with the momentum of disruptive and uncontrollable climate change, and it’s potential human impact: starvation, settlement destruction, mass migration, disease, war and extinction are all entertained. He reports on how paternalistic climate and social scientists warn against and censor discussion on the likelihood and nature of societal collapse due to climate change, labelling it as irresponsible, in that it might trigger hopelessness among the general lay public. He states this is related to the non-populist anti-politics technocratic attitude that pervades contemporary environmentalism and frames our challenge as one of encouraging people to try harder to be nicer and better rather than coming together in solidarity to either undermine or overthrow a system that demands we participate in environmental and societal degradation. There is a good discussion on the dynamics of denial which references “interpretative denial” i.e., accepting certain climate facts but interpreting them in a way that makes them “safer” to our personal psychology, and “implicative denial” i.e., recognising the troubling implications of climate facts but responding by busying ourselves on activities that do not arise from a full assessment of the situation.

Interestingly, collapse denial is suggested to be more common among sustainability experts than the general public, given the typical allegiance of professionals to the incumbent social and economic structures they benefit from. Another barrier identified is that there is no obvious institutional self-interest in articulating the probability or inevitability of environmental and societal collapse. He highlights how our interests in civility, praise and belonging within a professional community can censor those of us who seek to communicate uncomfortable truths in memorable ways. His review of a range of projects and studies suggests that the idea we “experts” need to be careful about what to tell “them” the “unsupported public” may be a narcissistic delusion in need of immediate remedy. In terms of framing, Bendell has chosen to interpret the available information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction. He has found that inviting his students to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression, but rather to a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a mix of creativity about what to focus on and discombobulation.

He then posits a Deep Adaptation Agenda, emphasising that we must look more critically at how people and organisations are framing the situation and the limitations such framings impose. Given that analysts are concluding that a societal collapse is inevitable, he suggests the following question becomes important: What are the valued norms and behaviours human societies will want to maintain, relinquish, restore and rediscover, as they seek to survive? Resilience asks us “how do we keep what we really want to keep?” Relinquishment asks us “what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?” Restoration asks us “what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?” Additionally, I add rediscovery might ask us what can we dig up from archaic times of yore that may have utility in post-collapse or catastrophic scenarios? He claims the era of “sustainable development” as unifying concept and goal is now ending and Deep Adaptation is an explicitly post-sustainability framing. He states the importance of recognising our complicity and posits that the West’s response to environmental issues has been restricted by the dominance of neoliberal economics since the 1970s. This led us to hyper-individualist, market fundamentalist, incremental and atomistic approaches.

By hyper-individualist, he means a focus on individual action as consumers, switching light bulbs or buying sustainable furniture, rather than promoting political action as engaged citizens.By market fundamentalist, he means a focus on market mechanisms like the complex, costly and largely useless carbon cap and trade systems, rather than exploring what more government intervention could achieve. By incremental, he means a focus on celebrating small steps forward such as a company publishing a sustainability report, rather than strategies designed for the speed and scale of change suggested by the science. By atomistic, he means a focus on seeing climate action as a separate issue from the governance of markets, finance and banking, rather than exploring what kind of economic system could permit or enable sustainability.

In terms of academic research and teaching he suggests asking “How might research findings inform efforts for a more massive and urgent pursuit of resilience, relinquishment, restoration (and rediscovery) in the face of social collapse? and “How can we best use MOOCs to widely disseminate the most useful economic re-localisation and community development strategies? He emphasises the need for citizens to access information and networks on how to shift their livelihoods and lifestyles. He adds Local Governments will need similar help on how to develop the capabilities today that will help their local communities to collaborate, not fracture, during a collapse. At the international level, there is the need to work on how to responsibly address the wider fallout from collapsing societies, including the ongoing challenges of refugee support and the securing of dangerous industrial and nuclear sites at the moment of a societal collapse. He states he has explored the emotional and psychological implications of this new awareness of a societal collapse being likely in our own lifetimes in a reflective essay on the spiritual implications of climate despair.

His final recommendations are narrow amounting to suggestions for academic researchers, teachers and students, although he does say he is developing a separate work for managers, policy makers and lay persons. He encourages communities to engage deeply with the three (or four) guiding questions offered up earlier. He concludes by reiterating the redundancy of the reformist approach to sustainable development and related fields of corporate sustainability that has underpinned the approach of many professionals, opting instead for a new approach which explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse, informed by his Deep Adaptation Agenda, which is not as yet well explicated, but certainly seems open for more reflection and collaborative contributions.

Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by internets_dairy

The post Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on localfutures.org. Chat transcript available for download as PDF here.

A 500-year-old economic and political system is dying. ‘Trump trauma’ is affecting people around the world, but the current climate (in every sense of the word) is not the result of one man alone. While we come to grips with that bigger picture, it’s worth asking: What gives us hope? What keeps our hearts beating, and gives us the spirit to keep the struggle for justice alive?

Moving from the personal, to the communal, to the political, this webinar explores the concept of ‘sacred activism’. Combining resistance with renewal, and structural critique with a celebration of life, sacred activism rejects the corporate message that we are greedy and aggressive by nature. It integrates politics, spirituality, and a deep-rooted sense of place into a holistic practice capable of bringing together indigenous peoples, traditional environmentalists, union organizers, New Age spiritualists, and ordinary citizens alike – as it did at Standing Rock, and as it continues to do in people’s movements around the world.

Delve into this exciting field with our speakers, Alnoor Ladha from The Rules and Helena Norberg-Hodge from Local Futures.

Resources to complement the webinar

Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock, by Alnoor Ladha. March 8th, 2017
Big Picture Activism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge. October 26th, 2014

PRESENTERS

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. Alnoor is a writer and speaker on new forms of activism, the structural causes of inequality, the link between climate change and capitalism, and the rise of the Global South as a powerful organizing force in the transition to a post-capitalist world. He is also writing a book about the intersection of mysticism and anarchism.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goi Peace Prize. She is author of Ancient Futures, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is the director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization, and a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.

The post Sacred Activism in a Post-Trump World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Editor(s): Paulo Magalhães, Will Steffen, Klaus Bosselmann, Alexandra Aragão, Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Book description from the publisher’s site:

It is clear that international law is not yet equipped to handle the “ecological goods and services” that exist simultaneously within and outside of all states. The global commons have always been understood as geographical spaces that exist only outside the political borders of states. A vital good such as a stable climate exists both within and outside all states, and shows traditional legal approaches to be ecological nonsense. With the recent possibility of measuring and monitoring the state and functioning of the Earth System through the Planetary Boundaries framework, it is now possible to define a “Safe Operating Space of Humankind” corresponding to a biogeophysical state of Earth.

In this sense, the Common Home of Humanity is not a planet with 510 million square kilometres, but is a specific favourable state of the Earth System. Recent major scientific advances anticipate a legal paradigm shift that could overcome the disconnection between ecological realities and existing legal frameworks. If we recognize this qualitative and non-geographic space as a Common Natural Intangible Heritage of Humankind, all positive and negative “externalities” end up being included within a new maintenance system of the Common Home.

Extract available in PDF here
Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

The post Book of the day: The Safe Operating Space Treaty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Colorado could be on the brink of embracing universal medical coverage. Thanks to an effort in recent months led by a band of doctors and volunteers, a proposal called ColoradoCare is going to be on the ballot, which, if passed, would create a quasi-cooperative healthcare system for everyone in the state. In an article for Vice, I introduce some of the people behind the effort, as well as their delectably Koch-backed detractors.

Meanwhile, a group of Oregonians wants to put a price on carbon and distribute the proceeds to everyone. In YES! Magazine, I interview Camila Thorndike of Oregon Climate, who is leading the effort. As the COP21 talks wind down and Finland considers a basic income policy, the moment seems especially ripe for such adventuresome thinking.

For more on ColoradoCare, too, see my earlier interview in YES! with its chief architect, Irene Aguilar, a physician and state senator.

Platform Cooperativism

Last month, together with Trebor Scholz of the New School, I co-organized a two-day event called “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy.” More than a thousand people from around the world came to help build a new breed of online platforms, with shared ownership and governance baked in—a real sharing economy. To learn more, read our manifestos at Fast Company, The Next System Project, and Pacific Standard. Relatedly, also, in The New Yorker, I reported on a new cooperative, co-working “guild” in New York that sets out to practice “slow entrepreneurship.”

Now, back in Colorado, I’m working with a fearsome team of visionaries and cooperators to strengthen the cooperative ecosystem here. More TK.

#OpenTheseDoors

  It’s Advent. As I wrote in my last column for America, the Mother of God is very pregnant right now. It was surprising how many fellow Catholics, who have no trouble contemplating the wounds of Christ-crucified, squirmed at reading about Mary’s stretching skin and discomfort. But whatever. This season is a great time to join the struggle to ensure necessities like paid family leave and access to the means for a safe, minimally invasive birth.

Last week, also, Pope Francis proclaimed a Jubilee of Mercy by opening the Holy Doors of St. Peter’s in Rome. In New York, some friends of mine took the occasion to call for the archdiocese to “Open These Doors” of its shuttered buildings for the city’s tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness. Take part in their Advent calendar here, and read my interview with them at America, as well as Kaya Oakes’ report for Religion Dispatches.

Have a happy new year!

The post Opening Doors through state policies (USA) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

One of the great advantages of a commons analysis is its ability to deconstruct the prevailing myths of “intellectual property” as a wholly private “product” – and then to reconstruct it as knowledge and culture that lives and breathes only in a social context, among real people.  This opens up a new conversation about if and how property rights in knowledge should be granted in the first place.  It also renders any ownership claims about knowledge under copyrights and patents far more complicated — and requires a fair consideration of how commons might actually be more productive substitutes or complements to traditional intellectual property rights.

After all, it is taxpayers who subsidize much of the R&D that goes into most new drugs, which are then claimed as proprietary and sold at exorbitant prices.  Musicians don’t create their songs out of thin air, but in a cultural context that first allows them to freely use inherited music and words from the public domain — which future musicians must also have access to. Science can only advance by being able to build on the findings of earlier generations.  And so on.

The great virtue of a new report recently released by the Berlin-based Commons Network is its application of a commons lens to a wide range of European policies dealing with health, the environment, science, culture, and the Internet.  “The EU and the Commons:  A Commons Approach to European Knowledge Policy,” by Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein, takes on the EU’s rigid and highly traditional policy defense of intellectual property rights.  Bloemen and Hammerstein are Coordinators of the Berlin-based Commons Network, which published the report along with the Heinrich Böll Foundation.  (I played a role in its editing.)  The 39-page report can be downloaded here — and an Executive Summary can be read here.

“The EU and the Commons” describes how treating many types of knowledge as commons could not only promote greater access to knowledge and social justice, it could help European economies become more competitive. If EU policymakers could begin to recognize the generative capacities of knowledge commons, drug prices could be reduced and climate-friendly “green technologies” could be shared with other countries. “Net neutrality” could assure that startups with new ideas would not be stifled by giant companies, but could emerge. And scientific journals, instead of being locked behind paywalls and high subscription fees, could be made accessible to anyone.

Bloemen and Hammerstein write that:

many of the economic and legal structures that govern knowledge and its modes of production – not to mention cultural mindsets – are exclusionary. They presume certain modes of corporate organization, market structures, government investment policies, intellectual property rights and social welfare metrics that are increasingly obsolete and socially undesirable. The European Union therefore faces an urgent challenge: How to manage knowledge in a way that is socially and ecologically sustainable? How can it candidly acknowledge epochal shifts in technology, commerce and social practice by devising policies appropriate to the current age?

EU policies generally focus on the narrow benefits of IRP-based innovation for individual companies and rely on archaic social wellbeing models and outdated models of human motivation. The EU has failed to explore the considerable public benefits that could be had through robust, open ecosystems of network-based collaboration. For example, the EU has paid little serious attention to the enormous innovative capacities of free, libre and open source software (FLOSS), digital peer production resulting in for example Wikipedia, open design and manufacturing, social networking platforms, and countless other network-based modes of knowledge creation, design and production.

Here’s a useful chart that summarizes key principles of the commons, policy designs, and outcomes that could be pursued through a knowledge commons agenda.

The report concludes with an agenda that the EU (or any government) could adopt to promote knowledge commons.  It includes such ideas as non-exclusive licensing of research so that biomedical innovations could have greater impact and more benefit for taxpayers; new support for knowledge commons through such things as patent pools, data sharing, the sharing of green technologies, and biomedical prizes that would make discoveries more widely available.  Muiltilateral trade treaties could be designed to promote investment in R&D and knowledge sharing among countries, producing enormous social benefits for people through expanding the global knowledge commons.  Net neutrality policies for the Internet could have similar catalytic benefits.

Will the EU stand in the way of the “collaborative economy” that is emerging, giving protectionist privileges to the big, politically connected digital corporations – or will it stand up for the great benefits that can be generated through open platforms, collaborative projects and knowledge sharing?  It’s great that this new report is stimulating this long-overdue debate.

For a broader overview of how the commons is going mainstream in Europe – most notably, via the new commons Intergroup in the European Parliament — here’s an insightful article by Dan Hancox that recently appeared in Al Jazeera English.

The post The Commons and EU Knowledge Policies appeared first on P2P Foundation.