“We are on the brink of an ecological mega-crisis threatening the future of life on earth and our actions over the next few years may well determine the destiny of our descendants. Between a manifesto and a tactical plan of action, How Soon is Now? by radical futurist and philosopher Daniel Pinchbeck outlines a vision for a mass social movement that will address this crisis.”

A short film by Ian MacKenzie for Daniel Pinchbeck’s new book How Soon is Now.

About the book

An expansion of the TedX talk that Pinchbeck gave in 2013 entitled, “The Planetary Initiation,” How Soon is Now draws on extensive research to present a compelling argument for the need for change on a global basis. The central thesis is that humanity has unconsciously self-willed ecological catastrophe to bring about a transcendence of our current condition. We are facing an initiatory ordeal on a planetary scale. We can understand that this initiation is necessary for us to evolve from one state of being—our current level of consciousness—to the next. Overcoming outmoded ideologies, we will realize ourselves as one unified being, a planetary super-organism in a symbiotic relationship with the Earth’s ecology and the entire web of life.

Covering everything from energy and agriculture, to culture, politics, media and ideology, How Soon is Now is ultimately about the nature of the human soul and presents a definitive blueprint for the future.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books, 2002), 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/ Penguin, 2006), and Notes from the Edge Times (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010). He is the founder of the think tank, Center for Planetary Culture, which produced the Regenerative Society Wiki and his essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, ArtForum, The New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Dazed and Confused and many other publications. In 2007, Daniel launched the web magazine Reality Sandwich and co-founded Evolver.net. Daniel also edited the publishing imprint, Evolver Editions, with North Atlantic Books. He was featured in the 2010 documentary, “2012: Time for Change” directed by Joao Amorim and produced by Mangusta Films.

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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.

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Why Degrowth has out-grown its own name by Kate Raworth

Here’s what troubles me about degrowth: I just can’t bring myself to use the word.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the degrowth movement is addressing the most profound economic questions of our day. I believe that economies geared to pursue unending GDP growth will undermine the planetary life-support systems on which we fundamentally depend. That is why we need to transform the growth-addicted design of government, business and finance at the heart of our economies. From this standpoint, I share much of the degrowth movement’s analysis, and back its core policy recommendations.

It’s not the intellectual position I have a problem with. It’s the name.

Here are five reasons why.

1. Getting beyond missiles. My degrowth friends tell me that the word was chosen intentionally and provocatively as a ‘missile word’ to create debate. I get that, and agree that shock and dissonance can be valuable advocacy tools.

But in my experience of talking about possible economic futures with a wide range of people, the term ‘degrowth’ turns out to be a very particular kind of missile: a smoke bomb. Throw it into a conversation and it causes widespread confusion and mistaken assumptions.

Banksy says: choose your missile wisely

If you are trying to persuade someone that their growth-centric worldview is more than a little out of date, then it takes careful argument. But whenever the word ‘degrowth’ pops up, I find the rest of the conversation is spent clearing up misunderstandings about what it does or doesn’t mean. This is not an effective advocacy strategy for change. If we are serious about overturning the dominance of growth-centric economic thought, the word ‘degrowth’ just ain’t up to the task.

2. Defining degrowth. I have to admit I have never quite managed to pin down what the word means. According to degrowth.org, the term means ‘a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet.’ Sounding good, but that’s not clear enough.

Are we talking about degrowth of the economy’s material volume – the tonnes of stuff consumed – or degrowth of its monetary value, measured as GDP? That difference really matters, but it is too rarely spelled out.

If we are talking about downscaling material throughput, then even people in the ‘green growth’ camp would agree with that goal too, so degrowth needs to get more specific to mark itself out.

If it is downscaling GDP that we are talking about (and here, green growth and degrowth clearly part company), then does degrowth mean a freeze in GDP, a decrease in GDP, being indifferent about what happens to GDP, or in fact declaring that GDP should not be measured at all? I have heard all of these arguments made under the banner of degrowth, but they are very different, with very different strategic consequences. Without greater clarity, I don’t know how to use the word.

3. Learn from Lakoff: negative frames don’t win. The cognitive scientist George Lakoff is an authority on the nature and power of frames – the worldviews that we activate (usually without realizing it) through the words and metaphors we choose. As he has documented over many decades, we are unlikely to win a debate if we try to do so while still using our opponent’s frames. The title of his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, makes this very point because it immediately makes you think of a you know what.

How does this work in politics? Take debates about taxes, for example. It’s hard to argue against ‘tax relief’ (aka tax cuts for the rich), since the positive frame of ‘relief’ sounds so very desirable: arguing against it just reinforces the frame that tax is a burden. Far wiser is to recast the issue in your own positive terms instead, say, by advocating for ‘tax justice’.

Does degrowth fall into this trap? I had the chance to put this question to George Lakoff himself in a recent webinar. He was criticizing the dominant economic frame of ‘growth’ so I asked him whether ‘degrowth’ was a useful alternative. “No it isn’t”, was his immediate reply, “First of all it’s like ‘Don’t think of an elephant!’ – ‘Don’t think of growth!’ It means we are going to activate the notion of growth. When you negate something you strengthen the concept.”

Lakoff: “When you negate something you strengthen the concept”

Just to be clear, I know that the degrowth movement stands for many positive and empowering things. The richly nuanced book Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era edited by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis, is packed full of great entries on Environmental justice, Conviviality, Co-operatives, Simplicity, Autonomy, and Care – every one of them a positive frame. It’s not the contents but the ‘degrowth’ label on the jar that makes me baulk. I’ll adopt the rest of the vocabulary, just not the headline.

4. It’s time to clear the air. Just for a moment let’s give the word ‘degrowth’ the benefit of the doubt and suppose that the missile has landed and it has worked. The movement is growing and has websites, books and conferences dedicated to furthering its ideas. That’s great. These debates and alternative economic ideas are desperately needed. But there comes a time for the smoke to clear, and for a beacon to guide us all through the haze: something positive to aim for. Not a missile but a lighthouse. And we need to name the lighthouse.

In Latin America they call it buen vivir which literally translates as living well, but means so much more than that too. In Southern Africa they speak of Ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. Surely the English-speaking world – whose language has more than one million words – can have a crack at finding something equally inspiring. Of course this is not easy, but this is where the work is.

Tim Jackson has suggested prosperity, which literally means ‘things turning out as we hope for’. The new economics foundation – and many others – frame it as wellbeing. Christian Felber suggests Economy for the Common Good. Others (starting with Aristotle) go for human flourishing. I don’t think any of these have completely nailed it yet, but they are certainly heading in the right direction.

5. There’s too much at stake, and much to discuss. The debates currently being had under the banner of degrowth are among the most important economic debates for the 21^st century. But most people don’t realize that because the name puts them off. We urgently need to articulate an alternative, positive vision of an economy in a way that is widely engaging. Here’s the best way I have come up with so far to say it:

We have an economy that needs to grow, whether or not it makes us thrive.

We need an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows.

Is that ‘degrowth’? I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that whenever I frame it like this in debates, lots of people nod, and the discussion soon moves on to identifying how we are currently locked into a must-grow economy – through the current design of government, business, finance, and politics – and what it would take to free ourselves from that lock-in so that we can pursue social justice with ecological integrity instead.

We need to reframe this debate in a way that tempts many more people to get involved if we are ever to build the critical mass needed to change the dominant economic narrative.

So those are five reasons why I think degrowth has outgrown its own name.

I’m guessing that some of my degrowth friends will respond to this blog (my own little missile) with irritation, frustration or a sigh. Here we go again – we’ve got to explain the basics once more.

If so, take note. Because when you find yourself continually having to explain the basics and clear up repeated misunderstandings, it means there is something wrong with the way the ideas are being presented.

Believe me, the answer is in the name. It’s time for a new frame.

You’re wrong Kate. Degrowth is a compelling word by Giorgos Kallis

My friend Kate Raworth ‘cannot bring herself to use the word’ degrowth. Here are nine reasons why I use it.

1. Clear definition. ‘Degrowth’ is as clear as it gets. Definitely no less clear than ‘equality’; or ‘economic growth’ for that matter (is it growth of welfare or activity? monetised or all activity? if only monetised, why would we care?). Beyond a critique of the absurdity of perpetual growth, degrowth signifies a decrease of global carbon and material footprint, starting from the wealthy.

The ‘green growth camp’ also wants such a decrease, but it argues that GDP growth is necessary for – or compatible with – it. Degrowth, not: in all likelihood GDP will decrease too. If we do the right things to thrive, such as capping carbon, if we transform the profit economy to one of care and solidarity, the GDP economy will shrink. Kate too calls for ‘an economy that makes us thrive, whether or not it grows’ and to ‘free ourselves’ from the growth ‘lock-in’. The Germans named this ‘post-growth’ and I am fine with it. But somehow it beautifies the scale of the challenge: reducing our energy or material use in half and transforming and stabilizing a shrinking (not simply ‘not growing’) economy. With its shock element ‘de’-growth reminds that we won’t have our cake and eat it all.

2. Right conversations with the right people. Know this feeling ‘what am I doing with these people in the same room’? Hearing the words ‘win-win’ and looking at graphs where society, environment and economy embrace one another in loving triangles as markets internalize ‘externalities’ (sic)? Well, you won’t be invited to these rooms if you throw the missile of degrowth. And this is good. Marx wouldn’t be concerned with sitting at the table with capitalists to convince them about communism.

Why pretend we agree? I’ve never had a boring or confusing conversation about degrowth (witness the present one). Passions run high, core questions are raised (did we loose something with progress? what is in the past for the future? is system change possible and how?). But to have these conversations you need to know about – and defend – degrowth.

3. Mission un-accomplished. Kate asks us to imagine that the ‘missile’ ‘has landed and it has worked’. Problem is the missile has landed, but it hasn’t worked, so it is not yet ‘the time to move on’. Microsoft spellcheck keeps correcting degrowth into ‘regrowth’. Degrowth is anathema to the right and left. Economists turn ash-faced when they hear ‘degrowth’. Eco-modernists capture the headlines with a cornucopian future powered by nuclear and fed by GMOs. A recent book calls degrowthers ‘Malthusians’, eco-austerians and ‘collapse porn addicts’. A radical party like Syriza had as slogan ‘growth or austerity’. The ideology of growth is stronger than ever. In the 70s its critique was widespread, politicians entertained it and at least economists felt they had to respond.

4. There is a vibrant community and this is an irreversible fact. In Barcelona 20-30 of us meet frequently to read and discuss degrowth, cook and drink, go to forests and to protests. We disagree in almost everything other than that degrowth brings us together. In the fourth international conference in Leipzig, there were 3500 participants. Most of them were students. After the closing plenary, they took to the shopping streets with a music band, raised placards against consumerism and blocked a coal factory. Young people from all over the world want to study degrowth in Barcelona. If you experience this incredible energy, you find that degrowth is a beautiful word. But I understand the difficulty of using it in a different context: half a year a visitor in London and I feel I am the odd and awkward one insisting on degrowth.

5. I come from the Mediterranean. Progress looks different; civilization there peaked centuries ago. SergeLatouche says that ‘degrowth is seen as negative, something unpardonable in a society where at all costs one must ‘‘think positively’’’. ‘Be positive’ is a North-American invention. Please, let us be ‘negative’. I can’t take all that happiness. Grief, sacrifice, care, honour: life is not all about feeling ‘better’.

For Southerners at heart – be it from the Global North or South, East or West – this idea of constant betterment and improvement has always seemed awkward. Wasting ourselves and our products irrationally, refusing to improve and be ‘useful’, has its allure. Denying our self-importance is an antidote to a Protestant ethic at the heart of growth. Let’s resist the demand to be positive!

6. I am not a linguist. Who am I to question Professor Lakoff that we can’t tell people ‘don’t think of an elephant!’ because they will think of one? Then again, a-theists did pretty well in their battle against gods. And so did those who wanted to abolish slavery. Or, unfortunately, conservatives for ‘deregulation’. By turning something negative into their rallying cry, they disarmed the taken-for-granted goodness of the claim of their enemy. The queer movement turned an insult into pride. This is the art of subversion. Is there a linguistic theory for it?

This is different from what Lakoff criticized US democrats for. Democrats accept the frame of Republicans, providing softer alternatives (‘less austerity’). ‘Green growth’ is that; degrowth is a subversive negation of growth: a snail, not a leaner elephant. Guardian’s language columnist Steven Poole finds degrowth ‘cute’. When most people agree with him, and find the snail cute, we will be on the path of a ‘great transition’.

7. Cannot be co-opted. Buen vivir sounds great. Who wouldn’t like to ‘live well’? And indeed Latin Americans took it at heart: the Brazil-Ecuador inter-Amazonian highway with implanted ‘creative cities’ in-between; Bolivia’s nuclear
power programme; and a credit card in Venezuela. All in the name of ‘buen vivir’. Which reminds me of ‘Ubuntu Cola’. No one would build a highway, a nuclear reactor, issue more credit or sell colas in the name of degrowth. As George Monbiot put it capitalism can sell everything, but not less.

Could degrowth be coopted by austerians? Plausible, but unlikely; austerity is always justified for the sake of growth. Capitalism looses legitimacy without growth. By anti-immigrants? Scary, but not impossible, it has been tried in France. This is why we cannot abandon the term: we have to develop and defend its content.

8. It is not an end. It is as absurd to degrow ad infinitum as it is to grow. The point is to abolish the god of Growth and construct a different society with low footprints. There is a ‘lighthouse’ for this: the Commons. A downscaled commons though. Peer-to-peer production or the sharing economy use materials and electricity too. Degrowth reminds that you cannot have your cake and eat it all, even if it’s a digitally fabricated one.

9. Focuses my research. I spend effort arguing with eco-modernists, green growthers, growth economists, or Marxist developmentalists about the (un)sustainability of growth. This persistence to defend degrowth is productive: it forces to research questions that no one else asks. Sure, we can in theory use fewer materials; but then why do material footprints still grow? What would work, social security, money, look like in an economy that contracts? One who is convinced of green growth won’t ask these questions.

Kate is not; she agrees with our 10 degrowth policy proposals: work-sharing, debt jubilee, public money, basic income. Why in the name of degrowth though she asks? Because we cannot afford to be agnostic. It makes a huge difference, both for research and design, whether you approach these as means of stimulus and growth anew or of managing and stabilizing degrowth.

Degrowth remains a necessary word.

Kate Raworth’s and Giorgios Kallis’ editorials were originally published in two parts on Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog. The original posts feature a great discussion with the two authors in the comments, as well as a poll on the term “degrowth”.

Lead image by Becky. Separator image by Liz West.

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I am happy to see the growing recognition of what he is talking about. The grief is essential in order to integrate on a deep level the reality of the situation we face. Otherwise it remains, to most people, theoretical. After all, our social infrastructure insulates us pretty well from the tangible effects of climate change (so far). For most people, compared to say their mortgage payment or their teenager’s addiction problem, climate change seems quite remote and theoretical — something that is only happening in the future or on the news. As long as that is the case, they will not take meaningful action either, and it won’t change through persuasion. Persuasion does not penetrate deeply enough. No one is ever “persuaded” to make major changes in their life’s commitments, unless that persuasion is accompanied by an experience that impacts them on a physical and emotional level.

Of course, by the time that the impact of climate change penetrates the structures of normalcy and causes food shortages, catastrophic weather events, etc. that impact modern Western society, it will probably be too late. So far the elite nations are able to insulate themselves from the harm that ecological destruction causes. Therefore it seems unreal. The air conditioner still works. The car still runs. The credit card still works. The garbage truck takes away the trash. School is open at 8am and there is medicine in the pharmacy. The narratives that define normal life are still intact. If we wait for those narratives to be demolished by external events — by geopolitical and ecological catastrophe — it will be too late.

That defines the challenge before us. How do we bring people to care as much about climate change as the residents of Flint, Michigan care about the lead in their water?

Here is what I want everyone in the climate change movement to hear: People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific evidence-based predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. What we need is the level of activism and energy that we are seeing now in Flint. That requires making it personal. And that requires facing the reality of loss. And that requires experiencing grief. There is no other way.

That is why I am suspicious of the entire framing of the climate change issue. To focus on an abstract, global quantity (CO2 or GGE’s (greenhouse gas equivalents)) creates a gap between cause and effect that requires an intellectual buy-in to the very same systems of authority that have long presided over and defended our ecocidal system. That framing, which I call CO2 reductionism, also lends itself to globalized and financialized solutions that, we have seen again and again, often have damaging ecological and social effects on the local level. CO2 reductionism has been used to justify and promote things like biofuel plantations that destroy traditional farming or wild lands, hydroelectric projects that submerge pristine ecosystems, nuclear power plants, GMOs, and even fracking.

Environmental organizations have long understood, at least unconsciously, the power of accessing grief; hence the success of campaigns invoking superstar species like elephants, rhinos, or whales. I think we can learn from that in the area of climate change. I like to make the point that everything that we might oppose on CO2 grounds can also be opposed on more local, tangible grounds. The Alberta Tar Sands projects are an example. Even if you know nothing about the greenhouse effect, what is happening there is heartbreaking. The same with mountaintop removal of coal. The same for oil field development. The same for offshore oil drilling and the whole petroleum industry (looking at oil spills). By framing them in terms of CO2, I am afraid we distance people from the aspects of those things that provoke grief and horror. If what is wrong with those things is CO2, and we avert our eyes from the immediate horror on the ground, then it seems perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, we’ll offset that gas field by planting a forest. And besides, it’s just transitional until we get enough wind turbines operating.”

Paradoxically, the CO2 framing actually enables the continuation of all the activities that are generating CO2.

I know this verges on apostasy, but I think we need to drop CO2 as the defining narrative of “green.” If you want to step into and the through the grief process as a society, CO2 is a hard sell. Sure you can say that such-and-such grievous flood in Bangladesh or drought in Niger was worsened by climate change, but people have to accept it as an article of faith, because Science Says So.

I’m not saying climate change isn’t a factor. But there are causes that are a lot more tangible. In many places people say, “The rains stopped coming because we cut down the forests.” I think we need to move toward making the forests sacred again, and the mangroves, and the rivers… to see them as sacred beings and not as instruments of human utility, to be protected because of their greenhouse mitigating contribution.

The attitude of instrumental utilitarianism toward nature — that is the problem. I’m talking about the idea that the world outside ourselves is basically a pile of resources whose value is defined by its utility. If that doesn’t change, nothing will change. And for that to change, for us to see nature and the material world as sacred and valuable in its own right, we must connect to the deep part of ourselves that already knows that. When we make that connection and feel the hurts of the planet, grief is unavoidable.

From this stance, we still seek to change everything that the CO2 narrative names as dangerous, but for different reasons and with different eyes. We no longer have to conjoin environmentalism with faith in Big Science and institutional authority, implying that if only people had more trust in the authorities (in this case scientific, but it extends to all the systems that embed and legitimize the institution of science) then things would be fine. You know what? Even if the “climate change deniers” are right, it wouldn’t alter my environmental passion one bit. Granted, I am a sample of one person here, but to me that indicates that it isn’t important to win the intellectual debate with the skeptical forces. That isn’t necessary to make people care.

I am grateful that awareness of the importance of grief is entering the environmental movement. Now is the time to translate that awareness into our framing and strategy.

The post Grief and Carbon Reductionism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is the last in a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared onCSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released. This extract was originally published in bollier.org

In our preceding essays in this series, we introduced the idea of Green Governance, a new approach to environmental protection based on a broad synthesis of economics and human rights and, critically, the commons. We also described the burgeoning global commons movement, which is demonstrating a wide range of innovative, effective models of Green Governance.

In our final post, we’d like to focus on how a vision of Green Governance could be embodied into law. If a new paradigm shift to Green Governance is going to become a reality, state law and policy must formally recognize the countless commons that now exist and the new ones that must be created.

Recognizing the Commons as a Legal Entity

Yet here’s the rub: Because the “law of the commons” is a qualitatively different type of law – one that recognizes social and ecological relationships and the value of nature beyond the marketplace – it is difficult to rely upon the conventional forms of state, national and international law. After all, conventional law generally privileges individual over group rights, as well as commercial activities and economic growth above all else.

Establishing formal recognition for commons- and rights-based law is therefore a complicated proposition. We must consider, for example, how self-organized communities of commoners can be validated as authoritative forms of resource managers. How can they maintain themselves, and what sort of juridical relationship can they have with conventional law? One must ask, too, which existing bodies of law can be modified and enlarged to facilitate the workings of actual commons.

 Threee Domains of Commons Law

Clearly there must be a suitable architecture of law and public policy to support and guide the growth of commons and a new Commons Sector. In our book Green Governance, we propose innovations in law and policy in three distinct domains:

• General internal governance principles and policies that can guide the development and management of commons;
• Macro-principles and policies that facilitate the formation and maintenance of “peer governance;”
• Catalytic legal strategies to validate, protect, and support ecological commons.

General Internal Governance Principles and Policies

As described in our fourth essay, as early as 1990 Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom identified eight core design principles for successful commons. Although subsequent research has elaborated on these principles, they remain the most solid foundation for understanding the internal governance of commons as a general paradigm.

The Ostrom principles hold that commons depend upon things such as distinct boundaries around the collectively managed resource so that it is possible to identify who belongs to the commons and who does not.

Commoners must be able to make their own rules for managing resources that matter to them – and those rules must be compatible with local ecosystems and particular resources. Commoners must develop ways to monitor for the theft and abuse of resources, and they must have a system of graduated sanctions to punish those who violate the rules of a commons.

While the exact rules of governance will always vary, generally the internal principles must honor such values as inclusive participation, open deliberation and consensus, transparency in rule making, and at least a rough equity in the allocation of resources.

Professor Ostrom has also noted:

“…extensive empirical research on collective action … has repeatedly identified a necessary central core of trust and reciprocity among those involved that is associated with successful levels of collective action… When participants fear they are being ‘suckers’ for taking costly actions while others enjoy a free ride, it enhances the need for monitoring to root out deception and fraud.”

Successful commons governance thus must embody the values and capabilities expressed in numerous human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It also should aspire to devolve to the lowest possible level of decision-making, known as the principle of “subsidiarity.” Successful ecological commons are careful to limit, regulate or ban the monetization of shared assets lest it encourage their overuse or abuse as “free markets” routinely do.

Macro-Principles and Policies for Peer Governance

Of course, internal governance principles are not enough to secure the commons – because all commons exist within a distinct political and economic context. Accordingly, there must also be a legal architecture supportive of commons – a set of macro-principles and policies, laws, institutions and procedures – that facilitate the formation and maintenance of “peer governance.”

History shows the State/Market duopoly is predisposed to enclose commons to monetize resources and consolidate power. It is a pattern amply confirmed by the U.S. Government’s lax oversight, discount leasing and outright giveaways of countless public resources. Among the most-abused forms of common wealth: public lands with minerals, forests, grasslands, wildlife and water. Politicians and corporations frequently collude in privatizing access, use and ownership of such public resources, notwithstanding the formalities of law (where they exist).

All the more reason, then, why traditional commons need affirmative protection by State law and policy. We need explicit declarations of law and administrative structure designed to protect shared natural resources. The State must agree to observe essential “macro-principles” in its dealings with ecological commons.

Protection Against Enclosure

For example, the State, as a matter of law, must agree to recognize commons- and rights-based ecological governance as a practical alternative to the State and Market. This means that the State will not enclose or facilitate the enclosure of shared resources and dispossess commoners. Simply recognizing this principle would go a long way toward preserving our many shared natural sources.

Democratic Participation by Stakeholders/Commoners

A related principle is the ability of people to participate in the governance of land, water, and other resources that serve their basic household needs. They should not have to rely upon market investments or profit-making activity to ensure their human right to their environmentally dependent basic needs.

State as Trustee of Commons’ Long-Term Interests

For larger-scale common-pool resources – national, regional, global – there is no avoiding that the State must play an active role in establishing and overseeing commons. For example, when a resource cannot be easily divided into parcels (the atmosphere, oceanic fisheries) or where the resource generates large rents relative to the surrounding economy (petroleum, mining), it makes sense for the State to intervene and devise appropriate management systems.

But in granting this authority to the State, the law must be clear that the resources still belong to commoners, not to the government, and that the State is acting as a trustee.

One way to reinforce this idea is to consciously design these systems as State trustee commons that must affirmatively serve the long-term needs of both ecosystems and commoners. This macro-principle should apply to public lands, national parks, wilderness areas, rivers, lakes, State-sponsored research, and related civil infrastructure. The elements of nature should not be regarded simply as market resources, ripe for exploitation.

Catalytic Legal Strategies on the Path to Green Governance

These principles may be high-minded and ambitious, but there is always the question of “How do we get from here to there?” How can we use or modify existing bodies of law to move us closer toward Green Governance? For this, we envision a variety of “catalytic legal strategies” to validate, protect and support ecological commons- and rights-based governance.

There are numerous legal and activist interventions that could help advance commons governance in incremental but catalytic ways. Here are a few:

1. Adapt Private Contract and Property Law to Protect Commons
The basic idea is to use conventional bodies of property law or contract law to advance collective rather than individual interests. The most famous example may be the General Public License, or GPL, which copyright owners can attach to software to ensure that the code will be forever accessible to anyone to use. The Creative Commons licenses use the same strategy to make text, images, and music legally shareable. Land trusts use real estate law to make land “property on the outside, commons on the inside.”

2. “Stakeholder Trust”
“Stakeholder trust” can be used to manage and lease ecological resources on behalf of commoners, with revenues being distributed directly to commoners. A well-known model is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which collects oil royalties from state lands on behalf of the state’s households. Some activists have proposed an Earth Atmospheric Trust to achieve similar results from the auctioning of rights to emit carbon emissions.

3. Federal and Provincial Governments Must Support Commons Formation and Expansion
Government agencies typically host conferences, assist small businesses, promote exports, and so on. Why not provide analogous support for commons? Governments could also help build translocal structures that could facilitate local and subnational “food sovereignty” commons, such as Community Supported Agriculture and the Slow Food movement, and thereby amplify their impact.

4. Expand Public Trust Doctrine
The public trust doctrine of environmental law should be expanded to apply to a far broader array of natural resources, including protection of the Earth’s atmosphere. This legal doctrine – sometimes called “nature’s trust” – is a critical tool for forcing States to act as conscientious trustees of our common ecological wealth.

5. Use Digital Technology to Make Governance Transparent, Participatory and Accountable
Various digital networking technologies now make it possible to reinvent governance so that it can be made more transparent, participatory, and accountable – or, indeed, managed as commons. Government wikis and crowdsourcing platforms can help enlist citizen-experts to participate in policymaking and enforcement. “Participatory sensing” can enable citizens to directly monitor environmental oversight and report it, wiki-style, to help assure public accountability.

Is Green Governance Utopian?

It might be claimed that Green Governance is a utopian enterprise. But the reality is that it is the neoliberal project of ever-expanding consumption on a global scale that is the utopian, totalistic dream.

Our book Green Governance outlines a variety of legal tools and initiatives (beyond those mentioned here) that we believe can help spread a vision of commons- and rights-based ecological governance.

As a practical matter, moving this agenda forward requires that the divide among activists between “intellectual dialogue” and “movement building” be bridged. On the one hand, we urge the immediate adoption, at every level of social organization, from town hall to global council, of our proposed Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources. On the other hand, we need deep, exploratory dialogues to move the environmental movement into new territory, so that it can begin to advance more visionary yet practical ideas.

Initiating some new, “out-of-the-box” dialogues are the next stage in our work to advance Green Governance – to bring together the scholars who think deeply about the law with the movement activists who seek to instigate change. There is an urgent need for intensive mutual collaboration between these two communities.

It is abundantly clear that existing frames of economic-legal-political governance and policy are not commensurate with our catastrophic problems. Somehow we must find ways to transcend and transform the status quo.

Since saving our planetary ecosystems is doomed without everyone’s participation, your suggestions and support in moving this agenda forward will be very much welcomed.

The post Green Governance 6: Advancing a New Legal Architecture to Support the Ecological Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is the fifth of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released. This extract was originally published in bollier.org

This is the fifth of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared onCSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

Our last essay outlined the great appeal of the commons as a way to deal with so many of our many ecological crises. The commons, readers may recall, is a social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.

Fortunately, the commons is not just an abstract idea. It’s a living reality, thanks to millions of commoners around the world. People are managing forests, fisheries, irrigation water, urban spaces, creative works, knowledge and much else as commons. In so doing, they are in the vanguard of a new/old trend: using the social practices of commoning as a way to reclaim shared wealth while fighting the predatory behavior of neoliberal capitalism.

Not an Ideology but a Social Practice

The global commons movement is not a traditional movement defined by an ideology or policy agenda. It is united, rather, by its participants’ commitment to certain social practices and principles of self-governance; commoners are passionate about self-organizing their own alternative models of provisioning to meet their basic needs in fair, inclusive and participatory ways.

In recent times, as we noted in our fourth essay, the commons has been known mostly through a negative characterization, the “tragedy of the commons,” a term made infamous—tragically—by biologist Garrett Hardin in a much cited 1968 essay. That highly misleading term has tarred the idea of the commons for at least two generations even though the late Professor Elinor Ostrom and a global network of scholars have demolished the concept. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her life work showing that commons are in fact a viable, sustainable social system for managing collective resources, especially those of nature.

Commons Movement Emerges with Digital Commons

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a global movement of commoners began to emerge alongside this scholarship, but independent of it. Most of these commons were not academics but, simply, ordinary people trying to defend and assert control over resources of importance to their daily lives.

One of the most significant trends was the emergence of millions of commoners using the Internet to share knowledge and collaborate on creative projects. This explosion of digital commons can barely be grasped because it is so varied.

It can be seen in Linux and thousands of free/open source software programs; the great international Wikipedia project and its many offshoots; and a burgeoning world of more than 10,000 open access scholarly journals, whose articles are freely available in perpetuity and not restricted by paywalls or strict copyright control. There is a happening remix music subculture, a boisterous video mashup world, and a proliferation of hackerspaces and FabLabs for the Maker movement.

The common denominator in each case is an eagerness to co-produce and innovate outside of conventional markets and the state.

Not surprisingly, the many tribes of digital commoners began to see that the familiar free-market narrative about “wealth-creation” through private property rights is grievously limited if not erroneous. Sharing and cooperation on open networks are often far more productive than markets, notwithstanding the absence of private property rights, legal contracts and market exchange.

Stewardship of the Eco-Commons

Meanwhile, a substantial other universe of commoners has been focused on the stewardship of natural resources, urban spaces, and social community. Many of these commons have been operating for decades and, in some cases, for centuries or even millennia, even in times of drought and scarcity.

Modern societies, we believe, can learn a great deal about “sustainability” from indigenous peoples who have learned how to blend their cultural traditions with agro-botanical husbandry.

In Peru, for example, a number of Peruvian indigenous peoples manage more than 900 genetically diverse potatoes as a “bio-cultural heritage” landscape. The Potato Park, as it is called, is a special regime authorized under international law that lets the Peruvian tribes protect genetic knowledge that their ancestors developed over the course of centuries. The Potato Park lets the indigenous peoples protect their crops from the “bio-piracy” of multinational biotech companies who would love to patent the potato genetic knowledge.

Lots of people in “developed” countries rely on natural resource commons, too. There are lobstermen in Maine who work together to ensure that no one over-harvests lobsters in a given bay. There are Community-Supported Agriculture farms and permaculture communities that blend their agricultural practices and social ethics with the imperatives of the land. There are land trusts and community forests, and urban gardens and the Slow Food movement.

The point in each case is to manage the resources for the benefit of all over the long term, and not just as a short-term input for market profits.

Commons Initiatives Spread

All this commoning is no aberration. Worldwide the International Land Alliance estimates that there are an estimated 2 billion people whose lives revolve around subsistence commons of forests, fisheries, arable land, water and wild game. The aberration is the continued neglect of commoning by mainstream economists, who generally ignore the commons or stigmatize it – incorrectly à la Garrett Hardin – as a failed management regime.

These attitudes are likely to change in the coming years as commoners around the world begin to find each other and hoist the banner of the commons to defend their resources.

A major international conference on economics and the commons hosted by the German Green Party’s foundation, the Heinrich Boell Foundation, gave new focus to the commons in 2010. The energy galvanized by that event also catalyzed a flood of new commons projects, too numerous to itemize.

There is, for example, a multimedia educational project known as Remix the Commons, based in Canada; a growing swarm of “commons cartographers” who are developing open mapping projects to help people identify and participate in various commons; and a new initiative to fight genetically modified crops by devising new legal protections for traditional seed-sharing.

What makes the global commons movement so robust and exciting is its spontaneous, uncoordinated momentum. Protesters in Istanbul’s Gezi Park carried signs, “Reclaim the commons!” when it was threatened with conversion into a shopping mall.

Traditional communities in Africa have developed their own “bio-cultural protocols” to help legally defend their lands and ways of life from neoliberal trade policies.

The Occupy movement quite naturally invoked one of thegreat resisters of the English enclosure movement – the Digger and commoner Gerrard Winstanley – who famously declared, “The earth was made a common treasury for all!”

Commons Values Span the Political Spectrum

Commoners are not all alike. They have many profound differences in their governance systems, management practices, cultural values, and so on. However, they tend to share fundamental commitments to participation, openness, inclusiveness, social equity, ecological respect, and human rights. Consumerism, limitless economic growth and maximum profitability are shunned.

The politics of the commons movement can be confounding to conventional observers because political goals are not paramount (unless the commons is under siege). Also, commoners are more focused on “prepolitical” social activity and relationships, not ideological uniformity.

As German commons advocate Silke Helfrich notes, “commons draw from the best of all political ideologies.”  Conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility. Liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement. Libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative. And leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the Market.

The Commons is a Relationship, Not a Thing

As Helfrich points out, it is important to realize that “the commons is not a discussion about objects, but a discussion about who we are and how we act. What decisions are being made about our resources?” Does economic activity satisfy basic human needs and honor human rights and dignity?

This kind of discussion does not easily map onto the categories of thought used by business people, such as “social responsibility” and the “triple bottom line” (company finances, community well-being and ecosystem sustainability). For commons, the idea of treating their social community or ecosystem as “capital’ is nonsensical because both are interdependent living organisms.

The point of a commons is not to quantify or monetize one’s resources or community relationships; it is to experience and enjoy their intrinsic character. So, instead of using dubious quantitative metrics (e.g., “natural capital”), commoners would rather use their own localized knowledge and group judgment to decide what forests or farmland should be “stinted” (limited), and how.

They might even decide that certain resources should be made inalienable (not for sale), a concept foreign to growth-minded businesses.

The Commons is Evolving

The commons movement is still finding its way forward, but there is a constant flurry of new developments every month. Among the more notable developments: the above-noted major international conference on economics and the commons held in Germany in May 2013; an on-going study commissioned by the Government of Ecuador on how to reorient its economy to promote “commons based peer production”; a recent Green Party conference in Istanbul that explored the strategic opportunities of the commons; formal public policies developed by commoners in India to protect their lands; and environmentalist Chinese filmmakers now shooting a film, “The Evolution of Commons.”

At a time when conventional environmentalism and policy advocacy wring their hands about the difficulty of making progress, the commons movement is making important gains that simply cannot be achieved within the straitjacket of neoliberal market activity or policy discourse.

This essay is adapted from Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons, by Burns H. Weston and David Bollier Copyright © 2013 Burns H. Weston and David Bollier. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The post Green Governance 5: The Commons as a Growing Global Movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is the fourth of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released. This extract was originally published in bollier.org

The overriding challenge for our time – as outlined in our three previous CSRwire essays– is for human societies to develop new ways of interacting with nature and organizing our economic and social lives. It’s imperative that we rein in the mindless exploitation of fragile natural systems upon which human civilization depends.

The largest, most catastrophic problem, of course, is climate change, but each of the “smaller” ecological challenges we face – loss of biodiversity, soil desertification, collapsing coral reefs and more – stem from the same general problem: a mythopoetic vision that human progress must be achieved through material consumption and the ceaseless expansion of markets.

State/Market Solutions Doomed to Failure

While most people look to the State or Market for solutions, we believe that many of these efforts are doomed to failure or destined to deliver disappointing results. The State/Market duopoly – the deep alliance between large corporations, politicians, government agencies and international treaty organizations – is simply too committed to economic growth and market individualism to entertain any other policy approaches.

The political project of the past forty years has been to tinker around the edges of this dominant paradigm with feckless regulatory programs that do not really address the core problems, and indeed, typically legalize existing practices.

Solution:  Stewardship of Shared Resources

So what might be done?

We believe that one of the most compelling, long-term strategies for dealing with the structural causes of our many ecological crises is to create and recognize legally, alternative systems of provisioning and governance. Fortunately, such an alternative general paradigm already exists.

It’s called the commons.

The commons in its broadest sense is a system of stewardship of shared resources. A commons is not run by government or businesses; the goal is not to maximize production or profit. A commons is a defined community of commoners who act as a conscientious trustee of given resources. They ensure that the land or water or fish is shared equitably among those who need it for their everyday needs.

Governance of Commons

They may do this via a direct delegation of authority, but, more typically, they self-organize to manage a resource and carry on that tradition for long periods of time, even for generations. And generally they do so with community participation, a rough democratic consensus, and with respect for one another as well as for the resources they administer.

What’s notable about a commons is that it is generally independent of the Market and State, and functions with a large degree of autonomy. A commons may consist of pastoralists in semi-arid regions of Africa managing wild game; lobstermen in the coastal coves of Maine; communal landholders in Ethiopia; rubber tappers in the Amazon; or fishers in the Philippines.

Each commons is run its own particular way, but the common goal is for the people themselves to negotiate cooperative schemes to manage their shared resources for non-market purposes.

In recent years the commons has attracted a great deal of attention, particularly with the rise of countless commons of information and creativity on the Internet, such as open source software, Wikipedia, social networking and open access scholarly publishing.

These are obvious different types of resources – intangible software code or electronic blips – but the stewardship of these resources amounts to a commons because they involve a group of people coming together, outside of business or government, to manage resources for the benefit of their members.

The “Tragedy of the Commons”

Despite the long and robust history of the ecological commons, dating back to the Magna Carta, Justinian Rome, and beyond, modern economics has largely dismissed it as an archaic curiosity. Much of the neglect can be traced to an influential essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a parable about the inevitable collapse of any shared resource that biologist Garrett Hardin published in the journal Science in 1968.

If you have a shared pasture on which many herders can graze their cattle, Hardin wrote, no single herder will have a rational incentive to hold back. And so he will put as many cattle on the physical commons as possible, take as much as he can for himself. The pasture will inevitably be over-exploited and ruined: A “tragedy.”

The tragedy narrative implied that only a regime of private property rights and markets could solve the tragedy of the Commons. If people had private ownership rights, they would be motivated to protect their grazing lands.

But Hardin was not describing a commons. He described a scenario in which there were no boundaries to the grazing land, no rules for managing it, and no community of users. That is not a commons; it is an open-access regime or free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms, and sanctions against “free riders.” A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a steward of a resource.

Yet, Hardin’s misrepresentation of actual commons as a failed paradigm – a “tragedy” – stuck in the public mind and became an article of faith. Economists and conservative pundits saw the story as a useful way to affirm their ideas that private property rights and markets are the best way to manage shared resources.

The Commons — Tragedy No More

Happily, contemporary social science scholarship has done much to rescue the Commons from the memory hole to which it was consigned by mainstream economics. The late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University was the most prominent academic to rebut Hardin and, over time, to rescue the Commons as a highly attractive governance paradigm.

Sometimes working with political scientist Vincent Ostrom, her husband, Elinor Ostrom studied the institutional systems for governing CPRs – “common pool” (or collective) resources over which no one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fisheries, grazing lands, and groundwater, all of which are certainly vulnerable to a “tragedy of a commons” outcome.

The central question of Ostrom’s work was, in her words, “how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically.” Her most penetrating answers came in her path-breaking 1990 book,Governing the Commons, which described how many resource-users can and do develop shared understandings and social norms – and even formal legal rules – that enable them to manage common-pool resources sustainably over the long term.

Some commons, for example – such as the communities of Swiss villagers who manage high mountain meadows in the Alps and the Spaniards who developed huerta irrigation institutions – have flourished for hundreds of years, even in periods of drought or crisis.

Design Principles for the Commons

In governing the Commons, Ostrom also identified eight basic design principles that enable commons to work reliably:

• A commons must have clearly defined boundaries of membership and of the resource, for example.
• People must be able to develop their own rules for managing the resource, for another.
• They must be able to devise systems to monitor how people use the resource and identify and punish people who violate the rules.

And so on.

Contemporary Commons

While many people regard the commons as a relic of history, they are in fact very much alive. You can see them in acequias, a community institution of rights and responsibilities used by Hispanic-Americans in New Mexico, to manage irrigation water in that very arid region.

The commons is at work in permaculture projects, which seek to blend agricultural practices with ecological imperatives. We can see the commons in the Slow Food movement and Community-Supported Agriculture, which attempt to integrate our production and enjoyment of food with the dynamics of regional ecosystems.

Community forests, urban agriculture, indigenous hunting and farming practices, land trusts – these commons all seek to work with nature over the long term, not simply to rip-and-run to sell as much in the marketplace as possible.

The International Association for the Study of the Commons has estimated that two billion people around the world depend upon commons of forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, wild game and other natural resources for their everyday needs.

But these commons are generally ignored because economists generally do not regard subsistence provisioning for household use as interesting. For them, market exchange and capital accumulation are presumed to be the only meaningful ways to create “wealth” – defined as something that can be monetized and transferred elsewhere. Two leading introductory economics textbooks – by Samuelson & Nordhaus and Stiglitz & Walsh – ignore the Commons entirely.

Much more could be said about the commons. But what is especially notable is the rise of a large, diversified global movement of commoners who see the commons as a way to defend their shared inheritance from the depredation of the State/Market.

That is the subject of our next essay, the burgeoning global commons movement.

The post Green Governance 4: The Commons as a Model for Ecological Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is the third of a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press.  The essays originally appeared on CSRWire.  I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released. This extract was originally published in bollier.org

In the previous two essays in this series, we outlined our approach to Green Governance as a new model or paradigm for how we can relate to the natural environment. We also stressed how “Vernacular Law” – a kind of socially based “micro-law” that evolves through commons activity (“commoning”) – can establish legitimacy and trust in official state law, and thereby unleash new sorts of grassroots innovation in environmental stewardship.

In this essay, we explore another major dimension of the large shift we are proposing: how human rights can help propel a shift to Green Governance and thereafter help administer such governance once achieved.

Nothing is more basic to life than having sustainable access to food, clean air and water, and other resources that ecosystems provide. Surely a clean and healthy environment upon which life itself depends should be recognized as a fundamental human right.

The Importance of Human Rights

• Human rights play a significant role here because they signal a public commitment to human dignity and basic needs, for which environmental well-being is clearly prerequisite.
• Human rights trump most other legal obligations because they are juridically more elevated than commonplace “standards,” “laws,” and other policy choices.
• To assert human rights is to challenge state sovereignty to respect certain basic principles and go beyond the parochial agendas of private elites. Human rights enable rights-holders to assert high-level entitlements; they empower legally and politically as well as morally.

The State/Market Duopoly Impedes Human Rights

Unfortunately, the ambitious project to advance environmental human rights has foundered because, in the present geopolitical order, it has been made to depend on the close alliance of the State and Market – what we call the “State/Market duopoly” – to vindicate its principles.

The human right to a clean and healthy environment can be conceived in essentially three different ways:

1. As an entitlement derived from other recognized rights (such as the right to life, to health, and to respect for private and family life);
2. As a legal entitlement autonomous unto itself; or
3. As a cluster of procedural entitlements (such as the right to environmental information and participation in administrative hearings and decisions).

But however construed, the right has limited official recognition and jurisdictional reach.

History has shown that investors, corporations, and their political allies are not eager to embrace innovative legal principles that might constrain their prerogative to use – and abuse – our shared natural resources for private gain.

Courts Reluctant to Support Robust Interpretations of Human Rights

What is more, formal jurisprudence tends to rely on precedents that often are relics of preindustrial era norms, or to focus on their limited geographic jurisdictions even if the environmental problems are transnational.

Additionally, courts are understandably wary of appearing to make political judgments, so they tend to defer to legislatures and executive branches, which are commonly beholden to wealthy special interests.

Further, with so many scientific uncertainties surrounding environmental problems, it is far easier for courts to focus on procedural issues and avoid the substantive ones and the hard choices they raise.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the laws enacted by legislatures and declared by courts continue to allow abusive environmental practices – especially by large corporations – notwithstanding their harm to basic human rights.

Efforts to Protect the Environment Hit the Wall

This situation is not likely to change within the current framework of international law and ecological governance – and most people see no viable alternative to the existing legal regime. Which leaves us at an impasse: unable to protect either our environment or our basic human needs through our legal systems and unable to imagine an overhaul of the current regulatory framework or a radical shift from it.

Let us be blunt: neither the State nor the Market has been very successful at setting limits on market abuses and excesses because ultimately neither really wants to. Setting limits could diminish economic growth, tax revenues and “progress.”

Despite many valiant efforts by various environmental and human rights organizations, these realities impede the quest for a more robust human right to a clean and healthy environment. One might even say that such efforts have “hit a wall” in terms of making significant progress.

The Human Right to Green Governance

And this is why we propose not just a new commons- and rights-based model of ecological governance, but a fundamental human right to such governance, as well. We call it the human right to Green Governance, which is, in essence, a recalibrated human right to a clean and healthy environment.

Two Alternatives: Intergenerational Rights and Nature’s Rights

Some environmental advocates – frustrated by the resistance of neoliberal economics, policy and law – have in recent years developed two innovative approaches to advancing the human right to environment.

The first approach focuses on the environmental rights of future generations; the second on the “rights of nature.”

The claim is made, for example, that future generations ought to be entitled to the same quality of air, water and soil as we and previous generations have enjoyed. “Nature’s rights” have been proposed as a way to formally grant nature protective rights of its own, and so put it on the same legal footing as individuals, governments, and corporations.

Ecuador incorporated such provisions into its constitution in 2008, and Bolivian President Evo Morales also has been an ardent advocate of nature’s rights in his country and at the United Nations.

Legal Obstacles to Environmental Rights

Both of these approaches – nature’s rights and intergenerational rights – go beyond the narrow anthropocentrism of existing law and try to develop a more biocentric, holistic approach. Unfortunately, courts have been reluctant to adjudicate these rights for various technical reasons.

For example, even though the idea of intergenerational rights is sound as a matter of legal theory, it is handicapped by a culture of modernity that prioritizes the present and thus relies heavily on moral appeal for its acceptance. In both instances, it is not self-evident who is the most appropriate legal representative of future generations or nature.

Apart from such surmountable issues, the real impediment is that any forthright recognition of nature’s rights would disrupt existing legal norms and spark great political controversy: a scenario that courts are not prepared to instigate. Both legal theories seek to persuade the existing State/Market regulatory system – which is fundamentally responsible for most of the environmental damage that threatens our collective future – to voluntarily abandon its core legal premises.

While intergenerational rights and nature’s rights are a constructive set of positive legal principles – if only because they spur public conversation about the inadequacies of existing law – they are not likely to produce the kinds of dramatic environmental improvements that we need.

Advancing Human Rights through Commons-Based Governance

How, then, might we proceed? We believe that the human right to a clean and healthy environment can still be a powerful tool for imagining – and implementing – a new system of ecological governance that serves everyone.

But advancing this vision will require that we go beyond conventional understandings of law and how it is formulated and enforced – the formal law of State-based institutions. We must begin to construct a new architecture of law and policy, one that will enable societies around the world to alter their governance of human activities, especiallyeconomic ones.

In our next essay in this series, we will set forth our proposal to elevate the Commons as a new model for ecological governance – and a new species of law that draws upon well-established legal principles. We believe that the Commons can serve as an holistic, integrated platform for a new paradigm of law and policy that could help secure a clean, healthy, biodiverse and sustainable environment.

The basic goal is to move toward new types of social practices, material provisioning and environmental stewardship as a way to give more substantive meaning to human rights. We immodestly believe that this may be the only way to bring the law of humankind into greater alignment with the laws of nature.

This essay is adapted from Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons, by Burns H. Weston and David Bollier Copyright © 2013 Burns H. Weston and David Bollier. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The post Green Governance 3: The Human Right to a Clean and Healthy Environment appeared first on P2P Foundation.