Kevin Stark: The Great Lakes Commons is a regional grassroots initiative advocating for the freshwater chain of lakes in the upper Midwest and Mideast parts of the U.S. and Canada. As part of that mission, the group has released a new toolkit designed to help communities and residents protect the lakes, which its members view as a public, natural resource. The kit is a mix of traditional advocacy tools, policy statements, historical documents, and educational resources. It’s organized around Indigenous, commons and modern environmentalist ideas.

The group’s mission is to establish the Great Lakes as a commons that is protected by its people. The toolkit was inspired by the Commons Charter, a 500-word affirmation of how the group relates to the Great Lakes and a collaborative process of how to articulate that vision.

Paul Baines, the group’s education and outreach coordinator, says the toolkit was a product of a collaboration among advocates, Indigenous people, water policy experts, researchers, and others. “It was a way to thread the various social movements around water quality, policy, ethics,” he says. The toolkit includes:

• Primers on Great Lakes and Indigenous water governance. The former serves as an overview of how the lakes are managed now. The latter is an introduction to the ideas of the region’s Indigenous people.

• An ethics document that the group calls a “Compass of Care.” It is a classroom exercise that was originally developed in a school in Ontario, Canada, and is intended to serve as a guide.

• Community organizing instructions. Many of the initiative’s members have a background in popular education and advocacy.

• The “Plastics Action Kit,” which explores the connection between the health of the lakes and its people.

• The toolkit also includes charter translations for five native and non-native Great Lakes languages. Baines says including all — especially the two indigenous languages, Anishinaabemowin and Mohawk — was important to the group. “We were thinking about who is this for and who lives in the Great Lakes region,” Baines says. “It was important to highlight and celebrate these languages.”

The Great Lakes Commons is an advocacy group that engages directly with the residents of the region. “We don’t really interface with government,” Baines says. “We are not petitioning corporations or governments to do the right thing — we are reaching out to the people of the Great Lakes.”

The initiative was created from On The Commons, a commons movement strategy center based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is comprised of individuals and groups from the U.S., Canada, and First Nations — including the Council of Canadians, Blue Mountain Center, Detroit People’s Water Board, and others. The “Commons Currency Project” is another initiative of the Great Lakes Commons. It is an alternate currency that imagines that the value of money is tied to the quality and availability of the water of the Great Lakes.

Baines said the concept came from a single question: “If water is a source of life, then wouldn’t protecting water be the most important and scarce resource that we have? And if we want to put value on something, shouldn’t it be that?”

Header image is a screenshot from the The Great Lakes Commons’ toolkit

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Aaron Fernando: The concept of ownership is a social contract that allows certain individuals and groups to have rights to certain resources or items while excluding others from that access. Under the mainstream conception of private property, both the ownership of land and anything built on top of it are combined into one. This bundling of land and buildings is often problematic — it puts neighborhoods and residents of cities in an unnecessarily precarious position by making them subject to the whims of land speculators.

This form of land ownership also prices out locals from areas that they historically lived and worked in by increasing costs — catalyzing the process of gentrification. It also privatizes and encloses common spaces and areas that previously benefitted surrounding communities, ultimately leading to a more fragmented society, one required to focus on uownsustainable short-term profits. All this holds true as long as land remains on the market.

Yet what we see today is a resurgence and re-invention of ownership models that allow communities to take care of themselves and steward their own natural resources. The Community Land Trust (CLT) model is one that reduces the socially-destructive effects of market forces by separating the ownership of land with the ownership of any property and equity atop the land itself.

Affordable housing-related CLTs are probably best-known, but this model can be applied for any community goal, including lowering costs for small businesses and ensuring local food production. Though the CLT model has been re-emerging since the late 1960s, it is actually somewhat of a return to indigenous practices around ownership of land and resources.

Winona LaDuke, anti-pipeline activist, water protector, and member of the Ojibwe nation spoke about this during the 1993 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. “Our traditional forms of land use and ownership are similar to those of a community land trust,” LaDuke said. “The land is owned collectively, and we have individual or, more often, family-based usufruct rights: each family has traditional areas where it fishes and hunts.”

Typically, a community land trust works by having a nonprofit (the community land trust’s legal entity) own the land and lease its long-term use to individuals — usually for 98 years. These leaseholders own anything that sits on top of the land, so if they make any improvements to their houses or other buildings, when they sell their buildings they can recover the buildings’ equity.

There is a fitting circularity at the root of LaDuke’s statements, because these lectures are hosted by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (where I work and where LaDuke will again be speaking), a nonprofit co-founded by Bob Swann, who was also one of the pioneers of the first community land trust in the United States.

The Indian Line Farm. Photo courtesy of Amelia Holmes/Schumacher Center for New Economics

Another CLT started by Bob Swann in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts has put in place an additional innovation to ensure sustainable land stewardship. The Indian Line Farm gives farmers equity in not just their buildings, but the soil itself. A soil sample was taken at the start of the lease and another will be taken if farmers decide to move away. The farmers are entitled to the equity generated by any organic improvements to the soil on the land, in addition to improvements on the buildings.

On a deeper level, this leads to the question of whether natural resources can be owned at all. “In our language the words Anishinaabeg akiing describe the concept of land ownership. They translate as ‘the land of the people,’ which doesn’t imply that we own our land but that we belong on it,” LaDuke said.

As LaDuke explained, for the Ojibwe land and resources are managed as a commons.

“We have ‘hunting bosses’ and ‘rice chiefs,’ who make sure that resources are used sustainably in each region,” LaDuke said. “Hunting bosses oversee trap-line rotation, a system by which people trap in an area for two years and then move to a different area to let the land rest. Rice chiefs coordinate wild rice harvesting. The rice on each lake is unique: each has its own taste and ripens at its own time. We also have a ‘tallyman,’ who makes sure there are enough animals for each family in a given area. If a family can’t sustain itself, the tallyman moves them to a new place where animals are more plentiful. These practices are sustainable.”

If this sounds familiar, it may be because Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for analyzing and popularizing these ideas, debunking the belief that a tragedy of the commons was inevitable without government intervention. Ostrom was awarded the prize “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” after she looked into the practices of natural resource management of groups like the Ojibwe, who had been managing their resources sustainably for centuries.

As new economy movements and sharing projects gain traction around the country and globally, it is important and helpful to realize that this models are nothing new; they are a return to centuries-old sustainable practices. As Ostrom, LaDuke, and many others have noted, the main reason why the indigenous resource management and land-use practices were trampled down is because the courts refused to uphold property held in commons. Now, in the nick of time with the CLT models and others, this is slowly changing.

Header image of Winona LaDuke courtesy of Honor The Earth

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Such curiosity led me to a wonderful new book by anthropologist James Suzman, Affluence without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen. The title speaks to a timely concern: Can the history of Bushmen culture offer insights into how we of the Anthropocene might build a more sustainable, satisfying life in harmony with nature?

Writing with the emotional insight and subtlety of a novelist, Suzman indirectly explores this theme by telling the history and contemporary lives of the San – the Bushmen – of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. The history is not told as a didactic lesson, but merely as a fascinating account of how humans have organized their lives in different, more stable, and arguably happier, ways. The book is serious anthropology blended with memoir, political history, and storytelling.

After spending 25 years studying every major Bushman group, Suzman has plenty of firsthand experiences and friendships among the San to draw upon. In the process, he also makes many astute observations about anthropology’s fraught relationship to the San.  Anthropologists have often imported their colonial prejudices and modern alienation in writing about the San, sometimes projecting romanticized visions of “primitive affluence.”

Even with these caveats, it seems important to study the San and learn from them because, as Suzman puts it, “The story of southern Africa’s Bushmen encapsulates the history of modern Homo sapiens from our species’ first emergence in sub-Saharan Africa through to the agricultural revolution and beyond.”  Reconstructing the San’s 200,000-year history, Suzman explains the logic and social dynamics of the hunter-gatherer way of life — and the complications that ensued when agriculture was discovered, and more recently, from the massive disruptions that modern imperialists and market culture have inflicted.

The fate of one band of San, the Ju/’hoansi, is remarkable, writes Suzman, because the speed of their transformation “from an isolated group of closely related hunting and gathering bands to a marginalized minority struggling to survive in a rapidly changing polyglot modern state is almost without parallel in modern history.” As European settlers seized their land, forced them to give up hunting, forced them to become wage-laborers on farms, and introduced them to electricity, cars and cell phones, the Ju/’hoansi acquired “a special, if ephemeral, double perspective on the modern world – one that comes from being in one world but of another; from being part of a modern nation-state yet simultaneously excluded from full participation in it; and fro having to engage with modernity with the hands and hearts of hunter-gatherers.”

In learning more about the San, then, one can learn more about the strange, unexamined norms of modern, technological society that most of us live in.  It is fascinating to see the social protocols of sharing meat and food; the conspicuous modesty of successful hunters (because in the end their success is part of a collaboration); and the “demand sharing” initiated by kin and friends to ensure a more equal distribution of meat and satisfaction of basic needs.

The inner lives of the Ju/’hoansi suggests their very different view of the world.  “For them,” writes Suzman, “empathy with animals was not a question of focusing on an animal’s humanlike characteristics but on assuming the whole perspective of the animal.” The performance of the hunt engenders a kind of empathy for the prey, as well as a broader understanding that the cosmos ordains certain sacred roles for all of us – as prey, hunters, and food. Hunting and eating in the Kalahari connects a person with the cosmos in quite visceral ways – something that no supermarket can begin to approach.

I’m not ready to hunt my own food, but is there some way that I can see my bodily nourishment reconnected with the Earth and my peers, and not just to packaged commodities?  For now, my CSA is a good start.

The most poignant part of Affluence without Abundance is the final chapter, which describes how many San – deprived of their lands, ancestral traditions, and cultural identities – now live out dislocated lives in apartheid-founded townships that Suzman characterizes as having a “curious mix of authoritarian order and dystopian energy.”  There is deep resentment among the San about the plentitude of food even as people go hungry, and anger about the inequality of wealth and concentration of political power.  Most frightening of all may be the pervasive feelings of impermance and insecurity.  History barely matters, and the future is defined by market-based aspirations — a job, a car, a home.  The modern world has few places to carry on meaningful traditions and sacred relationships.

I was pleased to see that James Suzman has founded a group, Anthropos, https://www.anthropos.org.uk/about to “apply anthropological methods to solving contemporary social economic and development problems.”  A timely and important mission.

Photo by Dietmar Temps

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