NARRATOR: What is the commons?
And how can we practice commoning to transform
the current social and economic paradigm?
Commoning is a way to manage shared resources that depends
neither on the state nor on the market.
But how does commoning work?
Economist David Bollier has a few ideas.
Let's imagine the commons as a shared resource to which everyone has a right.
Some people think that managing the commons without state regulation
or market forces is impossible.
They argue that people will ruin the commons
by overconsuming the shared resource or by wrecking
shared spaces with pollution and waste.
This argument that people are incapable of managing shared resources
for the common good without the state or market as arbiters
has been dubbed the tragedy of the commons.
And according to David Bollier, it's totally wrong.
Bollier says that the people who argue that the commons is
impossible to manage make the fundamental mistake
of treating the commons as a thing with those selfish commons destroying
people existing outside of it.
But the commons isn't a thing, it's a process
that involves everyone in the community working to share and distribute it
fairly.
People continually and diligently build and sustain a commons
by negotiating how best to distribute the commons,
creating the rules they need to manage the commons together,
and building the infrastructure needed to keep the commons thriving
for generations to come.
That's how David Bollier's vision of commoning works.
With the community using commoning as a way to successfully manage everything
from lobster fishing, to the water that the lobsters swim in, to the software
used in the computers of people who eat lobster and drink water.
Since commoning is a process that makes for a fair way
to manage and distribute shared resources that belong to everyone,
David Bolllier thinks it's an important part of the next system.