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A New Commons Story

For decades, people have defended the commons and not known it. They’ve battled pollution, development, corporate marketing assaults on their kids, and so many other things it’s hard to keep track. What’s been missing is a story that unifies all these seemingly unrelated battles with the force of a powerful idea.

Think about the market story. A few centuries ago, people looked at economic life and saw many seemingly unrelated things. They saw factories and farms, shipping firms and theaters, and so on. Then, in 1776, Adam Smith came along and said, “These aren’t separate things. They are different aspects of the same thing—the market.” His insight gave mental shape to the whole, and the idea of the market with its beneficent “invisible hand” has dominated public imagination ever since.

It has certainly made life easy for the Wall Street Journal. Without the market to cast a devotional glow upon private transactions, the Journal would be left with only a welter of deals to report. The market ties those mundane transactions into a larger narrative of uplift and grace. The editorial writers do not have to articulate this, of course; it is embedded in the magical word market.

We need to do something similar with the commons—to embed it not with myth but with truth, possibility, and morality. The true part is, The commons is real, huge, and invaluable, and it belongs to all of us. It’s also being destroyed—not by itself, but by too much privatization. The possibility part is, We have the capacity to save the commons, though time is short. The moral part is, It’s our right and duty to save the commons.

Telling a new commons story won’t be easy. Before a new story can take hold, the old one must be contested. That old story goes something like this: Long ago, ordinary people had the right to farm and forage, hunt and fish on property they didn’t technically own. People eked out a living but the system was static. No one had an incentive to innovate. Finally, the British Parliament saw the light. Starting in the eighteenth century, it stripped commoners of their rights and made agriculture efficient. The commoners then moved to cities and got jobs in factories. This was the beginning of the modern economy. Today the commons is an interesting relic but of no relevance to the twenty-first century.

This story, of course, is an example of history being written by victors. Native Americans or English peasants before 1700 would have told a different story: the commons served them well before it was taken away. But they lost the property wars and hence the narrative. And there’s no lack of contemporary enclosers to keep the old story going.

A new commons story must also confront Garrett Hardin’s tragedy myth. Hardin’s tale was a perfect complement to Adam Smith’s. Just as the market according to the latter is inherently creative, so the commons according to the former is inherently self-destructive. Market good, commons bad. It’s a formidable one-two punch, except that it isn’t true.

IT WAS A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL movement to create a unifying vocabulary. The concerns that came together in the movement existed long before the movement itself. Resource conservation, wilderness preservation, public health, population control, ecology, energy conservation, and anti-pollution regulation were all discussed and practiced to varying degrees, but separately. Most public health workers did not see themselves as part of a movement that included hunters and fishers.

Then Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and the many became one. They were now aspects of the environment, a realm of reality that lies outside the market and that the market isn’t automatically entitled to degrade. The word invested the smallest parts with the significance of the whole, much as the term market had done for business. Smog no longer was just hazy air; snail darters no longer were just little fish. They now were parts of a larger system in which the health of the whole was bound up with the health of the smallest parts.

Many of us sense that a similar commons story is waiting to be told. In this new story, pollution isn’t just a health threat; it’s a violation of common rights, a taking of what belongs to all of us. Sprawl isn’t just an inefficient use of land and energy; it diminishes the social commons, which withers among freeways and malls. The commercial invasion of childhood is more than a matter of obesity and hyperactivity; it raises the question of who creates the stories on which young people are raised, and to what ends.

The new story of the commons unifies these seemingly unconnected phenomena. It identifies not only the thing aggressed upon—the commons—but also the aggressor—the unconstrained market. It denies that the commons is irrelevant and puts it, properly, at center stage. By so doing it opens the way to a twenty-first-century movement aimed at protecting our shared inheritances and passing them on, undiminished if not enhanced, to our children.