Commons + Systems

Yet soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life. Here, in the thin earthy boundary between inanimate rock and the planet’s green carpet, lifeless minerals are weathered from stones or decomposed from organic debris. Plants and microscopic animals eat these dead particles and recast them as living matter. In the soil, matter recrosses the boundary between living and dead; and, as we have seen, boundaries-edges-are where the most interesting and important events occur.

“I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. I am a creature of the mud, not the sky. I am a biologist who has always found edification in the amazing abilities of slime to hold things in touch and to lubricate passages for living beings and their parts. I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many. Some of these personal microscopic biota are dangerous to the me who is writing this sentence; they are held in check for now by the measures of the coordinated symphony of all the others, human cells and not, that make the conscious me possible. I love that when “I” die, all these benign and dangerous symbionts will take over and use whatever is left of “my” body, if only for a while, since “we” are necessary to one another in real time. As a little girl, I loved to inhabit miniature worlds brimming with even more tiny real and imagined entities. I loved the play of scales in time and space that children’s toys and stories made patent for me. I did not know then that this love prepared me for meeting my companion species, who are my maker.”

“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit

“Let us turn to the Latin word comunis. We have the ‘co’, which means ‘together’, but the ‘munis’ means ‘under obligation’. Commoning is not only about sharing, but also about the mutual obligations we have to one another. You can join us, but you have these obligations of reciprocity. Imagine we have this lake. As a fellow-commoner, you are not to dump your sewage into it, because that prevents us from swimming and the other species living in it will die. That’s why I’d say that the kitchen and the meal, theoretically private assets, constitute the primary locus of commoning. You can have the soup from the kitchen, you can sit down at the meal, but will you help with the washing up when you are able? It doesn’t have to be an exchange, but you have to pitch in somehow, you have to help out. I would call this ‘indirect reciprocity’. Commoning has to do with a redefinition of work and labour as a human mutuality, rather than as an exploitation and exchange. Lexically, this is what I derive from the Latin comunis: ‘what we own together’, and ‘what we owe each other’. Not as a matter of ownership, but as a matter of mutual subsistence.”

just been reminded of this wonderful Hannah Höch quote, and how much I love it ...