The re-commoning movement
It is only twice that I remember reading a scholarly book and crying. The second time was when I read the introduction and the first few chapters in the book that David Bollier wrote with the late Silke Helfrisch called The Wealth of the Commons: A World beyond Market and State. That book connected me simultaneously with what is possible for humans when we can come together in collaboration to care for what feeds and supports us and with how much we have lost during the last few hundred years since the rise of capitalism. The impact on me was so strong that I went back to the book I was completing the editing of at the time, and added some sections and footnotes to make room for the significance of the commons as a fertile ground for going beyond the either/or of personal change or structural change on the largest global scale. Restoring the commons is a clear way to engage at a scale that is beyond the individual and yet is entirely tangible and supports the emergence of communities aligned with our collaborative and community-oriented evolutionary makeup. Within the learning packets, the place of the commons is within an exploration of what Gandhi called “Constructive Program” which I attend to within the “Working for Transformation without Recreating the Past” packet.
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