The tragedy of the commons – 15M-inspired responses to issues raised during the IWM Summer School, Austria

Pic by Louis Maniquet

15M-inspired responses to issues raised during the IWM Summer School, Austria

15M-inspired responses to issues/questions raised during the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) Summer School at Burg Feistritz, Austria

By Pablo Ouziel

 Entry number two: ‘The tragedy of the commons’

On one of the days at Feistritz castle, Holy Case, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, gave a talk in which she asked whether determining the relationship between democracy and demography was a thought problem or a real problem.

In her talk, Case presented our civilizations as shipwrecked in the global ecological disaster. Playing with the idea of metaphor she painted a picture of the current environmental crisis in which the more fortunate and capable passengers are able to escape on lifeboats, while others try to climb into the already overwhelmed and defective vehicles. At that point, those in the boats are faced with the dilemma of what to do. If they take the others, everyone sinks, if they do not, they have to live with their decision. Ultimately, some can be saved or everyone can drown.

Case was drawing on ecologist Garrett Hardin´s Lifeboat ethics: The case against helping the poor (1974). She also used William Forster Lloyd’s Two lectures on the Check to population (1833) to ask if we all should have equal right to an equal share of the resources. According to Lloyd “to a plank in the sea, which cannot support all, all have not an equal share.” It is the lucky individuals who appropriate the plank first that have the right to keep it for themselves at the expense of the remainder.

It is in this essay that Lloyd first raises the idea of the problem of the commons, describing the effects of unregulated grazing on common land. According to him, it is only through enclosure that land can be protected from over-usage. Nevertheless, it is only a century later in 1968, that Hardin popularizes the idea of the tragedy of the commons with his essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons.

As Case suggested during her talk, global warming is framed as a tragedy of the commons. Yet, I think it important to suggest that the co-regulated commons operate much like a dance that those bent on enclosing have not been able to understand. In fact, it is the tragedy of privatization, I will argue following James Tully, that is leading to accelerated climate change and environmental destruction.

As Tully has argued in Two ways of realizing justice and democracy: linking Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom (2013), from the space of elite democracy the institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy limits realization-focused democracy unjustly in two ways. First, it limits or eliminates alternative democracies. And, second, it limits democracy internally by pre-emptively privatizing a range of social and economic activities. This Tully argues, excludes realization-focused democracies from being brought under the democratic control of those who are engaged in and affected by them, and restricts democracy to public reasoning and representative government. As Tully points out, through privatization and shielding, a range of social and economic activities are left out of the democratization process and this causes three of the tragic global injustices we are currently living through. First, Global South exploitation, inequality and poverty. Second, the rapidly accelerating destruction of the environment. And third, global warming and climate change.

In his article Tully suggests that if we orient ourselves from this different democratic-commons perspective, “the injustices of the ‘institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy’ comprise what we can call ‘the tragedy of privatization’, in contrast to the thesis of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that has served to legitimate the coercive globalization of this institutional structure since Hobbes.” Basically, what I gather from Tully’s work is that it is not the commons that is the main cause of our current environmental disaster but the enclosures that have been imposed on our common land (earth).

I think Tully makes a valuable observation in this work, which speaks to how people in 15M in Spain (that occupied public squares in 2011) see humans and their relationships with each other. Rather than seeing humans as independent, insecure, and unable to organize without violence and domination, those being 15M in Spanish public squares and beyond, defend and enact cooperative and interdependent relationships of contestation and integration. In doing this, 15M presents a tentative and alternative imaginary of social relationships and power configurations which rejects the tragedy of the commons and embraces commoning practices. It is through these kinds of relationships that those being 15M think systems of violent conflict can be transformed and replaced.

In a sense, 15M defends and enacts the kind of nonviolent agonistics which Richard Gregg and Mahatma Gandhi advocated for throughout their lives. Nevertheless, this mode of being of collective presences like 15M has often been misunderstood. Therefore, in order to help better understand them I suggest that it is best to take a critical stance on Hobbes and read Peter Kropotkin as a alter-narrative to the much praised myth of the Leviathan.

In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin speaks of mutual aid to describe the kind of power relationship we see today enacted by 15M. He points out that, despite the systematic destruction of mutual aid institutions over the centuries, such institutionality, together with its habits and customs has survived. According to Kropotkin, millions of individuals not only continue to enact mutual aid institutions but are reconstituting them where they have perished. This, he is saying in 1902, but arguing along similar lines in the present, Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (2007), has suggested that these mutual aid networks constitute the largest informal, symbiotic fellowship of engaged citizens in the world. As Hawken puts it, it makes up a network of human beings “willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

Following from this and in multilogue with Kropotkin, Hawken, and millions of other participant-thinkers across time, 15M reveals the healthy existence of mutual aid institutionality within Spain. As a reminder, the popular 15M slogan ‘Vamos lentos porque vamos lejos’ (We go ever so slowly because we are going on forever) plays tribute to the autotelic relation between means and ends found in 15M’s joining hands relationships. I think of these joining hands relationships as exemplary responses and antidotes to neoliberalism and right-wing populism. Through them, citizens are challenging modernity’s foundational and violent forms of subjectivity, and building a counter-modernity “within, around, and against” the dominant institutions of their society. In this blog entry, I am not going to describe what these joining hands relationships entail because of space constraints, but if you are interested in reading about them in detail I have a forthcoming book on 15M in which I describe them in detail. The name of the book is Democracy here and Now: The exemplary case of Spain.

What is important for the purpose of this blog is to note that working around the enclosure of the commons, 15M continues to institute commoning practices in places were the commons seemed to have been lost. It is also important to highlight that 15M is just one recent example in Spain. Across the globe we can see examples and exemplars of commons and commoning practices that present a clear alternative view to that which Hardin popularized in his 1968 text. It is in these alternatives that one can perhaps tentatively respond to Case by suggesting that the problem we have when thinking about democracy and demography and how to overcome the climate crisis is not a real problem but a problem of thought. The reason I say this is that when humans have opted to think of these issues from the position of mutual aid, common responsibility and care, the concerns and responses have been different in kind.

Acknowledging the fact that there are many examples of the commons having historically worked and survived despite the enclosing logic of privatization, here are just some minor examples from the Spanish civil war which stem out of my research within 15M. What is interesting about this period is that a society under attack by totalitarian forces responded by sharing-with and mutual care and entered into gift-reciprocity relationships which obtained remarkable results.

On July 18, 1936, a military coup marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. During the very early days of the military outbreak, many workers who were actually on strike, soon began to reclaim their production capabilities; seizing corporations and organizing themselves into assembly-run collectives. Even strategic industries such as the oil company CAMPSA were collectivized. A mere week following the military uprising, different self-organizing demoi were running public transportation, the train system, water, and energy sources. In many cases, collectivization was so far reaching it encompassed the whole process of extraction or cultivation, production, distribution, and administration. In metropolitan areas, agrarian land was being collectivized.

In Barcelona, the central fruit and vegetable market in the neighbourhood of the Born was collectivized; distribution from the countryside was also facilitated through collectives. In Montblanc, articles were bought with a new collectivized currency. Some collectives used central storage areas where everyone took what was needed. In others, such as Llombay (Castellón), goods were distributed based on family needs. In most of the collectivized areas, when shortages existed, priority was given to children, the sick, elderly people, and women. In Seros, unmarried people were fed in communal kitchens and were given clean clothes. When they married, the community helped them set up their new family homes. In Graus, the population paid for newly-weds to go on honeymoons. Relationships in collectives were deeply democratic. In Hospitalet de Llobregat, they celebrated general assemblies every three months. In Ademuz, assemblies were celebrated every Saturday and, in Alcolea de Cinca, whenever anyone in the community deemed an assembly necessary.

During this period, a social revolution was taking place within the broader context of a civil war. In this sense, many collectives supported the Republican war effort. Nevertheless, most collectives were predominantly focused on developing their constructive programs towards a new society based on commoning, and constructed through nonviolent, cooperative and democratic principles. George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia (1938) speaks of the Spanish Militias fighting at the Aragon front. Referring to the experience there as an experiment in classless society, he says the following: “In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.” It is interesting that as he brings the book to an end Orwell also points to the fact he had found himself in “the only community of any size in Western Europe were political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposite” a state of affairs which could not last because it was only a temporary and local phase in the enormous power-over game being played out over the whole surface of the earth.

With this post, I am not expecting every reader to all of a sudden embrace the idea of the commons, what I do hope, however, is that it will give a glimpse of one alternative to our current hegemonic understandings on how we as humans have interacted with each other over time and how we might interact moving forward as the twin crises of democracy and the environment continue to unfold.

In my next entry, I will write about ‘spontaneity and collective presences,’ this was another reoccurring issue during the multilogue at Burg Feistritz, which my work within 15M has revealed to be in need of serious attention.

 

 

Youth Climate Justice Activism: Changing the Agenda

By Pablo Ouziel, Cedar Tree Institute at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria

A few weeks ago, I attended the webinar ‘Youth Climate Justice Activism: Changing the Agenda’. This was part of the EUCAnet Webinar Series Global Politics in Critical Perspectives: Transatlantic dialogues. The event brought together youth activists and allies from movements in the UK and Turtle Island as they shared their experiences with one another and discussed the ways forward.

The Webinar was co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and counted with the support of the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS) and the Cedar Trees Institute (CTI) at the University of Victoria (UVic), and with the support of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD).

Speakers included the following:

  • Mary-Jane Farrell & Roseanne Steffen, Youth Strike 4 Climate Brighton (YS4CB), UK
  • Rose Henry, Tla’amin Nation
  • Kiana Alexander, Director, Emerging Leaders Program, Raven Institute
  • Emily Thiessen, youth activist/organizer, Canada’s Green New Deal, Rise and Resist, Our Earth our Future (Victoria Youth Working for Climate Action) / the Canada Climate Strike Network
  • Antonia Paquin, youth activist/organizer, Canada’s Green New Deal, Rise and Resist, Our Earth our Future (Victoria Youth Working for Climate Action) / the Canada Climate Strike Network
  • Danny Noonan, Global Program Coordinator, Our Children’s Trust, US
  • Samantha & Carolyn Norr, Youth Vs Apocalypse

The event was co-chaired by Keith Cherry of CTI and the CFGS at UVic, and of Rise and Resist, and Rebeccah Nelems, also of CTI and the CFGS at UVic, and of IICRD.

Four key questions triggered the discussion:

  • How are movements currently coordinating or collaborating across movements, cities, countries and continents?
  • What are the opportunities and challenges for future collaboration?
  • What are opportunities for leveraging inter-generational support?
  • How might movements draw on the wisdoms of Indigenous nations, communities and organizations with respect to living in reciprocal relationship with the earth?

In this blog post, I want to highlight some of the contributions made by different speakers during the multilogue. It was a great experience to witness the level of commitment and expertise revealed by the youth involved in the Webinar and their allies.

In one of her interventions, Emily Thiessen pointed to the need of building a movement of the kind pre-figured by Occupy and suggested that the Green New Deal could be a platform from which to engage the broader community outside of the environmental movement bubble. For her, engagement with churches, unions and other communities of practice is important. Thiessen argues that this is the moment for youth to lead a glocal effort to coordinate a movement that can change the world.

Antonia Paquin spoke of an epiphany following a time of feeling intensely overwhelmed in which she realized that we lived in a globally polluted world in which young people were disempowered. She realized then the need to make a change in her life and to acknowledge the enormous power of a vision of a world that is more just. She became aware of the enormous capacity for change if people team up in a mindful manner. She gave the examples in Victoria of Rise and Resist and the Youth Climate Strike, and spoke of the March 15th 2019 demonstration in Victoria which brought out 2000 people in a revolutionary spirit. For Paquin, young people are always a force for change because young people are generally bolder and more provocative. Young people she argues, have more capacity to imagine a new vision for the future because of their fearlessness. This is why, she argues, the older generations are now looking at them to lead the way. Paquin spoke about numerous issues, she mentioned urban agriculture, food security, water and food, self-sufficency, energy democracy, and reducing the power of large corporations. She placed great emphasis on the source of our food, and on indigenous rights groups and their anti-colonization efforts together with allies. One prominent example repeated by other speakers was the Tiny House project in which activists built a Tiny House and carried it up the highway for 22 km to the location of a planned pipeline. This she described as indigenous people re-occupying their homeland. For Paquin, what is important as we transition to a healthy earth is authenticity. We need to help each other, and we need to speak and listen with our hearts.

Mary-Jane Farrell & Roseanne Steffen, joined the conversation from the UK and spoke of their experiences in the Youth Strike for Climate. In it, schools, colleges and universities are involved, and once a month since February they have been striking. As they explained this was initiated by Greta Thunberg from Sweden but it is actively being acted upon in the UK. They predominantly spoke of their local experience in Brighton and the diverse range of people from different generations active in the movement. The first strike in Brighton counted 2000 people, including local politicians, youth, academics, and performance artists. By the March strike, the numbers had doubled. Then Mary-Jane and Roseanne spoke of their trip to the EU parliament in Belgium to meet other youth activists from around Europe. They were invited by the democratic and socialist alliance in the EU parliament. For that trip, they planned a protest outside of the EU parliament, asking the EU to shut down British Petroleum (BP). They were asked politely to leave, then Swedish Green Party youth delegates decided to join the protest and they all ended up in a park nearby sharing with each other their strike experiences and discussing what to do in the future. What was most inspiring for them was the fact that this was a spontaneous meeting, which revealed the fact that coalitions can happen in the oddest of places. Their experience within the movement is one in which hierarchies have been broken and everyone is respectful of everyone in the space.

Samantha & Carolyn Norr, joined the Webinar from Oakland, California. Carolyn is an adult supporter of youths fighting for a liveable planet and has been supporting Samantha and other youths to travel to strikes. Carolyn spoke of a city with concentration camps on one side and rich people on the other. She described global inequality as it is lived within their city. She spoke of children in concentration camps following waves of deportations. For Carolyn, combating inequality and injustice is at the core of climate justice work. She spoke of the Climate Strike in San Francisco and how children from East Oakland could not afford public transport to attend ($10 roundtrip). Her work emphasizes getting children to these strikes so that they can fight for their communities. She also spoke of the block to the coal export terminal of the Oakland port. Samantha, spoke of Warriors for Justice in her middle school and of environmental racism. She also mentioned the difficulties they had getting people to go to the Climate Strike because of the strong resistance from teachers. This was due to the fact that the strike was not in the curriculum. Samantha launched a petition which was signed by 3/4 of the 7th grade class asking the school to let them go. Then some teachers threatened with lowering grades if people did not come to school on the day of the strike. They also threatened with calling their families. Those who made it to the strike, Samantha described, went to Nancy Pelosi’s office denouncing her proposal to tackle climate change. In a subsequent press conference, Pelosi withdrew her proposal. Samantha’s final comment was ‘do or die’. As she put it: “If we do not take action now we are going to go away”.

Danny Noonan of Our Children’s Trust, explained the work they are doing providing legal support to 21 young people across the US who have presented numerous lawsuits against the government, claiming that the government had knowledge of climate change while promoting fossil fuels. He spoke of these as youth led systemic legal actions. A growing movement in the courts protecting the fundamental right of people to be protected from climate catastrophe. Danny emphasized that their work is supported by a movement and that international awareness is rising thanks to local, national and international mobilization. He mentioned the 4th of July in Portland, Oregon, 360.org, Earth Gardens, and the Sunrise Movement as exemplars of the kind of action making their work possible. Danny also mentioned the support they receive from legislator allies on social media, and the work they have been doing on Podcasts to make their arguments more broadly accessible.

Rose Henry, Elder of the Tla’amin Nation, began by emphasizing how pleased she was seeing so many young people speaking about ‘our climate change’. She then went on to talk about the fact that we should be doing a lot more. That we should be making space for indigenous people and young people in our rallies. Rose was clear about the fact that we are in a crisis and that we need to change our climate direction. The youth, she argued are showing the rest of the world the direction we need to take. She mentioned how she has been fighting for social change since she was 14 years old. For her there are many links between murdered indigenous people and climate change. She denounced lack of action from leaders and voting people. For Rose, it is ironic that now people are looking at indigenous people and youth to make the change, while these are the people who have been oppressed. As she put it, in order to empower youth, we need to give them the microphone and allow them to speak. We have three elections, she reminded us, before many of the youth involved in this movement can vote, but many will already be voting in the next two elections. She spoke of Trump’s and Trudeau’s empty promises. She mentioned the Tiny house being moved 22 km down the highway as their attempt to stop the pipelines. Then, she emphasized that we need a major day of action. She suggested a day of action in October to shut down cashiers and coffee shops. Finally, she spoke of how she can see how climate change is affecting our oceans and our air, and how sick the trees are. She repeated the importance of saving the trees and spoke of this webinar as an event to bring communities together, pass the microphone around and see what we can do.

Kiana Alexander, of the Raven Institute began her contribution by reminding us of the fact that what is happening to the land is the same that is happening to people. She then moved on to talk about how disconnected we have become and how we are living our lives. According to Kiana, our identities and our cultures are interconnected with our ability to connect with the land. For her it is connectedness to each other that can provide the understanding needed for healing the world. She also felt a great sense of urgency and spoke of the Raven Speak Programme; a public forum for indigenous change-makers. For Kiana, pivotal to climate action is healing ourselves. This is integral to climate change from her perspective. She also thinks that climate action is an inevitable and deeply interconnected part of our reality. Therefore, it is important to deconstruct how things have been done previously, and to reinvent new ways of being the change. People in the movement need to remember to laugh, to play, and to connect.

Keith Cherry and Rebeccah Nelems from CTI and CFGS kept their moderation fairly minimal, yet Keith thanked the participants for all their amazing work, and described the kind of power, hope and optimism that this event had generated. For Keith, the Webinar served as a reminder of the fact that every issue is a climate issue. Every person, everywhere, whether in a faculty, union or church needs to be involved. Rebeccah closed the event by thanking all the participants, the audience, the organizers and the supporters of the event.

Youth Climate Change

Closing remarks

Echoing Keith’s sentiment regarding the Webinar and the inspirational contributions of the different participants, I would like to close this blog post with some reflections on the lessons young people are teaching us with their actions. No matter where I talk with youth, there seems to be a reoccurring theme of having a voice and prefiguring the change they wish to see in their societies. There seems to be a conviction regarding the fact that we can organize breaking hierarchies and at the same time there is a huge disconnect between what they are enacting and asking for, and what leaders from around the globe propose as solutions. I agree with Rose that it seems ironic that those people we are looking at to change the world are those who have been oppressed. I think the biggest lesson we can draw from this webinar, as far as university is concerned, is that we must innovate by listening to our students. We must actively refuse becoming obsolete by incorporating changes into our educational system which draw from the multiplicity of examples presented to us by youth, indigenous people and their allies. Together coalitions of demoi from across the planet are actively being the change they wish to see. Dialogues of reciprocal elucidation with them are urgent.

Do environmental refugees migrants have a greater right to safety and relocation?

By Sarah Grunert,  student at the Political Science Department at the University of Victoria

Do environmental refugees or migrants have a greater right to safety and relocation? The positivist would argue that because science can observe natural disasters and climate change that there is realistic necessity for groups to relocate due to accelerated environmental change. Despite persistent protest by some individual countries that climate change is a lie, the fact remains that science is saying otherwise. Science has proven the existence of increased drought prevalence, heightened soil acidity in farming regions, or rising sea levels near to coastal towns. These changes put certain populations of people at risk, especially in developing countries that may not have the resources to combat climate change. These are not social constructs or individual truths, but facts.

Let us not be mistaken: There can be facts proving the necessity for people to relocate due to war or poor quality of life that are collected with positivist methods. While it is grim, you can turn body counts into statistical evidence supporting refugee claims. However, there is always concern that individual states may be covering up that sort of evidence, particularly if there is state-involvement behind the reasons for emigration. Similar to denials of climate change, there can be denials of genocide and civil war.

Environmental migration also falls on a strange and fine line between economic (or voluntary) and forced migration. Arguments can easily be made from each side, both for and against environmental migration. On one hand, if environmental changes create such havoc that there is no realistic way for people to survive, then they could declare they were forced from their lands. But others may claim that environmental degradation made some careers impossible to sustain and therefore left to seek employment elsewhere, which could fall under the title of voluntary. There is also the hypothetical question of what if a population is forced from their nation or territory because other outsiders are taking over the land to survive on their own right? Creating a native of who is eligible for refugee claims may be made even more difficult by the fact that there is no singular person or group to blame. Everyone is in some way, shape or form party to climate change.

So we return to the initial question: If there is greater proof that there is reasoning for these immigrants to exist, should that not mean there is greater international support for and acceptance of them? Is it not a collective responsibility to support environmentally displaced people, when every country around the world could be blamed in some part for climate change? Creating a discourse that accepts the legitimacy of environmental refugees will likely prove easier said than done once, especially when you begin to take factors like resource supply and nationalism into account. Water wars are all hypothetical fun and games now, but blindly ignoring their potential is just ignorant.