Notes on the 20th Headwaters Conference

   
Annual Gunnison Conference is Incubator of Bioregional 'Outside-the-Box' Thinking

El Rito, CO. This past weekend (Friday-Sunday), Elaine and I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of attending the Twentieth Anniversary Annual Headwaters Conference at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. I guess I am considered one of the "Headwaters Elders." This is a group of "outside-the-box" thinkers that participated in the first gathering back in 1989, an event that was organized under the wisdom and grace of Professors George Sibley and Laura McCall. The "HW Elders" have been regulars of the event over the past two decades.   
   
I attended during the course of the first eight gatherings until 1999 when I migrated with my family to my current academic position in Seattle. That interlude allowed me to attend twice, in 2000 and 2007.
   
It is so, so good to be back, re-rooted as it were, in the Colorado Headwaters. In my case, those roots are in La Cuenca de la Culebra in the Headwaters of El Rio Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande). I live and work at our family's acequia farm in the San Luis Valley during the spring to fall irrigation season and was invited back to HW for the 20th annual meeting to deliver the Friday evening Keynote. Participating in this year's HW's conference was a big part of coming home. The theme was "Redefining Prosperity."
 
Organic bioregional intellectuals?   
  
The Headwaters gathering has shaped much of our work as "organic bioregional intellectuals." Bioregional because all of the Headwaters participants are people who live, work, and are committed to the ecological and socio-cultural wellbeing of our respective bioregions - the Colorado, Arkansas, Platte, and Rio Grande watersheds and their tributaries that slide, gurgling and burbling, east or west off the high peaks of the Continental Divide.
   
Organic in the sense that our intellectual or "knowledge work" revolves around our shared and distinct place-based experiences. The alterNative visions and intense exchanges shared at HW over the years helped sustain my spirit as I pursued a twenty-five year apprenticeship in the art and science of acequia farming. But I was a farmer without land until three years ago when my sister and I decided to establish the Acequia Institute on 200 acres of San Acacio bottom lands irrigated by La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis. I am now practicing what might be called "regenerative" and "resilient" mestizo agriculture.
   
If anything, HW colleagues have always challenged me to be clear about the heritage of acequia farmers and to avoid romanticizing what seems like an often difficult and always conflicted way of life because we are constantly threatened by subdivisions, the arrival of chain stores, genetically-engineered crops, the defection of too many of our youth to modernity and the city, and the lingering cumulative effects of enclosure of the commons and deforestation caused when Zachary Taylor, Jr. ravaged our watershed with stupifying levels of logging destruction between 1995 and 1999.
   
Indeed, I believe it was at HW V (1995) that I invited environmental activists from Earth First!, Greenpeace, and Ancient Forest Rescue to learn more about our struggles against logging in our Sangre de Cristo watershed. The eco-activists ended up staying for four years working with the local farmers and ranchers in opposition to the logging destruction of La Sierra Commons.
   
One of the activists decided to stay and lives in our acequiahood.  He has "gone local" and manages the county's cutting-edge biodiesel plant. I see Ben as a fellow organic bioregional intellectual nurtured by the good thoughts and thinkers that converge on Gunnison every year and radiate their knowledge of place and practice of progressive transformation across the Headwaters communities. None of my own work would have likely happened in the absence of a forum for  "encounters with new and edgy ideas" that is part of the synergy constantly unleashed at HW.
   
Over the decades, I have met with and collaborated with some of the most wondrously open and subversively creative minds in the country at HW: George and Laura of course but also Aaron Abeyta, Art Goodtimes, Patricia Limerick, Phil Crossley, Ed and Martha Quinn, Greg Cajete, Reyes Garcia, Joe Gallegos, and many others. Vandana Shiva graced us with this year's Saturday night keynote on "Earth Democracy."
   
I missed George Sibley who was absent for the first time in 20 years. He has retired from his faculty position at Western - although I have a hard time imagining that he is anything but retired from the task of helping communities build a more just and resilient future. We learned that he was in Wisconsin writing a book and other missives I am sure. He was said to be somewhere close to Aldo Leopold's cabin. A fitting reprieve for one half of our founding scholars, the other being the incomparable Laura McCall, one of the most dynamic and deep-thinking historians of the Intermountain West I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Laura provided a heartfelt twenty-year retrospective.
   
Vandana Shiva presented the Saturday night keynote. This was her first return to the Headwaters Bioregions since 1995 when I invited her to deliver a lecture on social justice at Colorado College and she came down afterward to San Luis to visit the village commons and the acequias.
   
I had last visited with Vandana at another pivotal moment in the history of our social movements for environmental justice and Earth Democracy - the infamous WTO blowout in Seattle (1999). I was at the time a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) and we collaborated and participated in a "No Patents on Life Campaign" meeting at the Presbyterian Church in downtown Seattle. It was interesting learning that Vandana and I have both found it necessary to shift to the regeneration of local place-based food systems by actually running our own agroecological farms.
     
Learning from Place-Based Colleagues
   
The annual HW gathering always presents provocative intellectual encounters and political challenges and this year was not an exception. I learned much at the gathering this year: From Jessica Young, an ecologist and passionate "bird lady," I learned that the historic range of the Gunnison Sage Grouse once included the San Luis Valley. This shy but fancily-clad ground-dweller was extirpated from our Valley around the 1950s.
   
Her inspired talk, based on more than thirty years of fiercely dedicated fieldwork in the Gunnison Valley, led me to suggest that we work together to re-introduce the "Gunny" Sage Grouse back to the San Luis Valley. Our acequia farm lands are already habitat for other threatened and endangered species including the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and the Yellow-Throated Warbler, both spotted by an ornithologist at Rancho Dos Acequias this summer.
   
I figure if we can grow the three sisters, a little hay, and then set the rest aside for habitat, then that is exactly what the ancient acequia system can accomplish: Farming in nature's image.
   
While Jessica overreached, in my mind, by blaming "agriculture in general" (including acequia farms) for the extirpation of the Gunny from the SLV, I suspect the principal culprits were center-pivot sprinkler agrifactories in the fields and, of course, the proliferation of roads after WW II; roads are considered the prime source of habitat fragmentation among the conservation biology community.
   
In the Rio Culebra, prior to the 1950s, we had no sprinklers or their leveled homogeneous landscapes. We only had our earthen-work leaky acequias that nourish riparian corridors and wetlands of native vegetation. In other words: we create riparian habitat; center-pivots destroy it as "non-beneficial evapotranspiration" and as a barrier to the smooth operation of these mechanical centipedes on wheels.
   
We had very few roads back then and 90 percent of the roads that exist in the San Luis Valley today were actually constructed after the 1940s as old aerial photography amply demonstrates. In other words, our farms have always been and largely remain habitat-friendly and our roads were few in between until the arrival of center-pivots and subdivision roads. I have a nagging suspicion that not all farmers are equally implicated in the extirpation of flora and fauna like the Gunny Grouse.
   
Regardless, I aim to help this passionate bird lady restore this lovely bird to its rightful place as a fellow denizen of the Culebra watershed. Indeed, bring on the Mexican Gray Wolf, the Mexican Spotted Owl, and other original inhabitants that are needed to make our homeland whole again.
   
There were some awkward moments, as always, and this time it came in the form of the misguided belief expressed by one of the panelists that corn is not very nutritious. Well, yes, nothing if eaten alone is very nutritious and reliance on a single crop is not going to sustain a people very long under the conditions of prosperity that we discussed and envisioned as an alternative to the dominant, money-fetish version.
   
But indigenous peoples, from Maya country in Central America to the desert Southwest, never just ate corn. That is a persisting nasty stereotype (the slash and burn monoculture corn milpas of imperial fantasies) and I couldn't let it pass without critical comment. The "three sisters" (corn, bean, and squash), especially when combined with a thousand wild edible and medicinal plants, fish, deer, elk, turkey, and other game, provided for a well-balanced and healthy diet. Indeed, according to the best available archaeological evidence, until the colonialist invasion and the coming of European disease like measles and smallpox, the average Mesoamerican lived a good ten years longer than the average European in 1519. We were not malnourished corn-eaters.
   
Aaron Abeyta shared a "Letter to Headwaters" that was a sobering reminder that we have a lot of work left to do before we can redefine prosperity. "We have never known prosperity in Antonito," he wrote, so how can we even begin to redefine it? I only partly agree with Aaron because I do think we have known prosperity in the Indo-Hispano part of the San Luis Valley: But this is the prosperity of conviviality, of the art and practice of dwelling in a place together through acts of sharing, cooperative labor, and mutual aid.
   
Every year I irrigate my row and field crops, usually in a solitary fashion. I may water the land alone but it is an activity based on the place-based knowledge of generations of farmers. Then the harvest comes and this is always the work of dozens of friends and neighbors.  This is my idea of prosperity: A bountiful harvest of local, slow, and deep foods produced by an entire community and friends from well across the Headwaters Bioregions.  Our prosperity is a bowl of hand-crafted, home-made chicos stew, kissed with the terrior or terruño of our land, and shared with friends and family. La comida.
   
So I close with a Twentieth Anniversary salute to Headwaters and best wishes to the new generation of dedicated place-lovers (topophiliacs) who have inherited the task of bringing the often curmudgenonly elders and the emerging generation of edge-thinkers together over the next two decades. Here is to Professors Brooke Moran and John Hausdoerffer, the new Headwaters crew that will continue this vital tradition and deep well of our intellectual prosperity.  Here is to Western's President, Jay Helman, surely one of the most visionary and progressive leaders of our Headwaters' institutions of higher learning. I look forward to having these three colleagues, and other Gunnison Valley friends, share in our conviviality next year when we restart the cycle of growing food from our nurturing lands. 

For more information on the Headwaters Conference, please click here.

La lucha por la sierra - Interjection

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel Prize in Economics  

El Rito, CO. Those of us who are concerned with the recovery and restoration of the "commons" as a matter of environmental justice were both surprised and delighted that our colleague, Professor Elinor Ostrom of the University of Indiana, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. 

This is an historic occasion. The obvious fact most pundits are mentioning in their comments on this year's Prize is that Dr. Ostrom is the first woman in the history of the Nobel to win in the Economics category. Downplayed by mainstream media (MSM) reporting are details on why the Professor won the most coveted honor granted to economists, also formerly known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

I was thoroughly taken aback by the timing of this announcement since last week's blog on the "Tragedy of the Commons" was written without my having had any personal knowledge of the Nobel Prize deliberations. This was sheer serendipity and my blog was simply the result of how Ostrom's work figures prominently as an influence in my own work on "The Last Commons," La sierra de la Culebra.

I went directly to the source, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (a.k.a. Nobel Prize Committee), to see why they deemed Professor Ostrom an appropriate choice for this award. Here are several excerpts from their analysis of Ostrom that places her contributions in the larger context of a longstanding and quite controversial debate in academic, governmental, and corporate policy-making circles: "The tragedy of the commons." 

More than forty years ago, the biologist Garrett Hardin (1968) observed that the overexploitation of common pools was rapidly increasing worldwide and provided the problem with a catchy and relevant title: "The Tragedy of the Commons."

....In economics, two primary solutions to the common-pool problem have been suggested. The first is privatization...An alternative solution...is to let the central government own the resource and levy a tax extraction. This solution initially requires coercion, in the sense that original users are disenfranchised...

A third solution - previously discarded by most economists - is to retain the resource as a common property and let the users create their own system of governance. In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), Elinor Ostrom objects to the presumption that common property governance necessarily implies a "tragedy." After summarizing much of the available evidence on the management of common pools, she finds that users themselves envisage rules and enforcement mechanisms that enable them to sustain tolerable outcomes. By contrast, governmentally imposed restrictions are often counterproductive because central authorities lack knowledge about local conditions and have insufficient legitimacy. Indeed, Ostrom points out many cases in which central government intervention has created more chaos than order.

As I read this I was struck by the similarities this language and vantage point shares with the last two blog entries of my ongoing series on "La lucha por la sierra." The local community, as I noted last week, is concerned about being "disenfranchised" by the federalization of La sierra, particularly when and if conservatives retake the White House and Congress.

What is truly significant here is that it now becomes more difficult for opponents of Chicana/o and Native American livelihood rights to use the same old tired and washed-out ideological argument about the "Tragedy of the Commons."

In my next blog in this series, I will outline the norms, rules, and practices that have underpinned the historical practices of commons governance. These are based on a critical reading of Ostrom's magnum opus and my own three-decades of knowledge of Mexican land grant history, law, and ecology. I will also discuss how this applies directly to the case of La sierra commons in Colorado. In subsequent blogs, I will propose a variety of strategies and policies that would support justice, resilience, sustainability, and democracy. I hope to initiate a wider conversation for a radical re-thinking of the management of the "public domain" that examines the prospects for the recovery and restoration of the commons as a "new paradigm" for ecological democracy.

The democratic experiment - and that is all it can be - involves in my estimation not just the two or four year election cycle and our vote-casting among ever more homogeneous options. Instead, democracy involves sustained daily lived experience in the practice of local place-based self-governance. This is the underlying principle that informs Ostrom's work.

Like Elinor Ostrom, I am a passionate proponent of place-based participatory democracy. The embracing of the ideas (and economic theories) underlying the struggle for the recovery and restoration of the commons is perhaps the most profound democratic challenge of the 21st century. I will examine these theories, and the critics' rejoinders, in forthcoming blogs.

For further information on the Nobel Prize in Economics and Elinor Ostrom, please visit: The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

La lucha por la sierra - Part II

Tragedy of the commons, or commoner's tragedy? 

Moderator's Note: As promised in the blog entry of August 30, the Environmental and Food Justice Blog continues to follow the unfolding story of the future of La sierra, the 80,000 acre commons restored to the heirs and successors of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant (issued 1843) by a 2002 Colorado Supreme Court decision in Lobato v. Taylor. 

On August 28 during a visit to San Luis, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced his intent to acquire, as new additions to the public lands, all the remaining private enclosures in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range in south central Colorado and north central New Mexico. This would include the "Cielo Vista Ranch" (formerly the Taylor Ranch) but to locals always known simply as "La sierra." 

This announcement has set off intense local discussions among community members and residents with a wide range of views converging on one common thread: The community fought too long and hard, sacrificed too much, and risked everything including families' acequia farms, in the struggle to restore historic use rights to the commons granted by the 1863 Beaubien deed and confirmed by the 2002 Supreme Court decision. Thus, many locals are skeptical that these restored rights to the Last Commons will be protected if the land becomes part of the federal public domain since it would be subject to the vagaries of partisan politics.

In today's entry, I am using the title, "Tragedy of the commons, or the commoner's tragedy," in deference to Michael Goldman who presented a paper with this title at the 1990 meetings of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), now the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). Please visit the IASC homepage at: International Association for the Study of the Commons.

An excellent bibliography of literature on the "tragedy of the commons," compiled by Charlotte Hess, is available at Hess Bibliography on the Tragedy of the Commons.


El Rito, CO. One of the arguments often made against the land rights claims of Chicana/o communities of the Rio Arriba is that we lack the necessary conservation ethics and scientific knowledge to be responsible "stewards" of our bioregional ecosystems and watersheds. I see this as an ideological expression of environmental racism or at best a racialized view of environmental history that serves to exclude "marked" peoples from exercising self-determination.

Indeed, some opponents of Chicana/o land grant claims, many of them self-professing "environmentalists," have for decades invoked the idea that we are "ignorant ecological thugs," and perfectly illustrate the "tragedy of the commons." Tom Wolf even wrote a book on Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains (1995, University of Colorado Press) in which he argues that in San Luis, Colorado, "Hispano cattlemen are more interested in poaching wildlife than minding their cattle."

I witnessed this very same argument in 1993 during the first of the many meetings of Governor Roy Romer's Sangre de Cristo Land Grant Commission. One of the members of the Commission, at the time the Director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife and a Chicano, argued that local people hoping to buy La Sierra to restore it to the community were unrealistic since it would result in the "tragedy of the commons."

What exactly is this tragedy of the commons? Why is it seemingly invoked anytime we seek to restore historic land rights on Spanish and Mexican land grants (mercedes) that have been unethically or illegally enclosed for conversion to the public domain (national forests, parks, wildlife areas, and range lands) or private mountain range estates for noveau land barons? 

In this somewhat more extended entry, I examine the theory of the "tragedy of the commons" and then argue that what we really have historically is a "tragedy of the commoner" displaced from the direct source of her right livelihood, cut-off from the material and spiritual basis of her lived experience, and prohibited from exercising her autonomy in the form of participation in the local governance of the homeland common. 

Tragedy of the commons... 

In 1966, Garrett Hardin published an essay in which he argued for a modern type of eugenics: He proposed the control of the breeding of "genetically-defective" people, which he viewed as crucial to the future of an Earth threatened by overpopulating hoards of little dark-skinned people. This was like De Gobineau meet Malthus. 

This is largely overlooked since the population biologist and "distinguished" professor is also credited with developing one of the most influential theories ever proposed in the history of American environmental thought: The tragedy of the commons. 

Hardin proposed this theory in a widely cited article published in 1968 in the journal Science. The population biologist basically proposed that natural resources were best managed under a regime of private property rights and under the guidance of keen scientific experts. See: Hardin, "The tragedy of the commons." 

The real tragedy as we will see is that Hardin mischaracterized the "commons." He defined it as a regime in which no one owns the resource and therefore the resource belongs to anyone who can extract and exploit it first. This, he argued, leads everyone to try to maximize their "take" of the resource since everyone else will also be rushing in to "get his first." This leads to the tragedy of the commons, or the over-exploitation and degradation of the environment.

For Hardin, the tragedy of the commons derived from the fact that selfish interest is a universal quality of the human being and this inevitably leads to environmental degradation because too many people competing for limited resources will eventually exceed the "carrying capacity" of the land. This led to the (in)famous tenet: "That which is owned by no one, will be abused by all." The actual quote is: "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." 

To illustrate this point, Hardin used a hypothetical scenario from medieval Europe and imagined a group of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons) on which they are entitled to graze their cows. In his example, all the herders have an innate desire to maximize the number of cows they graze on the commons in order to realize the most individual profit. 

This leads to a situation in which every herder overstocks the grazing range in order to realize maximum individual benefit, even if this means the resource will be depleted for all users. The inevitable result is uncontrolled consumption of the resource so that the herders come to exceed the carrying capacity of land and the commons is damaged. 

For Hardin, this tragedy was the result of individuals' greedy self-interested behaviors. There is no room in Hardin's world for altruism or cooperative and communal alternatives to individualistic utilitarian values, a point I will return to shortly.

It seems odd then that Hardin would choose to focus on individual self-interest as the solution to this tragedy. Hardin was a proponent of enlightened private property ownership of "natural resources." He believed that private owners would be more responsible stewards of the environment because it was in their own selfish long-term interests to protect the resources on their land so they could always profit from it. This is one of the original principles underlying the mainstream ideology of "sustainable development," but that is a story best left for another blog.

However, Hardin was not describing the commons as it has been known to and understood by historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Indeed as Ian Angus notes: "...Hardin didn't describe the behavior of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities - he described the behavior of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy.  The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behavior of corporations." See: Ian Angus, "The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons"

According to Hardin, these selfish but enlightened individuals would need help from scientific experts, presumably good old white guys like Dr. Hardin, who could provide guidance and direction on the proper management of the environment and on the basis of pure scientific objectivity (another myth).

I will note here that the author and environmentalist, Mr. Tom Wolf, was a proponent of this view when he championed Zachary Taylor's enclosure of La sierra commons as the best way to guarantee that the private owner in his infinite wisdom would use heroic "industrial forestry" experts and adopt the correct management policies to protect the mountain range from ecological destruction by Hispanic (sic) pasture poachers. 

Of course, the logging destruction unleashed by Mr. Taylor on la Sierra, between 1995 and 1999, involved a "world-class case of deforestation" (as per the views of the conservation biology community). This was conveniently obscured in Mr. Wolf's neoliberal charm tale of a heroic private owner battling the pasture and wildlife poaching commoners with the help of scientific and law enforcement experts from the state and private sector.

But back to Hardin. To this very day, his slight little journal article, and the theory it tragically propounded, is taught as the source of one of the most fundamental tenets of environmental science studies. It is almost held like a biblical belief in today's modern university because of the extent to which the theory is uncritically assumed to be truthful everywhere and for all time. 

There are no cultural or historical exceptions to the economic rationality underlying the theory and its assumption of selfish individualism as an immutable quality of human nature. Despite these obvious flaws, the theory has continued to shape the intellectual outlook of the past three generations of environmental scientists and students of environmental or ecosystem management.

Ian Angus, quoting anthropologist G. N. Appell, notes that Hardin's article "has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge."

Angus further states, "Like most sacred texts, 'The Tragedy of the Commons,' is more often cited than read...[and] although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science."  

...or, tragedy of the commoner? 

The real tragedy then is not that the commons is destroyed because of some universal and innate quality of human nature - selfishness. Instead the tragedy is that a culturally-specific (qua Eurocentric) individualistic ideology is imposed on all other cultures and places as the measure of their own true being. 

Of course, this presumption of universal selfishness denies the existence of non-European cultures with their own autonomous and often place-based economic rationalities that might better fit to sustaining community-based and democratically self-managed "watershed commonwealths," a term I have long preferred to use in reference to the commons appropriate to our Southern Rocky Mountain biome. 

In other words, not all cultures are wed to the reductionist behavioral economics of the individualistic greedy capitalist. 

Historians have demonstrated that the destruction of the commons resulted not from the actions of selfish and ignorant medieval commoners overusing everything that was "not owned" by any one. It came in the exploitative aftermath of the violent enclosure described by Marx as the "primitive accumulation" - which is to say, in the form of privatization or forcible conversion to the public domain wherein corporations could enjoy rights to log, mine, and otherwise exploit the resources of indigenous homeland commons.

The practice of "defining futures for others" is part of the everyday paradigm in the exercise of power by both private corporations and governments. In the context of governmental agencies or private owners that seek to define our collective "environmental futures," the myth of the tragedy of the commons needs to be challenged. It has been, actually, almost as long as the theory has been around. But the critique usually falls on deaf scientists' and bureaucrats' ears.

Decades of research by social and natural scientists, including anthropologists, paints a radically different picture of the commons. In short: the commons is the oldest form of land tenure on the planet. It is also the most "successful" form to organize "property relations" across various measures: 

(1) Social justice. It is the most likely to promote social justice and equity since it is based on local self-governance under indigenous norms that require participatory democracy in support of fulfilling needs of self-reliance and simplicity of wants. 

(2) Sustainability. It is the most ecologically sustainable since commons rules monitor and regulate use rights to prevent abuse, self-enrichment, and over-exploitation that violate the elegant principles of self-reliance and voluntary simplicity. 

(3) Resilience. It is the most environmentally and socially resilient form of ecosystem management since "nature" is not treated as a wilderness to be kept separate from humans nor as a "natural resource" to be exploited as a commodity; the environment is our home, it is an inhabited ecosystem that is the source of direct livelihoods guided by "original instructions" derived from multi-generational ecological knowledge of place. 

(4) Democracy. It is also the most democratic and the least violent form for the social organization of "livelihood" rights since compliance with the norms of commons use is based on face-to-face ethical "shaming" and expulsion is restricted to repeat violators of local community rules that are defined through participatory everyday practices.

All this suggests that the commons is "owned" by local place-based and multi-generational communities which collectively control use rights and administer sanctions to prevent abuse, self-enrichment, or other selfish activities deemed contrary to community norms that are primarily oriented toward the protection and conservation of the commons for future generations. 

In the Rio Arriba we have a folk tale that teaches this conservation ethic: "The Forest Spirit drove the man out of the forest for cutting too many trees as he was greedy and without shame." The power of verguenza is our "deep" ecology.

Studies of historical (instead of Hardin's imagined or fantastical) commons demonstrate that the typical arrangement involves a local community that does indeed manage the commons to prevent the tragedy of environmental degradation and exhaustion of the sources of direct livelihood. Indeed, one of the oldest commons in the European world is that of Torbel peasant villagers who have managed communal grazing lands for more than 900 years without impoverishing the land or depleting the natural resources. The state of biodiversity in their commons is superior to that of private enclosures or public lands.

The management of the commons is usually regulated by and restricted to the members of the local, place-based community. The historical commons is "owned" by the local community, so Hardin's assumption that the commons is owned by no one is mistaken.

So, why does this myth persist? Why is the tragedy of the commons repeatedly conjured, despite evidence to the contrary? The reasons are complex and do not require a resort to conspiracy theories. The myth persists because it serves the interests of those in government who wield public policy-making powers and are themselves often servants of corporate rather than public interests. This is partly an ideological problem.

Ideologies can be understood to constitute beliefs that are so generalized and taken for granted that they are assumed to be true and will be seen to remain true even in the face of evidence suggesting otherwise. This persistence of prejudice against the commons is like a case of the "Birthers" applied to the philosophy of property rights.


Despite the ideological nature of Hardin's tragically misconstrued theory of the commons, it remains the basis for denying the legitimacy and wisdom underlying Chicana/o and other Native American struggles to restore "traditional resource rights." The only thing I can call the invocation of the tragedy of the commons is that it is another misguided case of "neoliberal environmental ethics."

But the myth serves to reinforce a dominant institutional rationality in which corporate and governmental sectors privilege two forms of property: either private property or the public domain. In this manner, the erasure of common property as a Constitutionally-protected category accompanies the erasure of indigenous peoples displaced from their homeland commons to make way for either private property or the public domain.

It seems somewhat difficult to time this critique to the moment when the whole Nation seems fixated on celebrating Ken Burn's current documentary on the National Parks as the "best idea we ever had" as Americans. Perhaps it is, but it was also an idea that came on the heels of innumerable and violent land thefts unleashed by Manifest Destiny against the Native commonwealths.

The continued expropriation of Native land and water rights remains part of what our elected political leaders have defined as a public trust. And therein lies the real tragedy since the public domain technically belongs to all 350 million of us, including corporations and individuals.

Those numbers are a better recipe for a tragedy of the commons public domain than a few dozen Chicana/o herders. Regardless, the dangers of federalization of the commons are already illustrated by the sad state of our existing national parks and forests, which have suffered from decades of neoliberal neglect to follow on a hundred misguided years of "wilderness" preservation and "natural resource" exploitation.

The recovery and resurgence of the "historical" commons is a global phenomenon and is unfolding in the heart of the Culebra watershed, La sierra. The recovery of the commons defies us to question the wisdom of limiting human-environment relations to two mostly ethnocentric possibilities: Either the land is your private property to exploit as you so desire; Or, it is owned by the government which is best suited to manage it for the maximum benefit of society, however vaguely and tumultuously that might be defined in a partisan world where public lands are "wilderness" one moment and "exploitable natural resource" the next.

The recovery of the commons represents a third, even somewhat flawed, pathway to ecological democracy and the resilience of place in a globalized world. But it is an alternative not dissimilar to social movements for slow food, slow money, and workplace democracy (community-owned and democratically self-managed cooperatives and enterprises).

In the next blog, we will examine the actual rules for the granting, monitoring, and enforcing of common use rights. We will also examine how the local self-management of the commons has been challenged and transformed by the advent of global capitalism. This has often resulted in "defections" from the environmental ethics and use norms of the watershed commonwealth as local people sometimes become the very "free riders" that Hardin warned about in his misguided essay on the tragedy of the commons.


The tragedy lies in the displacement of the commoner who was torn from the place-bound fabric of her existence. Until we understand this meaning of the commons, it will be difficult to bridge the divide that separates proponents of the public domain from defenders of the watershed commonwealth.