The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology

Foreword

Foreword Michael Egan Derek Wall’s The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology inaugurates a new series from the MIT Press. “History for a Sustainable Future” is predicated on the idea that scholars, publics, and policymakers need to be conscious of the historical contexts of contemporary environmental problems to understand their social, political, economic, and ecological contexts. Resolving local and global environmental quandaries requires careful thought and planning, and future success depends on a deep appreciation of the past. This is the point of the series: we can learn from past mistakes, but more important, solving the environmental crisis demands the best information available, and history provides valuable insights into the creation and proliferation of the environmental ills we hope to curb. Fittingly, the commons in history is a good departure point for this series for two reasons. First, the commons constitutes one of the oldest stories of human interaction with the physical environment. The collective use of land and extraction of resources has been engrained in human activities since before history was written down. Second, this story possesses critical contemporary relevance for helping us to move toward a more sustainable future. As Wall notes in his introduction to this book, understanding property rights is essential for xii Foreword understanding sustainability. How we use, share, close off, and open up the land and its resources offers insights into how we value the environment, the economy, and each other. And by applying an historical lens to how the commons have evolved over time and across space, Wall reads a method of engaging with the future. Wall examines the historical commons to determine what we can learn from the past and how we might use it to inform future deliberations. In so doing, Wall champions the commons but criticizes their enclosure. A commons is land that is set aside for public use and jointly owned and managed by its surrounding community. Use is the key word here. As Brian Donahue notes, “to have a real commons [is] something more than enjoying a park, in other words, more than tossing a frisbee on the town green”; it requires some means of “productive economic engagement.”1 By extension, enclosure (or the blocking of access to commons through the establishment of private property or legal restrictions imposed on some members of the public) constitutes another form of productive economic engagement , but it often comes at the expense of a broader public good. In this respect, when we talk about managing nature, we are talking about managing people, which introduces questions of power and the unequal distribution of access to resources. As Wall demonstrates, the commons has multiple personalities . In overlapping scenarios, it is a material space organized by a form of local self-governance, an economic abstraction that explores collective resource use, and a practical tool for resource management. More recent practices have also developed a creative commons, which expands the intellectual resources of the information age and can be applied to the production of new ideas, work, and things. As the futurist and technology activist Stewart Brand famously asserted, “Information wants to be free.”2 If blueprints, open-source software, and free and collaborative knowledge collection mark a new era for the Foreword xiii information age, then how might we reimagine a transformation of the physical commons by examining it historically? This question is complicated by the conflicting baggage that travels with the commons as an idea, as an ecological space, and as a management practice. According to its analysts, it is either preternaturally good or intrinsically bad. For its proponents , the commons engenders notions of economic equality, ecological responsibility, and social justice while it encourages community, support, and the collective production of goods. For its detractors, the commons are a naïve and outdated system of land management that fails to address the increasing demands for resources in a growth-driven economy and is wholly inconsistent with the four P’s of capitalism—property, productivity, profit, and progress. In a recent study on the“cosmopolitan commons,” Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis observe the ahistorical tension in this duality and the importance of situating the commons in time and place.3 This is what Wall does. Throughout The Commons in History ,Wall emphasizes that the commons are culturally designed and historically dynamic and that most commons are never put to the test on their own merits. Instead, they are typically enclosed...