Jonathan Rowe
My wife grew up in what western experts call, not without condescension, a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide and seek late into the evening while the parents chatted under the tree—or on a neighbor’s porch, which was another version of the same thing.
The tree was more than a quaint meeting place. It was a productive asset—an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids who ran and played and invented their own games. It provided a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the US today—an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents are close at hand. In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect.
Yet most western economists would regard the tree as a pathetic state of underdevelopment. They would urge “modernization,” by which they would mean cutting down the tree and making people pay money for what it provided. In their preferred version, people would stay at home and watch TV, play video games, or surf the web. Corporate-produced entertainment would displace local culture. There would be “enclosure” of the social commons, in other words. Something free and available to all would become commodities sold for a price.
The result would be “growth,” as economists understand that term. Money would be changing hands. Yet there also would be side effects: obesity, debt, environmental decay, the sex and violence of the commercial culture, a weakening of community bonds.
That’s the story of the commons, which is the part of life that lies outside both the market and the state. The commons is the hidden economy, everywhere present but rarely noticed. It provides the basic support systems of life—both ecological and social. Yet almost everywhere it is subject to degradation and abuse. The destruction of the commons has been the leitmotif in much that passes for “development.” It is the thread that connects many of the problems that beset the world today. The pollution of water and sky, the noise, sprawl, and breakdown of community, the cultural cesspool called “entertainment,” and the attempts to engineer and patent the genetic substrate of life itself—with these and many others the underlying issue is the same. It is the destruction of the commons in the cause of private gain.
READ the full article from the Summer 2001 issue of YES magazine