While I had traveled to India previously on GEM business, it was my first experience in Hyderabad, which is in the process of building a new modern city miles from the traditional urban core. At the invitation of my friend Jagdeesh Puppala Rao, executive director of the Foundation for Ecological Security, a long-standing GEM partner working on sustainable rural livelihoods and landscapes in India, I participated last month in the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. This year the theme was “Sustaining Commons: Sustaining the Future” and was held in Hyderabad. Over 500 delegates were in attendance, with the keynoter being Nobel Prize winning economist, Elinor Ostrom. A stimulating event, here I attempt to share some emergent ideas I found interesting.
To begin with, the vivid sights, smells, and sounds of India always make a lasting impression. To give you an idea of the emphasis on modernity, our MindSpace Hotel was located amongst a burgeoning construction of highways and skyscrapers for information technology and other global commerce. The exuberance of human population pressure and the accelerated pace of earning a livelihood by each of the teeming masses is palpable in most Indian cities, and Hyderabad is no exception. Of course, the friendly courtesy, delicious cuisine, colorful saris worn by female construction workers carrying a basket of cement mud on their heads while stepping adroitly around sacred cows in traffic are just a few perceptions I bring home from India. The world’s largest democracy is abuzz with development, with an economic engine racing full throttle towards a seemingly Western notion of progress. Delegates at this conference—most of whom were citizens of India engaged professionally in natural resource management, education, small-is-beautiful economics, and many other areas of sustainability—define progress differently. They view progress as conserving and living within the limits of the planet’s life support systems. So do I.
The global commons such as air, oceans, and wilderness as well as virtual commons such as the Internet represent assets that transcend economic terms. Barry Commoner (what a great sir name), who was a professor of ecology and natural systems when I was in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1970s, US Presidential candidate and author of The Closing Circle, taught us that the world consists of many interconnected elements, including commons. I recall his insightful metaphor of a pyramid with the broad base representing ecological resources of the natural system, the smaller middle as the technology system where raw materials of nature are converted to other useful products and services as lifestyle amenities, and the smallest top of the pyramid as the economic system where all the products and services are traded globally. He would go on to say that a government system established the rules by which humans could interact with these three interconnected systems in a fair and equitable way. And he would add another layer to the metaphor—the ethosphere—or human ethics of responsible behavior in harmony with other humans, to all other life forms on the planet, and to the non-living elements as well. Finally, he would invert the pyramid so it was teetering on its point (the economic system), as ask rhetorically, “Is this sustainable?”
These images and messages from my old professor Barry Commoner were in my head as I attended the “Sustaining Commons: Sustaining the Future” conference deliberations. We can choose to stabilize the pyramid, giving most value to the life support systems at the base to conserve and protect Nature that ultimately sustains us all. We can choose not to operate “upside down” towards collapse toppling down into a heap of Industrial Age dust. Some delegates expressed that the economization of the commons is a threat to democracy, and that we urgently need to use an action verb, “commonizing” (not communism), is breaking down enclosures of minds to open access of communication and understanding worldwide. Happily, in my view more and more people are becoming aware that we have lots in common, shared fundamental values, and they are embracing behavioral change for real progress.
Happy memories of India and of Barry Commoner, Groundhog’s Day, Chinese New Year, Super Bowl Victory elating cheesheads universally, and upcoming 14th Birthday of my younger daughter (there must be something in common between all of these elements this February).
Commoningly?
Prof. Victor D. Phillips
GEM Director
GEM Education Center Blog 