Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

With collaborators Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon has produced a gloriously eccentric and sumptuous folk history of land rights, enclosure and resistance among English commoners. Their book, 'Common People' (Watkins, 2025) features stunning historical paintings, etchings, and folk relics from local cultures of commoning, as well as contemporary...

By applying commoning practices in rural towns in the Italian Alps, Bianca Elzenbaumer, a community economies designer and cofounder of Brave New Alps, is catalyzing many new forms of rural development and ecosocial transformation. Working from a repurposed railway station in Vallagarina, the group relies on radical pedagogy, "feral approaches" to community economies, and lots of DIY making and or...

In his new book 'Ecocivilization', Jeremy Lent offers a bracing vision for how humanity can escape the destructive imperatives of capitalism and create ecologically centered societies that work for everyone. The book draws on dozens of real-world projects and social movements to describe what a stable, humane world would look like and what strategies can get us there. Chapters focus on significant...

Benjamin Mako Hill has spent years studying the distinctive social dynamics and governance structures of collaborative websites, from open source software (GNU/Linux), wikis (Wikipedia), collaborative filtering (Reddit) and a range of social media. A noted hacker, activist, and computer science professor at the University of Washington, Hill has come to see that digital commons go through developm...

Federico Savini, a professor in environmental planning at the University of Amsterdam, talks about the state of the degrowth movement today -- its priorities, challenges, and hotspots of possibility. As the author of the book 'Post-Growth Planning' and many essays on degrowth, Savini advocates many policy changes that could make agriculture, energy, transit, and social services more ecologically s...

For the past five years, Stéphanie Leyronas has been part of an internal team at the French Development Agency (AFD) exploring how it might pioneer new forms of development by supporting commoning in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Instead of promoting the linear "progress narrative" of capitalist markets and growth, AFD's efforts seek to strengthen social collaboration and shared benefits, drawi...

Lewis Hyde, a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic and poet, wrote two classic books on aspects of the commons -- 'The Gift,' in 1979, about the power of gift-exchange in forging and maintaining social reciprocity, and 'Common as Air,' in 2010, about creativity as a force nourished by cultural commons. In this episode, Hyde discusses the origins of his striking perspectives on creativity...

As the capitalist economy grows more expensive and predatory, Stephanie Rearick and her colleagues are building an alternative social economy that meets people’s needs through care and cooperation. As founder of the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and Dane County Timebank in Wisconsin, Rearick is a leading champion of mutual aid projects as a force for building the "real wealth" of communit...

At a time when the superstructures of modern civilization seem terminally messed up, the authors of 'Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human' argue that we must start a new conversation about the nature of being and modern myths of the self. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar, cultural studies scholar Michal Osterweil, and biologist Kriti Sharma draw on a diversity of sources – evo...

What might the world look like if capitalist growth and carbon emissions continue, and modern civilization collapses? Chris Smaje, a small farmer and writer in England, extrapolates from existing trends to sketch a vision of post-capitalist social economies. His new book, 'Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft,' envisions a world that is largely rural, decentralized, and groun...

As climate change and other crises makes the economy and everyday life more precarious, innovative forms of bioregional action are needed to respond to 'Gaia on the move," says Isabel Carlisle, founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in Devon, England. Carlisle describes the importance of building local ecological expertise, participation, and institutions to build community...

Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, is a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and decentralized technologies. Here, Rabble explains how network protocols are critical infrastructure for enabling -- or impeding -- commons and open markets, not to mention privacy, free speech, and community control. Their ambition is a future in which everyone has "access to authentic, private on...

Gustavo Salas describes the remarkable culture of commoning at Cecosesola, a federation of 30 rural and urban cooperatives in Venezuela that serves hundreds of thousands of people with fresh produce, healthcare, funerary services, and many other goods and services. Cecosesola's priority is to create spaces of trust, togetherness, and self-improvement for its 1,300 associates while meeting the ever...

Jack Kloppenburg has been a leading figure in the fight to protect seed-sharing commons over the past forty years. It's a struggle that began in the 1980s as large ag-biotech companies have sought to make seeds privately owned and proprietary using all sorts of legal, technological, and market restrictions. Kloppenburg has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison since 1985 and a f...

Tom Llewellyn, Executive Director of Shareable, describes the countless varieties of organized sharing that it supports through its journalism, organizing, and partnerships. In recent years, Shareable has helped amplify the work of mutual aid networks, expand the Libraries of Things concept, championed new forms of urban commoning, and develop new infrastructures of sharing. Its work on creative,...

What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? This episode hears from artists' collectives in three countries to learn how they organize their commoning practices. The three collectives are the "-" (dash) collective in Iran (with an artist who goes by the pseudonym "M" for political reasons); Papaya Kuir, a lesbo-transfemi...

Radio Kingston host and executive director Jimmy Buff interviews David Bollier about his new, updated and revised edition of 'Think Like a Commoner,' originally published in 2014. This popular introduction now includes material on the commons as a living, relational organism, bioregionalism and the relocalization of economies, governance of digital commons, legal hacks to support commons, and new...

Anthropologist Amber Huff, coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures at the University of Sussex in England, explains how popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, podcasts, and video, among others, can illuminate contemporary commons, enclosures, and the disorienting crises of capitalist modernity. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like, and how can subjective exper...

Pirate Care is a term used to describe creative, public acts that challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene to show compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people. Pirate Care also highlights how the state, markets, or patriarchal families have politicized particular types of care by declaring them unpatri...

Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous researcher in the Department of Psychology at University of California Berkeley, discusses how contemplative practices in Indigenous traditions can expand mindfulness, heartfulness, compassion, and planetary flourishing. Her new book, 'Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Well-Being,' argues that relationality lies at the heart of Indigenous cultures...

Zoe Gilbertson is a British fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up, literally. In an effort to curb the ecological harms of fast fashion, global supply chains, and relentless consumption of clothes, Gilbertson is figuring how fiber crops like hemp and flax could be grown bioregionally to produce textiles and, in the process, catalyze localized garment design,...

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and therefore an important incubator of just, regenerative, self-determined communities that move beyond the market/state paradigm. The traveling international exhibit, 'An Atlas of Commoning,' which he helped curate, and his course on 'Commoni...

Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, discusses the history of bioregional activism in Cascadia and current challenges and strategies. Cascadia consists of three watersheds in the Pacific Northwest extending from British Columbia to northern California. For more than 40 years, Cascadia activists have been in the vanguard of a larger...

Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in sociology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, has launched an ambitious international project to invent noncapitalist forms of land conservation. He calls it "convivial conservation." Instead of locking up land as wilderness or using it to make money through ecotourism and genetic patents, "convivial conservation" is about enabling humans to become int...

Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world. For the Global South, long victimized by colonialism and capitalist extraction, oases culture embodies an eco-friendly, alternative vision of development. For the industrial West, oases reveals the importance of...