7. The Commons as a Relational Organism

After a ten-year odyssey of exploring the commons in its countless permutations around the world, my colleague Silke Helfrich and I decided in 2016 it was time to make better sense of everything we had seen. To our shock, we came to realize that much of the existing literature didn’t do justice to our experiences. It’s not that the facts were wrong or missing; there had, in fact, been plenty of important empirical fieldwork. It’s just that, based on our experiences, the perspective was off. It seemed to focus more on “resource management” and economic productivity than on the rich social practices and cultural life of commons—the particular relationships, landscapes, history, traditions, personalities, and vibe. Silke and I came to realize that we were facing (burst of scary music)… an ontological and epistemological issue.

Ontology is the study of the nature of being—how we conceptualize the elements of reality and how they are fundamentally connected. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies how we can know something and by what logic. While Silke and I didn’t set out to explore the philosophical complexities of commons, we came to realize that the ontology and epistemology of modern capitalism—its concepts, vocabularies, and logics—are incapable of properly representing the lived experience of commoning.

As noted earlier, standard economics and modern life are focused on individuals and material things. They see humanity as separate from each other and from nature. They see the world as a kind of machine, not as an organic, integrated living system of interdependent organisms, often known as Gaia. We concluded that the modern, Enlightenment worldview is too reductionist to convey the unfolding, living process of commoning.

So, we set out to explain how aliveness in commons actually works. The book that we wrote, Free, Fair and Alive, addresses questions like: If a commons is all about relationality, how exactly do diverse personalities and priorities get aligned into coherent commons of shared purpose? How do important things get made in a commons? How is care given without the exchange of money? How do peer-driven systems of cooperation arise and sustain themselves?

Fortunately, we were able to stand on the shoulders of Elinor Ostrom and her pioneering design principles of successful commons. She had identified the need for clearly defined boundaries, for example, and self-created rules of governance. She realized that commoners must be able to participate in making their own rules and to monitor and enforce those rules. If there are disputes, a commons must have its own low-cost, rapid system for resolving them. And commons must have sufficient independence from state authorities.

And yet, while this approach to the commons is a huge improvement over standard economics, it still privileges economic rationality and material self-interest as the driving forces. Social practices, values, the inner lives of people, and political economy are generally treated as secondary. So, Silke and I decided to develop a relational framing that shows more clearly and deeply how commons actually work.

We found guidance in the work of Christopher Alexander, an unorthodox urban planner, architect, and philosopher, who had developed the idea of pattern languages. Alexander had observed that in his field, certain solutions to problems appear again and again across the grand sweep of history and cultures. He called these recurring solutions patterns. They are designs and behaviors that emerge and crystallize through social practice, from the bottom up. They appear as variations on a theme, and their general effectiveness is demonstrated by their repeated use, eventually manifesting as systemic patterns.

Applying the pattern language methodology, Silke and I identified several dozen relational patterns that we had observed in many, many commons. We grouped the patterns into three spheres—Social Life, Peer Governance, and Provisioning—which roughly correspond to the social, the institutional, and the economic. Together, these spheres constitute what we called the “Triad of Commoning.”

It is not as if all commons have all of the patterns we identified. But taken as a whole, the patterns of commoning in the Triad do help us answer the question, What social practices and ethical values help create and maintain successful relationships of commoning?

In the Social Life of a commons, for example, one important pattern is Cultivate Shared Purpose and Values. People need to share experiences and collectively reflect on their commoning if they are to remain a coherent, vital group. Without this practice, a commons falls apart.

A related pattern is Ritualize Togetherness. People have to meet with each other, share with each other, and celebrate their accomplishments and affinities as a group. It’s important for commoners to play and celebrate together. They need to organize rituals, traditions, and festivities.

The social life of a commons also requires that people Contribute Freely—to give without the expectation that they’ll directly or immediately get the same value back. The point is that, in a commons, reciprocity is indirect and delayed. Commons do deliver real benefits over time, but it is rarely an even-steven, direct reciprocity.

Peer Governance, another part of the Triad of Commoning, is all about seeing others as equals, and sharing the rights and duties of collective decision-making. With Peer Governance, you try to avoid hierarchies and centralized systems of power because they often contribute to the abuse of power and accountability problems.

Peer Governance requires, among other things, Sharing Knowledge Generously. This is a crucial way to generate collective wisdom. Knowledge grows when it is shared, but this can only happen if information is accessible and freely circulating. A related pattern is Honoring Transparency in a Sphere of Trust. Transparency can’t just be mandated or formally supplied. Real disclosure won’t happen unless people trust each other—enough that they will share difficult or embarrassing information.

One of the most important patterns of Peer Governance is Keep Commons and Commerce Distinct. Since markets and money can easily disrupt the stability and culture of a commons, it’s important to take affirmative steps to keep commerce at arm’s length. Once money is introduced into a community, it can create arguments over who should get it, how to spend it, and who should make the decisions. It’s therefore important to build internal “buffers” or procedures to prevent money from corrupting a culture of commoning.

Finally, Provisioning, the third sphere of commoning, consists of patterns that describe how commoners produce what they need. In a commons, production and consumption are not performed by different people, as in the market economy. Commoners use what they produce. A basic goal is to integrate one’s economic provisioning with the rest of one’s personal life. The point is not to produce to sell in the marketplace; indeed, commoners take special care to self-regulate their interactions with markets lest they become dependent on it or corrupted by money and market exchange. A top priority is to protect the integrity of their commons, that is, the shared wealth and the relationships.

One basic pattern of provisioning is Make And Use Together. Anyone who wants to participate and take responsibility can join. Everyone contributes according to their own capacities, talents, and needs. Coproducing is the core process of what might be called DIT—“Do It Together.” Other patterns of provisioning include Share The Risks Of Provisioning, Rely On Distributed Structures, and Creatively Adapt And Renew. (A full list of the patterns of commoning can be found on pages 217–218.)

What unite commons across their diverse “resource categories” is their underlying social dynamics. Commons governance helps to advance:

• a richer collective wisdom and a sense of consensual fairness;
• distributed power, so that teams can work independently in modular ways;
• social relationships of trust that create stability yet flexibility;
• rapid feedback loops that create higher quality, fresher knowledge;
• overlapping responsibilities and therefore greater resilience, so that disruptions are not catastrophic;
• easy and creative adaptation; and
• stewardship of value that is not priced and traded, thereby avoiding the habit of market economics to treat nature, care work, gift economies, and social cooperation as limitless and free.

Unlike economic theory, which sees human beings as rational materialists who want to maximize their material wealth, commons governance allows for a more spacious field of human development. In a commons, people have greater opportunities to develop a richer amplitude of human talents, ethical commitments, and relationships than economic theory allows. Seemingly improbable organizational forms such as open-source communities, Wikipedia, local land stewardship, committed care work, and other cooperative possibilities are revealed as entirely practical.

Once you begin to understand the patterns of commoning, once you begin to see how relationships are a fundamental reality of how life unfolds, a different worldview comes into focus. We call this shift of perspective—or more precisely, this shift of ontology and epistemology—the “OntoShift.” (It’s an OntoShift for the modern, Western mind; for Indigenous and traditional Peoples, a relational perspective is fairly self-evident and normal.)

Making an OntoShift is critical for truly seeing the commons. By the terms of standard economics, politics, and modern culture, commons are largely ineffective, irrational, and unworthy of serious attention. However, once a commons is seen primarily as a relational social system, a different field of vision comes into focus. It becomes easier to see that the most salient element of a commons isn’t its resources, but the living, creative agency of its participants and how they are organized. It becomes easier to recognize the power of symbiotic cooperation and the formative role of the landscape, history, traditions, and personalities.

Instead of approaching the world as a universal grid populated by isolated individuals and things, everything is revealed as interdependent. Interestingly, this is precisely what spiritual teachers, ecologists, Indigenous Peoples, and philosophers have declared throughout history. Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and philosopher, wrote, “Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.” Martin Buber’s classic of existential philosophy, I and Thou, asserts the deep relationality of living presence. Martin Luther King Jr., argued that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Pope Francis’s Laudato Si ‘ declared a vision of the common good that celebrates how our spiritual lives, the more-than-human world, and our common wealth are deeply intertwined.

Seeing the commons as a relational living system helps us see that our inner lives and social relations matter. Our sense of being, our connections with nature, our desire for belonging, fairness, and wholeness—these are not side stories in the grand narrative of political economy. In a commons, they are the main story. Developing right relationships not only opens the door to better commoning, it gives us new ways to relate to the earth as alive and nourishing. This approach, sometimes called the “new animism,” opens up a new space for seeing relationality as a core dimension of life. Authors like David Abram, Graham Harvey, Andreas Weber, Isabelle Stengers, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold focus on the intersubjectivity of lifeforms and how this insight can move us beyond modernity into a more integrated, grounded worldview about life. Instead of modernity’s distracting spectacles and miraculous technologies intermixed with social hierarchy, cruelty, and alienation, a relational epistemology can help us see the world as an interconnected living whole, one that actually generates meaning.

The Metaphysics of the Commons Is Relational

Once you understand and feel the relational mindset, it’s no longer possible to treat nature as a mute, vacant backdrop for human civilization. The anthropocentric worldview seems astonishingly narrow, and we can begin to see the world as “full of persons, only some of whom are human,” as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has put it. A growing constellation of thinkers in biology, botany, evolutionary science, ecology, anthropology, and cultural studies are confirming that relationality is a fundamental organizing principle of life.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis was the first to demonstrate the role of interdependent relations at the cellular level of life. In studying exchanges of bacteria and cells, she identified symbiosis as a propulsive, creative evolutionary force. Although her ideas were initially rejected in the late 1960s, the scientific mainstream eventually embraced them. It even gave them broader applications, including in the study of the earth itself as a living system, Gaia.

Symbiosis clearly lies at the heart of commoning. So does the concept of autopoiesis, an idea introduced in the 1970s by Chilean cognitive scientist and biophilosopher Francisco Varela, working with Humberto Maturana. Autopoiesis is the capacity of living systems to create and maintain themselves as a whole through interactions with other organisms and the environment. Again, interdependency is key. When organisms encounter other lifeforms, they often enter into a process of “reciprocal specification,” Varela argued. It’s no exaggeration to say that the sense of selfhood is shaped by multiple living beings as they interact and coexist within ecosystems.

The “self ” that organisms manifest as material beings is, in a sense, “empty,” because identity arises through reciprocal specification with many beings (as in “it takes a village to raise a child”). Life on Earth amounts to “a meshwork of selfless selves,” as Varela put it—meaning those selves exist only in and through other selves living together in “an ecology of selves.” Biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber, a former student of Varela’s, explains that human beings are not really autonomous individuals. We are “colonies” that many other microorganisms inhabit: “On top of our ten billion body cells, there are one hundred billion microbial cells that play a role in our metabolism.”

Clinical psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel takes this a step further by suggesting that our very sense of self is deeply entwined with our relationships with others and nature. Drawing on wisdom traditions of Indigenous cultures and contemplative practices, Siegel argues that human identity is not isolated and autonomous, but deeply “intraconnected” with the system as a whole. The individual self is integrated with the collective. This is the very point of the Indigenous Bantu term Ubuntu, which roughly translates to “I am because we are.”

It is a paradox of life itself that we humans are both highly differentiated and unique, but also profoundly integrated with, and shaped by, a web of other living beings. “Every being is so deeply rooted in others,” writes Weber, “that it is never identical with itself in the final analysis—its essence comprises far more what it is not.” Modern economics may imagine humans as autonomous individuals, but in a biological sense that idea is absurd.

For Weber, “science and economics are unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.” Those disciplines prefer mechanistic, cause-and-effect models of human functioning, models that privilege the individual over collective wholes, and models that elevate humanity over the rest of nature. But biological evidence increasingly suggests that life itself functions as a commons—an interrelational matrix involving all living beings. From cellular matter to plants and wildlife to human beings to ecosystems to Gaia, organisms participate in large, complicated cycles of commoning. Notwithstanding the conceits of the Enlightenment, humans are not the only beings with intelligence, adaptative creativity, and consciousness. Those capacities are shared across the spectrum of life.

Weber sees this insight as a way to reintegrate our understanding of life itself: “The idea of the commons provides a unifying principle that dissolves the supposed opposition between nature and society/culture,” he writes. “It cancels the separation of the ecological and the social,” and provides us with the means to reimagine the universe and our role in it. This perspective is finding expression in many recent works by anthropologists, biologists, and evolutionary scientists, and it surely helps account for the surging popular interest in Indigenous cultures. Biologist Merlin Sheldrake, in his best-selling book Entangled Life, explains how fungi sustain nearly all living systems. Other scientists like Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard are explaining how trees feel and communicate. Botanists are documenting how plants reveal a creative nonhuman intelligence in how they adapt to light, soil, predators, and allies. Plants and fungi actively cultivate their relationships with other living beings by developing distinctive tastes, nutritional qualities, scents, beauty, and psychedelic effects. One could say that the chemical and sensory traits of plants are biosemiotic forms through which plants interact with humans.

Thinking about the agency of fungi, trees, and plants requires us to think about how living beings in ecosystems engender a world of meaning. In his book How Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn explored how the Runa people of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador interact with the creatures of the rainforest. He boldly declares that forests literally think and create meaning, albeit not through representational language. Humans tend to conflate meaning with language, but all embodied creatures have ways to communicate meaning to each other and to the larger ecosystem. Jaguars, birds, dogs, and trees present a “self ” to other creatures, which, through a fugue of embodied forms and actions, communicates meaning.

“All beings, including those that are nonhuman, are constitutively semiotic,” writes Kohn. A jaguar, behaving as a fearsome predator, affects how we think about ourselves and live our lives. Living as we do in a meshwork of other living selves—birds, plants, predators, natural systems—we enter into dialogues with these forms, which in turn shape our consciousness and identities. Can we come to appreciate and respect other living entities on their own nonhuman terms? Can we humans accept that a relational ecology animates and shapes the earth as a living system?

These are central propositions of the Gaia theory of the Earth, as put forward by atmospheric scientist James Lovelock. He named the complex, self-regulating biophysical systems that sustain life on Earth after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia. For modern humans, the very idea of Gaia has provoked knotty philosophical problems because how does one begin to characterize a planet that is alive? As stated by philosopher Bruno Latour, how do we “speak about the earth without taking it to be an already composed whole, without adding to it a coherence that it lacks, and yet without deanimating it by representing the organisms [of Earth] as mere inert passengers on a physio-chemical system?”

Gaia theory is helpful because it asserts that the earth is alive by dint of its constitutive relationships. That insight also helps explain the importance of commons and symbiotic relations as stabilizing forces for an endangered Earth. The idea of Gaia helps us see the planet and life as always changing and alive. Lovelock’s late colleague Stephan Harding once noted that “boundaries [in nature] are not fixed and static, and they do not enclose fundamentally isolated individuals, as the mechanistic worldview would have it. Instead, boundaries are fluid, open, dynamic, and permit intelligent communication, not only between those sentient ‘persons’ (in the widest sense) that we call ‘species,’ but also between previously isolated aspects of our own psyches, such as science, art, politics, and philosophy.”

It’s fascinating to see how certain strands of thought in bio-physical sciences are aligning with ancient Indigenous understandings of nature that have long been marginalized. Books like Restoring the Kinship Worldview (Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez), Hospicing Modernity (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira), and Flourishing Kin (Yuria Celidwen) speak to a deep thirst for premodern and postmodern ways of knowing and being. For example, Indigenous Peoples generally see individuals as nested within a larger network of people; the very idea of the “self-made” person is somewhat ridiculous or even delusional. Similarly, the idea of private property tends to be nonsensical for them. Shared inheritances cannot be described as things, let alone property; they are entangled in social relationships with others. (I call this idea “relationalized property,” to be discussed in Chapter 10.) The idea of “sole and despotic dominion” over a resource, as Western law has come to think of property, denies our inescapable interdependence on nature and each other. Indigenous Peoples similarly tend to see their knowledge and landscape as embedded in a community of reciprocal care and sacred respect—something that modern industrial societies tend to patronize as archaic and backward. But the collapse of the climate, Peak Oil, and countless other environmental crises suggests the actual limits of free market individualism. Our ontological assumptions about our place in the world are incorrect.

That’s where commons can be helpful. They can help change how we see the world. We can begin to imagine ourselves as commoners with relationships with living beings in all directions. In this framework, the subjective experiences of an organism matter—because all organisms are “meaning-making” living systems. Life can be seen as an evolutionary process in which embodied subjects interact with their environment and other living organisms to create meaningful relationships. Subjectivity is not an illusion or mere bubble of ephemeral feelings in an empty universe. Rather, subjectivity is the centerpiece of a new “existential ecology” whose primary concern is subjects, not objects alone. Human beings are not isolated atoms adrift in a vast, indifferent universe, but, rather, deeply entangled with other lifeforms. The subjective and the objective, the individual and the collective, the rational and nonrational blur into each other—just as in a commons!

Weber, speaking as a scientist, calls his new evidence-based theory “biopoetics.” It is both a metaphysics and a biological theory that can explain “the deep relationship between felt experience and biological principles.” He argues that the “science of life” as traditionally studied is no longer an adequate methodology for understanding living things. Conventional science fails to address the realities of consciousness and subjectivity in living organisms; indeed, these topics have been more or less marginalized from the field of study. For Weber, biopoetics has the potential to provide “a new holistic account of biology as the interaction of subjects producing and providing meaning and hence laying the groundwork for understanding the meaningful cosmos of human imagination.”

The commons is central to this vision. Through commoning, we start to reintegrate ourselves with nature and with each other. Through patterns of commoning, we can enact a vision of the universe that honors our subjective identities and need for meaning as biological imperatives. We can do this by engaging in “the rituals and idiosyncrasies of mediating, cooperating, sanctioning, negotiating and agreeing, to the burdens and the joy of experienced reality,” says Weber. “It is here where the practice of the commons reveals itself as nothing less than the practice of life.” He calls for an “Enlivenment” as a kind of rebirth from the five-hundred-year-old Enlightenment.

While the emerging theories about relational life remain outside of the mainstream, to me they help explain the deep resonances that the commons have. Life yearns for the presence of life. Life seeks connection and enlivenment. Only life can give rise to more life. One reason that the commons paradigm has such visceral appeal is because it helps us see the world anew, and more profoundly, in its totality, its diversity, and deep interconnections. Cultural historian Thomas Berry put it well: “The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”