8. Local, Vernacular, and Alive

Local landscapes were once powerful forces in their own right, shaping how people lived, farmed, traded, and made sense of the world. The land created people, and as people worked, they changed the land. Over time a shared identity and distinctive culture emerged. Again and again, people have made their patch of the earth feel like home: stable, familiar, well understood, enlivening.

Modernity and capitalist forces have largely shattered this historic pattern of life. Global commerce, air travel, technologies, and corporate imagery have homogenized once-distinctive places and cultures into interchangeable anywheres. Local traditions, foods, knowledge, and folkways have been eclipsed by branded Western foods, clothing, music, lifestyles, and technologies. Coca-Cola is sold in remote African villages. Fast fashion has marginalized Indonesian textile-weaving. Shopping malls in Bangkok are similar to ones in Doha, London, Kansas City, and Mexico City.

Now that the circuits of global commerce have become so powerful and pervasive, it may seem quixotic to attempt to defend and fortify the local. It’s difficult to preserve space for vernacular culture, and this has serious consequences. “The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth,” writes Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet and essayist. “This alignment destroys the commonwealth, that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community, and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”

How might we recover and renovate the local? This chapter surveys many brave, resourceful commons projects attempting to reclaim the local against the neocolonial designs of capital and nation-states. Each in its own way seeks to uphold different ways of knowing and being.

A big part of this challenge is recovering local ownership and use of land. This is not a defensive, aesthetic, or nostalgic project. It’s a forward-looking quest to build a new sort of sociopolitical culture. It’s about building appropriate-sized, accountable local commons as bulwarks against absentee investors, benighted politicians, and heedless bureaucracies. It’s about pioneering ecominded projects that the market/state ignores as insufficiently profitable. Above all, it’s about building a supportive space for our everyday lives.

Again, Wendell Berry: “Only the purpose of a coherent community, fully alive both in the world and in the minds of its members, can carry us beyond fragmentation, contradiction, and negativity, teaching us to preserve, not in opposition but in affirmation and affection, all things needful to make us glad to live.” He cites Alexander Pope’s advice: “Consult the genius of the place in all.”

Climate change and other ecocrises are making a return to the local inevitable. Global supply chains have become so long, complex, and fragile that even a small disruption of shipments of oil, food, semiconductors, or rare minerals can have far-reaching consequences around the globe. Since the frenzy of modern commerce is based on carbon fuels, the very metabolism of modern civilization is driving climate collapse. This is why the late, prophetic David Fleming, author of Lean Logic, predicted that “the political economies of the future will be essentially local. They will use locally generated energy and local land and materials, producing for local consumption and reusing their wastes. They will be managed—given life, competence, and resilience—by the people who live there, participants, in daily touch with the local detail.”

We urgently need a new vision of the local, and the commons has a lot to offer. Besides providing many practical economic and social models, the commons provides a much-needed imagination for orienting ourselves to a different future. Local commons can replace the fantasy of the global as a realm of limitless material extraction and infinite growth, without falling into the nostalgic, reactionary fantasy that the local is a haven of safety, morality, and order.

The Commonsverse rejects a local/global binary if only because modern economic life, technology, and culture are so deeply entangled at all geographic levels. Commoners are more concerned about developing a new type of postcapitalist economy grounded in bioregional realities—a transition that requires new types of democratic governance and equitable sharing of wealth. Securing common access and control of land is an essential place to start this journey.

Commoning Our Way to a Land Ethic

In his landmark 1949 book The Land Ethic, the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect   [Our land use] is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

From the start, Leopold’s quest for a conscientious “land ethic” ran up against three centuries of American political culture that treated land as a commodity. Waves of English and European business ventures, colonists, and slaveholders had encountered Indigenous communities living in respectful collaboration with natural systems. They violently converted this stable socioecological landscape into a grid of commercial properties as part of its larger mission of capitalist expansion.

John Locke conveniently provided a justification for commoditizing the New World, as we see in Chapter 10. His reasoning: Consider the land an open, unoccupied resource that’s free for the taking, and then contribute your labor to “develop” it. Voilà, it’s your property! Of course, he didn’t consider that the land was already inhabited by Indigenous people who saw no need to “improve” or privatize it. “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” is how the Indigenous Haida Peoples, among others, regard land.

As the harms caused by land enclosures have proliferated, most notably climate change, the challenge today is how we might reclaim and reinvent land as commons. How can Indigenous Peoples and African Americans, in particular, repossess land that had been illegally taken from them or their ancestors? How can the heirs to settlers, and those marginalized by capitalist landowners, decommodify land and steward it in more eco-minded, equitable ways?

Around the world, a number of movements are pursuing these goals through various means, as chronicled by the group Culture Hack in a 2022 report. In North America, the Land Back movement is trying to reclaim land taken during colonization as a form of reparations, and to restore biodiversity and Indigenous spiritual engagement with landscapes. The Comunalidad movement is pursuing a similar agenda in the Global South, particularly in Mexico, while the peasant group La Via Campesina has been leading the fight for “food sovereignty,” the idea that people should have the right to control production of the food they need, for both subsistence and cultural reasons.

For more than fifty years, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have been a powerful tool in North America and Europe for taking land off the market in perpetuity and managing it for community benefit. CLTs are democratically run, regionally based nonprofits that use their land to host affordable housing, sustainable agriculture, recreation, and village improvements. The basic goal is to make land more accessible and affordable to ordinary people over the long term, especially in areas where real estate speculation and gentrification are occurring.

Decommodifying land makes it economically feasible to use it for socially important purposes, which may be impossible under conventional markets. By insulating people from soaring land prices, CLTs can help preserve Main Street for locally owned businesses, improve substandard housing, and ensure that local farms can produce food for local people using good farming practices. CLTs have also been important vehicles for reparations to Black and Indigenous communities, and a way for them to rebuild wealth and capital stolen from them throughout American history. But there is still room for individual initiative: Farmers and housing residents who rely on CLT lands can own and improve buildings on the land and recover any increased value that results. But they can’t own the land itself or reap appreciated market value from it.

CLTs are often used as vehicles to help younger farmers and ranchers—who have more trouble affording high-priced land—to lease land. In the US, the Agrarian Trust organization, and in France, Terre de Liens, are converting privately owned farms into “agrarian commons”—land owned and managed by a community of farmers. Currently, there are over 225 CLTs operating in the United States. These provide between ten thousand and fifteen thousand homeownership units and close to twenty thousand rental units in the US.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is another commons-based approach to sharing in the benefits of farmland. In most CSAs, members buy upfront shares in the farm’s seasonal harvest and then pick up fresh produce as it is grown, week by week. This arrangement gives farmers working capital at the beginning of the season when they need it to buy seed and plant crops, while reducing their financial burden if the harvest is disappointing. For their part, CSA members usually get their food for below market prices and enjoy fresher, organic food in the bargain.

While CSA financing may seem like a business model, making money or competing with other farms is not really the point. The goal is for community members and farmers to help each other, and share the risks and benefits of local agriculture. There are nearly two thousand CSAs in the US alone and hundreds more worldwide.

Interestingly, CSA principles have been applied in other contexts to support localism. In western Massachusetts, Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares invites jazz fans to buy upfront subscriptions to a season of ten concerts. The group explains, “Our members purchase jazz shares to provide the capital needed to produce concerts with minimal institutional support…. By pooling resources, energy and know-how, members create an infrastructure that is able to bring world-class improvisers to our region.” There are also a number of community-supported fisheries, such as Cape Anne Fresh Catch, based in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Other commons-based models are helping to decommodify land and make its benefits more widely available to ordinary people. Community-owned forests are a way that people in a region can manage large tracts of land for community benefit, instead of ceding the land for commercial profit. While community forests often vary in size and purpose, they tend to prioritize hiking and riding trails or sustainable lumber, with community oversight of their operations.

Remarkably, the conservation movement is slowly moving into postcapitalist forms of land conservation. Historically, many conservationists have insisted on the sanctity of private property, business, and profit-making while at the same time trying to compensate for industry’s ruinous ecological impacts. There are two general approaches: a “fortress protection” approach that cordons off nature from all human activity, and a market-based approach that blends capitalist development and conservation, a strategy that has been called “selling nature to save it.” Examples of the latter include ecotourism, hunting preserves, and commercial harvesting of plant genes.

But what if humanity were to begin to see itself as an integral, everyday participant in nature, and not as a force separate and distinct from it? The real problem is not people as such, or the scarcity of wilderness zones. It’s capitalist-driven extraction of nature and pollution. Can the conservation movement begin to address that in serious ways?

That is the idea behind “convivial conservation,” as outlined by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher in their book The Conservation Revolution. Wilderness zones may be set apart from industrialized society, but they don’t address the core problem of capitalist “development” and growth, the authors write. Nor do conservation zones restore land to some aboriginal, pristine state. That’s a modernist fantasy. Throughout history, humans have in fact lived in symbiotic, noncapitalist, and nondualist relationships with the land. Living as commoners, one might say. Büscher and Fletcher envision a new type of land conservation based on “long-lasting, engaging, open-ended relationships with nonhumans and ecologies,” without market exploitation of land. For this to occur, they propose a “conservation basic income” and greater “democratic management of nature” that focuses on “nature-as-commons and nature-in-context rather than nature-as-capital.”

Aldo Leopold got so much right in The Land Ethic. Now, as seventy-five years ago, it’s imperative that we “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land . . .[and change] the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Vernacular Culture and the Commons

Commons have so much to contribute to relocalization because they can empower people to show care, creativity, and responsibility in their immediate circumstances. Commons invite people to initiate and organize things in sync with local traditions, values, history, and landscape. The shared sense of place and identity is a stabilizing force.

It’s important to see the projects of the Commonsverse as more vernacular in character than political or ideological. They are deeply human and everyday, not legal, formal, or institutional. The term “vernacular” was given a special meaning by social critic Ivan Illich in his 1981 book Shadow Work. As a critic of dehumanizing institutions such as schools and health care, Illich saw vernacular spaces as informal cultural zones where people naturally develop their own practical solutions. Grounding social practices in everyday realities helps make them more trustworthy.

The vernacular flourishes in the realms of householding and subsistence, and in family life and child rearing. It lives in the shared community spaces in which people try to express their collective values and interests, over and above those of the state, political parties, the corporation, and other institutional powers. As one of Illich’s students, Trent Schroyer, put it, the vernacular realm evokes a “sensibility and rootedness… in which local life has been conducted throughout most of history and even today in a significant proportion of subsistence- and communitarian-oriented communities.” The vernacular is enacted in “places and spaces where people are struggling to achieve regeneration and social restoration against the forces of economic globalization. To be sure, the local can be a site of patriarchy, racism, and parochial attitudes, which is why local commons should in no way aspire to be insular, but rather open-minded and translocal in perspective.

Throughout history, the vernacular has been the site for a certain timelessness and mystery, as seen in folk wisdom (“the wisdom of the crowd”), traditions, community festivals, sacred landscapes, communion with nature, artistic expression, the magical, and the ineffable. This makes perfect sense; human existence is a mystery. The voluntary convergence of people that commoning seeks to orchestrate is even more mysterious. What a marvel that people can at once be individuated, connected to each other, and connected to a larger, integrated whole—with everything “in a constant state of mutual becoming,” as scholar Margaret Stout puts it, “in dynamic engagement with the whole.”

It’s not a big stretch to find the religious in this mix. According to Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr, “Whatever reconnects (religio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God, whether we will call it that or not.” This doesn’t mean that people coming together to pursue shared purpose are necessarily religious in any conventional sense. But the vernacular life of a commons calls forth some deep energies and yearnings, and tries to give them durable institutional expression in everyday local settings. The vernacular is not the same as the commons, but all commons are certainly rooted in the vernacular.

What do those types of structures look like? There is no definitive taxonomy, but there are lots of fascinating examples and approaches.

A New Vision of Local Development

When the structures of conventional governance are exposed as weak and ineffectual, there is no substitute for ordinary people acting collectively. That impulse lies at the heart of commons-based local development. It reminds me of an airline pilot who, days after the 9/11 attacks, came on the intercom to inform passengers:

As recounted by journalist David Remnick, passengers “were asked to turn to their neighbors on either side and introduce themselves, and to tell one another something about themselves and their families. ‘For today, we consider you family,’ they were told. ‘We will treat you as such and ask that you do the same with us.’ ”

Local commoning amounts to a similar response to the capitalist polycrisis. We the people are a multitude, and there are relatively few oligarchs, rich investors, and corporations. The market/state system is too compromised and ineffectual to entertain a transformation, and indeed, it is intent on annexing local commons into global circuits of capitalism. This power remains deeply entrenched, often supported by the state. That’s why relocalization through commoning is such a necessity. Only individual initiative and collective commitments can imagine and enact a new order. Fortunately, this is already happening.

Alternative local currencies such as the BerkShares, as mentioned earlier, are helping to recirculate the wealth created in a community rather than let it be captured by the financial industry.

Mutual credit and timebanking systems are enabling marginalized communities to meet their needs despite a lack of the national currency. People can use their own neighborhood currency, or “credit vouchers,” to exchange goods and services with each other in a kind of bounded, shared economyc

Various food sovereignty movements like permaculture, agroecology, and Slow Food are relocalizing farming and food distribution and developing regenerative ecological practices. Various regional projects are reinventing food supply chains from farm to table. Food Commons Fresno in California is using a series of trust structures to capture surpluses to benefit the community, not investors, so that farms can grow higher quality food, improve wages for workers, and mutualize gains for everyone.

Community charters, or “charters for commoning,” are often used by neighborhoods, towns, or entire cities to declare a positive long-term vision and stimulate action on specific problems that local governments are overriding or ignoring. Many towns have used the charters to object to natural gas fracking, for example, and to call for better management of garbage and noise pollution.

Homegrown “repair cafes” bring together volunteer tech experts with people who have broken appliances and electronics. “Freecycle” and “upcycle” projects allow people to give used bicycles, clothing, and household goods to people who need them.

Solar Commons projects in Minnesota and Arizona are using revenue streams from solar energy arrays to build community wealth. The projects, managed as community trusts, bring together landowners, community nonprofits, a teaching farm for women, immigrant farmers, low-income neighborhoods, and Native American tribes.

Urban Commons

A number of venturesome cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Seoul, Bologna, and dozens of smaller cities, mostly in Europe, are actively experimenting with new types of collaborative governance and peer provisioning. They realize that ordinary people have a lot to contribute to their neighborhoods, but they generally don’t have the enabling structures (and sometimes, legal authority) to make commoning easier. At this point, there is no formal template for urban commons, but there are many fascinating bottom-up initiatives that suggest their potential, especially if augmented by commons/public partnerships (discussed in Chapter 11).

When Barcelona En Comú, a housing activist movement and political party, helped Ada Colau win the mayor’s office in 2015, it set out to create a “commons collaborative economy” in the city. Since then, the city has set a global standard for experimental city/commons work, such as city-assisted childcare commons. It has defended public spaces against commercial encroachment, created thousands of units of social housing, and brought open-source participation and transparency to city administration. It has also supported Guifi.net, the homegrown, commons-managed WiFi system that provides better broadband service at lower prices to more than thirty-six thousand internet access subscribers. The city has also supported Som Energia Coop, Catalonia’s first renewable energy cooperative.

LabGov, or the Laboratory for the Governance of the City as a Commons, is a project that originated in Italy to help city governments formally partner with citizen groups to create urban commons, such as kindergartens run by parents and urban agricultural coops. LabGov’s first project, in Bologna, gave rise to the “Co-City Protocol,” which outlines how to treat cities as “an infrastructure enabling cooperation, sharing, and participatory decisions to peer production, supported by open date and guided by principles of distributive justice.”

Most urban commons arise autonomously from the grit and determination of commoners, however, without government support. One of the most famous examples is the community gardens that New Yorkers created in the 1980s. Dozens of gardens were created by self-styled “green guerillas” who took over abandoned, rubble-strewn lots and made them beautiful. “We cut fences open with wire cutters and took sledgehammers to sidewalks to plant trees,” said one early activist. “It was a reaction to government apathy.” With similar bottom-up bravado, the citizen-led City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, took over the streets to help residents beautify their neighborhoods through “intersection painting.” They later moved on to build housing for the homeless and teach urban permaculture, sometimes with the assistance of city agencies.

In Germany, Mietshäuser Syndikat has grown into an impressive federation of 177 residential real estate projects peer-managed by residents. Thousands of commoners collectively own all of the buildings together while paying an affordable monthly (nonmarket)“rent” to themselves to cover maintenance costs and keep the federated system going. Because there are high legal barriers to prevent the collectively owned buildings from being sold, residents mostly avoid the risk of rising rents and possible eviction that would occur in market-traded buildings. A portion of everyone’s “rent” payment goes into a “pay it forward” fund that helps the federation acquire still more buildings.

In many cities, makerspaces and Fab Labs have become commons-based incubators for a creative new type of tech localism. These are open work spaces filled with experienced tech experts and various machines for crafting artworks, electronics, and flights of the imagination. The guiding ethic of these spaces is “think it, make it, share it.” They are rare places where anyone can tinker, invent, and learn from each other in informal, convivial ways. In practice, Fab Labs also encourage people to use technologies and their imaginations to address local problems.

Mutual aid networks are another underrecognized urban commons. Mutual aid systems take many forms, some dedicated to providing social services, others to emergencies, and still others to providing health care and life insurance. When Covid-19 paralyzed so much of the world, volunteer mutual aid in local settings often arose spontaneously to help the elderly, the sick, and shut-ins get their groceries, medicines, and social services.

The point of most local commons is to harness people’s natural desire to help build a better neighborhood, town, or city to inhabit. But people often need structures and assistance to enter into this process. They need focus and support to develop new ways of living. I like to think that Ecuador and Bolivia help move this process along through their ethic of buen vivir—“good living.” The term points to a worldview beyond rational instrumentalism and market norms. Buen vivir honors a vision of human development based on social reciprocity, respect for natural ecosystems, community autonomy, and a cosmic morality.

There is much more that could be said about commoning and local development because there is so much going on. A movement for bioregional economics and culture that once flourished in the 1970s is now resurgent, enlarging the ambitions of localism and commoning through practical projects. Bioregionalism is a natural extension of commons because it is all about the relationality of various life systems—water, soil, flora, fauna, weather, and so forth—that shape a defined geographic area. Activist-educators with a keen interest in the commons, such as Earth Regenerators (international), the Bioregional Learning Centre UK (Totnes, England), and All Together Now Pennsylvania (Philadelphia region), are helping people learn to “think bioregionally” and initiate new types of regional self-reliance and security.

The Social and Solidarity Economy has been doing similar relocalization work by building regional cooperatives and supply chains. Its goal is to develop durable noncapitalist economic structures to meet people’s needs affordably. Meanwhile, in dozens of towns, the Transition movement, in anticipation of Peak Oil and climate change disruptions, is pioneering community sufficiency through care networks, repair cafes, “free stores,” and local currencies. More broadly, many seasoned organizations are promoting local transformation through their work: Local Futures (founded by Helena Norberg-Hodge), the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (cofounded and directed by Susan Witt), the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (directed by Stacy Mitchell), and the Institute for Social Ecology (inspired by the late activist-scholar Murray Bookchin).

Decades ago, E. F. Schumacher, the celebrated author of Small Is Beautiful, once warned, “Somehow we have lost touch with one of the fundamentals, namely, what is the proper scale of things?” His contemporary, the ecological visionary Thomas Berry, offered his own warning: “It’s time for us to wake up and realize that our regional identity is the most important survival issue of our time.”