As school districts across the country continue to deal with the effects of Covid-19, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is here to help! Below are some suggested uses of our resources that can assist districts/schools with teacher shortages and/or students who may need to learn from home. As a reminder, ALL of our resources are free to use and adapt for home or classroom use, in Florida and beyond.
Please share! Questions? Contact us at any time!
What goes into a blog post? Helpful, industry-specific content that: 1) gives readers a useful takeaway, and 2) shows you’re an industry expert.
Use your company’s blog posts to opine on current industry topics, humanize your company, and show how your products and services can help people.
The post Blog Post Title appeared first on Dr. Sarah Shugars.
An Essay Addressing Philosophers, Parents, Teachers, and Educational Policymakers
It takes a village. Raising children takes all hands on deck, including parents or guardians, teachers, administrators, and educational policymakers. This paper examines common philosophical norms relevant to each of these groups. The norms include the idea of wanting a better future for our children than we had; the idea that human beings are rational animals; and that the unexamined life is not worth living. What does that mean for parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers when our children are intellectually or communicatively impaired?
WARNING: At least for me, rereading this paper inspired an emotional response. The stoicism called for in the paper is intended to help ease emotional reactions, but the fact of such a need for some readers (and others have let me know that they have shared such a reaction) is itself worth noting in advance.
Download the paper here.
We think of the norms I have mentioned as cultural. Philosopher John Dewey saw philosophy as the critique of culture, essentially as thinking about thinking. How we think plays a powerful role in how we treat people and how we educate ourselves and others. In this context, this paper examines one of the difficult contexts for education and the raising of children. And, I offer my own and my family’s experience for consideration, bringing philosophical ideas to bear on tough moments, decisions, and questions.
I first presented a draft of this essay at the annual meeting of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in January of 2019. It has just now been published in Disability and American Philosophies, edited by Nate Whelan-Jackson and Daniel J. Brunson in January of 2022 with Routledge Press of London.
It may be worth noting that in 2019 I was still married, something no longer true now, in 2022, when the essay has finally been released in print.
I agreed to publish this article with the understanding that I would have permission to share the essay in this way. You can download a copy of the essay in PDF format here or by clicking on the Adobe image above in this post.
Last, but not least, I have generated a computer-created text-to-speech recording of the essay. If I had more time, I would record myself reading the essay. The following recording took me only a few minutes to generate, by contrast to over an hour or more of work to record it myself. For the sake of accessibility, and at a friend’s request, I generated this audio file, which can be listed to if that is preferred over reading the text. I did not include the notes or bibliography section in the audio file.
Citation: Weber, Eric Thomas, “Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a Child with Disabilities: An Essay Addressing Philosophers, Parents, Teachers, and Educational Policymakers,” Chapter 11 in Disability and American Philosophies, Edited by Nate Whelan-Jackson and Daniel J. Brunson (London: Routledge, 2022), 182-198.
The post Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a Child with Disabilities first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.Thin stands of bare-limbed maples and pines Barely hide cinder-block buildings and signs, But snow, fresh snow, wet snow: snow drapes all. Each twig or needle bears as many crystals As could possibly be piled upon it, Becoming a slender line under white, Each just a tiny part of the lacy whole. Trees are huge versions of their own branches; Branches, like their own ornamented twigs; Drifts, composed of delicate, gem-like flakes. No shortcuts. No “Paint that whole section white.” Even in the densest thickets, each branch Is intricately decorated with snow. What superfluous generosity, What quiet power. The road, too, is hushed. Cars file through, wheels whispering, as if Reminded of what they have done, although The storm does not mean to chide or console. It is not meant for us; it simply is.
See also: More Temperate; Tangled Beauty; and “Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall”
In linguistics, a language is a whole system of communication used by a group, encompassing its semantics, grammar, and pragmatics. A dialect is a particular form of a language typical of a specific region. A sociolect is like a dialect, except that it is used by a dispersed social group, such as a profession or a class. A register is a form of a language used in a particular situation or context, such as by lawyers in court. And an idiolect is the distinctive way that an individual speaks: that person’s active vocabulary, grammar, accent, and preferred forms and style of speech.
Previous authors have used these distinctions from linguistics to inform models of culture. Language offers a useful model or example for understanding culture because we are familiar with explicit efforts to learn second languages, to list components of a given language in a dictionary, and to invent a writing system to represent a language (Goodenough 1981, p. 3; Goodenough 2003). I am especially interested in the aspects of culture that involve value-judgments: ethics, politics, aesthetics and religion.
I believe the following ten points from linguistics are relevant to thinking about culture (in general) and specifically about values:
The point of this list is to suggest some similarities with other aspects of culture. Like a language, another part of a culture can be modeled as a shared network of components (e.g., beliefs, values, or practices) as they are used by people who are organized in social networks, which reflect power.
Such a model is a radical simplification, because each individual holds a distinctive and evolving set of components and connections (e.g., linked moral values); but simplifications are useful. And we can model culture usefully at multiple levels, from the individual to a vast nation.
There are precedents for this kind of analysis. The anthropologist Ward Hunt Goodenough encountered the concept of idiolects in the 1940s, while studying for a doctorate in anthropology (Goodenough 2003). By 1962, he had postulated the idea of “each individual’s private culture, if we may call it that, [which] includes his conception of several wholly or partially distinct cultures (some well elaborated and others only crudely developed in his mind) which he attributes to others individually and collectively, both within and without his community. A person’s private culture is likely to include knowledge of more than one language, more than one system of etiquette, more than one set of beliefs, more than one hierarchy of choices, and more than one set of principles for getting things done” (Goodenough, 1963, 261)
Later, Goodenough named a private culture a “propriospect” from the Latin words for “private” and “view” (Goodenough 1981, p. 98). Harry Wolcott summarizes: “Propriospects … are networks of sense-making connections created and constantly being reformulated by each of us out of direct experience. As we develop and refine our competencies, simultaneously we ‘construct” (and continually ‘re-model’) our individual propriospects” (Wolcott 1991, p. 267).
Individuals may actually share fundamental characteristics of a group, they may perceive themselves to share those characteristics, and they may be viewed by others as sharing them–but these perceptions do not necessarily align, because every group encompasses diverse propriospects. For instance, you might think that believing in God is essential to a culture; and since you believe in God, you are part of that culture; but someone else may define the culture differently and view you as an outsider.
In a review of Goodenough, Mac Marshall (1982) wrote, “While some may disagree with the finer points of his argument, his position on these matters represents the dominant orientation in American anthropology today.”
A different precedent derives from the Polish tradition of humanistic sociology, founded by Florian Znaniecki in the early 1900s. In the 1980s, a Polish sociologist named Marek Ziolkowski (later a distinguished diplomat) wrote interestingly about “idio-epistemes” (presumably from the Greek words for “private” and “knowledge”) meaning “not only … the cognitive content of an individual’s consciousness at a given moment, but … the whole potential content that can be activated by the individual at any moment, used for definite action, and reproduced introspectively.”
Ziolkowski called on sociologists to “enquire into the social regularities in the formation of idio-epistemes, seek relationships among them, establish basic intragroup similarities an intergroup differences.” He acknowledge that any individual will have a unique mentality, “yet every individual shares an overwhelming majority of opinions and items of information with other definite individuals and/or groups.” Those similarities arise because of shared environments and deliberate mutual influence. Ziolkowski coined the word “socio-episteme” for those aspects of an idio-episteme that are shared with other individuals. As he noted, these distinctions were inspired by concepts from linguistics.
Even earlier, in 1951, the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig had coined the word “idioverse” for an individual’s universe of events” (Rosenzweig 1951, p. 301).
An analogous move is Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s influential redefinition of “religion” from a bounded system of beliefs (each of which contradicts all other religions in some key respects) to a “cumulative tradition” of thought and behavior that varies internally and overlaps with other traditions (Smith 1962). According to this model, everyone has a unique religion, although shared traditions are important.
These coinages–idioverse, propriospect, idio-episteme, and cumulative tradition–capture ideas that I would endorse, and they reflect research, respectively, in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. However, none of the vocabulary has really caught on. There may still be room for a new entrant, and I would like to emphasize the network structure of culture more than the previous words have done. Thus I tentatively suggest idiodictuon, from the classical Greek words for “private” and “net” (as in a fishing net–but modern Greek uses a derivation to mean a network). An individual has an idiodictuon, a group has a phylodictuon, and a whole people shares a demodictuon.
These words are unlikely to stick any better than their predecessors, but if they did, it would reflect their diffusion through a social network plus their utility when added to people’s existing networks of ideas. That is how all ideas propagate, or so I would argue.
A final point: “culture” encompasses an enormous range of components, including words, values, beliefs, habits, desires, and many more. Given this range, it is useful to carve out narrower domains for study. Language is one. I am especially interested in the domain of values, so I would focus on the interconnections among the values that people hold.
Note, however, that there is no neat way to distinguish values from other aspects of culture, such as desires and urges or beliefs about nature. In his influential empirical theory of moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt identifies at least five “Moral Foundations,” one of which is “sanctity/degradation.” I would have treated this category as a powerful human motivation, akin to sexual desire or violence, but not as a moral category, parallel to “care/harm.” Maybe Haidt is right, or maybe I am, but the evidence isn’t empirical. People actually see all kinds of things as the basis for action and make all kinds of connections among the things they believe. They may link a moral judgment to a metaphysical belief, or a personal aversion, or an aspect of their identity, or a belief about prevailing norms. When we carve out an area for study and call it something like “morality” or “ethics” (or “religion,” or “politics”) we are making our own claims about how that domain should be defined. Such claims require philosophical arguments, not data.
So the steps are: (1) define a domain, a priori, (2) collect a corpus of material relevant to that domain, (3) map it as a network of ideas, and (4) map the human relationships among people who hold different idiodictuons.
For me, the ultimate point is to try to have better values, and the study of what people actually value is preparatory for that inquiry. Clifford Geertz concludes his famous “Thick Description” essay: “To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action–art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense–is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.”
References:
See also individuals’ ideologies as networks; ideologies and complex systems; judgment in a world of power and institutions: outline of a view; from I to we: an outline of a theory, etc.
It's been more a year and a half in the making, but I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead !
Inspired by the format and sensibility of The Whole Earth Catalog of the early 1970s (subtitle: "access to tools"), this Catalog has a similar goal: to help people can build a new world, on their own terms, against the grain of a dominant culture that cannot yet see or understand the rising world of commoning.
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working. But the good news is….Commoners are building a new world of possibilities right now. There are scores of system-change projects a-borning, but mainstream politics and media regards most of them as too small, local, and trivial to matter....and commoners themselves often do not have a larger sense of the whole of which they are a part. The Commoner’s Catalog seeks to remedy this problem. 
The Catalog explains the grand, transformational power of social collaboration – in agricultural commons and digital spaces, in care collectives and gift economies, in urban settings and finance, among many other realms.
The Catalog's many profiles and stories are loosely grouped in 25 thematic sections spanning 114 artfully designed pages. There are sections on water, land, rethinking economics, law and the commons, the more-than-human world, urban commons, peer production, artistic commons, and many others.
I was thrilled when a French commoner-friend received an advance copy and exclaimed, "This is super-cool!" He was responding to the great cover art that illustrator Hugh Dunford Wood made to show the joy and excitement of commoning.
But he also loved the beautiful book design by Angela Lorenzo and the vivid diversity of projects described (great research support from Cameron Conner). I share my friend's reaction. The Commonsverse is a surprising, hopeful world and, and -- when seen in its eclectic glory -- amazingly cool.
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is the publisher of The Commoner's Catalog, and Chelsea Green Publishing is the distributor. The book was released this week in the US. Copies should be available in the United Kingdom and Europe by mid-February.
To help maximize its reach and impact -- and ensure open access -- I have posted The Commoner's Catalog online as a free "flipbook," licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can read it, and find weblinks for buying it, at commonerscatalog.org.
As an adolescent, I was rocked by The Whole Earth Catalog because it showcased dozens of gritty, obscure, back-to-the-earth experiments. It was also empowering. It said in effect, “You can be more than a passive consumer or anonymous onlooker. You can do cool and significant things yourself, and bring about serious change by heeding your own intuitions and mobilizing your talents. Here’s what other ordinary people are already doing, right now!”
And so, in this new Catalog, I have tried to call attention to notable peer-driven projects, organizations, websites, books, movements, and individuals. They are a cultural vanguard that more people need to know about. After all, these initiatives are going to help us get through the transitions being driven by unsustainable and unjust market extractivism, relentless economic growth, and climate change.
We may know about one or another example, but it's the broad sweep of such projects that is so amazing.Your entire perspective changes when you can see how community land trusts can open up land to more eco-minded farming and more affordable housing -- how open source platforms and platform cooperatives are empowering workers and users -- how Indigenous models of land and water stewardship offer guidance to us -- and how artistic commons are helping artists reclaim control of their creativity and livelihoods.
I like to quote the Belgian designer Thomas Lommée, who declared, "The next big thing will be a lot of small things." This should be the rallying cry for remaking politics and government, whose fragile, centralized power is increasingly dysfunctional, unjust, cruel, and incapable of dealing with distributed complexity.
If you're already a commoner, or know of folks who would love to learn more, please help spread the word about The Commoner's Catalog. We need to hoist up some new visions of change beyond those declared by the market/state, start some new discussions, find each other, begin new collaborations, and take the commons to a higher level.
It's been more a year and a half in the making, but I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead !
Inspired by the format and sensibility of The Whole Earth Catalog of the early 1970s (subtitle: "access to tools"), this Catalog has a similar goal: to help people can build a new world, on their own terms, against the grain of a dominant culture that cannot yet see or understand the rising world of commoning.
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working. But the good news is….Commoners are building a new world of possibilities right now. There are scores of system-change projects a-borning, but mainstream politics and media regards most of them as too small, local, and trivial to matter....and commoners themselves often do not have a larger sense of the whole of which they are a part. The Commoner’s Catalog seeks to remedy this problem.
The Catalog explains the grand, transformational power of social collaboration – in agricultural commons and digital spaces, in care collectives and gift economies, in urban settings and finance, among many other realms.
The Catalog's many profiles and stories are loosely grouped in 25 thematic sections spanning 114 artfully designed pages. There are sections on water, land, rethinking economics, law and the commons, the more-than-human world, urban commons, peer production, artistic commons, and many others.
I was thrilled when a French commoner-friend received an advance copy and exclaimed, "This is super-cool!" He was responding to the great cover art that illustrator Hugh Dunford Wood made to show the joy and excitement of commoning.
But he also loved the beautiful book design by Angela Lorenzo and the vivid diversity of projects described (great research support from Cameron Conner). I share my friend's reaction. The Commonsverse is a surprising, hopeful world and, and -- when seen in its eclectic glory -- amazingly cool.
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is the publisher of The Commoner's Catalog, and Chelsea Green Publishing is the distributor. The book was released this week in the US. Copies should be available in the United Kingdom and Europe by mid-February.
To help maximize its reach and impact -- and ensure open access -- I have posted The Commoner's Catalog online as a free "flipbook," licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can read it, and find weblinks for buying it, at commonerscatalog.org.
As an adolescent, I was rocked by The Whole Earth Catalog because it showcased dozens of gritty, obscure, back-to-the-earth experiments. It was also empowering. It said in effect, “You can be more than a passive consumer or anonymous onlooker. You can do cool and significant things yourself, and bring about serious change by heeding your own intuitions and mobilizing your talents. Here’s what other ordinary people are already doing, right now!”
And so, in this new Catalog, I have tried to call attention to notable peer-driven projects, organizations, websites, books, movements, and individuals. They are a cultural vanguard that more people need to know about. After all, these initiatives are going to help us get through the transitions being driven by unsustainable and unjust market extractivism, relentless economic growth, and climate change.
We may know about one or another example, but it's the broad sweep of such projects that is so amazing.Your entire perspective changes when you can see how community land trusts can open up land to more eco-minded farming and more affordable housing -- how open source platforms and platform cooperatives are empowering workers and users -- how Indigenous models of land and water stewardship offer guidance to us -- and how artistic commons are helping artists reclaim control of their creativity and livelihoods.
I like to quote the Belgian designer Thomas Lommée, who declared, "The next big thing will be a lot of small things." This should be the rallying cry for remaking politics and government, whose fragile, centralized power is increasingly dysfunctional, unjust, cruel, and incapable of dealing with distributed complexity.
If you're already a commoner, or know of folks who would love to learn more, please help spread the word about The Commoner's Catalog. We need to hoist up some new visions of change beyond those declared by the market/state, start some new discussions, find each other, begin new collaborations, and take the commons to a higher level.
This is a passage from Seneca’s On Clemency (written in 55–56 CE):
Pity [1] is a sickness of the soul due to the sight of others’ suffering, or a sadness caused by someone else’s misfortunes which one believes to be undeserved; but no sickness can affect a wise man [2], for his mind is serene and nothing can get through to it that he guards against. Besides, nothing is as becoming to a man as a great soul, but it is impossible to be both great and sad. Sadness breaks the mind into pieces, throws it down, and collects the parts, but this cannot happen to a wise one [3] even in a disaster. Instead, he will repulse any outrage of fortune and shatter it to pieces before him, always maintaining the same appearance–quiet, firm–which he couldn’t do if he were overcome with sadness.
Also to be considered: a wise person discerns the future and makes decisions without interference, yet nothing clear and lucid [4] can flow from turbulence. Sadness is unfitted for discerning circumstances, planning useful tasks, evading dangers, weighing equities. Therefore, the [wise person] will not feel pity, because there cannot be pity without suffering of the soul. [5]
Whatever others who feel pity want to do, he will do freely and with a lofty spirit. He will help those who weep, but not weep with them [6]. He will reach a hand to the drowning, welcome the exile, donate to the poor, not in the abusive way of most people who want to be seen as pitying–they toss something and flinch in disgust at those whom they aid, as if they feared to touch them–but as a man gives to a man from the common pool. He will return the child to the weeping mother, unfasten chains, save people from [gladiatorial] games, and even bury the stinking body, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind, of his own will. Thus the wise person will not pity but will assist and be of use, having been born to help all and for the public good, from which he will distribute shares to all. He will even give from his store to those sufferers who deserve a portion of blame and correction, but he will be even more pleased to assist those who are genuinely unfortunate. Whenever he can, he will counter fortune, for what better use of his powers than to restore what fortune has overturned? He will certainly not cast down his eyes or his soul toward someone who is shriveled or ragged and meagre and leaning on a staff; instead he will do good to all and kindly regard all who suffer, like a god.
Pity is close to suffering [7]; it even has something in common with it and derives from it. You know eyes to be weak if they water at the sight of someone else’s bleariness, just as, by Hercules, it is a disorder and not a case of merriment when people laugh just because others laugh or yawn whenever someone’s mouth opens. Pity is a flaw in the soul of one who feels suffering too much, and he who expects it from a wise person is not so different from someone who expects lamentations at a stranger’s funeral.
Seneca’s De Clementia (2.5.4-2.6.4), trans. Peter Levine
The topic of this book is clemency (clementia) which in modern English means a virtue or prerogative of governors and other rulers. Seneca addresses the young Emperor Nero and urges him to exhibit clemency (I:v). Emperors were sometimes addressed with the honorific “clemens” (similar to “your grace”), presumably to play to their good side.
However, a different meaning of clementia was calmness or mildness. The weather could be clement, and so could a human mind. Anyone could direct this kind of clementia toward anyone else. A better translation than “clemency” might be “compassion.” Seneca contrasts it with misericordia, which I have translated as “pity” to capture its negative connotations. (After all, nobody wants to be pitied.) But misericordia is close to the modern word “sympathy.” So let us consider the differences between clementia as compassion and misericordia as sympathy.
“Sympathy” means feeling some version of the same emotion that another person feels. Your friend is sad, so you feel sad for her and with her. Although I am sympathetic to the emotion of sympathy, Seneca suggests several reasons to avoid it. Feeling the same way as a suffering person does not necessarily help that person. Sympathy often comes with at least a tinge of condescension, since the person who is sympathetic does not actually experience the same circumstances as the one who suffers. By trying to replicate the sufferer’s emotions, you may undermine your ability to help. And by tying your emotions to another person’s state of mind, you expose yourself to fortune. This is not a reliable way to achieve your own happiness.
Instead, those who suffer deserve to be assisted effectively by people who genuinely respect them. The helper should not try to mirror their emotions but should display a different emotion: clear-headed and equitable good-will. To name that emotion “compassion” is a bit confusing, since it has precisely the same root meaning as “sympathy,” which is a suggested translation of misericordia. (Com = sym = with. Passio = pathos = feeling). Nevertheless, compassion seems to be the word we would use for Seneca’s idea of disinterested benign sentiments (2.6.3) that we exercise freely and with a tranquil mind (2.6.2). It can translate the Sanskrit word karuna, which is fundamental in Buddhism.
Seneca also relates this virtue–let’s call it compassion–to a political idea: equal standing and a common claim on the public good. Even though Seneca addresses De clementia to Nero, I think that in this passage, he describes a republican virtue, appropriate for relations among equals who co-own the commonwealth. (It is interesting that he doesn’t actually use “clementia” in these chapters of the book.)
A compassionate person is not exposed to chance. If we feel worse as another person worsens, and better as he improves, then we demonstrate sympathy, which subjects us to fate. But compassion remains unchanged regardless of the state of the sufferer. Compassion can even fill the mind’s attention, thus displacing emotions that are the cause of discomfort.
One question for me: is sympathy a path to compassion or is it a diversion or a dead end? There is a long tradition in Buddhism of cultivating an imaginative identification with another sentient being, feeling its pain, and “exchanging self and other” (e.g., Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara, 7:16) The goal is to shake one’s attachment to oneself and begin a journey from selfishness to concrete sympathy for specific others, and from there to generalized good-will for all, or karuna. I can’t criticize this path without having been taught it properly or seriously tried to practice it, but Seneca makes me wonder whether intense involvement in another’s suffering might detract from the cultivation of compassion rather than setting us on the right track.
Notes: [1] misericordia; [2] gendered in the original (vir); [3] not necessarily gendered; [4] socerumque, which doesn’t make sense to me unless it should read serenumque; [5] ergo non miseretur, quia id sine miseria animi non fit; [6] non accedet = not come near them; [7] Misericordia vicina est miseriae. See also: Horace against the Stoics; how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; empathy, sympathy, compassion, justice; empathy boosts polarization; empathy and justice, “you should be the pupil of everyone all the time” ; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; John Stuart Mill, Stoic; etc.
How is it possible that extreme hunger and food abundance coexist in today's world? Why is it that food, one of the most fundamental necessities of life, is so scarce for so many people even though the global food system produces so much and wastes so much? These questions have long bothered Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist, agricultural engineer, and advocate for treating food as commons.
Studying the reasons for persistent hunger amidst plentiful food, Vivero began to see that the real problem is our societal treatment of food as a commodity -- an object valued by its market price and traded in global markets. The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat. Treating food as a commodity inevitably means that millions of people worldwide will not be able to afford food and therefore must go hungry or eat nutritionally degraded, unhealthy food. 
I explored these themes in an interview with Vivero Pol in my latest podcast (Episode #22) on Frontiers of Commoning.
Vivero Pol works as a PhD Research Fellow of Food Transitions at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He realizes that attempting to decommodify food is a long-term proposition that requires a structural rethinking of our food system. But he emphasizes that food-as-a-commodity is an artificial social construct, not the natural order of life.
Indeed, food commons have been the norm throughout human history, and even in today's hyper-marketized world they remain widely prevalent. In many countries of Europe, the amount of land still managed as commons for growing food is 20 or 30%. In Iceland, 40% of land is still managed as commons.
Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.
At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.
Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.
By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.
This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.
Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds." He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."
Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.
"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.
You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.
How is it possible that extreme hunger and food abundance coexist in today's world? Why is it that food, one of the most fundamental necessities of life, is so scarce for so many people even though the global food system produces so much and wastes so much? These questions have long bothered Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist, agricultural engineer, and advocate for treating food as commons.
Studying the reasons for persistent hunger amidst plentiful food, Vivero began to see that the real problem is our societal treatment of food as a commodity -- an object valued by its market price and traded in global markets. The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat. Treating food as a commodity inevitably means that millions of people worldwide will not be able to afford food and therefore must go hungry or eat nutritionally degraded, unhealthy food.
I explored these themes in an interview with Vivero Pol in my latest podcast (Episode #22) on Frontiers of Commoning.
Vivero Pol works as a PhD Research Fellow of Food Transitions at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He realizes that attempting to decommodify food is a long-term proposition that requires a structural rethinking of our food system. But he emphasizes that food-as-a-commodity is an artificial social construct, not the natural order of life.
Indeed, food commons have been the norm throughout human history, and even in today's hyper-marketized world they remain widely prevalent. In many countries of Europe, the amount of land still managed as commons for growing food is 20 or 30%. In Iceland, 40% of land is still managed as commons.
Vivero Pol has done pioneering work in bringing the very idea of food as a commons to the fore, especially among academics, but also among many action-oriented activists engaged with agriculture, hunger, and bioregional ecological issues. His basic goal is to make the many varieties of food commons visible as a practical, functioning alternative to Big Ag. A landmark effort in this regard is The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, a major anthology published in 2020 with 39 chapters and 29 authors addressing this theme. The volume was co-edited by Vivero Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, and Ugo Mattei.
At a recent webinar co-organized by Vivero Pol, Professor Sam Bliss of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont pointed out that, while "nonmarket practices" for provisioning food are widely ignored, they are pervasive. According to surveys, gardening, fishing, foraging, hunting, bartering, sharing, gifting, scavenging from dumpsters are widely practiced in his state.
Bliss notes that nonmarket sources of food provide a way to escape the extractivist commodity system. Through food commons, people can not only reduce their dependence on (often-expensive) markets, they can respect the limits of nature -- because harvests from foraging or hunting, for example, are limited to household use; market sale is prohibited.
By contrast, the concentrated system of Big Agriculture that dominates most nations is based on massive public subsidies to the largest corporations. The United States, most European nations, Russia, China, and India, among others, all treat food as a commodity on the theory that "free markets" are the most efficient and productive ways to grow and distribute food.
This narrative, however, is a social mythology. Agriculture in the countries named above is based on lavish subsidies that don't take into account the gifting of public wealth to the already-wealthy, the ecological harm to soil, habitat, and water, and the hunger that results for those with little money.
Big Ag companies "are not playing on a level playing field," notes Vivero Pol. "They're not competing on a free market. The food market is the second most heavily subsidized market after fossil fuels. Basically, these companies are earning profits because they are heavily subsidized through public funds." He notes that while politicians "are always talking the market, the market, the market, under the table agricultural markets must be subsidized. Otherwise, they would be a complete disaster."
Vivero Pol suggests that public funds could be more fruitfully spent to help smallholder farmers, agricultural commons, food banks, school lunch programs, and bioregional projects.
"Once we change the narrative about food," said Vivero Pol, "state policies and legal frameworks will align to enact food in a different way." There will still be markets to distribute food, of course, but there will also be new forms of market regulation and new spaces of public intervention and commoning to assure that food is healthy, affordable, and accessible to everyone.
You can check out my conversation with Jose Luis Vivero Pol at this link.