The chart also shows four scenarios for our future from humanity’s current high point of energy consumption, which probably can only decline.  Each of the four scenarios is likely associated with a dominant type of governance system– the market, state, commons, or none of the above.

The market system is clearly the mode for continuing our current trajectory of tech-driven economic growth – a scenario that many argue is bio-geophysically impossible.  Growth at this scale would simply entail too much ecological destruction and instability.

A second scenario, which many European nations are pursing and that well-intentioned US liberals often support, seeks to achieve a stable, long-term balance between growth and ecological limits.  This “green economy” approach would require a dominant state role to discipline and guide markets – not exactly a plausible scenario in today’s world of unfettered capitalism.  It may also not be ecologically sustainable given the decreased and decreasing carrying capacity of the planet due to human impacts.

A third approach would seek to navigate a “regenerative descent” from the peak-oil consumption that has characterized modern times—reducing our footprint by descending from the energy peak, while simultaneously regenerating the health of the ecosystems that support us.  But instead of looking to either the market or state to be the dominant force of governance (both are too deeply committed to economic growth), the commons scenario would look to decentralized nonmarket provisioning, community-accountable markets, and new limits on extraction.  Permaculture obviously has much to say about these themes.

A final scenario amounts to a “you’re on your own” approach in which every individual is pitted against everyone else and a survivalist “lifeboat ethic” prevails.  Not an option to which we wish to aspire!

Commons & Permaculture as Ways to Manage “Regenerative Descent”

You can guess which one we commoners believe is most ecologically credible and necessary.  The question then becomes, said Jacke, “How do we learn how to rebuild ecosystems from the ground up and the sky down?  How do we make a graceful and ethical descent from the energy peak that we have probably reached?”

Much of the answer, he believes, lies in “devising new—or ‘new/old’—types of human cultures.”

This is why the commons and permaculture need to enter into a new dialogue.  Permaculture is not just about agriculture and ecological design, but concerns designing whole human cultures, including social and economic structures for stewarding ecosystems.  The commons, for its part, is very focused on the socio-ecological principles of self-governance.  Commoning is all about aligning social practices, governance and culture with the special character of local landscapes.

A big question is how we should understand culture.  Jacke believes that culture consists of four primary components.  The first three – resources, technology, and social and economic structures – can be designed in different ways, but Jacke argued that what really animates a culture is its “inner landscape,” which functions as a set of operating instructions.  (See chart below.) 

Somehow, a culture’s inner values, myths and aspirations must be brought into alignment with deep ecological principles, said Jacke.  That encapsulates the challenge we face in pursuing a “regenerative descent,” or the “commons scenario,” in the wake of peak energy.

Fortunately, said Jacke, the human species has a vast upside potential.  Quoting Stuart Hill, Jacke said:  “The human species is psycho-socially highly underdeveloped -- and paradoxically, that is our greatest reason for hope.”  If we were as psycho-socially developed as we could be, genetically, we’d be screwed.  But because we have so much potential for psycho-social growth, we can work our way out of this mess.  And the commons is a key piece of this.  But we need to look for solutions that challenge us on the inside.”

That is why the commons is not just about “managing resources,” but equally an exploration of how to change our “inner landscape.”  Jacke noted that the problem is that, as The Talmud says “We see things not as they are.  We see things as we are.” Who we think we are affects everything else.

Beyond Human Separation and Alienation

Jacke noted that, when he does workshops and asks people why ecosystems and societies fail, the heart of the problem always boils down to “human separation, disconnection and alienation.”  “Our culture believes that humans are separate from nature, that mind and matter are separate, and that consciousness and matter are separate.  That’s what the story of Adam and Eve is all about – our separation from nature, which is the story of Western culture.”

Of course, Jacke added:  “It’s not true – we’re not separate.  But the self-separation, induced through trauma, is itself a trauma, and has split ourselves internally.”

The best way to heal this separation within ourselves, and between ourselves and the more-than-human, is to mimic natural ecosystems, Jacke urged.  “The core strategy is conscious ecological design – design that is intentional, deliberate and mindful of nature.”

Jacke said that he once thought of “design” as “planning in a systematic manner.”  But he has come to realize that the design process really amounts to promoting “deliberate emergence” as a “co-creative participant.”  The point is not to impose solutions, which only continues our separation from nature and each other, inevitably leading to failure.  Our goal should be to “mimic natural systems” by trying to achieve “close external functional resemblances with it.  We have to ‘re-member’ ourselves as part of nature.  Ecosystem mimicry is a frame for reminding ourselves that we are nature.”

The Paleolithic Fish Weir Commons

We moderns tend to forget that we are deeply embedded in nature, and not apart from it.  Jacke helped emphasize this point by describing what could be one of the earliest documented commons in human history, represented by an 8,000-year-old fish weir off the coast of Denmark. 

Archeologists discovered the quarter-kilometer-long fence-like wooden structure beneath the ocean, with its tight web of wood still intact (Divers couldn’t even put their fingers between any cracks!)  The weir was built to direct fish and eels along the underwater fence to a wooden cage where they were trapped and held for consumption over the winter months.  Such fish weirs had to be rebuilt every year, and sometimes more frequently if there were storms.  Each weir required 6,000-7,000 very straight hazelwood poles 4-5 meters long — hard to come by unless one manages the hazel bushes through coppicing.  This means the hazel would be cut, and then allowed to sprout more shoots that then grew for about ten years to produce a new crop of straight poles of a size needed for the weir.  Hazel bushes managed this way can yield poles again and again for hundreds of years.

“The implications of this fish weir are vast,” said Jacke.  Its existence means that there was a well-organized community of people who were systematically harvesting vast quantities of coppice to build the weir.  “Based on current coppice-forestry design figures, such as the spacing of stumps and the time needed to grow new wood,” said Jacke, “it would take at least 1.7 acres to be able to harvest 6,000-7000 wooden poles.”

If we consider that each plot of 1.7 acres would require ten years to grow wood of sufficient size, then continuously producing the fish weirs would require a minimum of 17 acres under the most intensive coppice-management practices we know of today.  This would represent a major organized work effort and the transmission of cultural knowledge from generation to generation, especially considering that a single ten-year rotation would consume a significant percentage of a Paleolithic human’s lifespan.

Remember:  This was a time before agriculture had been invented and glaciers were not long gone from Europe.  There were no state power structures or market structures.  So this fish weir could only have been produced through some sort of collective social structure – a commons, said Jacke.

At this, a kind of stunned silence settled over the audience.  Wow.  The commons has clearly been a part of our deep history as a species.  Surely it will be a big part of our future as we cross the threshold of peak energy.

The P2P Foundation report is a welcome splash of clarity on a topic that is often obscured by deceptive terms like the “sharing economy” and mystifications about the structural realities of digital cooperation. 

The Bauwens/Niaros report starts with a section analyzing the theoretical nature of the “value crisis” we are experiencing, before moving on to three powerful case studies of alternative value-systems pioneered by the Enspiral network, Sensorica and Backfeed.  The report concludes with a series of policy recommendations for changing the economic and political infrastructure. 

The Value Crisis

The real roots of the “value crisis” stem from the fact that “contemporary capitalist value-practices are no longer able to determine what value is,” write Bauwens and Niaros.  Stock market valuations are notoriously unable to attribute a reliable (financial) value to a company because so much value resides in social intangibles – the goodwill of consumers, brand reputations, and social sharing.  Stock analysts can try to add up the resale value of factory buildings, equipment and office furniture, but there is no reliable, consensus method for assigning a value to all the social beliefs and activities that make a company valuable.

Such a delicious irony!  Contemporary capitalism loves that it can freely appropriate software code, personal data, user-generated information, videos, etc. – a shareable cultural abundance that the world has never seen before.  Yet investors have great difficulty in monetizing and commodifying this value.  It is hard to make abundant social value artificially scarce and therefore saleable.

So we have the spectacle of commoners having trouble protecting the use-value that they create, which businesses are aggressively trying to channel into extractive market production and consumption.  (“Extractive” because companies want this value for free, and don’t want to reward the social communities.)  And yet even with their great extractive powers (lots of capital, copyright laws, terms of service contracts, etc.), large companies are finding that it is difficult to develop reliable flows of profit.

Toward Value Sovereignty

The focus of the P2P Foundation report is how to move from an extractive digital economy to a regenerative one.  Hence the focus on how three digital communities are trying to protect their “value practices” and create a “value sovereignty” beyond the pressures of capitalist markets.  These communities are trying to achieve a “reverse co-optation” by generating value flows from the old economy to the new, and by developing new value-accounting systems to properly honor social contributions.

One such project is Enspiral, a highly participatory, mission-driven coalition of entrepreneurs and other entities, many of them based in New Zealand.  “Enspiral calls itself an ‘open cooperative’ because of its commitment to both the production of commons and an orientation to the common good,” write Bauwens and Niaros. One of its innovations is the use of “capped returns,” which puts a limit on how much an investor in the Enspiral infrastructure can receive in return.  As the report notes:

….the shares issued by a company would be coupled by a matching call option which would require the repurchase of the shares at an agreed upon price.  Once all shares have been repurchased by the company, it will be free to reinvest all future profits to its social mission. Through this mechanism, external and potentially extractive capital is ‘subsumed’ and disciplined to become ‘cooperative capital.’”

Sensorica is an open collaborative network that is experimenting with new ways to combine commons and market forms.  It has an elaborate “value accounting system” for keeping track of its members' contributions to market-based projects. This system is then used to allocate revenues in proportion to each member’s role. Is Sensorica a new kind of (market-driven) co-op or a new type of (mission-based) commons?  Maybe a hybrid.

A third case study looks at Backfeed, a production community that relies on the blockchain ledger as an infrastructure for decentralized production.  Backfeed is more of an aggregation of individuals working together to sell to markets, than a commons.  Still, the cooperative organizational structure has the potential for making it capable of acting as a “value sovereign” community. Many others are exploring how the blockchain might enable cooperative control over a community's resources, whether for sale in the market or for internal use-value.

Policy Recommendations

The P2P Foundation report concludes with a series of policy recommendations that would help protect the kinds of value regimes described in the case studies.  It proposes open cooperatives to create new types of livelihoods and the use of “reciprocity-based licensing” to protect against value capture by capitalist enterprises and foster solidarity among generative coalitions.  The report also calls for open supply chains and common network resource planning to help promote an open source “circular economy”(e.g., “design global, manufacture local”).  

Bauwens and Niaros envision new sorts of political collaboration to provide a counter-power to the old economy and advocacy for peer production communities.  Local “chambers of commons” and “commons-oriented entrepreneurial associations” are needed, not to mention new forms of transnational collaboration, they urge.

At a time when the political left has trouble moving beyond Keynesian economic models and the management of neoliberalism’s many crises, Bauwens and Niaros point to some new models of commons-based peer production that could help transform the terms of engagement.