But mainstream economists “balk at the idea,” said Raworth. “They say that I’m stepping away from the scholarship and imposing my values as a political advocate.”

Raworth argues that “the doughnut” simply expresses two foundational commitments that most societies collectively share – that people have a human rights to have their basic needs met, and that the ecological stability of the planet must be protected. If those are seen as controversial values, says Raworth, let's debate them. In any case, she adds, “It’s not as if mainstream economists don’t have values embedded in what they teach. They’re just not explicit about it.”

Raworth’s impertinence about economics may stem from years of straddling the worlds of economic theory and its real-world implementation. She has worked with micro-entrepreneurs in Africa and done development work for the United Nations and Oxfam. Nowadays Raworth teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as Professor of Practice.

Despite the academic affiliations, she remains focused on how to bring about economic transformation. That is the avowed mission of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), which Raworth cofounded in 2019 with Carlota Sanz. DEAL is an attempt to reframe economic narratives, influence strategic policy, and develop innovations with practitioners.

Doughnut Economics has the winning tendency of using spritely humor and common sense while skewering the buried half-truths of standard economics and serving up more credible alternatives. For example, economics continues to cling to the idealized notion of “rational economic man,” the fiction that people make careful, rational calculations about how to advance their material self-interests and happiness (“utility”) through market transactions.

Raworth handily debunks this point in her book, and then shows great brio in producing a delightfully clever video, “Economic Man vs. Humanity: A Puppet Rap Battle,” in collaboration with puppet designer Emma Powell and musician Simon Panbrucker. It’s safe to say that the rapping students get the best of their fusty old professor, and Raworth’s playful humor triumphs over economic dogma.

One of the biggest targets of Raworth’s "doughnut," of course, is the idea that economic growth is a magic elixir that can solve most inequalities, social ills, pollution, and even climate change. The general catechism is growth = jobs = consumer demand = market innovation = progress.

This mindset conveniently ignores the copious negative externalities of the capitalist economy and its circular faith that market-based strategies can abate market-based pathologies When US climate envoy John Kerry’s recently claimed that half of all carbon reductions needed to get to net zero will come from technologies that have not yet been invented, I realized that denialism has many faces.

What sets apart Raworth’s approach is her insistence that society and ecology are foundational to any economy, and economic thought must reflect that. Her theoretical framework, therefore, is not fixated on market and state – important as they are -- but equally on households and the commons as essential institutions. Why? Because households and commons engender social trust, reciprocity, care, and creativity in ways that the market/state system simply cannot. 

You can listen to Raworth’s conversation with me on Frontiers of Commoning here.

But mainstream economists “balk at the idea,” said Raworth. “They say that I’m stepping away from the scholarship and imposing my values as a political advocate.”

Raworth argues that “the doughnut” simply expresses two foundational commitments that most societies collectively share – that people have a human rights to have their basic needs met, and that the ecological stability of the planet must be protected. If those are seen as controversial values, says Raworth, let's debate them. In any case, she adds, “It’s not as if mainstream economists don’t have values embedded in what they teach. They’re just not explicit about it.”

Raworth’s impertinence about economics may stem from years of straddling the worlds of economic theory and its real-world implementation. She has worked with micro-entrepreneurs in Africa and done development work for the United Nations and Oxfam. Nowadays Raworth teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as Professor of Practice.

Despite the academic affiliations, she remains focused on how to bring about economic transformation. That is the avowed mission of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), which Raworth cofounded in 2019 with Carlota Sanz. DEAL is an attempt to reframe economic narratives, influence strategic policy, and develop innovations with practitioners.

Doughnut Economics has the winning tendency of using spritely humor and common sense while skewering the buried half-truths of standard economics and serving up more credible alternatives. For example, economics continues to cling to the idealized notion of “rational economic man,” the fiction that people make careful, rational calculations about how to advance their material self-interests and happiness (“utility”) through market transactions.

Raworth handily debunks this point in her book, and then shows great brio in producing a delightfully clever video, “Economic Man vs. Humanity: A Puppet Rap Battle,” in collaboration with puppet designer Emma Powell and musician Simon Panbrucker. It’s safe to say that the rapping students get the best of their fusty old professor, and Raworth’s playful humor triumphs over economic dogma.

One of the biggest targets of Raworth’s "doughnut," of course, is the idea that economic growth is a magic elixir that can solve most inequalities, social ills, pollution, and even climate change. The general catechism is growth = jobs = consumer demand = market innovation = progress.

This mindset conveniently ignores the copious negative externalities of the capitalist economy and its circular faith that market-based strategies can abate market-based pathologies When US climate envoy John Kerry’s recently claimed that half of all carbon reductions needed to get to net zero will come from technologies that have not yet been invented, I realized that denialism has many faces.

What sets apart Raworth’s approach is her insistence that society and ecology are foundational to any economy, and economic thought must reflect that. Her theoretical framework, therefore, is not fixated on market and state – important as they are -- but equally on households and the commons as essential institutions. Why? Because households and commons engender social trust, reciprocity, care, and creativity in ways that the market/state system simply cannot. 

You can listen to Raworth’s conversation with me on Frontiers of Commoning here.

But mainstream economists “balk at the idea,” said Raworth. “They say that I’m stepping away from the scholarship and imposing my values as a political advocate.”

Raworth argues that “the doughnut” simply expresses two foundational commitments that most societies collectively share – that people have a human rights to have their basic needs met, and that the ecological stability of the planet must be protected. If those are seen as controversial values, says Raworth, let's debate them. In any case, she adds, “It’s not as if mainstream economists don’t have values embedded in what they teach. They’re just not explicit about it.”

Raworth’s impertinence about economics may stem from years of straddling the worlds of economic theory and its real-world implementation. She has worked with micro-entrepreneurs in Africa and done development work for the United Nations and Oxfam. Nowadays Raworth teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as Professor of Practice.

Despite the academic affiliations, she remains focused on how to bring about economic transformation. That is the avowed mission of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), which Raworth cofounded in 2019 with Carlota Sanz. DEAL is an attempt to reframe economic narratives, influence strategic policy, and develop innovations with practitioners.

Doughnut Economics has the winning tendency of using spritely humor and common sense while skewering the buried half-truths of standard economics and serving up more credible alternatives. For example, economics continues to cling to the idealized notion of “rational economic man,” the fiction that people make careful, rational calculations about how to advance their material self-interests and happiness (“utility”) through market transactions.

Raworth handily debunks this point in her book, and then shows great brio in producing a delightfully clever video, “Economic Man vs. Humanity: A Puppet Rap Battle,” in collaboration with puppet designer Emma Powell and musician Simon Panbrucker. It’s safe to say that the rapping students get the best of their fusty old professor, and Raworth’s playful humor triumphs over economic dogma.

One of the biggest targets of Raworth’s "doughnut," of course, is the idea that economic growth is a magic elixir that can solve most inequalities, social ills, pollution, and even climate change. The general catechism is growth = jobs = consumer demand = market innovation = progress.

This mindset conveniently ignores the copious negative externalities of the capitalist economy and its circular faith that market-based strategies can abate market-based pathologies When US climate envoy John Kerry’s recently claimed that half of all carbon reductions needed to get to net zero will come from technologies that have not yet been invented, I realized that denialism has many faces.

What sets apart Raworth’s approach is her insistence that society and ecology are foundational to any economy, and economic thought must reflect that. Her theoretical framework, therefore, is not fixated on market and state – important as they are -- but equally on households and the commons as essential institutions. Why? Because households and commons engender social trust, reciprocity, care, and creativity in ways that the market/state system simply cannot. 

You can listen to Raworth’s conversation with me on Frontiers of Commoning here.

Crimes against property had been an essential part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as Linebaugh discovered. And so the “crime collective” scholars began to study highway robbery, smuggling, and piracy through the lens of sociology, history, and politics.

One of Linebaugh’s first books, The London Hanged, examined the role of public executions and state terror in combating “crimes” against early capitalism. The historians associated with E.P. Thompson also focused on how craftsmen, newly excluded from owning the means of their own production, began to insist on their traditional craft practices and perquisites. But now, new capitalist practices, as enforced by state law, were producing new types of “crimes.” Linebaugh, in short, has documented many forms of resistance to the fledgling capitalist order.

In my interview, this topic prompted Linebaugh to note a Roman aphorism that law creates the crime -- but ordinary people rarely are the ones writing the law in the first place. This prompted him to recite the famous protest poem of the 17th Century: “The law locks up the man and woman / who steals the goose from off the common. / But lets the greater villain loose / who steals the common from the goose.”

Another book written by Linebaugh, with Marcus Rediker -- The Many-Headed Hydra: A Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – examined the lives of Englishmen victimized by early capitalism. Transatlantic sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, and indentured servants were often forced into dismal servitude and immersation, but they sometimes found novel ways to liberate themselves and assert a social solidarity.

One of Linebaugh’s most remarkable books, to my mind, is The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, published in 2006. It’s about dispossessed peasants in the 1200s who helped secure the Charter of the Forest as a landmark written guarantee of commoners’ legal rights. For most contemporaries, the Magna Carta was seen as a totem of western, bourgeois law, and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as an arcane historical curiosity. Linebaugh’s scholarship helped excavate the real significance of the two documents to commoners, showing how they helped provide a bulwark of protection against rapacious state power and the wealthy.  

A more recent book by Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, tells a sprawling story about two star-crossed lovers in the 18th Century, Ned Marcus and his Black Caribbean wife Kate, as players in the American, French, Haitian and failed Irish revolutions.

Linebaugh’s recovery of the commons of centuries past is a gift to imagining a different, better future. I still savor a bit of poetry that he retrieved from a laboring commoner, John Clare, who in the 1820s described walking across Emmonsailes Heath as a child and getting lost:

“So I eagerly wanderd on & rambled along the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers seemd to forget me & I imagind they were the inhabitants of a new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one & shining in a different quarter of the sky.” 

Indeed, we have wandered out of our knowledge and lost track of the commons. But there is another sun, shining in a different quarter of the sky. You can listen to my interview with Peter Linebaugh here.

Crimes against property had been an essential part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as Linebaugh discovered. And so the “crime collective” scholars began to study highway robbery, smuggling, and piracy through the lens of sociology, history, and politics.

One of Linebaugh’s first books, The London Hanged, examined the role of public executions and state terror in combating “crimes” against early capitalism. The historians associated with E.P. Thompson also focused on how craftsmen, newly excluded from owning the means of their own production, began to insist on their traditional craft practices and perquisites. But now, new capitalist practices, as enforced by state law, were producing new types of “crimes.” Linebaugh, in short, has documented many forms of resistance to the fledgling capitalist order.

In my interview, this topic prompted Linebaugh to note a Roman aphorism that law creates the crime -- but ordinary people rarely are the ones writing the law in the first place. This prompted him to recite the famous protest poem of the 17th Century: “The law locks up the man and woman / who steals the goose from off the common. / But lets the greater villain loose / who steals the common from the goose.”

Another book written by Linebaugh, with Marcus Rediker -- The Many-Headed Hydra: A Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – examined the lives of Englishmen victimized by early capitalism. Transatlantic sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, and indentured servants were often forced into dismal servitude and immersation, but they sometimes found novel ways to liberate themselves and assert a social solidarity.

One of Linebaugh’s most remarkable books, to my mind, is The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, published in 2006. It’s about dispossessed peasants in the 1200s who helped secure the Charter of the Forest as a landmark written guarantee of commoners’ legal rights. For most contemporaries, the Magna Carta was seen as a totem of western, bourgeois law, and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as an arcane historical curiosity. Linebaugh’s scholarship helped excavate the real significance of the two documents to commoners, showing how they helped provide a bulwark of protection against rapacious state power and the wealthy.  

A more recent book by Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, tells a sprawling story about two star-crossed lovers in the 18th Century, Ned Marcus and his Black Caribbean wife Kate, as players in the American, French, Haitian and failed Irish revolutions.

Linebaugh’s recovery of the commons of centuries past is a gift to imagining a different, better future. I still savor a bit of poetry that he retrieved from a laboring commoner, John Clare, who in the 1820s described walking across Emmonsailes Heath as a child and getting lost:

“So I eagerly wanderd on & rambled along the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers seemd to forget me & I imagind they were the inhabitants of a new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one & shining in a different quarter of the sky.” 

Indeed, we have wandered out of our knowledge and lost track of the commons. But there is another sun, shining in a different quarter of the sky. You can listen to my interview with Peter Linebaugh here.

Crimes against property had been an essential part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as Linebaugh discovered. And so the “crime collective” scholars began to study highway robbery, smuggling, and piracy through the lens of sociology, history, and politics.

One of Linebaugh’s first books, The London Hanged, examined the role of public executions and state terror in combating “crimes” against early capitalism. The historians associated with E.P. Thompson also focused on how craftsmen, newly excluded from owning the means of their own production, began to insist on their traditional craft practices and perquisites. But now, new capitalist practices, as enforced by state law, were producing new types of “crimes.” Linebaugh, in short, has documented many forms of resistance to the fledgling capitalist order.

In my interview, this topic prompted Linebaugh to note a Roman aphorism that law creates the crime -- but ordinary people rarely are the ones writing the law in the first place. This prompted him to recite the famous protest poem of the 17th Century: “The law locks up the man and woman / who steals the goose from off the common. / But lets the greater villain loose / who steals the common from the goose.”

Another book written by Linebaugh, with Marcus Rediker -- The Many-Headed Hydra: A Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – examined the lives of Englishmen victimized by early capitalism. Transatlantic sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, and indentured servants were often forced into dismal servitude and immersation, but they sometimes found novel ways to liberate themselves and assert a social solidarity.

One of Linebaugh’s most remarkable books, to my mind, is The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, published in 2006. It’s about dispossessed peasants in the 1200s who helped secure the Charter of the Forest as a landmark written guarantee of commoners’ legal rights. For most contemporaries, the Magna Carta was seen as a totem of western, bourgeois law, and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as an arcane historical curiosity. Linebaugh’s scholarship helped excavate the real significance of the two documents to commoners, showing how they helped provide a bulwark of protection against rapacious state power and the wealthy.  

A more recent book by Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, tells a sprawling story about two star-crossed lovers in the 18th Century, Ned Marcus and his Black Caribbean wife Kate, as players in the American, French, Haitian and failed Irish revolutions.

Linebaugh’s recovery of the commons of centuries past is a gift to imagining a different, better future. I still savor a bit of poetry that he retrieved from a laboring commoner, John Clare, who in the 1820s described walking across Emmonsailes Heath as a child and getting lost:

“So I eagerly wanderd on & rambled along the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers seemd to forget me & I imagind they were the inhabitants of a new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one & shining in a different quarter of the sky.” 

Indeed, we have wandered out of our knowledge and lost track of the commons. But there is another sun, shining in a different quarter of the sky. You can listen to my interview with Peter Linebaugh here.

Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.

A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere  --  inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.

Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.

“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”

As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”

It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:

But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.

I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”

That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.

My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.

Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.

A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere  --  inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.

Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.

“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”

As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”

It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:

But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.

I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”

That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.

My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.

Just recently, I caught a lecture by CERN member Caroline Shenaz Hossein on the self-organized social finance systems known as ROSCAs, or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are informal cooperatives of Black diaspora women in the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere. ROSCAs, which go by many different names in different countries, help their participants amass capital for starting a business, buying a car, or paying college tuition for their children. The “Banker Ladies,” as Shenaz Hossein calls them, amount to a hidden social system for meeting financial needs that are mostly ignored by the formal, capitalist banking system.

A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism? So, among CEI and CERN researchers, the overriding goal is to shine a light on the actual diversity of community-based projects unfolding everywhere  --  inconspicuously, locally – and to understand them on their own terms.

Venturing into these unconventional forms helps us transform how we might think in fresh ways about the whole cultural construct known as “the economy.” After all, “the economy” is about much more than the stock market, GDP, the Federal Reserve, and the mainstream (capitalist) policy.

“The attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities,” explains Gibson. “There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible.”

As one reviewer of A Postcapitalist Politics put it, Gibson-Graham “rejects the idea that capitalist economies are tightly organized systems” and instead presents the economy as consisting of “many different undertakings, only some of which cluster around market transactions.”

It also follows that the potential for change starts with us, as embodied selves, not with distant political or economic institutions. Consider Gibson-Graham’s line in The End of Capitalism:

But what sense is there in denying the ample evidence that people have the capacity to experience extraordinary joy and pleasure in working with each other simply because they are working together: the giddy sensation that one is smaller than what one thought (a part of a whole) and larger than what one is (stripped of individual fetters), that one has become folded, along with others, into a new creature altogether.

I’ve also loved the memorable line by Gibson-Graham: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”

That’s the kind of sentiment that arises from feminist economics, with its attention to our living bodies and relationships. It’s the kind of idea that comes from scholars who want to study the real world, and avoid arid economic abstractions that are losing their explanatory power with each passing week as capitalist crises proliferate.

My Frontiers of Commoning podcast interview with Katherine Gibson can be accessed here.

"Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget – even the language we speak….

"In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.

Kimmerer informs us that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living earth is Bemaadiziiaaki. Since that's a mouthful for we English speakers, she suggests shortening it to “ki” or “kin.” “Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?” asks Kimmerer.

Eco-co-operativess called Zoöp

In the same vein as a new pronoun for nature, a Dutch webpage called Zoöp is calling for a new type legal entity that recognizes collaboration between human organizations and multispecies ecological communities. The term “Zoöp” is short for “zoöperation,” which itself is a combination of the word “co-op” (short for “co-operation") and “zoë” (Greek for "life").

The zoöp concept is based on the idea that the profit-maximizing greed of capitalism is overriding most human and nonhuman lives, so a different organizational form is needed. The stated goal of Zoöp is to “strengthen the position of nonhumans within human societies,” to “contribute to ecological regeneration in a way that resists extractivist dynamics,” and to apply the Zoöp model “to a wide variety of organizations.” A Dutch law firm is “critically assessing the zoöp legal structure and developing the charters and documents required to establish actual zoöps,” the group’s website notes. I'm curious about how the self-imposed criteria are to be enforced.

The project explains that “its key methods were developed in a public research trajectory of Het Nieuwe Instituut that took place during the Terraforming Earth Labs (2018),  the Neuhaus academy for more-than-human knowledge (2019), and the Venice Exploratorium (2020).”

The Idt Suffix as an Alternative to Inc. or Ltd.

In yet another innovation along these lines, the Community Economics Research Network – an international group of activist-minded academics with new visions for economic life – has proposed a new suffix to identify an organization as committed to interdependence. Businesses often have “Inc.,” “Ltd.” or “LLC” at the end of their names.

A CERN project called “The Interdependence” proposes that organizations add an "idt" to the end of their name if they “cultivate economic principles and practices that recognize our universal responsibility of mutual care, and strive to bring that understanding into the practice of everyday life.” The acronym idt would signal that the organization intends “to explore, experiment, share and learn together how to create ethical relations of interdependence.”

Already there are a number of enterprises that use the idt tag: Company Drinks idt., a UK community space and social enterprise; Brave New Alps idt., a participatory research project in the Italian Alps; Cube Cola idt., an open source soft drink in Bristol, England; and Trajna idt., a design collective that explores sustainable production in Slovenia that “works towards supporting multispecies livelihoods.” More about idt. in an Idt Charta statement.

Assigning Legal Personhood to Nature

Years ago the impulse to affirm our kinship with nature has manifested in the “rights of nature” movement. The tactic here is to assign legal personhood to mountains, rivers, and forests, and other elements of the Earth so that they can be properly “represented” in courts and legislatures. The states of Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and India have already enacted laws giving specific legal rights to nature.

But now this bold move in jurisprudence have found a footing in North American law. In February 2019, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, approved Lake Erie Bill of Rights Charter Amendment, which authorizes people to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie.

Self-Owning Trees

While nature’s rights as a legal doctrine is fairly new, the idea that nature is alive and sovereign has a long history, even in pockets of western culture. In Athens, Georgia, local lore celebrated the “Tree That Owns Itself for more than a century.

There is a huge white oak tree at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens that is said to have legal ownership of itself. A gentleman who lived across the street from the tree, William H. Jackson, bequeathed the eight-foot-wide tree to itself, circa 1832, with this legal statement: “For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.”

As recounted by Wikipedia, “The original tree, thought to have started life between the mid-16th and late 18th century, fell in 1942, but a new tree was grown from one of its accords and planted in the same location. The current tree is sometimes referred to as the ‘Son of the Tree That Owns Itself.’” The tree is recognized by National Register of Historic Places 1975, but almost certainly not by any court of law. (More about the tree here.)

Did law scholar Christopher Stone have this tree in mind when he wrote his famous 1972 law review called “Should Trees Have Standing?” His point – written in the fevered early days of the modern environmental movement – was to suggest that courts should recognize the rights of nonhuman beings in western courtrooms.

The Embassy of the North Sea

Another creative idea is to give distinct elements of nature political representation. Some folks in The Hague, The Netherlands, founded “The Embassy of the North Sea” in 2018 as a way for the sea to own itself. As the “About” section on its website explains:

“Diversity is in the interest of all life. Therefore, direct political representation of the sea and the life within it is necessary. The Embassy of the North Sea was founded on the principle that the North Sea owns itself. Here, the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea are listened to and involved….

“The Embassy researches how non-humans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks and cod fish – can become full-fledged members of society. We have plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.”

The Self-Owning Forest (via Digital Technology)

Even techno-solutionists seem to be jumping on the idea of sovereign nature, albeit through the narrow lens of their own high-tech vision. A Silicon Valley-inspired project called terra0 is proposing that blockchain software, artificial intelligence, and remote sensors be used to enable a forest to self-govern itself. In the capitalist/libertarian mindset, this means that the forest should have the capacity to manage itself as a business. Using a high-tech system (devised by humans presumably), the forest could selectively choose which of its trees are suitable to cut for timber, and then self-authorize the sale of those trees, based on algorithms that some programmer would write.

The idea is that the forest’s selective monetization of itself would allow it to "self-own" itself as a “digital autonomous organization” (or DAO). This is an idealized but elusive organizational form that many self-styled tech visionaries are striving to create. The “forest as a DAO” would ostensibly give it sovereignty over its future and even (if terra0 gets its way) generate a universal basic income for everyone. Terra0 describes itself as

“a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere. Driven by a keen interest in remote sensing, machine learning, and distributed ledger technology, we develop tools for the management of natural ecosystems and resources via the creation of meshes of interacting decentralized autonomous organisations. We believe that these key technologies give us the opportunity to rethink existing and ineffective governance and regulatory structures and that they will play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, resilient, and biodiverse future.” 

In more technical terms, terra0 describes the forest-as-DAO idea as “a scalable framework built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems.” For more, see also this TEDx Amstelveen video by Hilde Latourvideo by Hilde Latour (at 8 minute timemark).

Personally, I find the vision set forth by terra0 rather monstrous: a world “where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”

How do machines confer loving grace on us? And who oversees the designers as they presume to re-program forests as business-like DAOs? There are surely many kinks to work out in humanity's laudable efforts to sync with the more-than-human world.