Most of WKNY’s shows are hosted by ordinary people, not radio professionals. And yet many of the show hosts are natural talents born to live in front of mics, Buff reports.

During the pandemic, Radio Kingston has given regular updates on the local Covid situation. It has also hosted virtual concerts by local musicians and a “show and tell” event for over 50 “marginalized creatives.” The station’s website hosts a number of podcasts dealing with the concerns of young farmers, politics, cosmic topics, and personality-driven topics.

In short: the good citizens of Kingston and environs have their own radio venue to reach and interact with each other, creating a new sort of community and cultural space that is often missing. The station has shown, also, that community radio doesn’t have to be stodgy and amateurish, and certainly not soulless and frenetic like commercial radio. It can be exciting, authentic, unexpected, and diverse.

It’s ironic that a small local AM station is pioneering this kind of programming. Under the legal charter for US broadcasters – the Communications Act of 1934 – commercial radio stations are supposed to act as trustees for the public interest. Historically, in return for getting free use of the public’s airwaves – a business infrastructure worth billions of dollars – radio stations agreed to meet certain standards of public service. Most were never terribly excited about airing educational programming, public affairs shows, the Fairness Doctrine (giving people the right to rebut controversial statements), and free airtime for political candidates – but it was part of their legal mandate.

But even these modest requirements were swept away with broadcast industry deregulation in 1996, in the Clinton presidency. This epochal shift threw open the door to the national consolidation of hundreds of local radio into ratings-obsessed mega-networks like iHeartMedia. This is why radio has gone so bland and corporate these days. There is a premium on standardized formats, national advertising, and a slick commercial tone – and very little interest in distinctive local voices, local news, local talent, experimental programming, and other things that don’t maximize profits.  

After only three years in its new guise, Kingston Radio is still a work-in-progress. But with the recent addition of a new antenna and legal authority to air its programming on the FM radio dial, WKNY is exploring some new frontiers in stewarding a local radio station as a commons.   

You can listen to my podcast interview with Jimmy Buff here.

As you might imagine, Severine is a ball of creative energy and passionate commitment, precisely the traits needed to engage in and promote commoning. I find her work so inspiring because she has learned to fly by leaping off cliffs and flapping her wings. You develop different sorts of muscles that way! 

Ian McSweeney, the organizational director of Agrarian Trust, also joined me in the podcast interview. Ian works from his farm and forest in New Hampshire, and thinks a lot about how to protect land from development, how to transfer it to new generations of farmers and ranchers, and how to assure that they have secure land tenure.

Ian talked in greater depth and detail about Agrarian Trust’s efforts to acquire land and steward it as commons. Ian comes to this challenge after years of work with the gritty complications of land tenure and conservation, and in trying to build new types of local food systems that are regenerative, diversified, and community-minded.

A big part of this challenge is finding ways to take land off the market and decommodify it.  McSweeney explained: “We decommodify land by moving it out of private ownership into community-centered, nonprofit ownership. And then we restrict that land from being sold on the open market ever again. We also restrict the land from taking on debt beyond a 20% cap of the property’s value.  We don’t want to put that land at risk.” 

Fleming added that the pandemic is “intensifying the market pressures on land, especially in towns around cities. This has been a year when farmlands and farm properties have been sold within hours of being listed at prices far above what would normally be justified by farmland.” 

“As farms are being gobbled up and sliced-and-diced into lifestyle properties and private sanctuaries, it becomes clear that the valley floor has only so much ag land. So if we want the farm, we need to save the farm. We have the re-negotiate the terms under which our land is being managed and do it in a way that is more holistic and meets the needs of present and future generations.”

Listen to the rest of the interview, including discussion of Greenhorns, Farm Hack network, and Seaweed Commons, here.

As you might imagine, Severine is a ball of creative energy and passionate commitment, precisely the traits needed to engage in and promote commoning. I find her work so inspiring because she has learned to fly by leaping off cliffs and flapping her wings. You develop different sorts of muscles that way! 

Ian McSweeney, the organizational director of Agrarian Trust, also joined me in the podcast interview. Ian works from his farm and forest in New Hampshire, and thinks a lot about how to protect land from development, how to transfer it to new generations of farmers and ranchers, and how to assure that they have secure land tenure.

Ian talked in greater depth and detail about Agrarian Trust’s efforts to acquire land and steward it as commons. Ian comes to this challenge after years of work with the gritty complications of land tenure and conservation, and in trying to build new types of local food systems that are regenerative, diversified, and community-minded.

A big part of this challenge is finding ways to take land off the market and decommodify it.  McSweeney explained: “We decommodify land by moving it out of private ownership into community-centered, nonprofit ownership. And then we restrict that land from being sold on the open market ever again. We also restrict the land from taking on debt beyond a 20% cap of the property’s value.  We don’t want to put that land at risk.” 

Fleming added that the pandemic is “intensifying the market pressures on land, especially in towns around cities. This has been a year when farmlands and farm properties have been sold within hours of being listed at prices far above what would normally be justified by farmland.” 

“As farms are being gobbled up and sliced-and-diced into lifestyle properties and private sanctuaries, it becomes clear that the valley floor has only so much ag land. So if we want the farm, we need to save the farm. We have the re-negotiate the terms under which our land is being managed and do it in a way that is more holistic and meets the needs of present and future generations.”

Listen to the rest of the interview, including discussion of Greenhorns, Farm Hack network, and Seaweed Commons, here.

As you might imagine, Severine is a ball of creative energy and passionate commitment, precisely the traits needed to engage in and promote commoning. I find her work so inspiring because she has learned to fly by leaping off cliffs and flapping her wings. You develop different sorts of muscles that way! 

Ian McSweeney, the organizational director of Agrarian Trust, also joined me in the podcast interview. Ian works from his farm and forest in New Hampshire, and thinks a lot about how to protect land from development, how to transfer it to new generations of farmers and ranchers, and how to assure that they have secure land tenure.

Ian talked in greater depth and detail about Agrarian Trust’s efforts to acquire land and steward it as commons. Ian comes to this challenge after years of work with the gritty complications of land tenure and conservation, and in trying to build new types of local food systems that are regenerative, diversified, and community-minded.

A big part of this challenge is finding ways to take land off the market and decommodify it.  McSweeney explained: “We decommodify land by moving it out of private ownership into community-centered, nonprofit ownership. And then we restrict that land from being sold on the open market ever again. We also restrict the land from taking on debt beyond a 20% cap of the property’s value.  We don’t want to put that land at risk.” 

Fleming added that the pandemic is “intensifying the market pressures on land, especially in towns around cities. This has been a year when farmlands and farm properties have been sold within hours of being listed at prices far above what would normally be justified by farmland.” 

“As farms are being gobbled up and sliced-and-diced into lifestyle properties and private sanctuaries, it becomes clear that the valley floor has only so much ag land. So if we want the farm, we need to save the farm. We have the re-negotiate the terms under which our land is being managed and do it in a way that is more holistic and meets the needs of present and future generations.”

Listen to the rest of the interview, including discussion of Greenhorns, Farm Hack network, and Seaweed Commons, here.

In the permaculture world, Jacke is perhaps best-known as the lead author of the two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens (2005), written with Eric Toensmeier. The 1,068-page book lays out the vision of the forest garden and explains the basic ecological principles that make it work (Volume 1) before offering more concrete guidance on how to design, establish, and maintain your own forest garden (Volume 2).

An edible forest garden is a “perennial polyculture,” which means that many different plant species grow together and naturally regrow every year without replanting. As Jacke and his coauthor explain, “A forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production.”

What’s refreshing about Jacke’s approach to regenerative economics and landscapes is its integrated grasp of ecosystems, human technologies, culture, and our inner lives. Jacke points out that as soon as humans make their tools, they begin to treat any natural objects through the lens of that technology. This immediately focuses and limits our perceptions of the natural world – a tendency that becomes more entrenched as economic and social institutions arise to develop the technologies. 

Jacke warns that healthy cultures acknowledge that a boundary is crossed when we convert the multi-dimensionality of nature into tools for human use. A tree that lives a complicated, embedded life of interdependence within an ecosystem is seen as something quite different when it is reduced to timber. It becomes a dead “resource” that reflects human uses alone. 

The movement for “appropriate technology” that flourished in the 1970s sought to emphasize this point – that the tools we create and use influence how we end up seeing the world. Too often, our tools have objectified the living world into “the environment” -- an inventory of inert resources with little connection to life. It’s important to acknowledge to ourselves that the very idea of “value-neutral tools” is a self-deception. Our tools invariably reduce our appreciation for the complexity of “nature.” Which is why we must constantly remember that our tools and “nature" co-evolve together.  

Informed by decades of practice in ecological design, Dave Jacke is a deep thinker about the subtle interactions of ecosystems and humanity, and the role of the commons can play in mediating this (perceived) divide. Here is the link to the full podcast interview.

In the permaculture world, Jacke is perhaps best-known as the lead author of the two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens (2005), written with Eric Toensmeier. The 1,068-page book lays out the vision of the forest garden and explains the basic ecological principles that make it work (Volume 1) before offering more concrete guidance on how to design, establish, and maintain your own forest garden (Volume 2).

An edible forest garden is a “perennial polyculture,” which means that many different plant species grow together and naturally regrow every year without replanting. As Jacke and his coauthor explain, “A forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production.”

What’s refreshing about Jacke’s approach to regenerative economics and landscapes is its integrated grasp of ecosystems, human technologies, culture, and our inner lives. Jacke points out that as soon as humans make their tools, they begin to treat any natural objects through the lens of that technology. This immediately focuses and limits our perceptions of the natural world – a tendency that becomes more entrenched as economic and social institutions arise to develop the technologies. 

Jacke warns that healthy cultures acknowledge that a boundary is crossed when we convert the multi-dimensionality of nature into tools for human use. A tree that lives a complicated, embedded life of interdependence within an ecosystem is seen as something quite different when it is reduced to timber. It becomes a dead “resource” that reflects human uses alone. 

The movement for “appropriate technology” that flourished in the 1970s sought to emphasize this point – that the tools we create and use influence how we end up seeing the world. Too often, our tools have objectified the living world into “the environment” -- an inventory of inert resources with little connection to life. It’s important to acknowledge to ourselves that the very idea of “value-neutral tools” is a self-deception. Our tools invariably reduce our appreciation for the complexity of “nature.” Which is why we must constantly remember that our tools and “nature" co-evolve together.  

Informed by decades of practice in ecological design, Dave Jacke is a deep thinker about the subtle interactions of ecosystems and humanity, and the role of the commons can play in mediating this (perceived) divide. Here is the link to the full podcast interview.

It is astonishing that these developments have received virtually no European or American press coverage. This is surely because Montenegro is a small nation and a supplicant to Europeans. It wants to join the European Union. Its government is surely disinclined to object to the military intrusion on its lands while trying to join the EU. Farmers from Sinjajevina and local activists are demanding that the Montenegrin parliament urge the EU Commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, to suspend EU membership talks until it stops militarizing Sinjajevina.

A resistance movement has sprung up to fight NATO’s intrusion, however. A basic challenge is making this issue known to the wider world, especially Europe. First: if you’d like to learn more, here is a blog for the resisting commoners.And here is the hashtag they are using – #MissionPossible.

I encourage you to sign the petition that will be sent to the European Union and the EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi.The petition demands EU solidarity with the local communities of Sinjajevina and their ecosystems; removal of the military training ground as a precondition for Montenegro’s EU membership; and creation of a community protected area in Sinjajevina. 

Here is the petition in English; in French; and in Spanish.

Over the years, the SELC has advised over 1,500 grassroots groups, and when necessary, initiated policy initiatives to try to change laws and regulations that otherwise impede collective ownership and commoning. For instance, the SELC helped legalize the sale of homemade food in California, and it pushed to change California state law to allow coops to raise capital by selling membership shares. Much of the Law Center’s work attempts to bend existing laws and regulations to serve broader, socially minded purposes in concrete ways.

In its work with coops and nonprofits, the Law Center has used “customized bylaws that you have never seen before,” said Orsi. The idea is to prevent power from becoming concentrated in boards of directors and organizational hierarchies. Instead, Orsi and her team help organizations distribute power among co-workers and spread wealth more equally. The Law Center often advises groups to put a cap on the profits that anyone can extract, and to establish a cap on salaries to avoid egregious inequalities among co-workers.

One pioneering project that the Sustainable Economies Law Center assists is the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. The Coop describes itself as “a democratic, People of Color led cooperative that takes land and housing off the speculative market to create permanently affordable, community controlled land and housing. We are turning a racist, classist housing market into a tool that can build wealth for the groups most disenfranchised by it.”

The coop buys real estate properties in Oakland and the East Bay so that people who already live there can stay and build equity, without having to answer to a landlord. The land itself is co-owned and co-stewarded. Since the region already has a ridiculously speculative real estate market, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Coop has deliberately adopted several legal barriers to prevent coop members from simply cashing out as prices rise. The legal provisions help prevent one generation of coop members from monetizing the hard work of previous members and eliminating affordable housing for future generations. Like so many SELC-advised projects, the Coop is all about project long-term use-value over private ownership.

SELC sometimes uses special bylaw provisions that make it more difficult to sell any real estate, in effect decommodifying the land. Bylaws can also be used to give outside parties a veto over potential asset sales and give board seats to other area nonprofits. Going beyond such legal provisions, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative actively cultivates member engagement in the life of the Coop.

Orsi, a self-taught cartoonist on the side, likes to use cartoons to demystify various bodies of law and economics, so that they can use law to serve their own needs. For the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, she made a cartoon version of the coop bylaws so that they would be highly readable and easily understood. Check out some of Janelle’s other cartoon-videos, such as “Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future,” which explains a piece of pending legislation to fix things, or “The Legal Roots of Resilience.”

More recently, the Law Center has embarked upon an utterly novel project, the Radical Real Estate Law School. The School is not about strengthening private ownership and dominion over land and buildings, but about helping people live and work in closer relationship with each other, and to encourage stewardship of land in organic, dynamic ways. Recently, the School recruited four activists to join as co-workers/apprentices while learning to become credentialed lawyers. Two apprentices have deep connections to farmland, and two are former tenant organizers.

The word “radical” in the School’s name was chosen with care; it points to “getting to the roots” of  problems. In that regard, the team is working to acquire land so it can be returned to indigenous forms of stewardship and participation, and it is devising legal structures to ensure that land is protected in perpetuity. Among other activist/legal adventures. 

For the fuller story of the Sustainable Law Center and Janelle Orsi’s work, check out the podcast episode here.

A growing cohort of self-identified commoners, working largely outside the circles of respectable opinion, is developing important new frameworks of thought and innovative tech platforms. Such commoners bring an almost dizzying array of creative approaches to central challenges of human social organization. They are pioneering, for example, creative hacks of law and new sorts of currencies. They are re-imagining regional food systems and systems for keeping agricultural seeds shareable. They are developing new models of peer production such as “cosmo-local production,” which lets people share knowledge and design globally, open-source-style, while building physical things locally. Notwithstanding pervasive crises and traumas, it turns out that this is a fertile time to reinvent the world with collaborative initiatives.

The good news is that the social practices of commoning are opening up creative new modes of life. They can sidestep the pathologies of capitalism and generate and share wealth in fair-minded, ecologically respectful ways.

For example, new initiatives are bringing “open source” seed-sharing to agriculture, defying the proprietary schemes that Big Ag companies have devised to enclose the seed commons (chapter by Maywa Montenegro Wit). Another chapter explains the promise of blockchain ledger technologies in enabling networked collaboration (Primavera De Filippi and Xavier Lavayssiere) – an advance that could enable new, more versatile modes of commoning in online spaces.

My contribution to the volume looks at the importance of legal hacks as a way to overcome conventional law and open up new zones for commoning. Legal workarounds are necessary because “the practices and values [of commoning] are philosophically alien to many aspects of the liberal market and state and their mutual focus on individualism, calculative rationality, material gain, and market growth.”

I explore the tension between commoning and state law, and showcase some clever, elegant legal hacks, such as Creative Commons licenses for all sorts of content and the General Public License for software. Such hacks invert the intended uses of conventional law (by requiring sharing, for example), while retaining the enforcement powers of state law.

Three essays delve into the philosophical dimensions of commoning -- by Anna Grear, Vito de Lucia, and Paul B. Hartzog, respectively – to probe ontological shift that must be advanced if our human societies are going to find a responsible (and enlivening!) coexistence with the more-than-human world. These chapters provide some valuable big-picture perspective that move us beyond the grubby political and economic realities of the moment.

Here are the contents of the book:

        1. INTRODUCTION / Anna Grear and David Bollier 

        2. MODERNITY, ANTHROPOCENE, CAPITALOCENE AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS / Sam Adelman

       3. TWILIGHT OF THE NATION-STATE (AT A TIME OF RESURGENT NATIONALISM)? / Richard Falk 

4. THE DECLINE OF LIBERAL POLITICS / Andreas Karitzis

5. AWAKENING TO AN ECOLOGY OF THE COMMONS / Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos

6. BEATING THE BOUNDS: INSIDE THE STRUGGLE TO MAKE OPEN-SOURCE SEED / Maywa Montenegro de Wit

7. BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY: TOWARD A DECENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE OF DIGITAL PLATFORMS? / Primavera De Filippi and Xavier Lavayssiere 

8. HACKING THE LAW TO OPEN UP ZONES FOR COMMONING / David Bollier 

9. THINKING LAW, ECOLOGY, AND THE COMMONS / Vito De Lucia 

10. COMMONSWEALTH: THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE: COMPLEXITY AND GENERATIVITY—NEW ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS / Paul B. Hartzog 

11. RESISTING ANTHROPOCENE NEOLIBERALISM: TOWARDS NEW MATERIALIST COMMONING? / Anna Grear

A word of thanks to punctum books, one of the most important yet little-known experiments in open-access book publishing around. Many of us commoners are supremely frustrated that academic publishing is so corporatized and disdainful of their contributors and readers. It’s insane that so much academic knowledge must fit through the commercial filters of Edward Elgar, Sage, John Wiley, and Routledge, who not only acquire their manuscripts for free or very little, but then turn around and sell them to university libraries, at exorbitant prices that ordinary readers cannot afford.

For example, I recently encountered the announcement of a forthcoming book, Capitalism and the Commons, that I would very much like to read. To my dismay, the book is priced at a ridiculous $128. I realize that, for many academics, career advancement depends on publishing with the most “prestigious” publishers – and sometimes those publishers are the most efficient way to reach one’s academic peers. But it doesn’t advance the cause of the commons to speak to a mandarin cohort of cloistered academics through profit-driven publishers who both exploit their contributors (who were likely not paid for their essays) and readers (who can’t afford the retail prices). Academics would do well to rebuff the leading publishers – and counter-organize by starting their own upstart presses. That would be a fine commentary on capitalism and the commons.

This is why I admire punctum books (whose tagline is “spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion”) -- it's doing something about this problem by publishing high-quality academic books under Creative Commons licenses. This allows books to be published for a modest sum (our book is US$25) while making a PDF version available online for free.

Although some academic presses are starting to experiment with CC licenses, most politically progressive book publishers find this idea way too radical. Nonmarket ways of sharing are simply unimaginable. (Let me give a spirited shout-out to New Society Publishers, which had no trouble publishing Silke Helfrich's and my Free, Fair and Alive under a CC license.)

As Lauren Berlant, an English professor at the University of Chicago, has said: “The release of art and knowledge from enclosure and hoarding into spirited circulation is punctum books’ great work. It is not just that punctum books refuses to reproduce class inequality by making our work free to the desiring. It is also that it is radically open to collaborative, dynamic, rigorous experiments in genre and thought’s forms.”

New modes of life amidst capitalist ruins!