Commons-driven innovation solves extinction. Tragedy of the commons is a neoliberal myth.

What are commons? And what does it mean to make and share a commons? A commons is a property, a practice, or a knowledge that is

shared by a community. Our survival depends on many different kinds

of commons:

• biophysical commons like rocks, soil, sunlight, water and air, and plant and animal ecologies;

• cultural commons like language, a musical heritage, sacred symbols, and artworks;

• social commons like educational, health, and political systems; and

• knowledge commons like Indigenous ecological knowledge and scientific and technological advancements.

Commons are continually made and remade, drawn down and replenished, maintained or degraded. What happens to commons depends on whether a community cares for and shares the thing that sustains it or whether it exploits or neglects it. All too often the commons that sustain us come to our attention only when they are being extinguished, polluted, or otherwise debased—when the air around us has become thick with smog, when the last speakers of a language pass from us, when the final few specimens of a species are preserved only in zoos, when the parkland our children play on is covered with concrete by a private urban development. With the realization of this loss comes the recognition that a community has failed to take responsibility for caring what supports it. A loss of a commons is a loss of a community. In many people’s minds, the loss of commons is inevitable. This misunderstanding has come from an influential article written in 1968 by Garrett Hardin.3 Hardin introduced the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” through the example of a pasture that is used by a number of herdsmen. Each herdsman keeps adding more and more animals to his own herd in order to maximize returns. But as each herd gets bigger and bigger, the commons becomes more and more degraded until it collapses. According to Hardin, the tragedy of the commons is inevitable, because people act in their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. But it turns out that this presumed inevitability is far from the case. Researchers like the late Elinor Ostrom (the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, in 2009) have shown that across the globe commons have existed for thousands of years without collapsing. These commons have been successfully maintained and managed by the communities they support. Rules of use and access and protocols for care and responsibility have been devised to ensure that people act responsibly with regard to each other and the environment. It is only when these rules and protocols are absent that tragedy results. Indeed, Hardin revised his original paper in a statement he made in 1998 pointing out that he had omitted a key adjective and that the tragedy of which he had previously written is one of an unmanaged commons. Nevertheless, the idea of the tragedy of the commons has stuck. And the phrase has been used ever since to legitimize privatization and the ideology that resources are best placed in the hands of private owners who will manage them wisely so the owners can reap the rewards. If we want to take back the economy for people and the planet, we need to reconsider property as a relationship between people with respect to things. All forms of property can be potential commons.