The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

There is a prevailing attitude that if something belongs to everyone it naturally will become abused and deteriorate.  In this mode of thinking each individual will act predictably out of selfish interest to strain the common resource for his or her own benefit.  There are innumerable examples of this.  Litter in public parks, marker scratch in public bathrooms, air pollution, and even the stock market.  The oldest evidence for this comes from communal grazing, and subsequent over grazing that result from sharing a common resource for individual means.  So common grazing grounds have been eliminated, public and social support facilities like human health departments, public bathrooms, libraries, jails, parks, public schools and public transportation are minimally invested in because they are our common property and so we give them the least and expect the most.  We don't fertilize the common grazing ground, and we overload it with our livestock until collapse. 
But the Tragedy Of the Commons is built on a common flaw.  It is viewed as the result of inevitable behavior, when it is in fact the outcome of a world view that perceives the self as an interest isolated from the whole.  In true democracy, in the true emergence of all things as they are, the health and happiness of the individual is an expression of the health and happiness of the whole.  The individuals are the commons.  The individuals are self sacrificed when the commons are sacrificed.
The outcome of this inevitable tragedy pervading our current mode of thinking has been a confused justification in converting all publicly owned resources into private hands to ensure their preservation.  These resources include information, raw materials, energy, food, shelter, and medicine. 
Historically the basic necessities of life we not the property of one interest, to be purchased by another interest, they were all common.  Knowledge, shelter, energy, food, medicine, and space are the elemental and ecological conditions for human life.  This fact, that this planet has these things, is also the reason we as individuals were born.  Because earth supports life.
Earth is the common property and in the private hands of few individuals it, and all of its living resources are being exploited nearly beyond the point of regeneration.  When we understand that we can not be separated from our resources without it costing us our own human vitality we are able to blossom into the common understanding that the quality of the system we live in is the quality of our own lives.  Our interactions with the commons are reflective of our interactions with self.
The myth is in believing that if we share, we won't have what we need.  It is in believing that we as individuals are separate from the whole of our sensitive interactive responsive supportive environment and each other.  We are connected in ways we can not even perceive and are capable of seeing our common assets as regenerative for everyone when contributed to by everyone. 
In a recent dream I realized that the entire body of human knowledge is common property.  Soon after I read that any scientific fact discovered is eventually understood by all scientists.  Today our knowledge is separated from us.  There is unequal access to it.  In order to affect this realization into reality I readily submit my individual knowledge to the commons.
http://creativecommons.org

Gift of Suffering

It is possible that all of the shit we have been through, our worst broken hearts, become in us our deepest pools of empathy.  This vital resource, our empathy, our humanity, is the connecting point between us and future generations.  Without human empathy we as a species loose the comforts of infancy, our family, our friends, our communities, our doctors. All connections in which we feel a familiarity and trust dissolve without our ability to relate.  Our empathy shines through our action when we understand and respond to one anothers needs.  It is only through cooperation across time that we are able to live today.  We alone did not build our homes, sew our clothing, or produce our fuel. Many people created this life, within our human society.  We were working together all this time without even being awake to the connection between our lives.  There are farmers in South Africa, and Chile, and the Central Valley in Mexico who produced with their human attention your food, and the food of your neighbors.  Still our clothing is sewn in the brutal human reduction of sweat shops.  Our insatiable demand for energy comes at the expense of energy field workers, international military troops, local cultures, and environmental integrity.  We are all doing this together.  We establish the pattern of human culture together as individuals constantly collaborating on a changing vision of what we really are.  And how can we know?  Sensitivity.  To ourselves, to others, to other life on this planet.  The suffering of the human experience is our que to remember who we really are and what is really happening on this planet.  We are biological electrical hydro sentient events.  We are alive.  If we were unable to feel pain, unable to hurt, or to understand the hurt of another person, how would we then act?  Where can a human ethic without feeling go?   We are fragile.  This is universal among is.  We can be killed.  And will ultimately die.  We have only this brief experience with one another. It is a rare opportunity in this universe to become aware of our own sensitive intelligence, and then to develop it. Many species evolve but I can see that we alone can decide in which mode we choose to evolve.  Our primary lighthouse through the storm of human evolution is our empathy to one another.  To feel as though the other is self, because though we are individual, there is ultimately nothing separating us.  We must be vigilant against those parts of ourselves that have become unfeeling, and perhaps fatigued in an apathetic world.  Look around you at each human face, know that if they were gone, the man at the gas station, the child at the park, the unknown strangers of this planet, you would miss them very much.  Together we are redefining what we are.

Adapting to Climate Change

We are aware that climate change is eminent and understand that adaptation will be the survival mechanism for all life that continues forth from this point.  In the instance of humanity, the adaptation is both cognitive and behavioral.  The simple truth is that in time, we will not be living as we are living now.  Many systems are going to change including energy and public power, transportation, communication, food and water supplies, information exchange, and human cooperation.  We needn't fear these changes as all of these things have been changing in continuum since the rise of humanity and our co-emergence within these dynamicies.  We should however, as observant, responsive, intelligent life, that wishes to carry forward, adapt.  
Our behavior and the manner in which we conduct ourselves among other life is ascending beyond dominion thinking into a more complete understanding of our dependence upon, and vulnerability to other life on this planet.  Humans have both the potential to cultivate life beyond ourselves or to act biocidally with common disregard for all life forms. 
Our survival into the future begins now with growing plants, and trees.   While this may seem simplistic, plants store Sulfur, and CO2 in their structure. They use our toxins to build themselves. We have incidentally suppressed photosynthesis and increased aspiration in our activity.  The obvious outcome is a new gas balance less hospitable to the way we operate. Some plants can fix 20lbs of CO2 a year in new growth. Many plants and mycelia uptake our heavy metals and toxins into their systems and either metabolize them into safe compounds or store them.  This year, starting right now, we must begin to cultivate life in order to save our own.  Project 1 Urban Gorilla Gardens = nutrient dense, free, local food and climate change reversal through photosynthetic carbon fixing.  This is our adaptive collaboration with life that we co-developed across millennia ∞

evolutionism

In the last few years I've had a burgeoning world view of something like bio-centrism.  My approach to life within this view takes into consideration the effect of my daily activity on life within our biosphere.  I buy in bulk to reduce packaging, I buy locally to reduce transport, I buy domestically made products, and make my own to reduce social injustice, I meditate to increase awareness.  I know that the way I live my life affects other life on this planet. 

And I love people.  I have such a deep appreciation in fact for each unique differentiated rare human being that in many ways I hold human life in higher regard than other forms of life on this planet.  I may not risk my life to save and individual animal, but I know that I would to save an individual human.  My empathy towards human beings is greater because I intrinsically understand the human experience of suffering.  I can relate, and quite literally feel it.  This drives my thinking to always include the human element.  It is the lens I know best and so am especially called to take into consideration a human future.  I consider our species special.  Our current human condition is an important step in our long and slow path of evolving.  We are.  In this way I hold humans above others.  It is my immutable anthropocentric nature.  I want us to keep going, I want my children to live.  I want our species to evolve to the point of vital conscious cooperation with all other life on this biosphere. 
This is where humanity meets the biosphere.  And is not in fact never separate from it.  So tied to our biosphere we are that with out it the vital gases, complex carbons, and photosynthesized sunlight that it provides us we are dust.  Non-human, non-intelligent, and indeed lifeless.  My strictly ecocentric view holds true that if we do not carefully account for our unique part in our complex system of energy, life, elements, and change that we will not understand how to be a part of the future of our universe. 
To choose between these lenses or to become aware that in fact they are nested in one another for me is a stopping point where there needn't be one.  I have a deep environmental ethic.  But there is something more.  From what I have come to understand through careful observation is that we are presently and historically individually connected to the rest of the universe of our understanding.  We are made of its stuff and in the complex interconnections between light and energy and matter and Life each movement we make through time is within the context of the whole.  And with in this expansive view I have begun to understand that what I hold above people, life, and the biosphere is the rare and beautiful living form of evolution.  Of continuing to move forward in form and connection and complexity.  I really believe that life is beautiful.  Changing.  Impermanent.  And due deep respect as a rare rise of sensitive intelligence in our solar system and beyond. 

resisting systems thinking vs. understanding systems thinking

The instance in which I find it is most difficult to see systems, and feedback loops is in my personal emotional experience.  It has been difficult to deduce the origination points of problems that have arisen for me.  Outside of myself I can see systems working all the time, in complex and inter-related ways, but having perspective on a system that I am intrenched in is much more difficult within my simultaneous experience of it.  I have to continuously work for systems understanding ironically when it comes to my own brain.  On the other hand my intuitive understanding of inter-dependence and systems thinking does come from a place of experience, observation,  and being.  The inter-connectedness of the entire universe is familiar to me through several different experiences including zen meditation, living in permaculture,  giving birth, experiencing material loss, and altered states of consciousness. I have come to understand the we are connected to eachother genetically, the earth bio-chemically, and universe and beyond sub-atomically.  If everything is connected, or if we choose to operate under this premise-because we can choose, then everything is affecting everything else.  Simultaneously, spontaneously, in unpredictable and unexpected new ways constantly.  This is the madness and magic that brought life to earth.  Light to stars.  And war to people.  Because we are capable of understanding this principal-that constant subtle changes are constantly co-emerging all around and within us all the time- we can let this awareness affect our behavior within a system that is impossible for the human mind to comprehend.  Until it evolves of course. 

Human Impact.

Human impact.  Sometimes I find that if I watch to many documentaries in a row that I can begin to think that the human problem is so big and impossible to steer that the immense suffering and destruction on this planet is careening towards ...
You get the idea.  
There are many problems, or imbalances occurring all over this planet.  Many of them bring about change slowly, and in some parts of the world the change is coming much more quickly.  The solutions to our common problems, of unstable food sources, toxification of water supplies, environmental degradation, undignified human suffering, and in-access to vital resources, are at hand.  We needn't wonder when these problems will be solved or who will ever solve them for us.  We are the innovative, adaptive, creative, cooperative, intelligent life on this planet.  We are capable of seeing how we must evolve and then doing it.  This is an unusual gift, and we are using it to our utmost.  Human behavior is changing as we speak.  We are coming to understand our connection.  We are waking up to the possibility that a human future needn't be bleak, or lifeless, or apocalyptic, but instead creative, and vibrant, and exponentially better than our current reality.