Zoe Gilbertson is a British fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up, literally. In an effort to curb the ecological harms of fast fashion, global supply chains, and relentless consumption of clothes, Gilbertson is figuring how fiber crops like hemp and flax could be grown bioregionally to produce textiles and, …

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and therefore an important incubator of just, regenerative, self-determined communities that move beyond the market/state paradigm. The traveling international exhibit, 'An Atlas of Commoning,' …

Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, discusses the history of bioregional activism in Cascadia and current challenges and strategies. Cascadia consists of three watersheds in the Pacific Northwest extending from British Columbia to northern California. For more than 40 years, Cascad…

Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in sociology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, has launched an ambitious international project to invent noncapitalist forms of land conservation. He calls it "convivial conservation." Instead of locking up land as wilderness or using it to make money through ecotourism and genetic patents, "convivial co…

Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world. For the Global South, long victimized by colonialism and capitalist extraction, oases culture embodies an eco-friendly, alternative vision of development. For the…

Chilean political philosopher Camila Vergara boldly argues in her book 'Systemic Corruption' that decay and corruption are inevitable even in liberal, representative systems because oligarchs end up capturing state governance and law. Ordinary people rarely have their own plebeian institutions to express their interests and curb the abuses of the e…

The artistic duo known as Cooking Sections -- Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the Royal College of Art in London -- use their virtuoso visual, performance, and installation artworks to jolt people into new understanding of local ecosystems, capitalism, and food. Their work, shown at prestigious venues around the world to great acclaim,…

To counter the "implicit feudalism" that is the norm on the Internet, activist-scholar Nathan Schneider explains the potential of democratic governance in online life and its importance to "real world" democracy. A professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Schneider argues that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radi…

Will Ruddick, development economist and founder of Grassroots Economics, has spent the past 16 years in Kenya developing innovative "community inclusion currencies" for dozens of poorer communities. By combining ancient mutual aid practices with credit vouchers (circulating as a kind of money) and digital ledger technologies (to expand the scale of…

Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer, and energy democracy advocate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, has spent the past 15 years developing the innovative Solar Commons model. This powerful prototype uses decentralized solar arrays to generate steady revenue streams to build community wealth. Through partnership agreements, fou…

Appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people, Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator, has launched an open, collaborative project to develop a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus. Instead of framing "the economy" as a growth-obsessed machine standing apart from society and nature,…

Professor Aaron Perzanowski of the University of Michigan Law School explains how many artistic communities flourish as commons, without copyright protections that privilege private ownership and marketization. Tattoo artists, fashion designers, chefs, and stand-up comedians are among the communities that don't strictly own their primary creative w…

Shane O'Donnell, a sociologist and researcher, has been at the forefront of the "device activism" and #WeAreNotWaiting movement, a globe-spanning community of techies and people living with diabetes who have pioneered patient-led innovations in medical devices and healthcare. Outflanking a stodgy, risk-averse medical device industry, the movement h…

The best term for this era of geological history is not the Anthropocene, says Mihnea Tănăsescu, a research professor at the University of Mons in Belgium, but the Ecocene. "The increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life” requires us to shed our anthropocentric notions, and recognize our deep, entangled relationship…

Hannes Gerhardt, a professor of geography at the University of West Georgia (US), talks about his new book, 'From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism', especially as it applies to digital technology and online life. While Big Tech monopolies have crushed the hopeful experimentation that once prevailed in Internet …

Natasha Hulst, Director of the European Land Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, describes a spirited campaign by commoners to build an urban farm and green space, Voedselpark, or Food Park, on the edge of Amsterdam. While climate change and global economics argue for relocalizing agriculture, city officials and businesses are det…

Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, has been at the forefront of ambitious campaigns to create novel legal doctrines for "community rights," "the rights of nature," and more recently, "self-owning land." The primary goal is to expand democratic self-determination, especially at the local level,…

Long-time activist Alnoor Ladha and former program officer Lynn Murphy explain why so many philanthropies aren't really interested in system change. In their book 'Post Capitalist Philanthropy', they explain how large foundations are more intent on reproducing capitalist modernity and its norms than in moving beyond the growth economy. The real cha…

Leah Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York, showcases the history of African-American farming and Indigenous land traditions in her new book 'Black Earth Wisdom' in which sixteen Black elders of various backgrounds discuss the intertwined fate of the earth and our spiritual lives. The book brings attention to often-ne…

How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way? Professors Sheila R. Foster of Georgetown University and Christian Iaione of Luiss Carli University in Rome, share their insights into this topic after years of study and collaborative experimentation. Their new book, 'Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions Toward Just…

Dorn Cox is a New Hampshire family farmer who has long been in the vanguard of improving regenerative agriculture with open source technologies. He sees participatory science and knowledge commons as powerful tools for improving crop yields, soil health, and ecosystem resilience, especially in the face of climate change. Here, Cox talks about his n…

As Director of the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Binna Choi is in the vanguard of exploring how commoning can be used to make art and curate exhibitions. Choi and her colleagues in Utrecht, Netherlands, see commoning as an organizing principle for how artists can produce art collaboratively, in service to the community. As the Insti…

John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world. A Brit with extensive academic and journalistic background in design, Thackara is an independent writer, activist and thinker who is probing the idea of "designing for life." For him, this means…

Joe Brewer, an American activist with extensive background in earth sciences, embarked on a journey to heal the Earth, and ended up in Barichara, Colombia, helping to catalyze a bold effort to restore an arid tropical forest in the northern Andes. Here, Brewer describes his formal training in ecological sciences and complex systems; the techniques …

David Sloan Wilson is a renowned evolutionary biologist with pathbreaking insights into the role of cooperation in the evolution of life. A professor emeritus at State University of New York, Binghamton, Wilson has investigated how natural selection occurs among groups and even ecosystems, and not only at the level of genes and individuals. In this…

Drawing upon the pioneering work of Buckminster Fuller, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, explains his work promoting a "World Grid" -- a global infrastructure that would integrate electricity production and distribution into a single global network of networks. A free flow of electrici…

BIPOC farmers -- many afflicted by the persistent legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- generally do not have an easy path forward. To help inaugurate a different history, Jubilee Justice, a small Louisiana organization, is developing an ambitious array of commons-oriented projects. As cofounder and president Konda Mason explains, these stra…

When the Indonesian artists collective ruangrupa was selected to curate the prestigious international art exhibition Documenta, held every five years in Germany, the group made a bold choice: to prototype a new type of commons-oriented political economy for art-making. In this episode, Ruangrupa member Farid Rakun explains how the exhibition not on…

Guy Standing, an economist and scholar of the commons at SOAS University of London, talks about his new book, 'The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea'. He argues that overfishing and destructive deepsea mining are predictable results of 'rentier capitalism', the market/state system that privileges expansive property rights, financial…

Dr. Stephan Harding, a cofounder of Schumacher College (England) and senior lecturer in holistic science, is a pioneering scientist focused on earth sciences, deep ecology, and the theory of Gaia. His work stands on the shoulders of his friend and colleague James Lovelock, the originator of Gaia theory, and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who bravely…

It takes a lot of hard work to get small-scale commons started, especially with complications of managing money, budgets, and tax and legal compliance. These challenges have gotten easier since the rise of Open Collective, a nonprofit platform that acts a kind of commons-enabling infrastructure. In this episode, Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Offic…

Open access is a term used to describe academic books, journals, and other research that can be freely copied and shared rather than tightly controlled by large commercial publishers as expensive, proprietary product. Over the past 20 years, this vision has fallen far short of its original ambitions, however, as large publishers have developed new …

Ruth Catlow is an artist, curator, and co-leader of Furtherfield, a London-based arts collective that has been convening playful, participatory art projects for more than 25 years. The group's artistic experiments -- deeply rooted in open source technologies and philosophies -- use digital platforms and its green space and gallery in Finsbury Park …

British activist Sara Arnold and Dutch fashion scholar/activist Sandra Niessen explain their vision for "a radical defashion future" driven by degrowth, decolonization, and commoning. As two leaders of Fashion Act Now, they are part of a growing network of dissident fashionistas trying to make the global clothing industry more ecologically responsi…

Why is there so much hunger in the world today when the global food system produces, and wastes, amazing quantities of food? Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist and PhD Research Fellow at the Universite catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, points to our treatment of food as commodities, as traded in heavily subsidized markets dominated by l…

David Cayley has written a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his late friend and colleague, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), 'Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey', which reveals the ongoing relevance of Illich's searing social critiques. Illich was a radical Christian, cultural historian and itinerant scholar who soared to international fame in …

When he died in 2012, David Fleming -- a polymath thinker among the earliest to address Peak Oil -- left behind an unusual book manuscript about climate change, the fragility of capitalism, and the likely nature of our post-capitalist future. Fortunately, Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist who was Fleming's associate, shepherded the ma…

Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? In his new book 'Ours', Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, proposes inventing a new class of property rights -- "universal property" -- to protect land, watersheds and the atmosphere as well as co-inherited civic infrastructures su…

Among millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, ROSCAs, or 'rotating savings and credit associations', are trusted alternatives to racialized, exclusionary systems of formal banking. The self-organized, informal pooling of money among friends and neighbors offer a way to help people amass the money to buy a used car, pay …

Ecological economist Tim Jackson has spent over three decades investigating what a post-growth economy might look like and how to pursue it. His 2009 book 'Prosperity without Growth' became a landmark exploration of this topic. Now, more than a decade later, Jackson’s thinking has evolved in some new and unexpected ways. His new book, 'Post Growth:…

Jeremy Lent, author and self-described "integrator," has spent years exploring the "cognitive history of humanity" as expressed in diverse civilizations. Lent continues this investigation with a new book 'The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe," which can be succinctly summarized: "Our mains…

Kate Raworth's 2017 book 'Doughnut Economics' has become an international phenomenon by debunking the many half-truths of standard economics and offering a new framework for dealing with 21st Century realities. Her reconceptualization of the economy as a doughnut accents two vital concerns that economics often ignores -- the importance of meeting e…

Professor Peter Linebaugh, the acclaimed historian of commons, discusses the social and political histories of English commoners caught up in their struggles with state power and early capitalists. He explains the importance of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest; the criminalization of customary practices as early capitalism arose; the speci…

With an international network of scholars known as CERN – the Community Economies Research Network – Katherine Gibson, a professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, has explored the possibilities of a post-capitalist future for more than thirty years. Community Economies scholars reject many premises …

Rejecting the standard neoDarwinist account of life as mechanical and objectifying, theoretical biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber insists that science must study the subjective aliveness of organisms. While living beings certainly compete to survive, they also participate in symbiotic, relational webs of many other beings, each endowed wit…

Jimmy Buff, Executive Director of WKNY Radio in Kingston, NY, explains how he and a team of local talent converted an oldies-format AM radio station into a vibrant community broadcaster. The station features the usual blocs of rock, pop, and classical (with slots for polka and German music, too!), but also voices from the LGBTQ world, seniors, peop…

Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a young organic farmer who helped start Agrarian Trust, an organization supporting land access for the next generation of farmers. Ian McSweeney, the organizational director of Agrarian Trust, explains strategies for decommodifying land for farmers even as the pandemic drives up land prices. Also discussed: Greenho…

For Dave Jacke, a designer of ecological landscapes and lead author of the classic book 'Edible Forest Gardens,' the key to how humanity will navigate its future on Earth lies with our culture and "inner landscapes," as refracted through our technologies. Paradoxically, the extreme underdevelopment of Western culture, psychosocially, is a reason fo…

Janelle Orsi, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, in Oakland, California, is an accomplished practitioner of creative legal hacks. She and her colleagues at the Law Center focus on ingenious ways to decommodify land to keep housing and farmland affordable; to empower peer governance and give people control ove…

By David Bollier, Nathan Schneider