What Might The Commons Offer Us In The Face Of The Coronavirus?
Written on 1st April 2020
I’ve been thinking a lot about what coronavirus will mean for us humans, now, and in the long-term and how we function as a society. I think, if nothing else Covid-19 has demonstrated just how inescapably interconnected we are.
There is, undeniably, a lot of fear about the virus and its effects, and I understand that and know that it is merited — there are many vulnerable people who are at risk from Covid-19 and it is to be taken very seriously indeed. However, what’s also clear is that, for many of us, this fear is pushing us into a survival mindset, and has meant people are hoarding toilet rolls, hand sanitiser, stealing masks and supplies from hospitals, clearing the shelves of canned goods and bulk-buying food — prioritising themselves at the expense of others and the collective. Thinking and acting like this might seem intuitive to some, but, in fact, it’s the opposite.
“Putting ourselves first” in a pandemic will not save us.
Please know that I’m not talking about vulnerable and elderly people, who are at greater risk of serious health implications from Covid-19 and for whom goods and services are difficult to access in the best of times.
What people forget is that, even from a very selfish perspective, we collectively need people to be healthy and to get through this together as familial, local, regional, national and global communities that are incredibly connected and rely on each other. It makes no sense at all to steal face masks and medical equipment from hospitals and from people who are actually treating and keeping people alive who have the virus. If health professionals get sick — they cannot help you or your loved ones. And people are what keeps our systems running — the delivery driver who transported that hand sanitiser, the factory worker that made and packaged that toilet roll, the shop workers who are stacking that food on the shelves — where would we all be without them? And what happens when we prioritise our needs over theirs? If they can’t eat because we’ve taken all the food, if they can’t protect themselves and get sick because they don’t have access to soap or sanitiser — the whole thing stops and we really are on our own.
Something that keeps going round and round in my mind is a story I heard a few months ago when I was reading Free, Fair and Alive (David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2019, Ch 8 p22). In the quiet Massachusetts town of Hadley, there’s a farm called Next Barn Over, where families go on weekends to “pick beans and strawberries from the fields, cut fresh herbs and flowers, and gather their weekly share of potatoes, kale, onions, radishes, tomatoes and other produce.” Next Barn Over operates somewhat differently to the farms many of us know — it’s what’s called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which means that local people buy shares in the farm’s seasonal harvest and, in return, receive weekly fresh produce between April and November. What this means is that CSAs pool the money they receive from the community, before production, use it to purchase what they need to grow the food and then divide whatever is harvested among all those who invested.
Original image (in Spanish) by Miguel Brieva; translated by Guerrilla Translation.
What I SO love about the idea of Community Supported Agriculture is that it gives farmers the working capital they need, at the same time as sharing the risks of production that they face in growing food (bad weather, crop diseases, equipment issues etc). To many of us, who are used to walking into a shop and seeing food ready and waiting on the shelves and buying it, it might seem counterintuitive and risky to pay for our food before it exists and to share the risks and rewards of production. But to me, it makes so much sense to all be in it together — because we are all in it together! It is a huge responsibility to produce food — one of the very foundations of life, and we should all respect and support those who work to bring food to our tables and collaborate to manage food as the precious resource that it is. Food production, farming, is hard and precarious work, and all around the world farmers face tougher conditions than ever with a rising population, climate change, supermarkets driving down prices and everything in between, and we are seeing the effects — with farmer suicides on the increase and fewer and fewer people going into farming. If we share the responsibility of food production and support farmers from the start, we relieve some of the burden on those who carry this responsibility. Food, instead of a luxury item, should be a commons, and producers should not be rewarded and punished according to their successes and failings.
I know it might seem like I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but I feel that there are so many lessons we can learn from practices, approaches and values like those demonstrated at Next Barn Over and the thousands of communities the world over and throughout time who apply commoning principles to their work, lives and leisure. You may know lots or a little about ’The commons’, but essentially what I am referring to here are resources (natural (air, water, land, food) or otherwise (technology, money, information, housing, healthcare) that communities self-manage equitably for individual and collective benefit. So, what might the Commons offer us as a way to navigate and organise in these extraordinary uncertain times? What happens when we think differently about how we might manage our precious resources in the face of Covid-19? What happens when we think of food, healthcare, medical supplies, or even toilet roll as shared resources (which they are), that we all need to collaboratively and equitably manage for our collective benefit?
These questions have got me thinking about my own resources and how they might be of service, not only to me, but to the collective. I find myself asking myself if I have enough toilet roll that I might be able to offer a roll to a neighbour if they are caught short and are unable to find any in the shops. I’m thinking about what I can offer to Food Banks that might be short of items right now. If I am in good health (and following expert advice) how can I offer my services to those in my local community who might be in isolation, whether that’s running errands, buying groceries etc. I’m asking myself about the vulnerable and elderly people I know and how I can support them to keep safe and connected.
Beyond our immediate communities, what could the commons offer us systemically to tackle situations like a pandemic? How might open-source software support open access educational resources for learning at home, or open-source systems for working at home, or open-source medication that could make it accessible for all? And what about introducing a universal basic income to free up and support the people producing these resources? and those people in precarious jobs; freelancers, sex workers, artists, gig-economy workers, musicians and many more whose work and income are vulnerable in situations like these? What happens when we think of food as a provision, rather than a product, and farmers as providers, rather than producers? Might we have more respect and honour for those doing this work when we acknowledge we are being carefully and considerately and sometimes sacrificially provided for, rather than considering ourselves simply as consumers? And what about care? In Free, Fair and Alive, Silke and David talk about supporting care and decommodified work. They say: “Work in commons is not a purchased unit of commodified work, aka “labor”. It is an activity that draws upon people’s deep passions and values — their whole selves. Geographer Neera Singh calls this sort of commitment “affective labor” because people show love, devotion, and care — or simply awareness for what needs to be done — when stewarding a forest, caring for elderly parents, designing and curating a web archive, teaching a craft or tending a community garden. Care and commitment in a shared endeavor is central for commoning. It is the elemental glue that holds people together.” Approaching Covid-19 and similar situations would be totally transformed from this perspective. Can you imagine? I love what my wonderful friend Meera proposes — a ‘culture of care’ — moving toward community care and care as a political system, structure, framing, politics and practice.
Covid-19 is even raising questions about the resilience and effectiveness of our global economy. In these times we see what’s valuable; do we really need an economy that pursues economic growth at all costs? It is the competitive and profit-seeking motives of neoliberal capitalism that causes us to approach these crises with a fear of scarcity and as individuals instead of acknowledging the abundance we can all have access to, and benefit from, if we all honour our interdependence and the values of community and kindness that will see us through these times.
The commons offers us one framework of many about how we might cooperate to navigate Covid-19, and indeed the many crises we face collectively and individually as humans — climate change, poverty, environmental destruction, inequality. We are not transactions, and we are not consumers, we are humans. We make being here worthwhile for each other. We have imaginations as vast and limitless as the outer edges of the universe — with them we have explored and created worlds, painted masterpieces, loved each other through time and space. We can imagine new ways of working together to navigate the challenges we face. We might be being encouraged to self-isolate and socially distance ourselves from each other, but we are far from alone here; there are 7.6 billion of us. We need each other. So how can we approach this pandemic as an interdependent collective, rather than self-interested individuals?
(Image by Judy Schmidt)
I leave you with the words of Carl Sagan, who puts it better than I ever could:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
This week, we are mostly reading…
We have compiled a list of inspiring articles that will help us endure this quarantine and take the time to reimagine our society. Hope you enjoy!
- HOLY SH*T! 7 things to do instead of hoarding toilet paper: Beautiful Trouble’s irreverent guide to activism in the time of pandemic.
- Ultimate Medical Hackathon: How Fast Can We Design And Deploy An Open Source Ventilator?: Gui Cavalcanti, whose name you might recognize from MegaBots, got on a call with a medical professional in San Francisco and talked about respirators. The question being, can we design and deploy an open source version in time to help people?
- The Only Treatment for Coronavirus Is Solidarity: We live in an interwoven, interconnected world where an injury to one is truly an injury to all. We must confront the coronavirus with solidarity and fight for a society where the health of all is more important than profits for a few.
- The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: it provides infrastructure for technologists, civic organisations, public & private institutions and specialists of all kinds to collaborate on a rapid and sophisticated response to the coronavirus outbreak, including all the subsequent impacts. It is a quickly evolving resource with thousands of active expert contributors.
- How scientists are crowdsourcing a coronavirus treatment: This online puzzle game illustrates the power of citizen science.
- (From Upstream’s instagram account)
- Spread Stories, Not the Virus: A collection of stories that show how citizens around the world experience cities when life between buildings suddenly disappears. It explores what kind of city emerges when people are expected to practice social distancing and are confined to their homes.
- What is Coronavirus Teaching us About Resilience?: “We will recover from COVID, but if we don’t learn the lessons that it is teaching us in this moment and we prop up these same structures of production and extraction that are driving climate change and destruction of that which supports life, we are in for a rough road ahead.”
- Biohackers team up online to help develop coronavirus solutions: Students, scientists, developers and health professionals use forums to investigate potential vaccines and methods of testing.
- 10 Steps for Rebalancing our World in Times of Crisis: The coronavirus outbreak makes one thing abundantly clear: we’re interconnected and in this together.
- Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing: In a global economy that has been plagued by 40 years of neoliberalism, the social bonds that help to create strong, resilient communities have been so badly eroded that the strategy of social distancing, while necessary, is having many unanticipated consequences.
- Community Care is Greater Than the Coronavirus: It is in these uncertain times that we realise the fragility of the interwoven systems we all depend on to survive.
- Leslie Davenport on staying sane amid coronavirus craziness: Practicing self- and communal care in the times of pandemic.
- 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine: we are guessing that you might have some extra reading time these days during the worldwide makeshift quarantine
