We should define first what we’re talking about, and why it matters. "The Commons" was the name used in mediaeval England to describe parcels of land that were used "in common" by peasant farmers, very few of whom owned enough land to survive upon. Their lives depended upon access to and use of a shared landscape that provided many necessities: grazing land for their oxen or their livestock, water in streams, ponds or wells, wood and fuel from a forest. The land was probably owned by a titled notable, but the importance of the commons to the survival of the population was so obvious that strict rules, recognized by the courts, required landowners to ensure the commons remained available for use by peasant farmers. That access was considered a right, which people took for granted, much as we assume we have a right to breathe air. How the commons was used, and by whom, was governed by the people themselves, who ensured that its benefits were fairly distributed amongst those who required access to it for survival. Property was thought of as a collection of rights as much as it was title to a piece of land; and often those rights took precedence.

But landowners began to imagine how much richer they could be if they could remove "the commoners," and use the land themselves. They began to plant hedges or otherwise bar the way onto lands that had been used and depended upon by nearby families for centuries. This practice became known as "enclosure." Parliament bowed to the will of wealthy landowners and passed the Enclosure Acts, stripping commoners of their property rights. By 1895, about half of one percent of the population of England and Wales owned almost 99 percent of the land. Sheep grazed former common lands, while peasants starved, or were forced into the cities – which is why London was the first city to have a million inhabitants. Some provided labour for the industrial revolution, but tens of thousands of commoners were forced into vagrancy and destitution. In Scotland people were packed onto ships, often at gunpoint, and transported across the ocean to the Americas in conditions often as bad as those on slave ships.

And so "commons" and "enclosure" have become words loaded with significance. The term "commons," derived from that ancient usage in the English countryside, is now applied to those things to which we have rights simply by being members of the human family. The air we breathe, the fresh water we drink, the seas, forests, and mountains, the genetic heritage through which all life is transmitted, the diversity of life itself. There is the commons that humankind has created – language, a wealth of scientific, cultural, and technical knowledge accumulated over the ages, our public universities, our health and education systems, the broadcast spectrum, our public utilities. There are the commons that we have specifically declared to be public assets, like our parks. This church is a "commons" – it is important to us for the values it fosters and the community it provides, but it does not belong to any individual amongst us. It is supported and governed by all of us, together working out how it can best serve our needs and those of the wider community of which we are a part.

A "commons," then, is synonymous with community, cooperation, and respect for the rights and preferences of others.

"Enclosure," on the other hand, refers to exclusion, possession, monopoly, and personal or corporate gain. Just as "enclosure" removed the rights to the commons of peasant farmers before the industrial revolution, Europeans carried the principle of enclosing the commons with them during the era of colonization, declaring any land without institutions or evidence of European –style sovereignty to be Terra Nullius, vacant land – even though the population of the Americas, for example, is estimated to have exceeded 100 million before colonization. Except for tiny inadequate reserves, the land was "enclosed;" that is, restricted for the use of the newcomers, and barred to those who had used it from time immemorial. The process continues today in such places as Indonesia, India, the Amazon, or Africa, where indigenous populations or small farmers see the land they have long occupied enclosed in favour of large scale ranching and farming operations, or for exploitation by mining, oil and logging corporations that frequently destroy the landscape and pollute air and water.

Enclosure of the commons has been going on for centuries, but today it is being practised on a scale and at a speed unimaginable only a few years ago. Chief among the tools of enclosure are privatization of the commons, and corporatizing of our society. In his fine book "The Unconscious Civilization," John Ralston Saul has written, "It could be argued that we are now in the midst of a coup d’état in slow motion. Democracy Is weakening…Corporatism is strengthening…Yet none of us has chosen this route for our society, in spite of which our elites quite happily continue down it."

Just a few examples of enclosure as it is being practised today: the determination of a few large corporations to privatize as much as possible of one of our most important commons, fresh water. The privatization of forests here and around the world through grants of tenure that exclude communities that did or could prosper through a commons regime; the enclosure of that miracle upon which life depends, the seed, once freely available for saving, sharing and replanting, now increasingly patented and controlled by a handful of giant chemical and biotechnology corporations.

The genetic basis of life itself is being enclosed and corporatized through the development of intellectual property regimes that are being forced on the entire world under terms of the World Trade Organization, the WTO. This only became a practical possibility in 1980 when the United States first approved the patenting of living matter. Once patented, the genetics of a seed becomes an industrial secret and is unavailable, or available only at great cost, for others to improve upon. So the privatization of seed breeding tends to stifle agricultural science, and devastate entire farming systems.

The enforcement of intellectual property rights enables Northern industrial nations to enclose or appropriate genetic resources and knowledge from the South. Over 99% of all patents on living organisms are held in the North. Biotechnology corporations roam the world searching for seeds with desirable characteristics. They modify perhaps a single gene, then patent and acquire exclusive rights over a plant that may have been developed over centuries by traditional farmers in a developing country. In this way, ownership and control of the world's seed diversity, most of it in the third world, is being transferred to transnational corporations based in the industrialized nations, principally the United States.

Indigenous peoples and family farmers around the world are demanding an end to this process, often called "biopiracy." The patenting of life will, they claim, undermine their food security and lead to a disintegration of their communal values and practices. Local cooperatives are fighting transnational biotech corporations through movements like "Seeds of Freedom" in India. As Vandana Shiva writes, "monopoly ownership of life creates an unprecedented crisis for agricultural and food security, by transforming biological resources from commons into commodities."

Canada is not immune from such practices. Canola was developed by Canadian scientists for Canadian farmers over a period of 25 years in public research facilities paid for by all of us. Dr. Baldur Stefanson, a University of Manitoba scientist recognized as a "father of canola," explained with some bitterness that 75 percent of canola seed is now controlled by global corporations.

Our public universities have become particularly vulnerable targets for enclosure by corporate interests. Science, and knowledge generally, has long been considered one of the great "commons" of mankind. But corporate control in fields like genetic engineering is changing the way science is practiced, and threatening the basic function of our universities. In the normal practice of science, researchers publish their results so that colleagues around the world can verify or disprove their results, or use them as a springboard from which to press the work further. In biotech or similar research, the watchword is secrecy and the goal is speeding patented products to market. You don’t publish without corporate permission, and you certainly don’t publish anything that might reflect unfavourably on the product the company is pushing. Biotech scientists in our universities are footsoldiers in a vast corporate enterprise. One University of Victoria biochemist sadly described for me the loss of collegiality amongst his colleagues since corporate presence became palpable on the campus.

Patent rights are based on the argument that only private corporations will risk the time and money needed to come up with innovative ideas of value to society, and when they do, they must be rewarded by having exclusive rights to them. This, of course, ignores the benefits that publicly-funded research has brought us - superior varieties of grains and many other crops, disease resistant fruits and vegetables, a host of medical advances, including vaccination, insulin, and polio vaccine. When Jonas Salk was asked why he didn't patent his polio vaccine, he is reported to have said that it would make as much sense to patent sunlight - his vaccine belonged to everyone. Great scientists don't desist from doing research just because they don't have ties to a corporation that will make them rich if they keep their work secret.

The infiltration of corporations into universities is in part due to reduced public funding for research and higher education. Since the corporate funding that universities seek and accept to make up this loss is largely devoted to the search for patentable products, other, often more important research, is neglected. The role of the university in society shifts, as University of Toronto philosopher James R. Brown described in an essay in the journal "Science" that he called "Privatizing the University - the New Tragedy of the Commons." The corporate takeover of universities in the United States was documented not long ago in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Kept University."

Fifty years ago, the terms "commons" and "enclosure" were principally the domain of historians. Then in 1968, a biologist named Garrett Hardin, a Unitarian that our own Felix Lion knew in California, published a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons." It turned out to be one of the most famous and most cited academic papers of the last half century. It spawned an academic discipline that now produces over one hundred papers a year, as well as a plethora of theses, books, conferences, and some furious debates. It has also been used to justify all manner of political and economic chicanery.

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin argued that common property will always be destroyed, because the gain that individuals make by over-exploiting it will outweigh the loss they suffer as a result of that over-use. He used the example of a herdsman, keeping his cattle on a common pasture. With every cow the man added to his herd he would gain more than he lost: he would be one cow richer, while the community as a whole would bear the cost of the extra cow. With everyone following the same practice, the pasture they used in common would soon be destroyed. Hardin suggested that the way to prevent this tragedy was to privatize or nationalize commons land.

The principle can be applied to any common resource to which a large number of people have access. It might be the ocean from which fish are harvested, the global atmosphere into which greenhouse gasses are released, or a forest from which timber is harvested. Overuse of any of them can destroy their sustainability. But if you limit your use of the resource and your neighbours do not, the resource still collapses, but you have lost the short-term benefits of taking your share.

Hardin’s paper provided an academic rationale for the privatization of land and resources. It encouraged such things as the transfer of land from tribal peoples to the state or to corporations or individuals; it was used to justify the industrial exploitation of fisheries, and the privatization of water. Neo-conservatives cited it in support of the private takeover of many things long considered to be public assets, or "commons."

But Hardin's paper had a critical flaw. He had assumed that

individuals can be as selfish as they like in a commons, because there is no one to stop them. Many subsequent papers and books, and later Hardin himself, said that what he was really describing was a "free access" domain, not a commons at all. A central characteristic of a true commons is its careful, collaborative management by those who use it, a management often more cautious than that of privately or state-owned resources. Hardin’s reasoning was right, but his definition of the Commons was wrong. The unfortunate result was that his paper was used to support the destruction of commons regimes, rather than imposing control on access to public resources, which is the real requirement in many of our most serious environmental issues.

In an "open access" fishery, for example, anyone can fish as much as he wants. Inevitably the resource will by over-drawn and everyone will lose when fish stocks collapse. In fact, ninety percent of the world’s fishers rely on small inshore marine commons, where they catch over half the fish eaten in the world today. Such fisheries commons have fed large populations for centuries because they are regulated by the people who depend upon them. But when large foreign fishing corporations buy free access to these fisheries from impoverished governments, as happens frequently these days, they wipe out the fishery in short order and then move on to repeat the process elsewhere, leaving destitution behind them.

Of course, human nature is much more complex than Hardin’s "Tragedy of the commons" would suggest. Life would be unbearable if individuals did not often act in the interests of the collective good rather than with narrow self-interest. Communication, trust, and the ability to conclude binding agreements and rules, are essential ingredients of the commons.

"Free Access," on the other hand, is in fact a pretty good description of "globalization." A principal goal of institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary fund, the World Bank and the trade treaties they enforce is to ensure free corporate access to the commons of nations around the world, and to prevent communal values in those nations from being imposed on foreign corporations. And so a relatively small number of gigantic corporations, armed with WTO-endowed rights and relatively unencumbered with responsibility, roam the world looking for the richest resources and the most compliant governments, the least onerous environmental, health and safety regulations, and the lowest wages.

The World Bank and the IMF promote and finance export agriculture, a huge enclosure project that drives small farmers off the land and into the cities while eliminating sustainable, self-sufficient food production systems. Enclosure is one of the principal reasons that 800 million people are hungry in a world that actually produces enough food for everyone.

The newest development in globalization, the GATS or General Agreement on Trade in Services, is presently under negotiation by members of the WTO. It is aimed directly at some of our most treasured commons. Health-care, education, social services, and water resources – all would be open to exploitation and privatization by trans-national corporations under terms of the GATS. It would appear that globalization is the new colonization, and trade treaties are its gunboats.

Concern about the global commons and its enclosure is growing quickly. It encompasses most environmental issues, and the moral questions involved require the awareness of communities like ours. Efforts throughout the world aimed at reclaiming the commons include the growing movement against corporate globalization, the many environmental movements, the alternative media movement, and efforts to prevent corporate takeover of water. Activists from more than 50 countries are promoting a treaty to establish the earth's gene pool as a global commons.

Reclaiming the commons in its many forms, and accepting responsibility for its stewardship, in spirit and in fact, should be a defining issue of our time. The land we tread, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the biodiversity upon which life depends and the genetic code that expresses it, the knowledge and culture we inherited and enriched, can only be passed on unimpaired to future generations if they remain integral elements of "the commons."

Richard C. Bocking
5341 Parker Avenue
Victoria B.C. V8Y 2N1
Tel 250 658 2993
Fax 250 658 2989
Email: rbocking@coastworks.com
www.coastworks.com/rbocking