Our Commons and Greta's Call to Action
Peter Rabley and Kirk Talbott
Our Common Reckoning
Fifteen year old Greta Thunberg declared at last December’s Climate Meeting in Poland: “You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.” Carbon-based energy systems, unsustainable exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, and poor governance have brought us to a precipice. Call it the Law of Hubristic Unintended Consequences, an existential reckoning beckons like none before. To paraphrase famed biologist E.O. Wilson, our Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technological powers bode trouble, now.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 landmark book on DDT, Silent Spring, set the stage for environmental science and activism. The first Earth Day in 1970 signaled a new popular awareness of ecology. Over the next few decades people knew problems brewed with ozone, air and water pollution, worldwide forest degradation and habitat loss for biodiversity. But most of us thought any doomsday scenario stretched out past 100 years and into the realm of science fiction.
However, over the last several years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports increasingly warn of impending peril. We hold our atmosphere, oceans and fresh water, and a habitable earth, in common, not owned privately. Those global commons gain heightened importance in our rapidly transforming world. Meltwater from ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica alter ocean temperatures and currents – which in turn affects weather patterns and atmospheric systems. The disappearance of coral reefs, tropical forests, wildlife and even insects points towards an ecological catastrophe ahead. The scientific studies keep shortening the time frame towards devastating, irreversible climate change impacts; the latest estimate down to only 12 years. Gaining speed and catching many by surprise, we fast approach an alarming cliff of accountability of our own making. No wonder Greta’s words echo youth’s angst and brim with outrage at the status quo.
We still have time and several promising developments at our disposal to address the crisis. These include improving information availability and technologies along with impressive gains in solar energy and wind power. Renewed attention on strengthening property rights and managing the world’s commons presents another compelling avenue to pursue that can improve governance and help ameliorate the adverse impacts of climate change.
Our Crowded Planet
For Native Americans and most Indigenous Peoples, land, water, animals and other natural resources had a central place in society and property systems. Developed over millennia, a mosaic of traditional rules and customary practices has provided Indigenous Peoples balanced agro-ecological systems to manage landscapes and provide benefits for local communities. They have often shared in the governance of land and common property, practicing community-based forestry and agriculture systems, watershed management and animal husbandry.
The commons stand under assault today. The ‘free rider” problem prevails in most commons; those who benefit often do not pay their fair share for those common resources. Compounding this ongoing problem, sharing natural resources across an increasingly crowded planet presents a huge challenge. Over one hundred and sixty million people live in Bangladesh, for example, more than the entire U.S. population in 1950. The size of Virginia, Bangladesh’s vulnerable land mass declines each day from erosion and sea rise. Nigeria, one tenth the size of the U.S., has grown from 40 million in 1960 to over 170 million people today, with 400 million projected in less than 30 years. Mounting demographic pressure on a diminishing natural resource base plays out more every year.
From urban slums to rural, agricultural regions, land tenure and property rights tend to be skewed in favor of the wealthy. They have the means and the time to consolidate property to reap profits. Nigeria’s wealthy elite, for example, rapidly rises, the number of millionaires more than doubling in the last decade while poverty and inequality expands. Unemployment reaches nearly 80% for youth in the dry, degraded Sahel scrublands in the north, where Boko Haram actively recruits. Nearby Lake Chad, a vital regional commons, has all but dried up, with over 90 % of its water lost in recent years as the seeds of unrest spread across neighboring Cameroon, Mali and Niger.
Corruption and Natural Resources Management
Corruption, dishonest conduct by those entrusted with a position of authority, implies illicit benefit. Like fraud, corruption requires intent, a deception deliberately practiced. We generally know corruption when we see it. Honesty and integrity, or the lack thereof, lies at the core of society and governance. Leadership matters a lot; if the top rots, so too the body. Corruption brings a powerful corrosive effect on society, undermining good governance, management of the commons and efforts to combat climate change.
The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to a repeated pattern in international development. Countries rich in natural resources tend to eventually suffer; their bounty exacerbates corruption by encouraging aggressive, extractive practices. These conditions undermine traditional common property management systems and sustainable economies with its ‘rent-seeking’ collusion. Local resource users have little choice but to participate in a deeply-rooted system based on graft and ‘informal economies’ for paying off government officials, skirting laws and regulations and weak enforcement.
International actors including timber, oil, gas, mining and palm oil conglomerates continue to play a major role and land use and ownership. Corporate actors, like any others, vary greatly in their positive or negative impact on their host countries and our global commons. Some oil and gas concessions in Asia, for instance, have at least temporarily protected local forest and coastal ecosystems from the over-exploitation of neighboring areas. Often, the opposite has also proven true. International investors can play a similar positive or negative role in sustaining the commons in their choice for stewardship and engagement or not.
The civil society organization, Transparency International, helps lead the fight against corruption worldwide by ranking countries and drawing attention to corrupt states. No surprise that those countries with weak governance have inordinately suffered environmental stress and harm. The Environmental Law Institute, Asia Foundation, and other NGOs have found strong correlations between governance and environment.
Good governance hinges, foremost, on accountability and transparency. Transparency implies openness, communication and mutually supports accountability. Accountability means accepting full responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and decisions. Good governance also depends on two other bedrock principles: representation and equity. When stakeholders participate in transparent decision making and share, fairly, in responsibilities and benefits, the conditions exist for success – anywhere, any sector. But building those four cornerstones of good governance does not come easily.
The fight against corruption can provide a lens on human history and the ongoing struggle for land and property rights and the need to protect our commons as a crucial asset for all of humanity. Several thousand years of rising civilization appears to have done little to curb mankind’s propensity for greed, dishonesty and taking advantage of power or position. Corruption thrives when given an opening. Fraud, scamming and illicit gains from misused authority remain prevalent from villages to international agencies and corporations. The age of instant global communications, artificial intelligence and other new technologies has only heightened the cat and mouse tension between transparency and corruption, including in granting timber and mining concessions, land adjudication, and zoning.
Capitalism and Democracy Today
Since the end of WWII, the world has seen the hard-won rise and now decline of democracies. Stoking fear and exploiting resentments has long been the calling card of dictators. Increasing migration, environmental stress and demographic pressure adds to the mix. That pattern accompanies the current ascent of authoritarians in Europe, Brazil, the Philippines and elsewhere. Look at what happened to the Arab Spring. For the most part, it collapsed over the last seven years with a return to war and repression in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Last year China’s Congress abolished term limits for President Xi. Fractures and divides grow across the internet and continents in our world of accelerating change and uncertainty.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times helps us navigate these troubling waters by providing historical context in his writing about the failing marriage between capitalism and democracy. Mass education, communications, and mobilization for industrialized warfare in the early 20th Century strengthened the demand for political inclusiveness in a global system. The 1930s worldwide financial debacle, however, wreaked havoc on globalization; igniting poverty, insecurity, fear and anger.
Fast forward to the shockwaves of the 2008 financial crisis; they continue to ripple across the planet. Wolf reminds us that democracy requires confidence and trust that winners will not use their powers to destroy the losers. Unfortunately, we now stare at gaping inequities with less than 30 billionaires owning half the world’s wealth and corporations such as Amazon and Walmart consolidating markets, eliminating smaller competitors.
Facing explosive growth of new technologies and accelerating globalization, we ride a geometric curve of exponential change. We have not, however, experienced an equivalent rise in consciousness and good governance (accountability, transparency, fairness). At a minimum, managing this growth will require a new mindset, a balancing of capitalism, and a strengthened governance framework. Rendering our planet profane, we continue to treat its vast web of natural resources with irreverence and avarice. The price mounts.
Unprecedented
While the specific timing and nature of our ecological fate remain unknown, failure to act irrefutably brings ever worse outcomes. Like a patient with a known progressive disease we suffer, proportionally, the consequences of denial or inaction. Humans by nature tend to wait until we have to act; too often, too late. The absence of tangible, immediately apparent harm makes being proactive especially difficult; short-term gains trump long-term costs in our decision making.
When many of us look out our windows, the coming climate change threat on the horizon does not appear immediate. For others, however, the arriving crisis jumps out before their eyes: the recent horrific forest fires in Greece and California; the devastating cyclones in Mozambique; relentless sea level rise that undermines the fabric of life by submerging Pacific Island states; and massive mangrove destruction in the Florida Keys and elsewhere.
Each day without concerted and effective action taken to reverse the course of a carbon-based global economy, our options narrow. Without change, we move steadily towards more draconian rationing and distribution of limited natural resources. We can expect widespread social unrest and more pandemic health crises such as the recent Ebola and bird flues outbreaks.
Yet we have time to act, as Greta starkly reminds us. “We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.” We can still make a huge difference in terms of 2, 3, 4 or more degrees warming of the planet. Arnold Toynbee argued in A Study of History that civilization can be seen “as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses… unprecedented effort.” Our man-made climate change crisis presents such an unprecedented challenge. To turn the corner towards ecological health, we must make the commensurate unprecedented effort. We can change paths towards renewable energies, restoring balance in capitalism and building sustainable economies. A key ingredient of a resilient economy and good governance revolves around strengthening property rights and management of our commons.
Hopeful Signs: Good Governance and the Commons
When Magellan planted a large wooden cross on a Philippine island in 1521, he claimed to have appropriated all Filipino forbears’ sovereignty and property rights. This bold declaration set in motion centuries of colonial usurpation of native lands. Four hundred years later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Carino v. the Insular Government affirmed in a unanimous decision that land occupied in the Philippines since time immemorial was never public land.
The landmark ruling established private, community rights for Indigenous Peoples in the remote jungles of insular Asia. It punctured the myth of public lands as essentially unoccupied or unclaimed (the notion of Terranullius), ready for the taking and exploitation. It also set a precedent for recognition of ancestral domain and public or group rights to land and property.
Indigenous Peoples have long established a balanced relationship between property rights and the natural environment. Managing the commons including rivers, seas, forests and wildlife, as a class of asset, has been a critical element of that balance. Private property has also held a central place in traditional cultures, but has often been used for the exclusive benefit of a few and harmed the commons or public property. Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Article popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons” and described many examples of overfishing and wreaked commons. He helped spark a debate on governing the commons and Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economics for her book of that title. Awareness of the role of the commons s proves essential to striking a balance and improving governance in any cultural setting.
With a nuanced, demand driven approach, we can bring new attention and levels of support to sustainably managing our commons. We need to bridge customary and modern law to sustain the resource base and provide ongoing benefits and sustenance for local communities. Balancing property rights and concomitant responsibilities in the spectrum of ownership and use of assets, both private and commons, including land, can only be achieved through transparency and accountability.
Clarifying and securing land and resource tenure rights and responsibilities through legal and policy reform can help shift authoritarian, state control towards partnerships with local communities, including vulnerable Indigenous Peoples. Property and boundary confusion, legal grey areas, lack of clarity in agreements can all cause confusion and discord in administering land rights and adjudicating conflict. Specifying property boundaries and governance terms can only help improve management of the commons and ecosystems.
An encouraging trend in international investment offers some promise for improved stewardship of the commons. There is a growing recognition of a fiduciary duty to the commons, a responsibility that gains increasing traction. Harvard Business School’s George Serafeim, for instance, explores how large institutional investors can mitigate the free rider dilemma through value enhancing company action and collaboration. He describes in “Investors as Stewards of the Commons?” how long-term horizons and common ownership along with social and customer pressure has mobilized investor voice towards positive social impact. He describes the different class of investors most likely to embrace the Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI). These include large index investment managers such as Vanguard and Blackrock to individual investors who play an increasingly active role as asset managers, “exercising voice and voting rights in the governance process of corporations.”
Recognizing, delineating and enforcing property rights often depend on communities producing written documents. Transparency, improving GPS technologies and expanding investor sense of responsibilities help identify the common or public property and strengthen fiduciary duties of all stakeholders in those commons. These include surveys, participatory maps, and deeds, contracts, bills of sale or other written evidence to back up public or community claims. These efforts to “bring state to custom” have demonstrated limited but significant results in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Managing risks related to property relations stands as a major challenge in the mining, forestry and oil and gas industries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) provides a solid institutional setting in this direction with accumulating member experience and resources. The recent Land and Forest Tenure Facility (TF) already demonstrates a strong voice and funding mechanism for Indigenous Peoples and other vulnerable stakeholders in extractive industries and agriculture and development.
Environmental Justice
Greta has helped resets the stage. Lighting a candle in the darkness with her own raw, powerful message of a people-based popular ecology, she declares: “We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”
In Paris, thousands marched in yellow vests against President Macron and his plan to put a dent in climate change by taxing diesel fuel. These protests reflect a worldwide frustration with corporations and the wealthy few who reap profits, while often not paying their fair share of the costs. Greta reminds us that “our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money…It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.”
Environmental injustice plays out every day in the U.S. and around the world against the poor and marginalized. More than 10 million Burmese, for example, many from ethnic groups in rugged, mountainous border regions, remain landless agricultural or mining laborers. As international development, religious and conservation organizations race into Burma and elsewhere, they must not lose sight of the need for inclusiveness of citizenship in in the benefits of resource exploitation, ecotourism and growth.
A Way Forward
An understanding and appreciation of the commons as an asset class that benefits all of humanity offers a vital piece in a larger equation needed to pivot away from corruption and climate crisis. Each individual person can make a fundamental change in their attitude and everyday behavior to achieve small but significant, measurable steps towards their better selves and a better future.
Replacing fear and despair with hope and action, a new consciousness can take hold, one person at a time. Each of us can connect to others in our community and beyond to build collective action that makes a difference. Holding ourselves more accountable, we can demand more from our politicians; change what we consume, who we vote for, and what we insist upon for our human, constitutional, and fundamental property rights. We must build a community, ‘we-are-in-this-together’ ethos within our neighborhoods, towns, watersheds, and regions. We can follow the principled consciousness of a now sixteen-year old fellow world citizen.
Changes must be made, sooner rather than later, in our laws and financial regulations to strengthen standards and measurements for government and corporate accountability. Increased collaboration between companies and investors holding long-term horizons can combine with smaller activist funds and individual asset managers to improve engagement and common property stewardship. Good governance demands heightened transparency and equity in sharing costs and benefits related to our interconnected environment, particularly our vulnerable global commons.
Perhaps now we stand ready to pay attention to and respect the world’s Indigenous Peoples, who have long warned us of the peril of monetizing land and resources and rendering nature profane. Having thrived for millennia, Indigenous Peoples more than ever have valuable lessons to share as we try to find our way forward.
Strengthening governance and management of the commons in concert with new technologies, investment strategies and balancing social movements, can enhance our chances for turning the corner from the precipice. Human society has proven resilient in the past; we thrive by learning and changing. Greta’s stark perspective and her call for transparency and change can help lead the way – while we still have time.
Endnotes
1. * For a full transcript of Greta Thunberg’s speech, (12/18/2018), see the Poland Meeting and interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now
2. Beyond political ecology, mankind’s dilemma arises from its Promethean nature. In 2000, Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, predicted a nightmare scenario within a half century. He described rapid advances in nanotechnology, genetics, robotics, and warfare, resulting in devastating harm (both intentional and accidental) to civilization. He considered the chilling possibility of a ”White Plague” created through genetic manipulation or nanotechnology run amok, “possibly turning the biosphere into dust in a matter of days.” (See Wilbur, Theory of Everything, p. 104.) Scientists surveyed then put humanity’s chances for survival to the end of our century at 30-50%. One wonders what those chances are today as miles-long trains of coal depart several times a day from Wyoming’s Powder Basin for West Coast ports and China.