Words&Dirt

“Humanity is quickly becoming aware that the biosphere is the indivisible overarching community to which we all belong and whose well-being is indispensable to assuring our own well-being as well as our survival.  This dawning awareness comes with a new sense of responsibility––living our individual and collective lives in our homes, businesses, and communities in ways that advance the health of the larger biosphere.

James Boyle and his colleagues pinned their intellectual hopes on using the environmental perspective as an analogy from which to draw lessons for creating what they call cultural environmentalism––a systems theory of the indivisibility of the public domain that might unite all the disparate interests and initiatives in an overarching general theory.  They’re still looking because what they regarded as an analogy is, in fact, a common frame that unites our species.  The same general theory that governs the biosphere dictates the general welfare of society.

While the enclosure, privatization, and commercial exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems in the capitalist era has resulted in a dramatic rise in the standard of life of a significant minority of the human race, it has been at the expense of the biosphere itself.  When Boyle, Lessig, Stallman, Benkler, and others lament the consequences of enclosing the various Commons in the form of private property that is exchanged in the market, the damage inflicted penetrates more deeply than just the question of freedom to communicate and create.  The enclosures of the land and ocean Commons, the fresh water Commons, the atmosphere Commons, the electromagnetic spectrum Commons, the knowledge Commons, and the genetic Commons has severed the complex internal dynamics of Earth’s biosphere, jeopardizing every human being’s welfare and the well-being of all the other organisms that inhabit the planet.  If we are looking for a general theory that brings everyone’s interests together, restoring the health of the biosphere community seems the obvious choice.

The real historical significance of the Free Culture Movement and Environmental Movement is that they are both standing up to the forces of enclosure.  By reopening the various Commons, humanity begins to think and act as part of a whole.  We come to realize that the ultimate creative power is reconnecting with one another and embedding ourselves in ever-larger systems of relationships that ripple out and encompass the entire set of relationships that make up the biosphere Commons.

If by advancing culture we mean the search for meaning, it is likely to be found in exploring our relationship to the larger scheme of things, of which we are irrevocably intertwined––our common biosphere and what lies beyond.  ‘Free speech’ is not ‘free beer,’ but what is its purpose if not to join together and collaboratively reimagine the nature of the human journey in a way that celebrates life on Earth?  The opposite of enclosure is not merely openness, but transcendence.”

––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg. 184-5