The Commons are the universal
heritage of people and all living things. They are
everything needed to support healthy life on earth:
air, water, food, shelter, health care, energy sources
and our genetic heritage. They are what is needed
to sustain culture: our multicultural heritages,
education, information and the means to disseminate
it, essential human services, public spaces, the
air waves, and political space. They are equally
the land, its forests, the oceans, and all ecosystems.
From the Statement of Unity
Reclaim the Commons Mobilization
www.reclaimthecommons.net
Over the next ten days, June 3-9 in San Francisco,
while the biotechnology industry meets in its annual
convention, the streets of the city will be filled
with marches, demonstrations, and actions organized
by the Reclaim the Commons Mobilization. The schedule
of events is ambitious, even for the progressive
Bay Area, a solid week of activities designed to
highlight the corporate takeover of our economies,
governments, and public life. But beyond the events
and actions that are planned, the mobilization is
an attempt to forge a new political language, that
can help us focus not on any single issue or list
of issues, but on the links and connections between
them, a language to express what we want, not just
what we don't want.
What we don't want is clear and overwhelming: the
whole laundry list of exploitations, corporate takeovers,
and "isms"--racism, sexism, classism,
and all the others. We can easily become exhausted
trying to keep up a decent level of protest on all
those issues. Here in the Bay Area, a determined
activist could go to two or three protests on most
days. Add a few meetings into the mix, and you'd
need to forego gainful employment, family life,
and all other meaningful human relationships just
to stay abreast.
What we do want is less defined. We don't have a
consensus on the specific form of economics or the
ten-year plan that we are pushing for. Nor should
we. What we want is a shift in worldview, a move
away from the model of reality that sees the universe
as a giant machine, and toward an understanding
of the world as organic, alive, dynamic, and changing.
That view doesn't lead to monolithic solutions or
imposed programs, but rather to experimentation
and to a multiplicity of proposed solutions. It's
a dynamic view, that understands that any solution,
any form, must continuously dissolve itself and
reform if it is to remain alive and liberating.
Biotechnology is only one of the many ways in which
corporate profiteering imposes on the commons, but
it is perhaps especially offensive, as it privatizes
the very building blocks of life itself. The patenting
of life forms has allowed corporations to claim
the rights to and profits on everything from traditional
healing herbs and food plants to the genomes of
indigenous cultures. Once released into the environment,
altered genes cannot be recalled. While many negative
effects have already been documented, the true scope
of their impact is still unknown. We are being subjected
to a massive, global-scale, uncontrolled scientific
experiment that could have potentially devastating
consequences for our ability to sustain life. While
biotech corporations claim to be feeding the poor,
corporate-driven research is directed at designing
crops to be used with heavy doses of the herbicides
produced by those same corporations. Biotech claims
to heal the sick, and has produced some effective
drugs for diseases--but corporations have also managed
to skew research efforts away from investigating
the environmental causes of cancer and ill health.
The same corporations that produce the pesticides
that give you cancer then claim your gratitude for
profiting from the drugs that offer a cure.
Biotech, for all its high-tech gloss, represents
the old mechanistic model of the universe, nineteenth-century
science. Its basic premise is that one gene equals
one trait, and that they can be switched and matched
from organism to organism as similar screws can
be switched between large and small machines. The
mechanistic model assumes that the universe is entirely
knowable and controllable One cause equals one effect--and
unintended effects somehow do not count. It's a
very good model for isolating single causes and
effects, but it does not help us understand complex
sets of interrelationships.
The mechanistic model has brought us many advances.
I'm not proposing to give up the electric light
bulb or modern telecommunications. But widely applied
over the earth, this model can also cause extreme
damage, not least because of its tendency to not
count unintended consequences or hold accountable
those who create them. It makes us literally unable
to see or comprehend the vast impact of our policies,
or to notice when they are not working. So we douse
our agricultural crops with 3300 times more pesticides
than before World War II, and suffer a 20% greater
loss to insect pests, plus uncountable cancers and
related diseases, habitat loss, degradation of soil
and streams, and loss of many other species. Yet
somehow we are unable to notice that this approach
to agriculture is simply not working.
The concept of the Commons arises out of a different
world view, one more akin to the twenty-first-century
sciences of complexity and systems and chaos theories.
It sees reality as a web of relationships, of complex,
intertwined causes and effects, linked in multiple
ways and cycles that may maintain or disrupt equilibriums.
It acknowledges that reality contains mystery, huge
areas that we don't yet understand and can't control,
and that mystery asks from us reverence and humility:
at the least, a long pause to observe before tinkering
with what we do not fully understand.
What links the issues of biotech, racial justice,
war, the environment, and police brutality? The
Commons gives us a language to talk about the connections,
how corporate control of scientific research, corporate
ownership of our very genes, is linked to an agenda
which must always keep some people oppressed so
that others must profit, and must ultimately use
force to maintain that repression. And it gives
us a language and an imagery to talk about what
we want: a world of rooted abundance, in which enterprises
are part of a web of relationships that constitute
community and are accountable to those communities,
a world in which the integrity of all those commons
that support life takes precedence over profit,
a world of real democracy, where all people have
a voice in the decisions that affect them, a world
that cherishes creativity and nurtures intelligence
and vision in all human beings.
When we say we are "Reclaiming the Commons,"
people ask, "What is the Commons?" And
in explaining what the Commons is, we create a new
frame, one that assumes that there are and should
be areas of life which have a value beyond their
value as commodities. "Commons" implies
that community is a value, not just individual gain.
Moreover, those commons we cherish are being eroded
and taken from us, and we need to take them back.
And we ally ourselves with the "commoners,"
not the princes or kings, the emperors or empire
builders, but the ordinary people upon whose backs
the world is built, and whose rights any true democracy
must safeguard. Air, water, seed, a poem, a public
space, a conversation, a healing herb, a tree, a
flower, a healthy child--all of them are common
as dirt, and yet beyond price, like healthy dirt,
earth itself, the common ground that sustains our
lives.
Reclaim the Commons Mobilization: Rough
Schedule of Events
for details, see www.reclaimthecommons.net
Copyright (c) 2004 by Starhawk. All rights reserved.
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