Filmmaker Annie Leonard finds people want to be liberated from overconsumption.  

Annie Leonard is one of the most articulate, effective champions of the commons today. Her webfilm The Story of Stuff has been seen more than 15 million times by viewers. She also adapted it into a book.  Drawing on her experience investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues in more than 40 countries, Leonard says she’s “made it her life’s calling to blow the whistle on important issues plaguing our world.”  

This article originally appeared in On the Commons. 

On the Com­mons recently asked Leonard a few questions about the commons.  

How did you first learn about the commons?  

I first learned about the commons as a kid using parks and libraries. I didn’t assign the label “commons” to them, but I understood early on that some things belong to all of us and these shared assets enhance our lives and rely on our care.

Like many other college students, my first introduction to the word “commons” was sadly in conjunction with the word “sheep” and “trage­dy.” That lousy resource management class tainted the word for me for years, until I heard Ralph Nader address a group of college students. He asked them to yell out a list of everything they own. This being the pre-i-gadget 1980’s, the list included “Sony Walkman…boombox… books…bi­cycle…clothes…bank account.” When the lists started to peter out, Ralph asked about National Parks and public airwaves. A light went off in each of our heads, and a whole new list was shouted out: rivers, libraries, the Smithsonian, monuments. That’s when I realized that the commons isn’t an overgrazed pasture; it really is all that we share.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle to creating a commons-based society right now?  

There are so many interrelated aspects of our current economic and so­cial systems which undermine the commons. Some obstacles are struc­tural, like government spending priorities that elevate military spend­ing and oil company subsidies over maintenance of parks and libraries. Others are social, including the erosion in social fabric and communi­ty-based lifestyles. Actually, even those have structural drivers; for ex­ample, land use planning which eliminates sidewalks and requires long commutes to work contribute to breakdown of social commons by im­peding social interactions. It’s all so interconnected!

A huge obstacle is the shift toward greater privatization and com­modification of physical and social assets. Many things that used to be shared—from open spaces for recreation to support systems to help a neighbor in need—have been privatized and commodified; they’ve been moved out of the community into the market place. This triggers a downward spiral. Once things become privatized, or un-commoned, we no longer have access to them without paying a fee. We then have to work longer hours to pay for all these things which used to be freely available—everything from safe afterschool recreation for kids to clean water to swim in to someone to talk to when you’re feeling blue. And since we’re working longer hours and spending more time alone, we have less time to contribute to the commons to rebuild these assets: less volunteer hours, less beach-clean-up days, less time for civic engage­ment to advocate for policies that protect the commons, less time to in­vite a neighbor over for tea. And on it goes.

What is the greatest opportunity to strengthen and expand the commons right now?  

In spite of real obstacles, we have a lot on our side as we advance a com­mons-based agenda. First, we have no choice. There’s a very real eco­logical imperative weighing down on us. Even if we wanted to continue this overconsumptive, hyper individualistic and vastly unequal way of living, we simply can’t. We have to learn to share more and waste less, to find joy and meaning in shared assets and experiences rather than in private accumulation, to work together for a better world, rather than to build bigger walls around those who can. And the good news is that these changes not only will enable us to continue to live on this planet, but they will result in a happier, healthier society overall.

There’s another shift emerging which offers some real opportuni­ties for building support for the commons. People in the overconsuming parts of the world are getting fed up with the burden of trying to own everything individually. We used to own our stuff and increasingly our stuff owns us. We work extra hours to buy more stuff, we spend our weekends sorting our stuff. We’re constantly needing to upgrade, repair, untangle, recharge, even pay to store our stuff. It’s exhausting.

The shift I see emerging is from an acquisition focused relationship to stuff, to an access- focused relationship. In the acquisition framework, the more stuff we had, the better, as captured in the 1990s bumperstick­er “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” Having spent a couple de­cades being slaves to our stuff, we are rethinking. Now it is “He Who dies with the Most Toys Wasted His Life Working to Buy Them and Lived in a Cluttered House When He Could have been Investing in Community with which to Share Toys.

Increasingly people want access to stuff, not all the burden that comes with ownership. Instead of owning a car and dealing with all that comes with it, we get one just when we want through city car share programs. Instead of hiring a plumber, we swap music lessons with one through skillsharing networks. Why buy something to own alone, when we can share it with others? Why signup for an even more crushing mortgage for a house with a big back yard, when we can instead share public parks? From coast to coast, there’s a resurgence of sharing, so much that it even has a fancy new name: collaborative consumption. I’m really excited about this. A whole new generation of people is realiz­ing that access to shared stuff is easier on one’s budget and on the planet, then individual ownership. Now, that’s liberating.

—JAY WALLJASPER  

Image: Annie Leonard by annainaustin, licensed under Creative Commons. 

"Story of Change", Annie Leonard's "Story of Stuff" follow-up video. 

Once you start looking for the commons, you’ll find them everywhere, from roads and water to money systems and the stock market, to the Internet and the oceans. As commons-based thinking grows in influence, we present this guide to some of our favorite resources and writings on the commons. Also see our series of articles on the commons in the September-October 2010 issue of Utne Reader.

The nonprofit organization On the Commons is one of the best single sources on the commons, featuring resources on a host of topics and writers including former Utne Reader editor Jay Walljasper and activist/strategist David Bollier.

The website Shareable emphasizes sharing more than commons as its buzzword, but it covers similar ground. One notable project is the Shareable Futures series, featuring stories and essays that touch on commons themes by writers including sci-fi scribes Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling.

If you enjoyed the interview with commons pioneer Elinor Ostrom in the September-October Utne Reader, check out her “8 Keys to a Successful Commons” that ran with the original interview in Yes magazine.

Former labor secretary Robert Reich weighs in with a way to help the ailing economy—invest in the common good—in his article “From Consumers to Commons” in The American Prospect.

David Bollier extends this line of thinking to drugs and treatments in “Restore Medicine to the Commons” from the Boston Review.

As we prepare to reform copyright and intellectual property law for a digital era, commons thinking is forming some of the legal foundation. Cornell Law Review dedicated an entire issue to the cultural commons, which extends from Wikipedia and Linux software to the Associated Press and jam-band fan communities that trade concert recordings. Using Elinor Ostrom’s research as a starting point, a host of writers point the way to possible futures.

Last year, a study found that commons-based forest management can be good for people, the forest, and a warming earth. Read about it at New Scientist or Treehugger—or see the report itself, “Trade-offs and Synergies Between Carbon Storage and Livelihood Benefits from Forest Commons,” by Ashwini Chhatrea and Arun Agrawalk, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Giddy biking and public policy enthusiasts crowded into Minneapolis’ Uptown Theater last night, grabbing pints of Surly brew (in a corn-based compostable cup, no less), and settling in for a panel discussion on “Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around,” part of a popular “Policy and a Pint” series sponsored by local public radio station 89.3 The Current.

Headlining panelist David Byrne, avid cycling advocate and former Talking Heads frontman, was no doubt causing some of the buzz—I mean, he’s David Byrne, for heaven’s sake; if you haven’t seen Stop Making Sense, stop reading this blog and go. Go now. Do it. But to be fair, Twin Cities cyclists have also had a lot of other things to get excited about lately: Bicycling named Minneapolis the #1 U.S. city for biking, and that was even before last week, when the initial phase of Nice Ride Minnesota, a spectacular public bike sharing program, got off the ground.

Nice Ride co-sponsored the panel, which also included Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, author Jay Walljasper, and Steve Clark, manager of Transit for Livable Communities’ Walking and Bicycling Program. (The men rode cheerful green bike-share cruisers down the aisles of the theater.) So, you might ask yourself, what is the future of cities, bicycles, and getting around?

David Byrne delivered a photo-based powerpoint, beginning with slides of suburbs shot from above and termite high-rises (take note: the insects have a better grip on passive heating than we humans), and transitioned into the alienating, futuristic cities imagined by folks like Hugh Ferriss, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Buckminster Fuller. He also showed also a vintage image featuring a super-mega-highway from General Motors—which at the time, Byrne stressed, was the biggest company on “the whole damn planet.” Its vision carried weight.

The evidence of that weight is all over. Byrne began showing photographs from his travels: shots of downtown highway underpasses, barren stretches of road, vacant parking lots, and dead strip malls. “The city is a parking lot,” he said, “and when it’s not a parking lot, it’s a parking structure. This is dead. This is dead life.”

Not everywhere, however. The mood shifted as Byrne began flipping through photographs shot both stateside and abroad, rattling off some of the more promising places he’s been and things he’s seen. New bike parking facilities and protected bike lanes—one in New York that he says has changed his rides for the better. A sensor that clips onto spokes that could be used by employers to track and give credit to employees who commute on two wheels. European town squares, where cars are not prohibited but are so obviously inefficient choices, they’re hardly ever seen. And a preteen band playing—not well—on a street corner. He stopped, he said, and listened for a minute, wondering in effect: Is this avant guard? Is their dad hiding just around the corner? But the point is he stopped, a moment he never would have had if he had been traveling by car.

Mayor R.T. Rybak followed Byrne’s presentation, raising whoops from the audience by declaring that the city would work to keep the laurel that Bicycling gave it. “Portland is just a street in the city of Minneapolis,” he quipped, and then launched into a rapid-fire speech about how Nice Ride came to fruition—and what the city has planned next, including 35 new miles of bike trail.

Up next, writer Jay Walljasper (a former Utne Reader editor, as it were) posited his vision for the future of cycling: “Incredibly sexy and utterly normal.” To understand the sexy part, he proposed, think back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—that scene where Butch (Paul Newman) gives Etta (Katharine Ross) a ride on his handlebars. (Walljasper imagined thousands of Americans, sitting on their couches, wondering: Now where was that bike again? The garage?)But in all seriousness, he said, biking is sexy: “It’s elegant, fun, and will make [you] feel a lot better.” The utterly normal part became evident in a gauntlet thrown down to the people who are already biking nuts—to break down the clubbishness and exclusiveness, and make sure that everyone can access the “environmental, social, and spiritual” reasons to ride.

In closing, Steve Clark from Transit for Livable Communities, a nonprofit working to reform Minnesota’s transportation system, took the stage. “I do believe our world is changing,” he said, “And it’s hanging so fast that we can’t [appreciate] what’s happening.” His prediction: 2010 will be recorded in history as the year our love affair with the automobile came to an end.

Clark was a rousing, earnest speaker, pointing out what he sees as the cracks in the foundation of car culture: both oil-related Gulf crises (BP’s spill and Iraq), rising rates of asthma, obesity and health issues, and air pollution, to name a few. Federal financial support his organization has received is in a sense groundbreaking, he says, representing government recognition that biking and walking are real parts of a solution to national transportation needs.

Transit for Livable Communities, for example, through its Bike/Walk Twin Cities program, was able to financially support Minnesota Nice Ride, the largest bike-share program in the United States. Clark packaged his take on why bicycles are the future into a tidy and timely acronym:

Nimble. Bikes are a quick and nimble way to get around.

Inviting. Anyone can ride one, and you can do it in regular clothes.

Convivial. On a bike, you interact with people. In a car, you don’t.

Efficient. Biking is so efficient, it even beats out walking.

And you know? That really does cover it. Biking is just nice. In every way. Oh, and by the way—here’s a trailer for Stop Making Sense:

Image (top)  by tsuacctnt, licensed under Creative Commons.

What makes a great neighborhood? Former editor of Utne Reader and author of The Great Neighborhood Book Jay Walljasper writes about his favorite neighborhood on the website for the Project for Public Spaces. For Walljasper, a welcoming community, pedestrian-friendly roads, diverse shops, and plenty of pubs all combine to create his favorite neighborhood in America.

The key to a great neighborhood, in my opinion, is personality. Living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a few years ago, I could feel the place was changing, but it retained its feel as a traditional Italian neighborhood. Bistros selling mozzarella held strong in areas where new restaurants were opening all the time. For me, that was my favorite neighborhood. Feel free to chime in with yours.

Image by Jeffrey Bary, licensed under Creative Commons.