Pax is still under the influence of the Blackhaws football game— very ambivalent about what is normally his favorite thing, walking in the prairie. He must still be hearing echos of touchdown canon fire.

It seems I've always been a commoner, that is a person who believes in the concept and in the actuality of various commons.

In France, all along the foothills of the Jura Mountains (to the west of Geneva, Switzerland) each lovely little farm has a right to a certain amount of wood (timber, firewood) from the forest up above.

On Turtle Island (North America pre-Columbus) almost everything was held in common, and private property seemed incomprehensible.

Then in 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote the influential essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he argued that a commons will never work because individuals acting rationally in their own self interest will always try to take more than their fair share, more than is sustainable, and the commons will be destroyed.

Luckily, Elinor Ostrom came to the rescue and proved that a commons does not always end in tragedy. Ostrom, professor at University of Indiana and long time Manitoulin summer resident, won a Nobel prize researching and demonstrating how commons around the world, like those in the Jura foothills, can prosper over millennia. The secret, she discovered, is local control—the people who actually live near and use the commons, common as they might be, developing and implementing their own system of management.

Of course, I think of the Great Lakes as a commons, as, of course, they are. And there is a movement now afoot to create a hiking trail around all five of them—exclusive, lakeside gated communities be dammed.

What I marvel about, given the extreme privatization ethic in the United States, are two amazing national lakeshores: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. How these two amazing commons places came into being is an amazing story (featuring Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, I might add).

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From Gary Snyder:

The commons is the contract a people make with their local natural system. The word has an instructive history: it is formed of ko, "together," with (Greek) moin, "held in common."... The root comes into Latin as munus, "service performed for the community" and hence "municipality."

The commons is a curious and elegant social institution within which human beings once lived free political lives while weaving through natural systems. The commons is a level of organization of human society that includes the nonhuman. The level above the local commons is the bioregion. Understanding the commons and its role within the larger regional culture is one more step toward integrating ecology with economy.