Staff and Advisors

Founding Editor NANCY B. ROOF Editor RHONDA FABIAN Webmaster | Art Director KAREN ANDERSEN Assistant Editors CATALINA LASSEN ROWAN BABER Kosmos Associates Board of Directors NANCY B. ROOF TARA STUART RHONDA FABIAN, Chair JERRY BABER, Treasurer Advising Editors ALNOOR LADHA RIANE EISLER DAVID BOLLIER GLENN APARICIO PARRY NORA BATESON Poetry Editor CAROLYN MARTIN……

Book Review: The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market & State

If I were to be marooned on a desert island and could take along only two commons-related books, they would be Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 classic, Governing the Commons, and David Bollier and Silke Helfrich’s The Wealth of the Commons. This remarkable anthology of seventy-two essays by authors from six continents represents a milestone in the commons literature. The quality of the essays is not…

The Rise of the New Economy Movement

by Gar Alperovitz Activists, theorists, organizations and ordinary citizens are rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up… The movement includes young and old, “Occupy” people, student activists, and what one older participant describes as thousands of “people in their 60s from the ’60s” rolling up their sleeves to apply some…

The Commons Law Project: Greenkeeping Governance

Green Governance  Wednesday, May 16, 2012  For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law).  Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of…

The London Seminars: Emergence of a Commons-Based Economy

The London Seminars: Emergence of a Commons-Based Economy  Friday, May 25, 2012  To judge from James B. Quilligan's recent series of talks in London, Brits are more receptive to, and interested in, the idea of a commons-based economy than ever.  Below, James reflects on his many encounters and dialogues over the course of two weeks.  –David Bollier  Twelve…

Greenkeeping Governance: Toward a Law of the Ecological Commons

At least since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, we have known about humankind's squandering of nonrenewable resources, its careless disregard of precious life species, and its overall contamination and degradation of delicate ecosystems. In recent decades, these defilements have assumed a systemic dimension. Lately we have come to realize the shocking extent to which our atmospheric emission of…

Spring | Summer 2012

The Great Coming Together | in this issue Editorial   Read now TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS SERIES – PART ONE Contemporary Leaders of Courage and Compassion: Competencies and Inner Capacities Monica Sharma   Read now TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS SERIES – PART TWO Explosive Wisdom: What Landmines Teach Us About Liberation and Leadership…

Burns Weston

Retired from full-time teaching on The University of Iowa law faculty in May 1999, Professor Weston began his legal career in 1961 with the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. In 1966, after two years as a Sterling Fellow and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Yale Law School, he joined The University of Iowa College of Law and since then has served as…

Knowledge Commons for the Global Commons

Common Course  Dr. Terri Homan: “Six months ago I had never heard of the commons. Perhaps the starting point for a world movement is spreading awareness, so there are more banner-carriers to work toward the change in consciousness that is required. Unless a critical mass of world citizens demand change, it is too easy for the rest to look away.” Terri is a physician in the Chicago area, one…

A Journey to Sharing

The latest chapter of my life began in the parking lot of a warehouse near Brussels Airport in Belgium one sunny Saturday afternoon in 2004. At the time, I was working for one of the largest global transportation companies in the world on a multi-billion dollar merger integration project. In a strange twist of fate, I was actually working indirectly for the German government who had bought the…