Welcome to the Commonsverse, a parallel social economy helping millions of commoners take charge and escape the predatory Market/State order.This completely revised and updated edition of Think Like a Commoner offers a succinct yet thorough account of the history and future of the commons.Working outside of both market capitalism and state power, commoners are deeply committed to developing local, practical solutions, social trust, and community. F...

An impassioned, darkly amusing look at how corporations misuse copyright law to stifle creativity and free speechIf you want to make fun of Mickey or Barbie on your Web site, you may be hearing from some corporate lawyers. You should also think twice about calling something "fair and balanced" or publicly using Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. It may be illegal. Or it may be entirely legal, but the distinction doesn't matter if you can't afford a lawyer. More and m...

In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.The beauty of commons is that we can build them ourselves, right now. But the bigger challenge is, Can we learn to see the commons and, more impo...

'They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common, But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose.' - Traditional nursery rhyme Until a 1998 federal court decision, a Minnesota publisher claimed to own every federal court decision, including Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education. A Texas c

The power of the commons as a free, fair system of provisioning and governance beyond capitalism, socialism, and other -isms.From co-housing and agroecology to fisheries and open-source everything, people around the world are increasingly turning to 'commoning' to emancipate themselves from a predatory market-state system.Free, Fair, and Alive presents a foundational re-thinking of the commons — the self-organized social system that humans have use...

What accounts for the persistence and spread of "commoning," the irrepressible desire of people to collaborate and share to meet everyday needs? How are the more successful projects governed? And why are so many people embracing the commons as a powerful strategy for building a fair, humane and Earth-respecting social order? In more than fifty original essays, Patterns of Commoning addresses these questions and probes the inner complexities of this timeless social paradigm. The b...

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine...

What can we learn from Bitcoin and Burning Man about re-inventing money and designing better forms of self-governance?  Why are “decentralized autonomous organizations” the next great Internet disruption? From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond:  The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.  Th...

Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. Action—on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises—is being driven by local, people’s, women’s, and grassroots movements around th...

The vast majority of the world's scientists agree: we have reached a point in history where we are in grave danger of destroying Earth's life-sustaining capacity. But our attempts to protect natural ecosystems are increasingly ineffective because our very conception of the problem is limited; we treat 'the environment' as its own separate realm, taking for granted prevailing but outmoded conceptions of economics, national sovereignty and international law. Green Governance is a direct resp...

A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. This is "the commons," a term that denotes everything we share. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature: the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness, and watersheds. Others are the product of human creativity and endeavor: sidewalks and public spaces, the Internet, our languages, cultures, and technologies. Jonathan Rowe illuminates the scale and value of the commons, its symbiotic relationship with the rest...

In the age of climate change, food scarcity, and increasing industrialization, can a few visionary farmers find global solutions through technology and create networked, open-source regenerative agriculture at a truly transformative scale?In The Great Regeneration, farmer-technologist Dorn Cox and author-activist Courtney White explore unique, groundbreaking research aimed at reclaiming the space where science and agriculture meet as a shared human endeavo...