Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
The transborder parks are a departure from the existing narrative that emphasizes enclosure, privatization, and commercial development of the environment in favor of restoring and managing biodiversity in regional ecosystem Commons, making them whole again. The very idea that nature’s boundaries supersede political and commercial boundaries in importance has the effect of redirecting the social narrative away from individual self-interests, commercial pursuits, and geopolitical considerations to the general well-being of nature.
Transborder parks represent the very tentative beginnings of a great reversal. After a half millennium characterized by the increasing enclosure of Earth’s environmental Commons, transborder parks reopen the Commons, even if only in a very limited way.
What makes ecology so radical as a discipline is its emphasis on Earth as a complex system of interrelationships that function symbiotically and synergistically to maintain the functioning of the whole. Where Darwin concentrated more on the individual organism and species, and relegated the environment to a backdrop of resources, ecology views the environment as all the relationships that make it up.
Ecology grew out of the study of local habitats and ecosystems. In the early twentieth century, Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky expanded the concept of ecology to include the ecological workings of the planet as a whole. Vernadsky parted ways with the conventional scientific thinking of the day, which held that Earth’s geological processes evolved independently of biological processes, providing the environment in which life evolved. He published a seminal book in 1926, positing the radical theory that geological and biological processes evolved in a symbiotic relationship. Vernadsky proposed that the cycling of inert chemicals on Earth is affected by the quality and quantity of living matter. That living matter, in turn, is affected by the quality and quantity of inert chemicals cycling Earth. He called his new theory the Biosphere.
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His ideas about the way Earth evolves changed the very framework by which scientists understand and study the workings of the planet.
The biosphere is described as an
integrated living and life-supporting system comprising the peripheral envelope of the planet Earth together with its surrounding atmosphere so far down and up as any form of life exists naturally.
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The biosphere sheath extends only about 40 miles up from the ocean floor, inhabited by the most primitive life forms, to the stratosphere. Within this narrow realm, Earth’s biological and geochemical processes are continually interacting in a complex choreography that determines the evolutionary path of life on the planet.
Biosphere science gained greater prominence in the 1970s with the growing public awareness of global pollution and the destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems. The publication of the Gaia hypothesis by the British scientist James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis sparked a new wave of interest within a scientific community that was increasingly concerned with the impact industrial pollution was having on the biosphere.
Lovelock and Margulis argued that Earth operates much like a self-regulating living organism in which geochemical and biological processes interact and check each other to ensure a relatively steady balance in Earth’s temperature, making possible a planet hospitable to the continuation of life. The two scientists cite the example of the regulation of oxygen and methane. Oxygen levels on Earth have to stay within a narrow range. Too much oxygen risks global conflagration, too little risks choking off the life force. Lovelock and Margulis theorized that when oxygen climbs above an acceptable level, some kind of warning signal triggers microscopic bacteria to release more methane into the atmosphere to reduce the oxygen content until a steady state is reached.
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The Gaia hypothesis has been taken up by scientists across a wide range of disciplines, including geochemistry, atmospheric science, and biology. The study of the complex relationships and symbiotic feedback loops between geochemical and living processes that maintain Earth’s climate in a steady state, allowing life to flourish, has led to a consensus of sorts. The new, more holistic approach to ecology views the adaptation and evolution of individual species as part of a larger, more integrative process—the adaptation and evolution of the planet as a whole.
If Earth functions more like a self-regulating organism, then human activity that undermines the biochemical balance of the planet can lead to the catastrophic destabilization of the entire system. The spewing of massive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere over the course of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions has done just that. The rising temperature from industrial emissions of global warming gases has now dramatically altered Earth’s hydrological cycle, throwing ecosystems into rapid decline and ushering in the sixth
extinction event in the past 450 million years, with dire consequences for both human civilization and the future health of the planet.
Humanity is quickly becoming aware that the biosphere is the indivisible overarching community to which we all belong and whose well-being is indispensable to assuring our own well-being as well as our survival. This dawning awareness comes with a new sense of responsibility—living our individual and collective lives in our homes, businesses, and communities in ways that advance the health of the larger biosphere.
James Boyle and his colleagues pinned their intellectual hopes on using the environmental perspective as an analogy from which to draw lessons for creating what they call cultural environmentalism—a systems theory of the indivisibility of the public domain that might unite all the disparate interests and initiatives in an overarching general theory. They’re still looking because what they regarded as an analogy is, in fact, a common frame that unites our species. The same general theory that governs the biosphere dictates the general welfare of society.
While the enclosure, privatization, and commercial exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems in the capitalist era has resulted in a dramatic rise in the standard of life of a significant minority of the human race, it has been at the expense of the biosphere itself. When Boyle, Lessig, Stallman, Benkler, and others lament the consequences of enclosing the various Commons in the form of private property that is exchanged in the market, the damage inflicted penetrates more deeply than just the question of freedom to communicate and create. The enclosures of the land and ocean Commons, the fresh water Commons, the atmosphere Commons, the electromagnetic spectrum Commons, the knowledge Commons, and the genetic Commons has severed the complex internal dynamics of Earth’s biosphere, jeopardizing every human being’s welfare and the well-being of all the other organisms that inhabit the planet. If we are looking for a general theory that brings everyone’s interests together, restoring the health of the biosphere community seems the obvious choice.
The real historical significance of the Free Culture Movement and Environmental Movement is that they are both standing up to the forces of enclosure. By reopening the various Commons, humanity begins to think and act as part of a whole. We come to realize that the ultimate creative power is reconnecting with one another and embedding ourselves in ever-larger systems of relationships that ripple out to encompass the entire set of relationships that make up the biosphere Commons.
If by advancing culture we mean the search for meaning, it is likely to be found in exploring our relationship to the larger scheme of things, of which we are irrevocably intertwined—our common biosphere and what lies beyond. “Free speech” is not “free beer,” but what is its purpose if not to join together and collaboratively reimagine the nature of the human journey in a way that celebrates life on Earth? The opposite of enclosure is not merely openness, but transcendence.
The distributed, collaborative, laterally scaled nature of Internet communications is indeed both the medium and the domain. The domain, in turn, is the social Commons. It is the meeting place where our species comes together and creates the necessary social capital to cohere as a whole and hopefully to expand our empathic horizon to include the many other communities we live with, but often fail to recognize, that make up the biosphere Commons.
The social Commons is merely our species’ habitat and a subregion of the biosphere, and, it turns out, the same laws of energy that determine the optimum well-being of nature’s mature ecosystems operate in the public domain. In a climax ecosystem like the Amazon, the thermodynamic efficiency is optimized. The consumption of matter does not significantly exceed the ecosystem’s ability to absorb and recycle the waste and replenish the stock. In a climax ecosystem, the symbiotic and synergistic relationships minimize energy loss and optimize resource use, providing abundance for each species’ needs. Similarly, in the economy, the optimal efficient state is reached when marginal costs approach zero. That is the point at which the production and distribution of each additional unit and the recycling of waste requires the least expenditure of energy in the form of time, labor, capital, and power generation, optimizing the availability of resources.
Even the legal tools used to open up both the cultural Commons and the environmental Commons are uncannily similar. Conservation easements, for example, operate by a set of legal conventions that mimic Creative Commons licenses in the cultural sphere. My wife and I own land near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The land is being converted into a wildlife refuge for the black bear, white-tailed deer, red foxes, wild turkeys, raccoons, and other species native to the region. The land is in a conservation easement. That means that our title of ownership comes with restrictions governing how it can be used. While my wife and I own the land, we cannot subdivide it for sale, or build certain kinds of structures on it.
Conservation easements might require that the land be maintained in a pristine state as a wildlife habitat or that it be preserved as open space for scenic and aesthetic reasons. Like Creative Commons licenses, the purpose of the easement is to promote the Commons by separating the right to own the land from the right to enjoy exclusive use of it.
Conservation easements modify enclosures by transforming some of the uses to the public domain. The legal instrument is not unlike open-source creative licenses that perform much the same function. In both instances, the thrust is reversing enclosures of Earth’s various Commons—the central feature of the capitalist era—and reopening and restoring the Commons to allow the biosphere to reheal and flourish.
The point is, the Commons doesn’t stop at the public square, but extends ever outward to the very edge of Earth’s biosphere. We human beings are members of an extended evolutionary family of species that fills
the planet. The ecological sciences are teaching us that the well-being of the entire biological family depends on the well-being of each of its members. The symbiotic relationships, synergies, and feedbacks create a form of mass collaboration that keeps the extended family vibrant and the biosphere household viable.
Let me share a personal anecdote relating to the notion of the Commons. When I first began writing about the evolution, devolution, and reconstruction of the Commons nearly 25 years ago, my near obsession, I suspect, got the better of me. I was seeing enclosures everywhere I turned, and being a social activist, I couldn’t help thinking about new Commons possibilities every time an opportunity lent itself to push forward what we used to call “participatory democracy”—this was before peer-to-peer engagement nudged the term to the side. My intellectual musings became the butt of jokes among my friends and colleagues, not to mention my wife. If I mentioned a new book I was writing or initiative my office was undertaking, I would be mercilessly ribbed with the refrain “not the Commons again . . . please say it ain’t so.”
Around the mid-1990s, I was beginning to hear of others who suffered from this rare “Commons affliction.” The affliction began to spread. I was hearing the words
enclosure
and
commons
everywhere I turned. The terms were floating across the social ether and spreading like an epidemic across the public square and even more quickly in virtual space. The breeding ground was globalization, a grossly misnamed metaphor that disingenuously cloaked government deregulation and the privatization of public goods and services in the wrap of a new global “interconnectivity.”
The contradiction of privatizing the human and natural resources of the planet in the hands of several hundred commercial enterprises and labeling it
globalization
was not lost on a generation of scholars and activists whose ideas of globalization went in the opposite direction—toward greater participation by the marginalized and disenfranchised throngs of humanity in the sharing of Earth’s largesse.
Globalization versus Reopening the Global Commons
In 1999, tens of thousands of activists representing a panoply of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and interests, including labor unions, feminists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, farm organizations, fair-trade activists, academics, and religious groups, took to the streets of Seattle in a mass protest at the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference being held there. Their objective was to reclaim the public Commons. Protestors filled the downtown streets around the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, blocking intersections and preventing WTO delegates from attending the scheduled meetings. The protestors were joined by the Seattle City Council, which passed by unanimous vote a resolution declaring the city a Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI) free zone. The international press joined in, not a few siding with the protestors. In the days leading up to the global convention, the London
Independent
wrote a scathing editorial attacking the WTO itself:
The way [the WTO] has used [its] powers is leading to a growing suspicion that its initials should really stand for World Take Over. In a series of rulings it has struck down measures to help the world’s poor, protect the environment, and safeguard health in the interest of private—usually American—companies.
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