getting started

[Chris Wilson]

It's good to see TT taking shape in Ottawa. As you know the wiki I've been developing is targeted on a community dialogue but something like this can help nurture the community over the longer term just because it can be providing solutions, or at least directing people to solutions.

There are a number new videos at the Ottawa We Want site. The most recent I've run across is a series of talks by UBC professor William Rees who addresses the growth paradigm and its disconnection with real happiness and well being. For the 50+ demographic well-being is an important and personal concern, and therefore one which an Ottawa TT should try and emphasize. There is no collective well being in the scenarios where high energy prices predominate and climate change has reduced our ability to tend to our basic physiologic and safety needs.

As I mentioned to Mike N. there is a real need to present the food-energy-climate issue as something more visceral and immediate than as something altruistic to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons' and a lack of widespread individual ownership. As the the TT Handbook makes clear, we can't wait for government to act -- it'll be too late. A TT in Ottawa can help to be a catch basin for those who choose to work to create a different future for their community. As Heather Hamilton mentioned recently in the flurry of emails this week, the TT approach can be hugely democratizing. It's exciting!

Glad to be here.

[Kaia Nightingale]

I'm hoping the government will turn around more quickly if there are solutions to turn to. Not everyone can think out of the box. The groups on the forefront of alternative technology and sustainable solutions obviously know much more about these possibilities and where to go than someone, however well meaning and hard working, who has spent the last 30 years behind a government desk. If we, between us, can figure out the best directions, the best use of Ottawa resources, land, technology etc. this will help turn the tide.

"If the people lead, the leaders will follow."

With this networking of groups and skills across the city, we can respond with real action - tangible initiatives that can be seen, felt and copied by the wider population. Like replacing lawns with delicious vegetables,designing electric-pedal hybrid vehicles that drive on to flat-platform rail carriages for long distances, more local farm-to-table delivery through web order, neighbourhood markets set up specifically for local produce and products, nearby businesses where we can go to refill our shampoo bottles, jam jars, special sterilized milk container, or juice jar (since most recycling ends up in landfill; even recycling requires energy).

Our collective actions need rethinking. e.g. Half our grain is fed to livestock rearing, which also consumes immense amounts of oil and water. How can we do this differently?

Recent figures show that up to half our food goes to waste - is damaged in transport, goes limp on grocery shelves, rots in the 'crisper' in the bottom of the fridge, or is left uneaten on our plates. Again, how can we better rethink the way we do this.
The up side of this waste is : with local food sourcing and more consumer awareness, we can probably feed ourselves using much less oil than we think.

A better world is definitely possible. I look forward to it!

[Caelan MacIntyre]

Chris, just a quick cautionary quote regarding, and from, your tragedy of the commons reference:

Hardin's essay has been widely criticized. Public policy experts have argued that Hardin's account of the breakdown of common grazing land was inaccurate, and that such commons were effectively managed to prevent overgrazing. Referring to Hardin's crucial passage on page 1244,17 Partha Dasgupta, for example, comments that ‘it is difficult to find a passage of comparable length and fame that contains so many errors as the one quoted’. More significantly, criticism has been fueled by the "application" of Hardin's ideas to current policy issues. In particular, some authorities have read Hardin's work as specifically advocating the privatization of commonly owned resources. Consequently, resources that have traditionally been managed communally by local organizations have been enclosed or privatized. Ostensibly, this serves to "protect" such resources, but it ignores the pre-existing management, often appropriating resources and alienating indigenous (and frequently poor) populations. In effect, private or state use may result in worse outcomes than the previous management of commons.-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Criticism

The Eden that Europeans described when they reached North America was not a wilderness, but a well-managed resource, a complex combination of nature and culture, ecology and economy, a system so subtle and effective that it eluded the settlers who saw only natural wealth free for the taking. The result of this land grab in North America is that only 2% of the land is now wild, its major rivers are polluted, its lakes have caught fire, and its forests are dying from the top down. The tragedy of this commons was that it never really was a commons after colonization, but was surrendered to plunder, privatization, and exploitation in the name of Manifest Destiny and progress. - http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_community_domain_b...

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Richard

I'm not sure what you intend with this? Are you suggesting that there is no such thing as a 'commons'? Or that that there is no 'tragedy' in the way commonly shared resources are managed?

In regards to the former one only has to think of the air we breath, the water we drink, the oceans, grasslands, rivers, the forests, even the whole array of public goods (roads, education, health care, etc. etc.) that we receive so automatically these days to understand that there are indeed collective resources. Without them our private lives would not be possible.

With respect to the latter, a 'tragedy' does frequently occur in our management of these assets. We tend to put our individual interests before our collective interests, even if it means that the shared resource, asset, or benefit becomes depleted as a result and becomes available to no one. This short-sighted human behaviour is referred to as a social trap and is not only the cause of overgrazing of pasture lands, but pollution of air and water, the decimation of forests and wildlife, but also the collapse of whole civilizations as Jared Diamond has described.

That is why we use the coercive power of the state to regulate these common assets. However, state regulation is a blunt instrument that rarely operates in a way that optimizes the use of collectively shared resources. Ask, for instance, the fishermen on our east coast about government management of the cod fishery which has been closed for a decade and is unlikely to return to anything approximating its original health in our lifetime -- if ever.

At this stage, Hardin's idea of a 'tragedy of the commons' is accepted largely as a truism. The question that continues is how do we deal with the issues of social cooperation so as to avoid the tragedy.

Robert Axelrod and others have explored cooperative responses by way of game theory where they have found the 'tragedy' continues in all cases except in tit-for-tat strategies where there may be a willingness to forgive and start again. This implies that owners of collective resources need to evolve social learning mechanisms. Elinor Ostrom has suggested that cooperative management solutions need to involve all the major stakeholders otherwise no agreement will hold. That face-to-face participation builds mutual trust, develops shared values and norms, increases moral contracting, improves monitoring, resulting in common pool resources being managed more sustainably. BTW, for her work on the cooperative management strategies for common resources that avoid the tragedy, Ostrom received a Noble prize last year.

My initial comments reflected a view that communities were by their nature, character and vitality common pool resources -- a commons -- which, if not managed collaboratively for the the benefits they produce for everyone and not just individuals, may fall prey to social traps. In the case of the inter-related food-energy-climate issue, a reliance on government intervention may well come too late to forestall serious social pain. The TT approach is for individuals to accept responsibility for whatever contribution to the problem they may be making, to individually alter their contribution and then to network with others to scale both individual efforts and social norms to a level where local institutions may be more willing to act -- even before a full blown crisis exists.

Richard MacIntyre said:

Chris, just a quick cautionary quote regarding, and from, your tragedy of the commons reference:

Hardin's essay has been widely criticized. Public policy experts have argued that Hardin's account of the breakdown of common grazing land was inaccurate, and that such commons were effectively managed to prevent overgrazing. Referring to Hardin's crucial passage on page 1244,17 Partha Dasgupta, for example, comments that ‘it is difficult to find a passage of comparable length and fame that contains so many errors as the one quoted’. More significantly, criticism has been fueled by the "application" of Hardin's ideas to current policy issues. In particular, some authorities have read Hardin's work as specifically advocating the privatization of commonly owned resources. Consequently, resources that have traditionally been managed communally by local organizations have been enclosed or privatized. Ostensibly, this serves to "protect" such resources, but it ignores the pre-existing management, often appropriating resources and alienating indigenous (and frequently poor) populations. In effect, private or state use may result in worse outcomes than the previous management of commons.-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Criticism

The Eden that Europeans described when they reached North America was not a wilderness, but a well-managed resource, a complex combination of nature and culture, ecology and economy, a system so subtle and effective that it eluded the settlers who saw only natural wealth free for the taking. The result of this land grab in North America is that only 2% of the land is now wild, its major rivers are polluted, its lakes have caught fire, and its forests are dying from the top down. The tragedy of this commons was that it never really was a commons after colonization, but was surrendered to plunder, privatization, and exploitation in the name of Manifest Destiny and progress. - http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_community_domain_b...

[Caelan MacIntyre]

There is a tragedy-- it hasn't been avoided-- and there is a commons of course. :)

How we end up with tragedies in the first place, as well as how they are framed, explained or approached, etc., is important and was, if recalled, at least part of the essence of my note of caution.

BTW, one would think that, with all those Nobel Prize-winning folks running around-- all those universities and Phd's-- and gov't intervention, that the commons would be in far better shape than it is, a better place in which to live-- better at least than the traditional tribespeoples' wisdom would have it, yes?

"...if we lose the forests, we lose our only instructors. And people must see these forests and wilderness as the greatest educational system that we have on the planet. If we lose all the universities, then we would lose nothing, but if we lose the forest, we lose everything."
-- Bill Mollison,
From the video, The Permaculture Concept

I think we would do well to always consider alleged truisms, Phd's, governments, Kings and Queens, university-education, and Nobel prize-winners, etc., with a grain of salt.

"When Henry Kissinger was announced to be awarded the Peace Prize, two of the Norwegian Nobel Committee members resigned in protest."
-- Wikipedia

Everyone "deserves a prize" (the prize of mutual authority/privilege and a healthy world/life), their contributions being, like the elements of the forests, themselves, equally important.

With regard to the quote, 'a reliance on gov't intervention', etc., I'm reminded, among other things, of an expression-- something to the effect of; 'Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.'...
Now, of all the thumbnail glam-shots I see on TO, not one has a thumb in their mouth, and it would seem high time, and a very opportune one at that, to truly mature as a culture/species and to leave dubious hierarchical constructs behind once and for all, make it count, make history.

"Akuta: But it was Vaal who put the fruit on the trees, caused the rain to fall. Vaal cared for us.
Captain Kirk: You’ll learn to care for yourselves... And there’s no trick to putting fruit on trees. You might enjoy it. You’ll learn to build for yourselves, think for yourselves, work for yourselves, and what you create is yours. That’s what we call freedom. You’ll like it, a lot. And you’ll learn something about men and women, the way they’re supposed to be. Caring for each other, being happy with each other, being good to each other. That’s what we call love. You’ll like that, too, a lot."
-- Quoted dialogue at 7:10

"Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people."
-- Henry Kissinger

[Caelan MacIntyre]

I have included a fresh article that, among other things, proposes that the tragedy of the commons, at least according to Hardin, is false:
http://transitionottawa.ning.com/forum/topics/foodland-sharing-part-2

I've also included a good video documentary on Diamond's work here:
http://transitionottawa.ning.com/video/guns-germs-and-steel

The 'coercive power of the state'-- the 'nanny state' as some call it-- is ostensibly precisely what is having a large hand in creating "ecosocioeconomic tragedies", in part by creating/upholding various "laws" pertaining to land/resource (mis)use and (irresponsible) (corporate) activity/(bedfellows).
"Corporatocracy, with an oligarch on our bills."
There seems nothing the "40-hour-workweek-job-creation-fetishist" state (just a bunch of people, in apparent pseudo-representative guise, really) can do that we can't do for ourselves-- likely with only a 1/4 of the 40-hour workweek labour and none of the tax-deductions-- as truly free and self-governing local communities. (Uh-oh, but what happens to gov't salaries? Exactly. The apparent conflict-of-interest between job-creation-fetishism-cum-large-workweek-hours-slavery for taxation-for-bloated-gov't-employees'-lifestyles is thusly eliminated.)
One of the points behind, and responses to, permaculture and peak oil, respectively, is the movement away from centralized control.
Jared Diamond's short essay, 'Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?', seems to suggest that these kinds of centralized, bloated, disconnected/short-sighted and/or distant control can contain many factors that can lead to some societies making disastrous decisions.

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."
~ Karl Marx