Time to invest in the commons

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/04/2023 (1065 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN 1968, Garret Hardin wrote a profound and provocative paper for Science Magazine entitled Tragedy of the Commons. In it, he argued that the commons — publicly shared resources — are often depleted when people act in their own interest. From communal pastures, fisheries, dog parks, the biosphere, public schools, hospitals, and other goods, we sustain the commons through collective investment and responsibility.

Conversely, we exploit them at our peril.

Hardin’s words may be over 50 years old but they are more prescient today than ever.

When we cut social, health, and education funding for years, we see the impacts on our streets and in the eyes of our brothers and sisters. People are worn out, distraught, and in crisis.

Worse still, through the erosion of education on this planet, both K-12 and post-secondary, we now inhabit a mindscape where critical thought has become an anathema. The lack of action — or even consensus — on species-threatening climate change is a glaring indictment of this very phenomenon. Thankfully, in Manitoba we have dedicated educators whose very being is devoted to ensuring that our young people become ecologically literate.

Nevertheless, in a society guided by market imperatives steered by corporate interests, this has become an uphill battle of Herculean proportions. We have been — and continue to be — intentionally sold a bill of goods encouraging the depletion of the commons.

Despite the fetishization of privatizing initiatives, divesting in the commons has and will have significant impacts on our own well-being and that of our families and our communities. The commons in our city, our province and our country are slowly rotting through neglect and deliberate inattention. If you live in Winnipeg, you see the chasm between rich and poor widen. You bear witness to growing class and racial divisions and the abandonment of our fellow citizens.

Similarly, and very much in the same vein, we see the brutal — yet entirely predictable — sequelae of colonization, be it in the form of poorer educational and health outcomes, over-representation in the justice system or the devastatingly unconscionable crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Colonization, in that sense, was the first assault on the commons in this country we now call Canada.

Sadly, we are not alone. The depletion of the commons is not unique to our context. It is a global phenomenon. From Los Angeles to London to Rio to Johannesburg, the process continues along its inexorably destructive march. We are told that, as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once famously said in the most boldfaced of lies, there is no alternative.

You can name it when we have abandoned the core in our cities, and spread even further away from it, stretching our already thin resources. When we underfund libraries and community programming in exchange for lower taxes and tax rebates. When we establish more gated communities, private schools and clinics for those who can afford them. When we create more tax havens for the ultra rich to hide their money, and where the billionaire class imagines a new life on Mars.

The market will tell us what university courses to offer. Democratically-elected governments, councils, and school boards aren’t important and in fact are troublesome.

Nobody should tell you to get vaccinated. Freedom is ultimately about doing whatever you want.

Prices on externalities like carbon emissions are an attack on your freedom — that it’s your right to own a massive truck, or a colossal house to visit on your vacations.

That it’s your right not to worry about the future of your children and grandchildren.

This is what we’re being sold. Me first. The consequences of our collective disregard, second.

There are individuals, groups and organizations whose main objective is to perpetuate all these myths and destroy the commons. Don’t be fooled. This is deliberate.

There is an alternative. Another world — a happier, more compassionate one — is possible.

If we wish to maintain and foster the expansion of the commons — that is, the public good — we need to invest fully in our communities: in the collective us.

Andrew Lodge is medical director, Klinic, assistant professor at University of Manitoba, and Matt Henderson is a Winnipeg educator.