The Commons

Ralph Stanley, the national award winning master wooden boat builder from Southwest Harbor, Maine, in relating his family history a few years ago, told of his family coming to America in 1762 after being accused of stealing sheep in their native England. Stanley, now in his 80s, is an historian, a believer in determined hard work, a straightforward man who is generous with his time and knowledge – noteworthy survival skills.

If his ancestors did steal sheep back in 1762 they were very likely exhibiting survival skills as well. England at the time was writing and enforcing Enclosure Acts. These laws forced farmers from the land they had farmed as common property for generations. The king’s cronies, and lobbyists for private owners got control of the land, closed it of, enclosed it, and evicted the farmers.

The former farmers options then were to sell their labor to the new woolen mills, and rent a flat in town from the mill owner, who coincidentally might be the new owner of the farmer’s land. Other options included starving, or eating a stray sheep now and then.

Five hundred years earlier King John, having run England into the ground with among other things, wars in the middle east, was forced by noblemen to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. The story of Robin Hood has been traced back to this period.

In this Magna Carta the people’s rights were documented, which included the rights of common people to the common use of the forest. The forest meant the woods, fields and waterways where they gathered and grew what they lived on.

This was not the first time in history people had to struggle for rights to access what had always been the means of human survival. The Magna Carta did not end the near constant struggle to maintain these rights in England either.

England in 1762 saw the beginning of the end of the popular use of common resources. The development of machinery to spin fibers into thread led to the construction of factories, the demand for more wool fibers, more grazing pasture, and more wage laborers. It was the beginning of the age of mass labor in factories, time clocks, disconnection from the land, and the reordering of community.

Today most people are unfamiliar with common resource ownership. Modern people equate survival with education, getting a job in a corporation or institution, or starting a business that requires being entrenched in a range of social and economic systems.

Fishermen are the last group, in America at least, to make a living in a common resource. Of course fishermen in America have not been able to fish freely on the commons for the last few decades because of federal regulations. In New England they fished that resource for 350 years before it began to falter.

But commonly held resources have long been the most established means for humans to use the earth’s resources – plants, meat, fish, and water.

Long before the Magna Carta, native Americans had lived on the buffalo commons of North America since the end of the last ice age. They fished the rivers, lakes, and coastal ocean commons, hunted the forest commons, and grew crops on common property. This was true of early human settlements around the world.

In 1968 Garrett Hardin, a biologist, was looking for the negative impacts of overpopulation and published a widely publicized article titled The Tragedy of the Commons. In it he claimed that men pursuing their best interests would increase the use of the commons until it collapsed. But Hardin blamed the historic users of the commons, when it fact it has been outside forces that have collapsed commonly owned resources.

Hardin’s claim is not supported by the thousands of years that cooperatively hunted, fished, and grazed commons have survived around the globe. Medieval European commons were very managed, barring access to outsiders and limiting use by villagers.

There is abundant evidence that commonly managed resources that have declined, did so after private ownership took over. Fishing grounds on the west Coast of Africa in the 1990s are a recent example. Fished sustainably as a commons for countless generations, the government leased the fishing grounds to large European industrial trawlers that wiped out the resource in a few short years.

Peter Barnes wrote in 2006, “If an accounting could be made, private appropriations of the commons in America alone would be worth trillions of dollars. The plot is almost always the same: when a commons acquires commercial value, someone tries to grab it. In the old days, that meant politically connected individuals; nowadays, it means politically powerful corporations. What’s astonishing about these takings isn’t that they occur, but how unaware of them the average citizen is. As former secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel and former governor of Alaska said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his decendants, he may not even notice.”

Many societies throughout history have cooperated in the management and use of renewable resources. It made no sense to do it any other way, since for them it was more than obvious that their immediate survival was dependent on sustainable husbandry of the resources around them.

In the long view of human history two things have interferred with that long track record. The first has been organized political power taking over the common ownership to serve the few. The second has been the addition of technology and mass-market forces with near term maximum profit, with bottom line practices out-striping a resource’s natural self-sustaining rate.

From the grabbing of the commons in 12th century England, to the industrial English land grab in the mid-1700’s, to industrially wiping out the Buffalo on the American plains, to the European trawlers in the Gulf of Maine in the 1970’s, to the trawlers off the west coast of Africa in the 1990’s, to the earth’s atmosphere this afternoon, Garrett Hardin got it wrong.

Ralph Stanley’s ancestral English family was one of thousands of victims faced with starvation in a new world order, where rent and the sale labor displaced self-initiative on the commons in the provision of a family’s food and roof.

Today the United States fishing commons, and in particular in those in New England, are faced with a similar fate. Fishing will not end, but the right of citizens to fish commercially will end as large corporations have buy the rest of the rights to commercially fish the citizen’s commons.