Ecological Literacy - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 157

farmers who understand some of this information, and who are confident
about experimentation, have the components of an advanced operating
system. This is social learning - a process that fosters innovation and
adaptation of technologies that are embedded in individual and social
transformation. As a result, most social learning is not to do with hard
information technology, such as computers or the Internet. Rather, it is
associated, when it works well, with farmer participation, rapid exchange
and transfer of information when trust is good, better understanding of
agroecological relationships, and farmers experimenting in groups. Large
numbers of groups work in the same way as parallel processors, the most
advanced forms of computation.
The Creation of New Commons
We treat nature as property in several different ways. In one setting, nature
may be private property, and so only used by a limited number of people.
In another, it may be controlled by the state, perhaps on behalf of a larger
group of people, or to restrict access by another group. In yet another,
nature may be held as a common property. Finally, it may not be controlled
or managed at all, and therefore available for use by anyone who wishes.
These controls matter because they determine the outcomes for nature. 24
Common property or common pool resources are technically defined as those used
in common by an identifiable group of people, and from which it is too
costly to exclude users who obtain individual benefits from their use. A
key feature is that they are interdependent systems in which individual
actions affect the whole system. If these actions are coordinated, then
individuals will enjoy higher benefits (or reduced harm), when compared
with acting alone. But if this joint management breaks down, then some
may benefit greatly in the short term by extracting all the benefit for
themselves. In this case, the likely outcome is damage to the whole system.
There are many types of common resources that are shared by com-
munities of producers and consumers. They include forests and aquifers,
fisheries and wildlife, roads and public hospitals, carbon reserves in the
soil, and the air we breathe. They exist at different levels of aggregation,
from the local to the global. At the local, they comprise irrigation water,
forests and grazing lands. At a national level, they include fish stocks in
lakes, soil stocks, biodiversity and landscapes. At a regional level, they are
manifested in large watersheds and basins, such as the North American Great
Lakes, the Nile Basin and the North Sea, and in ecosystems that cross
national boundaries, such as the Amazon forests. At the global level, they
comprise the high seas, Antarctica and the atmosphere. Crossing all of