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state-owned forests, the broadcast spectrum, disciplinary gift economies, the Inter-
net, and more, and Bollier casts all efforts to reassert a public interest in these
domains as fundamentally 'commons' inasmuch as they provide alternatives to
privatization (see http://www.bollier.org/reclaim.htm). Peter Barnes' 2001 book,
Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism
, argues
that the United States should set up a 'U.S. Skytrust' - a non-governmental public
trust that would charge for rights to emit atmospheric pollutants in the United States
under a cap-and-trade scheme and then distribute the proceeds equally among citi-
zens. Barnes calls this 'stakeholder trust' model, 'The New Commons', and advo-
cates extending it to other collective assets as well as a way to, 'save capitalism from
itself' (p. 106); his is thus a broadly Polanyian project. Finally, Brian Donahue's
1999 book,
Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms & Forests in a New
England Town
, argues that American suburbanites ought to tax themselves to buy
up at least half the land in their towns and set it aside as common forest and con-
servation lands to be used to reduce residents' ecological footprints and foster their
environmental awareness. These lands would be true village commons, used as
woodlots, fi elds for sustainable agriculture, and sources of berries and other non-
timber forest products. Thus, while village commons have been metaphors and
symbols for many in recent years, they are literal goals for Donahue, albeit ones
adapted to contemporary circumstances as an antidote to excessive privatization
(pp. 295, 297).
The metaphor of the commons has been taken up with respect to regional gov-
ernance as well: in 2001, the Alliance for Regional Stewardship, a national network
of regional leaders in the United States, published, 'The Triumph of the Commons',
a manifesto for the creation of successful regions. The title was intended as a direct
counterpoint to Hardin's tragedy of the commons, and the monograph argued
(imaginatively, if rather loosely) that while the sheep of Hardin's village-scale
example had now been replaced by sports utility vehicles at regional scales, the
dynamics of the commons were still relevant. But where Hardin prophesied tragedy,
the Alliance argued that commons were precisely the right way to think about and
design cohesive, competitive regions, ones that leveraged the shared self-interests of
regional citizens, public-private partnerships, and federal resources to govern and
grow, without getting bogged down in either the bureaucracy of the national state
or the pettiness of municipal-scale politics.
The handful of quick examples above in no way does justice to the range of the
most recent invocations of the commons: they are all by North American authors,
and mostly about North American cases. But they do illustrate a few key points
about this conversation, including the many differences below the surface of some
major commonalties. First, it is clear that in many, if not most, contemporary calls
for 'commons', what is desired are not commons at all, in the senses discussed in
the previous sections; rather, commons have become a powerful language for assert-
ing the existence and legitimacy of collective rights and interests not limited to those
that have to be paid for in markets or sanctioned by states. Many calls for commons
are not calls for common property regimes strictly speaking, but calls for new public
trusts, goods, spaces, entitlements, or property; increased state regulation; or even
the creation of new markets in some cases (e.g., cap-and-trade schemes). All rest on
a foundation of inherent collective rights to resources, though, rights tied to being
a resident of a certain place, a citizen of a given country, or even a human being;
in that sense, they are very much like archetypical commons and fundamentally
