For the first time in history, the natural world we leave our children will
be frightfully worse than the one we inherited from our parents. This isn’t
just because we’re using the planet as if there were no tomorrow — that’s
been going on for centuries. It’s because the cumulative weight of
our past and present malfeasance has brought us to several tipping points.
Nature has her tolerance limits, and we’ve reached many of them.
In some cases, very possibly, we’ve passed them. ...
When most people think of the commons, they imagine a pasture where animals
graze. That’s an antiquated notion, and not what I have in mind. In
this book I use the commons as a generic term, like the market or the state.
It refers to all the gifts we inherit or create together.
This notion of the commons designates a set of assets that have two characteristics:
they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared. A gift is something
we receive, as opposed to something we earn. A shared gift is one we receive
as members of a community, as opposed to individually. Examples of such gifts
include air, water, ecosystems, languages, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics,
parks, the Internet, and much more.
These diverse gifts are like a river with three tributaries: nature, community,
and culture (see figure 1.1). This broad river precedes and surrounds capitalism,
and adds immense value to it (and to us). Indeed, we literally can’t
live without it, and we certainly can’t live well.
There’s another quality to assets in the commons: we have a joint
obligation to preserve them. That’s because future generations will
need them to live, and live well, just as we do. And our generation has no
right to say, “These gifts end here.” This shared responsibility
introduces a moral factor that doesn’t apply to other economic assets:
it requires us to manage these gifts with future generations in mind. Markets
don’t naturally do this. If an asset yields a competitive return to
capital, markets keep it alive; otherwise, they let it die. No other factors
matter.
Assets in the commons are meant to be preserved regardless of their return
to capital. Just as we receive them as shared gifts, so we have a duty to
pass them on in at least the same condition as we received them. If we can
add to their value, so much the better, but at a minimum we must not degrade
them, and we certainly have no right to destroy them. ...
All thought processes start with premises and flow to conclusions. Here
are the main premises of this book.
1. WE HAVE A CONTRACT Each generation has a contract with the next to pass on the gifts it has
jointly inherited. These gifts fall into three broad categories: nature,
community, and culture. The first category includes air, water, and ecosystems.
The second includes laws, infrastructure, and many systems by which we connect
with one another. The third includes language, art, and science. All of these
gifts are immensely valuable, and need to be preserved if not enhanced. ... read
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