Today is the first day of the 4th International Polar Year, perhaps a fitting end or a new beginning for Climate Commons. As many of the posts here have discussed, the poles play an important role in global climate. A major goal of this IPY is to study these linkages in greater detail and make the public aware of them. You can learn more about IPY at www.ipy.org and get a 3D tour in Google Earth at www.earthslot.org/ipy . It’s been a pleasure participating in this commons, and I encourage you all to continue the sorts of discussions we’ve had here as part of IPY.

Cheers,
Matt

from a great article in Harpers this month:

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient Music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

Tim O’Reilly has a recent post about energy issues making it onto what he calls the “alpha geek radar”. I think another way of saying this might be that more and more people are having conversations like ours. He says, “It’s really interesting the way ideas spread and catch on, and suddenly get on everyone’s radar at the same time. It makes me think of Danny Hillis’ definition of global intelligence: ‘It’s that which decided that decaf coffeepots should be orange.’”

Sitting down with a scotch tonight, I wanted to answer the question of why I called this site Climate Commons. I think the first word is obvious, but what is this notion of the commons? I went through my writing on it, and then starting surfing around the various sites I have found that use it as their central tenet. Daunted, I decided to collect phrases that seem to point at its varied form:

a public sphere in which community values are expressed

a collaborative working space

distributed problem solving

a public library

an invisible college

a space for community owned assets

a piece of land over which other people—often neighbouring landowners—could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it

any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community

Hello friends–this is a wonderful site–there have been many times over the past two decades when I’ve wished for just such communities, and to see them start forming and getting to work is truly an inspiration.

This winter, a few of us decided the time for mass action on climate change had finally arrived in this country. We’d organized a walk across Vermont last summer–fifty miles in five days–which drew a thousand people. That was great, but it was dismaying to learn that a thousand people was the largest crowd that had ever gathered anywhere in the U.S. about climate issues. So a week ago we launched stepitup07.org. Our plan is to get local people and groups to host rallies in hundreds of places across the country on April 14, and then link them together electronically. And so far it seems to be working–in that week, 111 rallies in 32 states have already been set up. There’s no question that this will turn out to be the largest demonstration on global warming in U.S. history.

Climate Commons, developed by Jane D. Marsching with Matthew Shanley, is an online conversation about climate change, sustainability, and the Arctic. The conversation runs from November 27, 2006 to February 28, 2007. Please join the conversation here by reading the posts and conversation threads or logging in as a new user to respond.

Climate Commons is part of a larger project by Marsching, Arctic Listening Post, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in the 2006 Foster Prize exhibition in which Marsching is a finalist. At the ICA Climate Commons can be viewed on laptops in the Climate commons Lounge, created with Justin C. Knapp and Christopher Wawrinofsky, provides a modular social space for conversation and inquiry. The Lounge’s furniture was created by Marsching with Justin C. Knapp and Christopher Wawrinofsky with upcycled materials from the construction of the new ICA.