In the video below, Nate Hagens offers another cogent analysis of some of the core symptoms, patterns, and drivers impacting the ongoing more-than-human predicament.

Nate talks about the major symptoms that increasingly get attention today like planetary heating, biodiversity loss, and geopolitical tensions, only to emphasize how these “surface problems” are driven by recurring systemic patterns, which are kept in place by “society-scale driving forces”.

Here is the episode:

My only quibble with Nate’s assessment is how he misdiagnoses the “tragedy of the commons” for what is actually a tragedy of the non-commons.

Hardin argued that common or collective stewardship of lands ultimately led to tragic mismanagement of resources, so private property and control was a better strategy. The ToTC argument has been a lynchpin ideology for the continued enclosure of actual common-use lands by wealthy private interests since the 1800s.

With this, our planetary situation now is dominated by an unrestrained system of private property that favors short-term private interest over long-term common good — resulting in a lack of commons and collective coordination of resources. The ‘global’ system of industrial production, state control and private property is a non-commons. And the tragedy, now, is the actual removal of collective common-pool resource management in favor of private decision-making and gain.

Ultimately, the so-called tragedy of the commons is a false flag. And one that Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom debunked decades ago.

If the planet was governed as a commons, the tragedy of mismanagement by private interests could be ameliorated through a collective coordination of resources that lead to contraction of private interest and an expansion of common good.

At base, non-common governance and private property established inequalities are also at the heart of the current ecological crises. As Anthropologist Pauline von Hellermann writes:

The climate and ecological crisis truly is a Tragedy of the Non-Commons. Not only because those who are responsible for it suffer the least, those least responsible the most — an overwhelmingly huge injustice — but also because those who have power are the least well equipped and inclined to truly change things, whilst those who could offer the most in finding different ways of living are excluded and marginalised.

Maybe it’s time for a little more commons, and commoning — as a process of collaborative collective organization? And maybe it’s time to cultivate the best, most pro-social capacities rather than encouraging destructive competition and a race to consume the planet?