The United Kingdom is crisscrossed with public footpaths where the public holds a legal right to traverse.
Many of these paths are centuries old. Many of them are probably even older, dating back thousands of years to the Neolithic or older.
They predate virtually every extant property claim that could be leveraged against them. They have belonged in common to the community that uses them since before there was a British state.
And yet, the British state is in the process of handing over thousands of miles of public footpaths to private owners because these paths—older than the state—have not been registered with the state. In James Scott’s terms, they are not legible to the state.
But carefully surveyed, delineated, discrete parcels of private property linked to individual owners—the state’s favorite—are legible to the state. So over they go.
"The commons refers to all our shared natural resources – including the land, the forests, the moors and parks, the water, the minerals, the air – and all the social, civic and cultural institutions that our ancestors have bequeathed to us, and that we may have helped to maintain or improve."
Photos on the Wikmedia Commons taken during India's second and third expeditions to #Antarctica, including those of the Dakshin Gangotri, India's first research station on the continent. Many thanks to Col Pavan Nair for his generosity and for responding to my request to donate these.
How did we get into this mess? In our first comic, we take a look at the values that create artificial divisions between humans and the rest of nature. What alternatives can be found in #commoning and #commons, and what possible futures do they open up?
Here is the main practical reason that developed countries have been reluctant to pay up on #ClimateFinance, #LossAndDamage, and generally helping developing countires: we owe a lot.
As in, thousands of dollars for every citizen in developed countries. Every year. Until 2050.
This paper spells it out, by country:
"The #compensation system is based on the idea that the #atmosphere is a #commons, a natural resource for everyone to use equitably and sustainably."
Uploaded a few of my photos from this week's Hayley Kiyoko concert to Wikimedia #Commons, including some of Allison Ponthier, who previously had no photos on her Wikipedia page
These photos and the other Picture of the Year finalists are all amazing, hopefully they inspire you to also contribute freely licensed media to #Wikimedia#Commons
Are there any examples of Structured Data on Commons being consumed/presented on-wiki outside of the context of the file page itself? Ideally something like a module on a Wikipedia which adds info to where the image is used in an article (but I'll be happy for even a minimal example).
1/17 With the recent #coronation of #CharlesIII, there have been a lot of stories in the press talking about whether Canadians want to keep our traditional relationship to the British monarchy, or abandon it and choose a different head of state.
11/17 To fill the positions, we take the oldest sitting member of the House of #Commons, and similarly the oldest sitting Senator. They are removed from their political positions; this is #mandatory. They then have a choice: they can choose to serve as co-head of state for a period of up to one year, or they can decline. Either way, their political career is over.
In his latest post, @pluralistic writes about studying the practice of democratic decision-making in the same ways Elinor Ostrom scientifically studied what makes a successful commons work.
This field is called Analytical Democratic Theory. I've been working on another side of this: how do we make genuine and meaningful invitations to people to participate in managing the problems that affect them?
“Foragers know that the plants and fungi they pick are alive; they know their stories of birth, growth, reproduction, aging, and dying. They know who eats whom, who becomes food for whom, and their own place in this dance.”
Anniversary of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass on Sunday 23 April so here's Commoners Choir with From Below. If you want more related folk songs then there's Manchester Rambler by Ewan MacColl, and the rearranged version by John Tams, and Trespassers by the Young'uns (on their album Tiny Notes on Bandcamp). And there's a short, song filled, documentary about the Kinder Scout trespass by the Young'uns with Boff Whalley on youtube. If you can't find links for any of these let me know and I'll post them.
For every footprint on the land,
For all the banners and the banned,
Should we keep to the landlord’s plans? Hell no!
‘Cos real change comes from below.
On the anniversary of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, which also happens to be St George's Day for those who celebrate, it's important to ask why we commoners have been dispossessed of our land rights: the right to roam; the right to forage for and grow our own food; the right to living space; and the right to stop ecocide and ecocidal action.
Variations of the following poem have been recorded since at least the 19th century but land theft by enclosure began centuries earlier.
The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
Other historical mass trespasses include the 17th century Diggers who attempted to reclaim common land in Surrey, Kent, Northamptonshire, and Buckinghamshire (and they claimed in at least six further counties), where they were met with murderous violence from land-lords and the state. Their presence was erased so thoroughly that historians are unable to trace exactly where Diggers lived. Today St George's Hill is a 4 square km (965 acre) private gated community with some of the most expensive housing in the UK - in 2014 at least 72 properties, £282+ million of assets, were registered offshore in tax havens.
Before the Diggers squatted St George's Hill it was probably "Crown land" acquired by the monarchy through invasion, conquest, confiscation, English "clearances", the Harrying of the North, and evictions from newly enclosed "Crown land" such as "royal hunting forests". Which brings us back around to the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass on land kept exclusively by the ruling classes for hunting and intensive farming of birds for shooting. /end thread
In 1649, to St. George's Hill,
A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's will.
They defied the landlords. They defied the laws.
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.
"We come in peace," they said, "to dig and sow.
We come to work the land in common, and to make the waste land grow.
This Earth divided we will make whole so it will be a common treasury for all."
Nancy Kerr sings The World Turned Upside Down, by Leon Rosselson
A new piece for #FutureNatures where I think about Ursula Le Guin's story 'She Unnames Them' and other themes of naming and renaming in Le Guin's work. It's about the naming process involved in natural science, and how that differs from the way people name things in every day life. And it's about who has the power to name stuff and who might decide to unname and rename it.