Abstract

We are currently witnessing both the destruction and formation of vastly different ways of constituting community, as some commons are enclosed or destroyed and others emerge and grow strong. As we face the challenge of acting ‘as a species’ within the multi-species community of life on this planet, it is ever more evident that our lack of ability to ‘common’ our atmosphere, to care for and take responsibility for what presently exists as an open access, unmanaged commons, threatens our very existence. It is time to rethink the possibilities for collective action, not only as a public with voice and vote, but as a community-without-essence in which making and sharing a commons is a living, participatory and never-settled commitment. Katherine Gibson argues for a reinvigorated language and politics of the commons, one that can bring to visibility practices of everyday commoning that operate at multiple scales from the planetary to the local.