As many as 300,000 people marched in New York on Sept. 21 to call for the United Nations to take action on climate change—four times the number that organizers predicted. In the interfaith bloc, behind a wooden ark on wheels and a giant inflatable mosque, I marched and sang with nuns and seminarians, friends and strangers, sharing our love for the planet we all have in common.
The Book of Acts talks twice about the early church holding “all things in common,” in the second chapter and in the fourth. Both times, the phrase “signs and wonders” comes right before. Sharing things followed a shared experience. There is some kind of connection, it seems, between holy spectacle and how we treat the world around us. Like how falling in love makes us see miracles all around us, or how a wedding binds families together, signs and wonders help us share what we once kept to ourselves. September’s climate march was certainly a wonder. I hope world leaders will also take it as a sign.
But what does the phrase “in common” mean? Cold War shudders might arise in us: Are we talking communism or capitalism? Was the climate march some kind of plea for an Earth-worshiping politburo?
I hope not. Heeding the scientific consensus and the cries of people enduring climate-induced floods and famines, popes from John Paul II to Francis have spoken of inaction on climate change as a pressing moral crisis for Christians. An environmental encyclical is in the making. In New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote on his blog, “It would be wonderful if there were a strong Catholic presence at the march, to indicate our prayerful support of God’s creation.”
What the apostles were doing, and what we should be doing to protect the planet, falls on neither side of the Cold War binary. Acts is not talking about a state bureaucracy any more than about a stock market; it is talking about the ancient practice sometimes called “commoning”—that is, treating the means of livelihood as the common birthright of everyone. The whole world, after all, is ultimately God’s. Thus Gratian understood that by natural law omnia sunt communia—all things are common—and thus St. Thomas Aquinas held that poor people’s right to necessities trumps the property rights of the rich. Thus, alongside England’s Magna Carta came the Charter of the Forest, which ensured that the landless masses would have the right to sustain themselves with the fruits of common land. Thus Leviticus required that farmers leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the poor could live off the remains—and so, to protect the health of the land, every seven years it was to be left fallow.
Commoning was the original bulwark against poverty, an economic system built around meeting the needs of the poor and sustaining the environment. It was a natural fit for early Christians, many of whom were on the fringes of society. The medieval church went on to maintain churches and land for common use; it was no accident that with the Reformation came a surge in the enclosure of land into private estates.
Throughout history, commoners have had to fend off the urges of the wealthy to enclose common resources. “The pre-eminent challenge is to assure the greatest integrity of the commons, so that the fruits of commoning are not siphoned away by clever, covetous businesses and governments,” writes David Bollier in his essential new introduction to the commons, Think Like a Commoner. While commoning might coexist with a market or state, it is neither. Commons are governed by the customs of the poor, not the bureaucracies of the rich.
Today, movements framed around the commons are resisting attempts to privatize such essentials as water, seeds and medicines. Climate change itself results from a kind of enclosure—an economic system that allows polluters to treat the atmosphere as theirs to disrupt and profit from. That is why, the day after the big march, I helped to organize another event: Flood Wall Street. Following a call to action from poor and indigenous communities, several thousand people wearing blue filled the Financial District. One hundred were arrested in a peaceful sit-in near the stock exchange.
First, we must see a God-given commons like the climate for what it is. Next, we must organize to protect it. Third, may we find the grace to become good stewards of it again.
This is a great point to raise, Beth—and the connection between Catholic monastic tradition and our own possible economic futures is a subject I plan to come back to in future columns. And I think J Cosgrove raises a very real concern, also—that practices of commoning often depend on strong community ties.
On the one hand, a question we might ask is whether there are ways we can better strengthen community ties today? Can technology help? A lot of the new "sharing economy" initiatives (like Airbnb and Couchsurfing), for instance, claim that they can use the Internet to restore lost trust relationships (and large venture capitalists believe them). Others are more skeptical and argue that technology fundamentally gets in the way of strong community ties.
I think monastic tradition points toward a middle way. Monasteries, after all, were not built around just close community ties; they were built around shared vows, traditions, beliefs, and rules. A traveling monk could feel immediately welcome in a monastery far from his own, thanks to these shared values. Religious communities have explored many other ways of fostering trust and sharing that might not otherwise have seemed possible.
This past May I spent a week with a group of secular hackers who turned to monasteries as an inspiration for building a network of commons-producing communities across Europe. (Read my report in The Nation.) They saw monastic rules as a kind of technology, and I think there's truth in that. They would think you're both right.
Thank you for your plea for balance. Part of the appeal of the notion of the commons is that it is not all-or-nothing; commoning can, and perhaps should, co-exist with a state an market. Throughout history, markets have played an important role in ensuring the flow of not just goods but also culture and ideas. However, balance needs to go both ways. I do think that it is possible for a market as a whole, not just individual actors within it, to become too powerful and to become a serious threat to the commons. Pope Francis, for instance, has warned against "a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."
It is of course a problem when a particular company profits from damaging the environment. But I think a more accurate description of the current situation right now is that the rules of the market are rigged in such a way that actually incentivizes environmental irresponsibility. Companies that profit from carbon-intensive industry (as well as other forms of pollution) are often not required to pay the actual price of the damage they cause. Further, companies are not only competing with each other to create marketable products, they are competing to influence politicians to pass favorable legislation (both in the U.S. and the U.N.). The result is a system in which the market is not taking into account the actual costs of its activities, and a political system that is unable to correct the market mechanisms because of the market participants' outsized influence. This is why a coalition of poor and indigenous communities called for Flood Wall Street; those people know very well how much less say they have in the political process than do those who have access to the markets that Wall Street symbolizes.
Finally, when we think of the commons, we should not consider it a free-for-all. Commoning is a process that must be cultivated through generations, often, of custom and experience. It is a process that requires rules; Paul's admonition against free-riders is something every practice of commoning must take into account. As you'll see in such resources as David Bollier cites in another comment, commoning doesn't come out of thin air, which may be why the early Puritan settlers weren't able to do it successfully right off the bat. They came from communities in Europe that had been practicing forms of commoning for as long as anyone could remember, but they threw out many of those practices in the act of trying to design a utopian "city on a hill." One need only consider the differences when flying in an airplane over the European countryside—with clustered villages surrounded by farmland—and its American counterpart—with single-family homes spread out among carefully-divided plots—to see the consequences.
I certainly agree with you that whatever response we make to shifting climate conditions should begin with securing necessities for the most poor and vulnerable among us. Thank you for making that point. I confess I'm not a meteorologist myself, but it is notable that the American Meteorological Society published reports linking extreme weather events in 2012 and 2013 to climate change. And although the U.S. government is generally unwilling to take significant steps to reduce the likelihood of further climate change, numerous government agencies, as well as a polluter as formidable as the U.S. military, have come to recognize carbon-induced climate change as both real and linked to extreme weather. Not sure where you're getting your information about the ice caps, but NASA says otherwise.
In any case, I hope we do care whether the church makes a fool of itself. Climate change is not fundamental doctrine, but stewardship of the earth does go to the heart of our faith, and there is an overwhelming outcry from the scientific community that climate change is indeed a case in which we are falling terribly short in that responsibility.