Creating New Commons: Taking the Leap

The creation of new types of agricultural commons represents an enormous and necessary leap forward. It is important to keep in mind, however, that a global peer-to-peer learning community, even if governed through open-source principles, could end up privileging short-term, anthropocentric farming goals over the holistic, long-term needs of an ecosystem. We need the many constructive advances that open-source collaboration on a global scale can yield for agriculture, but might this path serve to homogenize the great diversity of farming cultures around the world? An important challenge is finding ways to honor the pluriverse of local farming cultures as they interact on a common platform (the internet) and traffic in the epistemology of Western science and information technology.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer brilliantly explains how Indigenous peoples tend to observe plants and other living systems through a different lens than the inhabitants of capitalist modernity. They see ecosystems through their own distinctive cosmovisions, spiritual beliefs, and intergenerational commitments. “Facts” are not self-evident; they arise and flourish within the framing of a living culture in communion with the Earth. George Wash- ington Carver, the great American biologist who developed crop-rotation methods and novel uses for peanuts and other crops, was a scientist but also a mystic. He declared that his agricultural discoveries came from listening closely, and with respectful awe, to what flowers and other plants had to say.

Mindful of this strain in agricultural history, we must be wary of a techno-solutionism ethic that might marginalize the role of human spirituality and culture in agricultural practices. Western scientists once dismissed the Subak irrigation systems of traditional rice farmers in Bali as religious superstition best displaced by “rational,” modern techniques. It is now seen that centuries of cultural tradition and religious practices have helped Bali farmers coordinate the timing of planting and harvesting on a community scale, so that scarce water supplies can be effectively allocated and pests kept to a minimum. A broad challenge going forward is to bring the insights of modern science (itself undergoing methodological shifts) into closer conversation with culture. Fortunately, there are constructive models for doing just this, such as the global, open-source network focused on rice agronomy, the System of Rice Intensification.

In the pages that follow, Dorn Cox documents and explains a rich convergence of so many forces that are already making agriculture more regenerative, intelligent, and decentralized. He also opens up fresh spaces for dialogue and collaboration that urgently need to expand. May the ideas in this book find a broad audience of readers—and enterprising, creative farmers around the world—as we enter the turbulence ahead.