commons

Megan Youdelis reviews the book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer by Steven Davis.

Miriam Tola explores the entwinement of fascist biopolitics and the chemical industry at the site of the former chemical-textile plant Ex-SNIA Viscosa from the 1920s to the 1950s, and how this affected human and nonhuman bodies.

Gustavo A. Garcia-Lopez and Camille Antinori trace and analyze the historical processes driving formation and change of Mexican inter-community forestry associations over time, drawing on survey data and in-depth case studies from two Mexican states.

A woman and her family live next to a recycling plant in China, in mountains of plastic waste from Asia, Europe, and the U.S.This documentary reveals the lives of those on the fringes of global capitalist realities, a far cry from the communist dream.

Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.

Yonten Nyima Yundannima provides an empirical analysis of rangeland use rights privatization through an empirical case study from Pelgon county in the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. She criticizes the applicability of the tragedy of the commons model to Tibetan pastoralism, arguing that this has led to a disruption of the essence of pastoralism in the region.

This film follows an Indian farmer whose situation becomes a microcosm of the conflict between Monsanto and rural people living in poverty in India.