http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1104-08.htm
Published on Tuesday,
November 4, 2003 by the Cape
Cod Times
Do We Value Commonwealth?
by Sean Gonsalves
A good boiled frog recipe can be found in one of Daniel Quinn's
lesser known novels, "The Story of B." "If you
drop a frog in a
pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber
out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn
the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water
gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor,
exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a
smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be
boiled to death."
A new report issued
by Friends of the Commons
(http://www.friendsofthecommons.org/)
called "The State of the Commons 2003/2004" (.pdf)
(http://www.friendsofthecommons.org/stateofcommons0304.pdf)
helps us to see our boiling condition.
What are the Commons?
"It embraces all the creations of nature
and society that we inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust
for future generations," the report says.
What are Common assets?
"Those parts of the commons that have
a value in the market. Radio airwaves are a common asset,
as are timber and minerals on public lands. So, increasingly,
are air and water."
The concept of the
Commons may be foreign to most but it's been
around for a long time. The Romans, for example, distinguished
between three types of property: res privatae, res publicae and
res communes, as the report points out.
Res privatae consisted
of things that could be possessed
by individuals or families. Res publicae were those things
set aside for public use by the state, i.e. transportation
infrastructure. Res communes consisted of natural things used
by all of us, such as air and water.
During the Middle Ages,
the Commons were shared lands used
by villagers for hunting, crop planting and wood gathering.
The Magna Carta of 1215 established forests and fisheries
as res communes, natural resources available for everyone.
The idea of the Commons
can also be seen in America's founding,
which is why Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky
established themselves as "commonwealths."
Jonathan Rowe, one
of the report's co-authors, explained to me
how they set out to write the report. "We asked ourselves,
'What would a corporate annual report look like if it were
written for stakeholders in common assets instead of for
shareholders in corporate assets?'
"We wanted to
turn a corporate annual report inside out,
and start to turn what economists call 'externalities'
into the internalities that they are in terms of human
health and well being."
Did you know that economists'
primary method of ascertaining
economic health is by calculating the Gross Domestic Product?
But GDP measurements don't distinguish between beneficial
economic activity and the kind spurred by social ills like
divorce, crime and pollution. Why? Divorce means second homes.
Crime boosts private security business and environmental
clean-up is a booming industry.
The value of our common
wealth is beyond measure, though
there are aspects of it that can be roughly quantified,
the report argues. In fact, the report says, the value
of our common wealth is worth more than the estimated
$40 trillion value of our nation's private wealth.
Take the airwaves,
as one small example. "The broadcast
spectrum is worth roughly three-quarters of a trillion
dollars. Yet much of it has been given away to commercial
broadcasters for free," the report says.
"Benjamin Franklin
never got a patent on the Franklin Stove,
nor did Jonas Salk get a patent on his polio vaccine. But
today a patent frenzy has turned research labs and even farms
into lawyer heaven. The Monsanto Corp. has brought over
400 lawsuits against farmers for alleged misuse of its
patented seeds."
One of the report's
many recommendations is to establish
common property rights that would force polluters to pay
into specified trusts and use the money to replenish the
common wealth, which runs counter to last week's Senate
rejection of mandatory caps for greenhouse gas emissions
and the recent EPA rule change that widened the definition
of "routine maintenance" for power plants, giving major
polluters more latitude to "modernize" their facilities
without having to install pollution controls.
The cauldron bubbles
with boiling water and they say frog
tastes like chicken. The question is: Are we too chicken
to leap frog out of the pot?
Sean Gonsalves is a
Cape Cod Times staff writer and a
syndicated columnist.
Copyright © 2003
Cape Cod Times
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