PODCAST

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier

A monthly conversation with creative activists pioneering new forms of commoning.

society & culture

All Episodes

00:46:55

The Future Requires a Politics of Relationality

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/11/01

At a time when the superstructures of modern civilization seem terminally messed up, the authors of 'Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human' argue that we must start a new conversation about the nature of being and modern myths of the self. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar, cultural studies scholar Michal Osterweil, and biologist Kriti Sharma draw on a diversity of sources – evolutionary science, cultural studies, art and poetry, Indigenous practices, wisdom traditions, and more –

00:44:06

Chris Smaje's Vision of a Post-Collapse Eco-Localism...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/10/01

What might the world look like if capitalist growth and carbon emissions continue, and modern civilization collapses? Chris Smaje, a small farmer and writer in England, extrapolates from existing trends to sketch a vision of post-capitalist social economies. His new book, 'Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft,' envisions a world that is largely rural, decentralized, and grounded in local ecosystems and self-reliance. The book is neither a doomer nor survivalist tract, but

00:53:54

Isabel Carlisle, Bioregioning as a Response to 'Gaia...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/09/01

As climate change and other crises makes the economy and everyday life more precarious, innovative forms of bioregional action are needed to respond to 'Gaia on the move," says Isabel Carlisle, founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in Devon, England. Carlisle describes the importance of building local ecological expertise, participation, and institutions to build community resilience in the years ahead, especially because centralized nation-states will not be able to do the

00:57:42

Rabble Evan Henshaw-Plath: How Network Protocols...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/08/01

Evan Henshaw-Plath, better known as Rabble, is a pioneering programmer for social media platforms and decentralized technologies. Here, Rabble explains how network protocols are critical infrastructure for enabling -- or impeding -- commons and open markets, not to mention privacy, free speech, and community control. Their ambition is a future in which everyone has "access to authentic, private online communities built on care, connection, and sustainable relationships.” [More on commons at

00:32:59

Gustavo Salas of Cecosesola: Prioritizing Commoning...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/07/01

Gustavo Salas describes the remarkable culture of commoning at Cecosesola, a federation of 30 rural and urban cooperatives in Venezuela that serves hundreds of thousands of people with fresh produce, healthcare, funerary services, and many other goods and services. Cecosesola's priority is to create spaces of trust, togetherness, and self-improvement for its 1,300 associates while meeting the everyday needs of low-income families. Market prices and norms are secondary. For its work in escaping the

00:45:07

Jack Kloppenburg on Sharing Seeds in a World of...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/06/01

Jack Kloppenburg has been a leading figure in the fight to protect seed-sharing commons over the past forty years. It's a struggle that began in the 1980s as large ag-biotech companies have sought to make seeds privately owned and proprietary using all sorts of legal, technological, and market restrictions. Kloppenburg has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison since 1985 and a founder of the Open Source Seed Initiative. OSSI leads a movement of farmers, breeders, gardeners, and

00:37:38

Tom Llewellyn on the Many, Innovative Spheres of...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/05/01

Tom Llewellyn, Executive Director of Shareable, describes the countless varieties of organized sharing that it supports through its journalism, organizing, and partnerships. In recent years, Shareable has helped amplify the work of mutual aid networks, expand the Libraries of Things concept, championed new forms of urban commoning, and develop new infrastructures of sharing. Its work on creative, bottom-up collaborations also showcases dozens of vanguard ideas, such as peer-to-peer lending, DIY bike

00:53:23

Commoning within Arts Collectives, Episode #61

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/04/01

What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art? This episode hears from artists' collectives in three countries to learn how they organize their commoning practices. The three collectives are the "-" (dash) collective in Iran (with an artist who goes by the pseudonym "M" for political reasons); Papaya Kuir, a lesbo-transfeminist collective for Latin American migrants in the Netherlands (with Mexican-born Alejandra Maria

00:39:59

David Bollier on His New, Updated Edition of 'Think...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/03/01

Radio Kingston host and executive director Jimmy Buff interviews David Bollier about his new, updated and revised edition of 'Think Like a Commoner,' originally published in 2014. This popular introduction now includes material on the commons as a living, relational organism, bioregionalism and the relocalization of economies, governance of digital commons, legal hacks to support commons, and new ways for state power to facilitate commoning. More about the book at https://www.thinklikeacommoner.com

00:36:07

Future Natures: On Seeing Commons through Popular Genres

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/02/01

Anthropologist Amber Huff, coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures at the University of Sussex in England, explains how popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, podcasts, and video, among others, can illuminate contemporary commons, enclosures, and the disorienting crises of capitalist modernity. What does this moment of crisis and collapse feel like, and how can subjective experiences and emotions be organized to create commons and new visions of the future?

00:43:31

Pirate Care as a Revolutionary Act: Valeria Graziano...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2025/01/01

Pirate Care is a term used to describe creative, public acts that challenge the "organized abandonment" of people in need. In the tradition of civil disobedience, pirate care activists intervene to show compassion and social solidarity for ordinary people. Pirate Care also highlights how the state, markets, or patriarchal families have politicized particular types of care by declaring them unpatriotic, a threat to business revenues, or unacceptably kind to people of the "wrong" citizenship, race, or

00:49:40

Yuria Celidwen on Applying Indigenous Wisdom...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/12/01

Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous researcher in the Department of Psychology at University of California Berkeley, discusses how contemplative practices in Indigenous traditions can expand mindfulness, heartfulness, compassion, and planetary flourishing. Her new book, 'Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Well-Being,' argues that relationality lies at the heart of Indigenous cultures, as seen in seven key principles. Celidwen explains that happiness is "only possible in community, when

00:44:33

Zoe Gilbertson on Bioregional Fibersheds & New...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/11/01

Zoe Gilbertson is a British fashion ecologist who is re-imagining the fashion industry from the ground up, literally. In an effort to curb the ecological harms of fast fashion, global supply chains, and relentless consumption of clothes, Gilbertson is figuring how fiber crops like hemp and flax could be grown bioregionally to produce textiles and, in the process, catalyze localized garment design, production, and distribution as well as bioregional clothing cultures. This vision is part of a larger,

00:42:36

Stefan Gruber's Global Portfolio of Urban Commons

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/10/01

Stefan Gruber, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of architecture and urbanism, sees cities as a prime site of struggle between capitalism and commons, and therefore an important incubator of just, regenerative, self-determined communities that move beyond the market/state paradigm. The traveling international exhibit, 'An Atlas of Commoning,' which he helped curate, and his course on 'Commoning in the City', study how participatory action, community design, and creative commons/public

00:53:07

Brandon Letsinger on Cascadia and Bioregional Activism

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/09/01

Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer and cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion, discusses the history of bioregional activism in Cascadia and current challenges and strategies. Cascadia consists of three watersheds in the Pacific Northwest extending from British Columbia to northern California. For more than 40 years, Cascadia activists have been in the vanguard of a larger, now resurgent global movement. Its general goals are to reinvent markets, cultures and identities in

00:51:32

Bram Büscher: Bridging the Human/Nature Divide...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/08/01

Bram Büscher, an activist-scholar in sociology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, has launched an ambitious international project to invent noncapitalist forms of land conservation. He calls it "convivial conservation." Instead of locking up land as wilderness or using it to make money through ecotourism and genetic patents, "convivial conservation" is about enabling humans to become integral, respectful co-creators with nature. The new Convivial Conservation Centre, with staff in five

00:49:46

Safouan Azouzi: Lessons of Desert Oases for...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/07/01

Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world. For the Global South, long victimized by colonialism and capitalist extraction, oases culture embodies an eco-friendly, alternative vision of development. For the industrial West, oases reveals the importance of commoning in building stable, regenerative economies in sync with ecosystem needs. More on the commons

00:53:28

Camila Vergara's Vision of Plebeian Constitutionalism

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/06/01

Chilean political philosopher Camila Vergara boldly argues in her book 'Systemic Corruption' that decay and corruption are inevitable even in liberal, representative systems because oligarchs end up capturing state governance and law. Ordinary people rarely have their own plebeian institutions to express their interests and curb the abuses of the elite. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman history and four modern political philosophers, Professor Vergara makes an audacious case for constitutionally

00:47:00

Cooking Sections Serves Up Art, Eco-Activism & Local...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/05/01

The artistic duo known as Cooking Sections -- Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the Royal College of Art in London -- use their virtuoso visual, performance, and installation artworks to jolt people into new understanding of local ecosystems, capitalism, and food. Their work, shown at prestigious venues around the world to great acclaim, dramatizes how modern diets are products of "a globally financialized landscape," ranging from artificially colored farmed salmon to eco-destroying

00:50:18

Nathan Schneider on Building Democratic Governance on...

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier ·

2024/04/01

To counter the "implicit feudalism" that is the norm on the Internet, activist-scholar Nathan Schneider explains the potential of democratic governance in online life and its importance to "real world" democracy. A professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Schneider argues that "online spaces could be sites of creative, radical and democratic renaissance." But this will require progressive activists to heed the lessons of various social and decolonial movements throughout

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Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

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