Food, water, ener­gy, and even the air we breathe must be democ­ra­tized. Equi­table access to life-sus­tain­ing resources can no longer wait.

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was paint­ed, it said pri­vate prop­er­ty; But on the back side it didn’t say noth­ing; This land was made for you and me.” — Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land”, 1940

Decom­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the human spir­it is just one step toward cre­at­ing the con­di­tions under which we can lever­age the pow­er of coop­er­a­tion over com­pe­ti­tion. Lib­er­a­tion of one­self is pow­er­ful, but ulti­mate­ly mean­ing­less unless it also coin­cides with col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty for all the basic ele­ments of a healthy life. 

How could it be pos­si­ble for one group to have exclu­sive own­er­ship of any­thing organ­ic on the plan­et? Life was all here long before us and it will remain long after we die. Humans are mere­ly bor­row­ing the world for a lit­tle while and we should behave accord­ing­ly. Each new gen­er­a­tion must assume the role of stew­ards of the Earth. It’s a cat­a­stroph­ic mis­take to assume we are its master.

Yet, there are many who con­tin­ue this pur­suit of eco­log­i­cal mas­tery. Com­pa­nies like Mon­san­to and Syn­gen­ta tweak the genet­ic mate­r­i­al of seeds and use this as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for intel­lec­tu­al own­er­ship. Aggres­sive busi­ness prac­tices and suc­cess­ful lob­by­ing help these com­pa­nies become monop­o­lies. They become like impe­ri­al­ist states, sweep­ing across the world and bend­ing agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices to their will. And in their wake we’re left with drink­ing water that’s taint­ed and air that’s pol­lut­ed. Illog­i­cal­ly, it is those who face no direct con­se­quences from the abuse of nat­ur­al resources who are the ones who get to decide their use.

And yet, water uni­fies all peo­ple with Earth. Water con­nects us to the orig­i­nal source of life. Half the water in our bod­ies, oceans, and streams con­tains hydro­gen from the ori­gins of the uni­verse. Water uni­fies the sto­ry of all that is, ever was, and will be. Water reveals the neces­si­ty of a decom­mod­i­fied plan­et. Every­one must be able to drink from this pow­er­ful medicine.

We can­not trust the prof­i­teers to take good care of the nat­ur­al resources of our plan­et. Nat­ur­al resource is the great­est wealth there is and must be democ­ra­tized. The tragedy of the com­mons is a hypoth­e­sis that claims that shared use of nat­ur­al resources makes those resources prone to dam­age due to overuse by non-cor­po­rate indi­vid­u­als abus­ing the resource for their ben­e­fit. Though an obvi­ous myth, it has played a use­ful pro­pa­gan­dis­tic role in jus­ti­fy­ing the pri­va­ti­za­tion of land. The cor­po­ra­tions con­trol­ling the land then claim­ing that only through clear­ly-defined own­er­ship can a resource be ade­quate­ly main­tained.  But the cur­rent con­di­tion of the envi­ron­ment has proven this the­o­ry false. Even now, free-mar­ket fun­da­men­tal­ists call for the pri­vate own­er­ship of the very air we breathe as a solu­tion to the ris­ing lev­els of CO₂ with­in its make­up. We deserve far more faith in our own col­lec­tive actions than that.

We envi­sion a soci­ety run on the prin­ci­ples of mutu­al aid, one of unmedi­at­ed and vol­un­tary coop­er­a­tion. We are more than capa­ble of self-reg­u­la­tion. In this new, pro­posed sys­tem that did not reward vio­la­tions of moral­i­ty, self-reg­u­la­tion would become even eas­i­er. In a mutu­al aid soci­ety, any­one who sought to exploit a shared resource for per­son­al enrich­ment would face seri­ous sanctions.

De-com­mod­i­fy­ing the plan­et will take time. And it will require enact­ing mass par­tic­i­pa­to­ry democ­ra­cy. But if we can con­fig­ure soci­ety in a way that engages the pop­u­lace, invites every­one in, and ensures that we all feel like mem­bers, then we might very well find our­selves on a path toward the type of utopi­an future we’ve always imagined.