Global Commons  

Every day more land, air, water and forests are taken from the common wealth of the human race and transformed into private property for profiteers who then act irresponsibly and accelerate the destruction of the earth.

Rebuilding The Common Wealth

For much of human history, the people in a given community held some property in common, often in trust for what they perceived as the spiritual power of the universe. As God makes clear in the Torah, from the divine perspective there is no such thing as a right to private property, “Because the whole earth is Mine” says the Transformative Power. God is saying this in the context of telling people that they must return the land to its original distribution once every fifty years during the Yuval or Jubillee, so that inequalities of wealth get abolished. But if people are going to hold land as private property temporarily between the Jubilees, they must share. And part of what people shared were parts of the land which everyone could use—the common wealth of the community.

Today, we need a strategy of rebuilding the common wealth. Unfortunately, that concept got eroded when the state became the holder of the common wealth (as in “The Commonweath of Pennsylvania”). Given the tremendous power of corporate wealth to erode substantial democratic control by ordinary people of the apparatus of state power, most people came to feel that “commonwealth” was a meaningless terms, giving them neither power nor wealth.

So ecologists are beginning to talk about reclaiming “the commons” as collectively ownded and community managed resources and spaces, such as rivers, ponds, forests, pastures and air. While corporate privatization and enclosures threaten to turn even air and water into private commodities, the movement to reclaim the commons can be a first step toward reinventing a middle space between private property and state property, a space in which local communities get empowered. As Vandana Shiva put it (Tikkun,Jan/Feb 2003), “the recovery of the commons will require a movement of people fighting to keep the fundamental necessities for life beyond monopoly, ownership and commodification. This in turn would prevent the patenting of life forms and privatization of water.”

We at the NSP are allies with all those who seek to preserve the Global Commons. As the Torah makes clear, no one has a RIGHT to ownership of the land of our planet earth, because, as God is heard to put it, "The whole earth is Mine." God's not ours. Our responsibility is to tend it and guard it. And if we do not do that in a responsible way, the earth will literally vomit us out of the entire planet.