Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

With collaborators Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, British photographer and filmmaker Leah Gordon has produced a gloriously eccentric and sumptuous folk history of land rights, enclosure and resistance among English commoners. Their book, 'Common People' (Watkins, 2025) features stunning historical paintings, etchings, and folk relics from local cultures of commoning, as well as contemporary photographs of commoners who continue these traditions as Ramblers, Gypsies, travelers, squatters, festival-goers, ravers, antinuclear protesters, and nature lovers. The visual imagery is augmented by a series of insightful essays about "vanquished peasants," vagabonds, rural rebels, and folk traditions, revealing how historical memory about the commons is still very much alive in England. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

By applying commoning practices in rural towns in the Italian Alps, Bianca Elzenbaumer, a community economies designer and cofounder of Brave New Alps, is catalyzing many new forms of rural development and ecosocial transformation. Working from a repurposed railway station in Vallagarina, the group relies on radical pedagogy, "feral approaches" to community economies, and lots of DIY making and organizing. Projects don't aim for market development and conventional investment, but for participatory vehicles that honor social imagination, improvisation, and collective impact. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.

In his new book 'Ecocivilization', Jeremy Lent offers a bracing vision for how humanity can escape the destructive imperatives of capitalism and create ecologically centered societies that work for everyone. The book draws on dozens of real-world projects and social movements to describe what a stable, humane world would look like and what strategies can get us there. Chapters focus on significant socio-economic changes that must occur in business organization, agriculture, technology, finance, infrastructure, law, global governance, among other areas. For more on the commons, go to www.Bollier.org.