The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead

By David Bollier (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021)

David Bollier and I met for coffee several months ago. Without discussing it ahead of time, we each brought a copy of our most recent book to give to the other person—and that so embodies the theme of this book that I had to start with it. Although we live one town apart and do similar work, our paths so rarely intersect that the book I was giving him is eight years old, and his was three. I think we met 1:1 only once before, probably about twenty years ago.

Modeled loosely on the 1960s-era Whole Earth Catalogs, The Commoner’s Catalog is a heavily annotated collection of resources on dozens of subtopics under the umbrella of collaborative economy. Some are familiar, like food co-ops, land trusts, open-source software, Transition Towns, and worker-owned businesses. Some were completely new to me, like a collaborative, “value-sovereign,” and feminist initiative around blockchain (p. 96). Some partner with government entities, such as a reparations project in Mississippi that sued the federal Department of Agriculture and used its 1999 $1 bn settlement to fund the initiative (p. 88), or like Peru’s project to protect species diversity of indigenous potato varieties (p 55).

The book is divided into short sections, each with a few articles. it’s crammed with resources: URLs or publishing information for books, articles, videos, organizations, and even processes. I wrote down 42 page numbers listing books I might review in future newsletters! And many of those pages contain multiple books.

A few among many key insights:

• Collaborative ventures are often created out of stress—as a response to a system that tries to crush people, or as a response to disaster, for instance
• Commoners can influence the creation of new laws and businesses that not only allow but encourage collaborative success
• Successful models of resources held in common and managed by collaborative groups are all around us. I knew that the World Wide Web was placed into the commons by its creator, Tim Berners-Lee (and what a magnificent gift that has turned out to be)—but even though I’ve used them since I got my first smartphone many years ago, I had no idea that Android phone operating systems are based in open-source Linux.
• The “tragedy of the commons” concept that open-source is inevitably corrupted by private greed just isn’t true—especially if the communing systems are designed to be resilient, self-policing, and serving the needs of users and ecosystems. A corollary is that the model of the lone-wolf genius entrepreneur achieving magic all by himself (and it’s usually a him in these stories) is also flawed. Most geniuses had a lot of help creating their successes.

I really only have one criticism. Presumably to save paper, the layout is deeply challenging. Most people who would want a paper copy are going to skew older, but this book’s design is a nightmare for older readers. All this information is crammed into 114 8-1/2 x 12 pages. The introductory text to each section is nice and readable but the specific narratives are in a tiny font and many of the resources are in even tinier print, plus the eye flow isn’t always easy. It took me about a month to read it because I could only do two or three pages at a shift. I’m someone who reads small print on paper better than a lot of my cohort (I’m 67). There’s no way I could recommend this paper edition to my wife, who was 39 when she started refusing to look at a printed phone book (oddly, she can read much smaller print on screen than I can, so an e-edition may be better for people with eyes like hers).