on weeds and the city.

[mo cahill]

(x-postoed from my fb page-http://facebook.com/moahsark)

so, one thing that occurs to me on this issue of weeds is this- the city regulates this mostly as a marker of neglect. vacant lot, full of weeds=bad for the city, for the neighborhood. 

fine. not a problem. 

BUT. these laws are being used against people who are doing the opposite of neglecting their property. 

gardeners and farmers like me allowing some "weeds" to grow, where they have a purpose. an environmental purpose. 

the "weeds" we allow here are either something we eat or feed to the animals, something that is feeding pollinators, or something that is serving a purpose for the soil. 

this is not neglect. 

this is what we should be doing more. this is what the city actually asks people to do with programs like "sustainable back yards".

most of my conversations with the alderman's office have ended with the idea that what it boils down to is it doesnt "look good".

now, ftr, my land never looks bad to me. far from an eyesore, every green thing that i allow is a sight for sore eyes. i just literally do not see it the way others do. 

so, to the question- why do my neighbors have to look at it, i say, why is the city of chicago litigating the aesthetics of my property?

there is no neglect here. 

the city has every right to harass the negligent property owners, like the former owner of my farm (who was apparently never cited for weeds). 

the city has no business litigating what plants should be growing in my garden. 

it seems to me that presenting evidence that the land is being tended should negate any citations for "weeds".

this was my understanding of the law. 

untended. that is supposed to be the operative word. 

when we get to court i will be bringing my fb book, 140 pages of pics and posts of the work we have done here. if that isnt enough to get the thing dismissed, we sure as hell will be appealing the ruling. 

thoughts?

[Debbie Hillman]

Hi, Mo --

I don't have any immediate answers to your questions, but yesterday I came across a scholar whose work  on "the commons" can be applied to your situation.   City of Chicago public policy would still have to be changed, but maybe you and others can get some ideas and messaging from this interview with Elinor Ostrom.    Unfortunately, she died in 2012, but her legacy is worth investigating.   

In the context of Ostrom's work, the "commons" that can be identified here is a combination of factors that can probably be distilled down to biodiversity -- biodiversity in humans and biodiversity in non-human species.

The entire interview is worth reading (and easy reading), but I've highlighted a few passages in red that might apply directly to your situation.  Whether the passages help you in court remains to be seen.

Keep us posted.   

-- Debbie

Debbie Hillman

Evanston, Illinois

847/328-7175

DLHi...@sbcglobal.net

D. Hillman Strategies:  Food Policy for Voters

http://DHillmanStrategies.com

When indigenous female elders do not know what to do, they wait.  They do nothing.  And they are completely relaxed and open and at ease within this timeless place of surrender and being.

-- Roslyne Sophia Breillat, Womb of Wisdom

Elinor Ostrom: The Commoner

Utne Reader visionary

November-December 2010

http://www.utne.com/politics/utne-reader-visionaries-elinor-ostrom-commons.aspx

by Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader

Sharing is one of the first things we learn as small children, yet capitalism suggests that we set it aside as a naive notion: It’s every man for himself. 

 

Elinor Ostrom is one of the first social scientists to specifically study the things we share—from oceans and forests to roads and money systems—and breathe fresh life into an old term: the commons. 

 

Ostrom’s key idea is that neither the state nor the market is the best manager of our collective resources—it’s us, we the people. The commons concept is catching on in a big way as we look at how to lighten our impact on the earth, live within the means of our natural resources, and navigate the ownership issues of a new digital era. Ostrom’s research is often the foundation for reformers in these areas, which is one reason she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. 

Ostrom often speaks of growing up in a frugal, Depression-era household as an inspiration for her work: In that atmosphere, people had to pull together and make the most of what they had. As we bump up against the limits of our economic and environmental systems, it may be time to revisit the spirit of collective action. 

 

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense

The newest Nobel Laureate in Economics has built her career on the science of cooperation.

by Fran Korten

posted Feb 26, 2010

 

Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.

 

Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop.

Fran Korten, YES! Magazine’s publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and the United States. She and Ostrom drew on one another’s work as this field of knowledge developed. Fran interviewed her friend and colleague Lin Ostrom shortly after Ostrom received the Nobel Prize.

---

Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom has built her career on the science of cooperation.

 

Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised?

Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved.

 

Fran: Why relieved?

Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn’t like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn’t fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That’s very nice.

And it’s very nice for the team that I’ve been a part of here at the Workshop. We have had a different style of organizing. It is an interdisciplinary center—we have graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty working together. I never would have won the Nobel but for being a part of that enterprise.

 

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate. And your Workshop at the university is also organized on principles of cooperation.

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question—case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

 

Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He says that if, for example, you have a pasture that everyone in a village has access to, then each person will put as many cows on that land as he can to maximize his own benefit, and pretty soon the pasture will be overgrazed and become worthless. What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?

Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

 

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

 

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property—such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.

 

Fran: But what about the “free-rider” problem—where some people abide by the rules and some people don’t? Won’t the whole thing fall apart?

Elinor: Well if the people don’t communicate and get some shared norms and rules, that’s right, you’ll have that problem. But if they get together and say, “Hey folks, this is a project that we’re all going to have to contribute to. Now, let’s figure it out,” they can make it work. For example, if it’s a community garden, they might say, “Do we agree every Saturday morning we’re all going to go down to the community garden, and we’re going to take roll and we’re going to put the roll up on a bulletin board?” A lot of communities have figured out subtle ways of making everyone contribute, because if they don’t, those people are noticeable.

 

Fran: So public shaming and public honoring are one key to managing the commons?

Elinor: Shaming and honoring are very important. We don’t have as much of an understanding of that. There are scholars who understand that, but that’s not been part of our accepted way of thinking about collective action.

 

Fran: Do you have a favorite example of where people have been able to self-organize to manage property in common?

Elinor: One that I read early on that just unglued me—because I wasn’t expecting it—was the work of Robert Netting, an anthropologist who had been studying the alpine commons for a very long time. He studied Swiss peasants and then studied in Africa too. He was quite disturbed that people were saying that Africans were primitive because they used common property so frequently and they didn’t know about the benefits of private property. The implication was we’ve got to impose private property rules on them. Netting said, “Are the Swiss peasants stupid? They use common property also.”

 

Fran: Why were Netting’s findings so surprising to you?

Elinor: I had grown up thinking that land was something that would always move to private property. I had done my dissertation on groundwater in California, so I was familiar with the management of water as a commons. But when I read Netting, I realized that when there are “spotty” land environments, it really doesn’t make sense to put up fences and have small private plots.

 

Fran: Lin, if you were to have a sit-down session with someone with a big influence on natural resources policy—say Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, or Ken Salazar, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, what would be your advice?

Elinor: No panaceas! We tend to want simple formulas. We have two main prescriptions: privatize the resource or make it state property with uniform rules. But sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons.

 

Fran: Is there a role for government in those situations?

Elinor: We need institutions that enable people to carry out their management roles. For example, if there’s conflict, you need an open, fair court system at a higher level than the people’s resource management unit. You also need institutions that provide accurate knowledge. The United States Geological Survey is one that I point to repeatedly. They don’t come in and try to make proposals as to what you should do. They just do a really good job of providing accurate scientific knowledge, particularly for groundwater basins such as where I did my Ph.D. research years ago. I’m not against government. I’m just against the idea that it’s got to be some bureaucracy that figures everything out for people.

 

Fran: How important is it that there is a match between a governing jurisdiction and the area of the resource to be managed?

Elinor: To manage common property you need to create boundaries for an area at a size similar to the problem the people are trying to cope with. But it doesn’t need to be a formal jurisdiction. Sometimes public officials don’t even know that the local people have come to some agreements. It may not be in the courts, or even written down. That is why sometimes public authorities wipe out what local people have spent years creating.

 

Fran: You’ve done your research on small- and medium-sized natural resource jurisdictions. How about the global commons? We have the problems of climate change and oceans that are dying. Are there lessons from your work that are relevant to these massive problems we’re now facing?

Elinor: I really despair over the oceans. There is a very interesting article in Science on the “roving bandit.” It is so tempting to go along the coast and scoop up all the fish you can and then move on. With very big boats, you can do that. I think we could move toward solving that problem, but right now there are not many instrumentalities for doing that.

 

Regarding global climate change, I’m more hopeful. There are local public benefits that people can receive at the same time they’re generating benefits for the global environment. Take health and transportation as an example. If more people would walk or bicycle to work and use their car only when they have to go some distance, then their health would be better, their personal pocketbooks would be better, and the atmosphere would be better. Of course, if it’s just a few people, it won’t matter, but if more and more people feel “This is the kind of life I should be living,” that can substantially help the global problem. Similarly, if we invest in re-doing the insulation of a lot of buildings, we can save money as well as help the global environment. Yes, we want some global action but boy, if we just sit around and wait for that? Come on!

 

Fran: Do you have a message for the general public?

Elinor: We need to get people away from the notion that you have to have a fancy car and a huge house. Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

 

Fran: Let’s look ahead 20 years. What would you hope that the world will understand about managing common property systems?

Elinor: What we need is a broader sense of what we call “social ecological systems.” We need to look at the biological side and the social side with one framework rather than 30 different languages. That is big, but I now have some of my colleagues very interested. Some of them are young, and what I find encouraging is that with a bunch of us working together, I can see us moving ahead in the next 20 years or so. Twenty years from now, at 96, I probably won’t be as active.

 

Fran: Not as active? I wouldn’t bet on that.

 

 

8 Keys to a Successful Commons
Advice on how to govern our commons by Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom.

Let’s think about this a bit. In the valleys, they use private property, while up in the alpine areas, they use common property. So the same people know about private property and common property, but they choose to use common property for the alpine areas. Why? Well, the alpine areas are what Netting calls “spotty.” The rainfall is high in one section one year, and the snow is great, and it’s rich. But the other parts of the area are dry. Now if you put fences up for private property, then Smith’s got great grass one year—he can’t even use it all—and Brown doesn’t have any. So, Netting argued, there are places where it makes sense to have an open pasture rather than a closed one. Then he gives you a very good idea of the wide diversity of the particular rules that people have used for managing that common land.

 

1.  Define clear group boundaries.

2.  Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

3.  Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4.  Make sure the rulemaking rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

5.  Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members' behavior.

6.  Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

7.  Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolutions.

8.  Build responsibility for governing the common resources in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system. 

 

[mo cahill]

thanks for this debbie. just the highlights are great. will ready later tonight. 

i actually have done a ton of pr. my fb page is all about keeping people in the loop. when the apartment was finished we had an open house. 

i have done a more extensive than usual fall clean up. all is tucked in or decorated for the holidays. srsly. 

i do always have flowers, and have a serious weakness for pretty vegetables. its not that there is zero nods to the neighbors. i keep plastic bags and a garbage can for the dog walkers, with a pee log, even. 

i have solar lights and decorations. 

i have some statuary. 

i have chairs and a fire ring in the front yard of the 2 flat. 

there seriously are many, many neighbors that love it. maybe you dont see it when you drive by, but when you take the tour, most people are all smiles and wow. 

i made one of those fb books to show the judge. thanks to my ex's most excellent photography, it is an awesome little document. 

there is no way to do more than flip through the thing to see that beauty abounds here, it is a matter of seeing it. 

but you would have to be blind not to see it in print. 

thinking of giving the alderman one for xmas.