Conceptualizing A Great Lakes Commons
Slowly over the past 50 years or so the perception of the Great Lakes has changed—at least among most thoughtful people—from limitless, exploitable resource to finite, fragile ecosystem.
We now have the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Great Lakes Compact, a Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and a variety of agencies and organizations working on Great Lakes problems.
Unfortunately, problems persist, threats proliferate, most of the safeguards are reactive, and, with climate change and environmentally careless legislatures, the lakes may be threatened as never before.
What the Great Lakes need at present are a few new ideas. Ideas? Why? Because ideas have power, ideas have the power to change the world— as for example a heliocentric solar system, germ theory, evolution, the scientific method, democracy.
Right now, four other ideas, also potent, must take root in the minds of North American citizens if the lakes are to have a future. These ideas are:
- a new kind of capitalism,
- the Great Lakes as a commons held in public trust,
- an international multi-Lake management/regulation program, and
- refinement and implementation of the emerging technology that profitably converts human and animal waste into hydrogen and electricity.
In a previous Guest Opinion I outlined the new capitalism. Here I’d like to touch on the ideas of the Great Lakes as a commons held in public trust. Then, subsequently, perhaps, multi-lake regulation, and profitable energy from waste.
The idea of a commons is actually a long-established and venerable one, from the Institutes of Justinian and Roman law, through the Magna Carta, through treaties and court decisions, up to 2008 and Great Lakes St. Lawrence River Water Resources Compact which declares the waters of the Great Lakes “precious public natural resources shared and held in trust by the states.”
Basically, the commons consists of those things that belong to all of us together as a result of our having been born on planet earth—air, water, biologic diversity, the genetic code, the internet, ideas. Nobody owns the commons. In its various aspects the commons has been an important and enduring part of many cultures across the millennia.
Now, a nascent but rapidly growing movement is working to have the Great Lakes declared a commons. This movement is being lead by environmental lawyer Jim Olson and his brother Eric, of the Michigan environmental group Flow for Water, along with distinguished environmentalist Maude Barlow of The Council of Canadians.
This past December Barlow and Jim Olson presented the concept to the International Joint Commission’s board of commissioners, asking the IJC to work with legislatures and regulatory agencies to see that public trust principles are integrated into new and existing environmental law. They also asked the IJC to lead the campaign to formally and legally declare the Great Lakes a shared commons.
Olson and Barlow argue that the commons approach is necessary because the old, well-intentioned regulatory process isn’t keeping up with developing threats. Current regulation is aimed at limiting damage, while the commons approach starts from the position that the ecosystem is of primary importance and any use must do no harm. No more “take a little here, take a little there;” no more “mess it up first and maybe fix it up later.” With the Great Lakes a commons, “those who would use the water must show, in advance, that their actions will not alter, harm, alienate, or subordinate the water and its many human and natural uses for private purposes or gain,” according to Eric Olson.
Having the Great Lakes a commons provides the philosophical underpinning and the legal foundation necessary for the survival of one of the world’s most magnificent, living ecosystems. It provides the “counter narrative” to the runaway market/profit/privatization juggernaut. It provides a body of law that recognizes the inherent right of the natural world, the environment, other species.
People like me who think that the idea of the Great Lakes as a commons is an exceedingly important idea hope that it will spread virally. We hope that it will come to be seen as absolutely the right idea in the minds of the great majority of us living around the Great Lakes—and across North America. We hope the Great Lakes as commons idea can help to break the “economic” spell that has allowed such exploitation and devastation in the past. We hope that, with the great majority of us supporting a Great Lakes commons, our elected officials will also “get the idea.”
More about the Commons is at: On the Commons. Also, Our Great Lakes Commons by the Council of Canadians, is a thorough examination of the problems and the solution. Flow for Water has many valuable resources as well.
The above opinion is that of Jim Nies of both Whitewater, Wis. and Kagawong, Ont.