Some commons are regional in scale and require
regional management. The examples that follow are in the
early stages of conception, design, and
implementation.
AIR
TRUSTS
While the federal government dallies on climate change,
several states are taking action. Most advanced is the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, launched by seven
northeastern states from Maine to Delaware. Their plan
will limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and
require utilities to hold emission permits. Still
undecided as of mid-2006 is a crucial question: will
polluters pay for their permits, or will they get most of
them for free?
Dozens of citizens’ groups are calling upon the
states to auction emission permits and use the proceeds
to reduce costs to consumers. “Historically,
polluters have used our air for free,” says Marc
Breslow of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network.
“But there’s no justification for allowing
them to keep doing so. The atmosphere is common
property.”
As this is written, some politicians are listening.
The Vermont legislature voted to auction 100 percent of
the state’s emission permits, rather than give them
free to polluters. In Massachusetts, a key committee
approved a five-year transition to full auctioning
— though the state’s governor, Mitt Romney,
abruptly withdrew Massachusetts from the regional
initiative. In New York, the state attorney general,
Eliot Spitzer, announced his support for 100 percent
auctioning. This could be especially significant if
Spitzer, as seems likely, becomes governor in 2007.
WATERSHED
TRUSTS
In the 1930s, there was the Tennessee Valley
Authority. Its main job was to control floods and bring
electricity to a seven-state region. Today a watershed
trust’s missions would be different: to protect
rivers and fish, and to promote sustainable agriculture.
Consider our largest watershed, the
Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio, which drains water and waste
from twenty-five states into the Gulf of Mexico. In the
mid-1980s, fishers in the Gulf noticed a growing
“dead zone” during summer months, when fish
and crustacean populations plummeted. According to the
EPA, the dead zone has now swelled to some five thousand
square miles. The problem is hypoxia, or absence of
dissolved oxygen. The proximate cause is overabundant
algae growth that triggers a cascade of effects that
ultimately sucks oxygen out of the water.
What causes aquatic plants to grow so fast they
overwhelm an entire ecosystem? In a word, nutrients
— the same nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous)
that farmers feed to their terrestrial crops. Excess
nutrients run off the soil and are washed down the
Mississippi. In 1997, an interagency task force was
created to study the problem and recommend solutions. In
2001 it called for “voluntary, practical, and
cost-effective” actions by industry and government.
Unfortunately, so far not much has happened.
What if we considered the topsoil and flowing waters
of the Mississippi basin as a commons to be preserved for
future generations? We might, then, create a Mississippi
Soil and Water Trust. The trust would hold all rights to
introduce fertilizers (and perhaps pesticides and
herbicides) within the basin. Its job would be to reduce
chemical inputs to safe levels and to reward farmers (and
others) for proper stewardship of their land.
Each year the trust would sell a declining number of
tradeable soil input permits; manufacturers would bid for
these. It would then recycle revenue from permit sales to
landowners who meet stewardship guidelines. This would
raise the cost of chemical-intensive agriculture while
rewarding farmers for being good land stewards.
Farmers’ crop yields might decline for a while,
but their incomes wouldn’t. In a decade or two, the
Gulf would come back to life, and farming in
America’s heartland would be a lot more organic.
The transition time would depend on the rate at which the
trust decreases the number of permits it issues.
BUFFALO COMMONS
The Great Plains have been called America’s lost
Serengeti. Once, millions of bison, antelope, and elk
roamed here, sustainably hunted by native tribes. When
European settlers arrived, so did cattle, wheat, and
fences. Soon the big wild animals were all but
exterminated. The Great Plains boomed for a while, but
declined after the 1920s. By the 1980s, population had
plunged, soil erosion was at Dust Bowl levels, and the
Ogallala Aquifer, the source of much of the
region’s water, was dropping fast. In 1987,
geographers Deborah and Frank Popper proposed a long-term
restoration concept they called the Buffalo Commons.
The metaphor sparked the region’s imagination.
Meetings were held, studies conducted, task forces
formed. What emerged is a movement to reestablish a
corridor large enough for bison and other native wildlife
to roam freely. This unfenced prairie, perhaps ten or
twenty million acres in size, would not only restore some
of the bison’s lost habitat; it would turn the
whole region into a high-quality place to live. The
Nature Conservancy and similar entities are now trying to
build this commons piece by piece. ...
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