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Currently, two market leaders, Monsanto and BASF, have entered into a $1.5 billion partnership to engineer stress-tolerant plants. ETC says that the two companies own “nearly half of the patent families related to engineered stress tolerance.” Globally, the top 10 seed corporations already control 57% of commercial seed sales – a trend that will intensify if the patented “climate ready” seeds gain widespread acceptance.

Shand explains that the alternative is to let farmers and nature do what they have done for millennia – experiment with their own breeding of crops, foster the free exchange of germplasm, and manage and conserve a diverse set of crops over generations. GMO crops will not only entail greater costs to the world’s farmers, especially in the South, they will preclude the evolution of locally adapted crop varieties and responsible co-evolution with the environment.

On the Commons Fellow Julie Ristau together with Alexa Bradley and Dave Mann of the Boston-based Grassroots Policy Project are collaborating on a popular education curriculum that introduces the framework of the commons into the context of contemporary organizing. They are conducting workshops with a set of strategic groups and networks to engage organizers in integrating a commons orientation into their work.

The On the Commons-GPP team conducted a training for community organizers from across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin; led a workshop for farmers and rural activists who are part of the Land Stewardship Project, a leading sustainable agriculture group; and showcased the principles of the commons to ISAIAH, a network of religious congregations whose work on justice and community issues carries wide influence in Minnesota.

“We see the potential for the commons framework to help organizers ‘reframe’ existing issues, surface new issues and, most importantly, ground organizing work in a broader framework that bridges constituencies,” Ristau explains. “The commons offers a paradigm broad and rich enough to spark a new vision and philosophy.”

The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.

If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.

The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.