I understand that not everyone will have access to a stream/river with fish, but I thought people might find this interesting anyways.
Do you have videos that stick with you? "Through the Kitchen Window: A Town Living with Water [Harie, Shiga] " is one that occasionally pops back in my mind.
In Harie, Shiga(Japan), water canals run through much of the town, and the people there use it to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with fish. đ
Imagine a pool of water that people use for washing fruits, vegetables, and dishes. That same pool has carp that call it home, and the carp eat the scraps and keep the water crystal clear. This could be inside the home or outside, but it is constantly added to by natural spring water, and the water exits in to a canal. This system is called âKabata,â and has been used for over 300 years.
(Both images above are from this website)
That running water then heads to rice flats, which benefit from the natural fertilizers the fish provide. That water then heads to wetland area, where the water is cleaned by reeds and other vegetation before entering a lake.
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what I find most amazing is that people don't destroy the water by throwing in garbage. no way would that work where I live
I think thatâs the strength of a commons, really.
Because everyone directly uses and directly benefits from it, everyone is invested in keeping it well maintained and useable.
I bet thereâs a super strong local culture around protecting that system from harm. It could be deleterious for the whole community if it was allowed to be ruined, and theyâd be super aware of that.
This is exactly what Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize for - showing that local communities can manage shared resources sustainably without privatization or government control when they have the right social norms and communication strucutres in place.
Yeah, in direct opposition to the tragedy of the commons idea, which hadnât even been fully released when she started debunking it. Itâs always been a capitalist argument that doesnât hold up to reality when moneyed interests donât exist. In this case it serves their money interests but if there were big companies locally that wanted the water or something, if they gave in that would ruin the system and invoke a tragedy of the commons where itâs I got mine, screw you.
But if you talk about it that way it doesnât resonate with people. You have to be roundabout with how you approach science and communism topics with average people because itâs very radial ideas to them, even though itâs literally the default way humans work.