The latest nobel economic prize winner, Elinor Ostrum, believes "that common property such as natural resources can be managed successfully without being held under a private plan or a government program." We can create "restorative commons" which contribute to social, physical, emotional and community health.

http://www.restorativecommons.org/Site/Home.html

"Monocultures are not Forests & Community-owned forests store more carbon"

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons - Sunday October 11, 2009 by Plebian Report

Recent research published in this week's New Scientist and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that 'commons' communities would do a better job of managing forests than state control. Government control generally leads to enclosure (privatisation) and licensing rights for logging, or an expectation that the forest will not last leading to unsustainable exploitation. Carbon storage potential is especially improved when community organisations and their institutions "incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making" to "restrict their consumption of forest products". http://www.indymedia.ie/article/94405

" Even in the UK, the dominant form of radical protest is shifting to the occupation – we have seen this with the university occupations over Gaza and worker occupations at Visteon and Vestas. What is now needed is for workers and students to stop making demands on the state, whether that be nationalisation, concessions or government intervention; and figure out how to take their occupied spaces and make them their own."

University and workplace occupations are promising indications of the return of communism, in its original sense Nathan Coombs Guardian Oct 8 2009

One of the remarkable things about the manifesto of the recent University of California Santa Cruz student occupation, the Communiqué from an Absent Future, was the emphatic use of the word communism to describe their project to "demand not a free university but a free society". This re-appropriation of the word communism marks a new direction after numerous attempts to refigure a certain spirit, while avoiding the specific content, of communism under such concepts as "the common" or "communisation" in various brands of leftwing, post-cold war political activism.