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. 🐟
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 “Kabata,” 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 that’s 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 there’s 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 they’d 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 hadn’t even been fully released when she started debunking it. It’s always been a capitalist argument that doesn’t hold up to reality when moneyed interests don’t 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 it’s I got mine, screw you.
But if you talk about it that way it doesn’t resonate with people. You have to be roundabout with how you approach science and communism topics with average people because it’s very radial ideas to them, even though it’s literally the default way humans work.
