Regarding land as a fictitious commodity, Polanyi\u2019s view draws to my mind the concept of the Commons.\u00a0 I was first introduced to this in college, and then further in my work with and through the program GreenFaith<\/a>.\u00a0 The Commons are \u201cthe cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.\u201d[ii]<\/a> Much of my discussion of land, water and air as the commons has involved the fact that there is no universally held manner of monetizing them, let alone a full understanding of how important clean air, water, and land are to the well being of all of humanity or all of creation.<\/p>\n According to one Fortune article the water industry may be a \u201c$600-billion-a-year industry \u201c[iii]<\/a> but that only includes how much money can be made in selling water to places and communities that do not have access to water that is clean.\u00a0 \u00a0The price of land needless to say varies from location to location, but clearly it is a non-renewable resource.\u00a0 I also am very aware of the hypocritical nature that is present in my writing this blog post, as I used to serve a church that sold her \u201cair rights,\u201d the space above our sanctuary, church house and steeple, in a promise to never build any higher, and to add that new found income from the sale into our endowment.\u00a0 We sold that \u201cair\u201d for $17 million.<\/p>\n All three, land, air and water are finite resources, and not items to either be used completely up or that can be produced by human hands.\u00a0 Polluting these resources not only damages the quality of life for everyone that benefits from them, but also limits how much of them we can share.\u00a0 Clearly all three are not shared equally.\u00a0 However, Polanyi\u2019s genius may not be in his calling out of fascism or in his wok describing the transformation from before to after the industrial era.\u00a0 It may be his prophetic voice in rightly naming that if land \u2013 and then in extension water and air \u2013 are mismanaged and misunderstood and then treated as an economic commodity, it places all of human society at risk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation <\/em>(Boston:Beacon, 2001), \u00a023.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> Basu, Soutrik; Jongerden, Joost; Ruivenkamp, Guido (17 March 2017). “Development of the drought tolerant variety Sahbhagi Dhan: exploring the concepts commons and community building”. International Journal of the Commons<\/em>. 11 (1): 144, https:\/\/www.thecommonsjournal.org\/article\/10.18352\/ijc.673\/<\/a><\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> Dumain, Brian, \u201cWhat is Water Worth?,\u201d Fortune, <\/em>May 1, 2014, http:\/\/fortune.com\/2014\/05\/01\/what-is-water-worth\/<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While reading along with Polanyi I was pleased to find a very subversive thread in his work stemming from his idea of what is and is not a commodity.\u00a0 Polanyi lists three things as false commodities, those of land, labor and money: For Polanyi the definition of a commodity is something that has been produced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1321,1322,4],"class_list":["post-20990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp9","tag-lgp9","tag-polanyi","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20990"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20993,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990\/revisions\/20993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/land-air-water-300x169.jpg\")
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