 I think that global climate change provides a new opportunity to recognize the fundamental importance of commons in all aspects of our lives. It's almost as if it's part of the background. We don't recognize it because commons are so ubiquitous really. We take it for granted that there will be the things that we've always relied on. Whether it's a transportation system, a road network is a commons. A public transportation system is also a commons. There's just so much that the natural world provides as inputs for the economy that we just don't even... It's as if it's not recognized or measured until it's commodified. Really you can think of the commons as everything that has not been commodified. For which we don't pay the full value every time we use it. The tragedy of the commons, that article by Garrett Hardin, really just points out that if commons aren't managed properly, if there's totally free access but no responsibility for people who are benefiting from the commons, then the whole thing falls apart. The challenge that Eleanor Ostrom talked about in her book, Governing the Commons, is how do you develop the institutional framework based on trust and mutual reciprocity and knowledge about who can use that commons because they have demonstrated their sense of responsibility for it. If you don't adequately safeguard it, you'll lose it. It will become subject to those increasing incursions of commodification and get frittered away and pretty soon the commons that you relied on won't be there anymore. And so that's why we need to start recognizing that it's there, that it's important, that we depend on it, and that in fact the ways that we manage things that we already recognize as commons can be extended and applied to other things like aquifers and fresh air.