Simon Barnes is back from India where he had been covering the cricket. Nimbyism is an acronym from the struggles in the seventies and eighties…Not In My Back Yard. Today in his Wild Notebook column in The Times Simon Barnes remarked that one of the great joys of coming home is to have confirmed for you that all the essential processes of life are continuing in the place that matters most to you. The family thrives, the garden grows, and there is a woodpecker in it.

It is an aspect of Nimbyism. It’s supposed to be a Bad Thing. Me, I’ve got a lot of time for Nimbyism. Nimbyism is an attempt to protect a place you love, a place that has meaning for you. There is a difference between ‘don’t destroy this fine place’ and ‘I don’t care if you destroy somewhere else’. I love my backyard, especially after a spell away from it, and I was thrilled that a woodpecker felt the same.

This got me thinking about the Nimbyism motivating my fellow blogger riverbend…female, Iraqi and 24. ‘I survived the war…that’s all you need to know…and it’s all that matters these days anyway’. Her chronicles about life in the new Iraq are a cross between an underground manifesto and a polished cultural history. The weblog was started in September 2003 and is being published in book form by Marion Boyars under the title Baghdad Burning.

I am sceptical about these Radical Consultations and Fourth World Assembly gatherings John Papworth believes in as they seem to me to be perpetuating the attitudes inherent in mass politics and refusing to admit that democracy does not work in opinions, ideas, scholarship and knowledge. Fools seldom differ. Fritz Schumacher a key thinker behind the Human Scale Movement was very conscious of this point…his chapters in Guide for the Perplexed on the meaning of the Latin term adaequatio provide the deeper background to these remarks.

It is in this context that I respond to such initiatives as the Thomas Naylor project for a Second Vermont Republic and to a new project on The Commons proposed by Thomas Greco. The idea seems to have originated in an exchange with John Jopling who works with Richard Douthwaite and the FEASTA people in County Kerry, Ireland. Tom has just returned to Tucson Arizona after a month in India where he talked about exchange alternatives and community economics. Tom now believes that the greatest challenge in regards to privatization and corporatization is to work to restore the commons in all its aspects…including in particular what Tom calls the credit commons.

I entered the debate when Tom copied me on an e-mail to John Jopling that went like this: Would you be open to convening a colloquium to focus on the process of restoring all aspects of the commons…I would envision this to be a week-long (or longer) process involving collaborative research, mutual education, and joint creation of some product such as a blog, a wiki, a website or a parer...[a forum discussion with the word 'parer' in the title]. Some areas of research are how elites succeeded in privatizing the commons? We should do some deep research on this and put on our best Machiavellian thinking caps. Some things that come to mind are enclosures, clearances, genocide, legal privileges of various kinds (corporate charters, franchises, etc.). (2) Exploration of current efforts to commonize in various realms, e.g., the creative commons, open-source software, the identity commons, the credit commons, etc.

I thought Tom was homing in on something important so here is my response. I think this tighter focus on detailed processes behind the end result is what is needed for the next few years...and the disappearance of the commons…as if by magic…is one process that needs to be laid bare. Richard Douthwaite's Schumacher Briefings Number 4 The Ecology of Money is very good and has the best discussion I have yet seen of multiple currencies in his chapter One Country, Four Currencies. I don't go for his ideas about an energy currency but the discussion and the agenda-ing of the issue is important. Douthwaite works behind (or in front of) the FEASTA label…and this is the connection to your e-mail. I will be writing a weblog on Douthwaite's parallel currencies chapter next week and will send you a copy.

Here is the text of The Second Coming by WB Yeats. Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ the ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ the best lack all convictions, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity/ Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand./ The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out/ when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/ troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert/ a shape with lion body and the head of a man,/ a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/ is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / reel shadows of the indignant desert birds./ The darkness drops again; but now I know/ that twenty centuries of stony sleep/ were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle/ and what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Most days I browse the small news items in The Times in the right-hand column of several inside pages. One of them today was headlined Body in Harbour and went like this. The body of a middle-aged woman was found floating in the harbour at Rye Bay in East Sussex yesterday. A spokesman for Sussex Police said the death was being treated as suspicious pending the results of a post-mortem examination. The victim has not been formally identified.