The Commoner's Catalog For Changemaking
“The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking” was born of a simple realization: That we need to build a new world of possibilities right now. Inspired by the format and sensibility of “The Whole Earth Catalog” of the early 1970s, this Catalog has a similar goal: to help people build a new world, on their own terms, against the grain of a dominant culture.
There are scores of system-change projects alive and well just below the surface of our world, but much of mainstream politics and media regards them as too small, local, and trivial to matter… and many at the heart of this work often do not sense the broader mycelial networks of which they are a part. The Commoner’s Catalog seeks to remedy this problem.
The Catalog expands on the grand, transformational power of social collaboration that I saw every day within Ganesh Himal Trading, and interweaves it with the parallel groundbreaking work being done in agricultural commons and digital spaces, in care collectives and gift economies, in urban settings and finance, among many other realms.
The Catalog’s many profiles and stories are loosely grouped in 25 thematic sections. There are sections on water, land, rethinking economics, law and the commons, the more-than-human world, urban commons, peer production, artistic commons, and many others. In collecting them together, our hope is not only to bridge these revolutionary ideas, but also inspire new commoners to cultivate new branches and buds of their own.
A free online version of the Commoner’s Catalog can be found at: https://www.