The Hidden Code That Once Held Communities Together

On a train ride to Tällberg, a conversation with Elinor Ostrom opened a door to an ancient wisdom: how communities can thrive not through ownership, but through relationship.

It was a bright Scandinavian morning when I boarded the train from Stockholm to Tällberg, heading toward the Tällberg Forum — a gathering of minds and hearts convened to rethink the future of humanity. I had just settled into my seat when I noticed the woman across from me, deeply engaged in conversation with a journalist.

She wore warm, autumn-colored clothes and spoke with the ease of someone recounting simple truths.
There was no trace of academic arrogance in her voice, only the unshakable confidence of someone who had spent her life observing real people solving real problems.
She talked about small towns, local agreements, and old ways of doing things.

I had no idea at that moment that I was sitting face-to-face with Elinor Ostrom, who had received the Nobel Prize in Economics just a year earlier — an award all the more remarkable because she wasn’t, technically, an economist at all. She was something rarer: a political scientist who had quietly but profoundly reshaped how we understand the foundations of cooperation, survival, and prosperity.

As I listened, what unfolded wasn’t just a theory. It was a memory being rekindled in me — a memory older than capitalism, older than nations, older even than the idea of ownership itself.

It was the memory of the Commons.

A Commons is a shared resource — natural, cultural, or social — governed collectively by a community through rules, trust, and stewardship, to sustain its vitality for present and future generations.

Rediscovering an Ancient Wisdom

The Commons are not a relic of the past. They are the deep substrate of human civilization — a way of organizing life based not on extraction and control, but on stewardship and relationship.

Commoning is the ancient practice of remembering that life thrives through connection, not possession. It is the space where the world’s generosity meets human care — where rivers, forests, seeds, languages, and songs exist not as commodities, but as shared gifts, freely flowing among all beings.

A Commons is not merely a resource. It is a living relationship. It is the understanding that what nourishes life cannot — and must not — be owned. It can only be honored, tended, renewed.

It is the quiet work of weaving — soil to seed, neighbor to neighbor, river to shore — strengthening the web of life, thread by thread.

It is the recognition that the health of the whole is the true wealth of all.

The Village of Törbel: A Hidden Masterpiece of Governance

Elinor Ostrom spoke to the journalist about a small Swiss village called Törbel, nestled high in the Alps. In 1714 — more than three centuries ago — the villagers faced a profound challenge: how to manage their summer grasslands, essential for grazing cattle, without destroying them.

If each herder were left to their own devices, the incentive would have been clear: graze as many cattle as possible. Milk, wool, and meat could be privately consumed and sold — but the cost, the slow degradation of the grasslands, would be shared by all.

This is the classic setup for what economists later called the “tragedy of the commons”: when shared resources are destroyed because individual gain outweighs collective responsibility.

But in Törbel, the villagers did something extraordinary. They created a set of rules, collectively agreed upon, that limited the number of cattle each household could graze — directly proportional to the amount of winter fodder the family could produce. Those who could not sustain more animals in winter could not exploit the summer pastures beyond their means.

They weren’t acting out of utopian idealism. They were acting from deep, lived wisdom — the understanding that without balance, there is no future. Without reciprocity, there is no survival.

Their success was no accident. It reflected what Ostrom would later codify into eight principles for managing commons sustainably: clear boundaries, collective choice, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, and nesting governance structures among them.

Törbel wasn’t just managing grass. It was managing relationship: between people, between people and land, between present and future.

The Art of Commoning: Becoming Alive Again — Together

Hearing Elinor Ostrom explain this — seeing the calm certainty with which she spoke — something clicked inside me.

It wasn’t about recreating ancient villages or pastoral nostalgia. It was about seeing again: realizing that the Commons are not a bygone phase of history. They are the underlying condition for any truly thriving human future.

We lost sight of the Commons not because they failed, but because industrial society needed us to forget them. Ownership became sacred; extraction became normal. We mistook domination for progress. But somewhere beneath that forgetting, the thread remained unbroken.

Today, that thread is being picked up again.

In community land trusts. In open-source software. In seed-saving networks. In cooperatives, watersheds, community currencies. In Indigenous governance systems that were never extinguished, only overlooked.

Commoning is not something we do alone. It is how we become alive again — together.

It is how we recognize, once more, that true wealth is not stored in vaults or spreadsheets. It is stored in relationship: the intricate, living web that binds people to each other, to place, and to life itself.

The Challenge — and the Invitation

We stand today at a crossroads as profound as anything Törbel faced eight hundred years ago. But our Commons are no longer just pastures in a valley. They are the forests that breathe for the planet, the oceans that regulate the climate, the languages that encode our diversity, the cultures that root us to meaning.

The stakes are planetary.

And so the call of the Commons is not just local — it is global. It is not just practical — it is spiritual. It demands a remembering of who we are: not owners, but caretakers. Not competitors, but co-creators.

The Art of Commoning is not merely about designing better institutions — though that matters. It is about cultivating a new (and ancient) consciousness.

It is about answering a simple, revolutionary question: What would it look like to live in right relationship with all that sustains life?

That day on the train, I didn’t just hear about Elinor Ostrom’s ideas. I received an invitation — an invitation to remember, and to weave again the tapestry of belonging.

It’s an invitation still open to all of us.