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Contribution short abstract:

I consider the shared fate of discourses of forest commoning in Ikaria and in the Appalachian region of the U.S. under what legal scholar Mary Christina Wood calls the “failed regulatory paradigm” of environmental review, and describe the Seasonal Round as a method for modelling forest commons.

Contribution long abstract:

I consider the shared fate of discourses of forest commoning in Ikaria and in the Appalachian region of the U.S. under what legal scholar Mary Christina Wood calls the “failed regulatory paradigm” of environmental review. Under this paradigm, environmental assessment constructs a sieve that filters out land-based commons on resource frontiers, which may then be dispersed into new enclosures of heritage. Relying on existing documentation of natural and cultural resources, environmental impact assessment tends to limit community engagement to review and comment on technocratic plans. Existing documentation in the gray literature of the archives of environmental review rarely acknowledges the interdepencies of community life with surrounding ecosystems. De facto commons tend to be invisible, cast into relief on the threshold of their disappearance. The archives of the commons are living archives, accessed continually through speech practices that drive commons as what I call “narrative climax systems.” I argue that engaging narrative of the commons – itself a practice of commoning – coaxes commons into visibility. Drawing on Appalachian and Ikarian examples, I will describe a methodology for modelling and mapping time-spaces of commoning (sites of fishing, hunting, gathering, harvesting, worshipping, festivity, and so forth -- all topics of constant conversation on which commoning depends) as sites that anchor daily, seasonal, annual, life, and generational cycles, and will point to efforts underway to identify and dismantle specific practices of discommoning favored under the regulatory paradigm.