This recent notion is inspired by the work of Elinor Ostrom on the “commons” to politicize the governance of non -recyclable industrial waste. Too often invisible and relegated to poor territories, they require an enlarged and united community to take care of them.
by Claire Legros
History of a notion. We knew the concept of the “commons” developed by the political scientist Elinor Ostrom: the members of a community collectively decide rules of use to share and take care of positive or desirable resources, whether material, as the fish of A lake, or intangible, such as free software or Wikipedia.
Now has emerged for a few years their dark face, that of “negative commons”, these residues and vestiges of two hundred years of industrial growth, which will have to worry about – and for a long time -, without anyone n ‘Trosses to take care of it.
The concept of “negative commons” is recent and still under construction. It appeared for the first time in 2001 in the work of German sociologists Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. In an article entitled “Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing The Commons” (Canadian Review of Development Studies, 2001), they are interested in fate reserved for organic waste, and recall that what is considered to be waste today Hui was perceived in pre -industrial societies as a simple step in the life cycle of life. The communities themselves ensured the elimination of this “negative” by valuing it. With the disappearance of community spaces and ties, this waste is now perceived as residues, whose management is delegated to companies themselves having an interest in seeing their production increases in order to ensure their profitability.
“Relegate the negative to the invisible domain”
It takes a little more than ten years for researchers to Japan to take over this idea of ”negative commons” and prolong it, while the country faces the consequences of the fukushima nuclear disaster . In 2013, the professor of environmental sciences Hidefumi Imura proposed to expand the concept to nuclear waste reprocessing factories, while his colleague, the researcher and militant Sabu Kohso, extends it to all “the waste cannot be recycled “. Indeed, he notes, “the more capitalist companies develop, the more they lose their ability to recycle what they produce in excess, thus relegating the negative to the domain of the invisible-the air, the ocean , the basement, the economically lower territories “. Among these multiple residues produced by industrial development, radioactive contamination constitutes, according to him, the “ultimate negative”, since irreversible.
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