David Bollier

David Bollier is an American activist, scholar, and blogger who is focused on the commons as a new/old paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. The commons is as old as the human race but newly discovered, too, as the Internet, open source software, alternative currencies, and platform co-operatives.

Bollier pursues his commons scholarship and activism as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (Massachusetts, US), and as cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project. He is particularly focused on the role of commons in re-imagining local economies to empower community self-reliance, prevent market enclosures, and anticipate the coming disruptions of climate breakdown and Peak Oil.

Bollier has co-organized pioneering international conferences and strategy workshops on the commons, and consults regularly with diverse activists and policy experts in the US and Europe. His blog, Bollier.org, is a widely read source of news about the commons, and his book Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons [www.thinklikeacommoner.com] (2014), has been translated into six languages. He and coauthor Silke Helfrich  published Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons in 2019.

Bollier’s other books include Patterns of Commoning (2015) [www.patternsofcommoningorg] and The Wealth of the Commons (2012), [www.wealthofthecommons.org] both with co-editor Silke Helfrich; Green Governance (2013), co-authored with the late Professor Burns Weston; and Viral Spiral (2009), Brand-Name Bullies (2005), and Silent Theft (2002). Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.