The Gate in the Evening

Abstract

The pasture in William Forster Lloyd's lecture of 1833 had no gate. It needed none, because nobody in the argument ever spoke to anybody else. Each herdsman decided alone, added his cow, and went home. The ruin of the grass followed from the silence as surely as from the cows. Every real commons in this book has a gate, or something that does a gate's work. A door before a cathedral in Valencia, where eight farmers sit at noon on Thursday. A list drawn up each September in a Turkish harbour. A barn in Törbel in February, where a household can see how much hay is left. A dashboard that sixty engineers can read the next morning. A table on a Sunday, with the account open and the coffee still hot. In each case the gate is where the people who share something meet, see what has happened to it, and say so to each other. That is the whole difference between Hardin's pasture and Ostrom's. The grass is the same grass. The difference is the talking at the gate.