Stint & Allocate

Openness is different from a stinted commons." Stinted, as described by Lewis Hyde in "Open as Air," is about commoners placing limits on access & use of a CPR.) Stinting is self-determined capping.

Hyde writes in "Common As Air" (2010): "The commons [in medieval times] were not open; they were *stinted*. IF, for example, you were a seventeenth-century English common farmer, you might have the right to cut rushes on the common, but only between Christmas and Candlemas (February 2). Or you might have the right to cut the branches of trees, but only up to a certain height and only after the tenth of November. Or you might have the right to cut the thorny evergreen shrubs called furze, but only so much as could be carried on your back, and only to heat your own house." pp. 34-35

Hyde notes that "stints, the constraints placed on use in the name of longevity," are present in all durable commons. "Without these there is no true commons, only things belonging to no one or pools of resources no one manages. Moreover, primary among the stints that sustain the commons must be counted the right to tear down encroachments. The commons is never the only kind of property at large in the land; there is always some form of despotic dominion and some form of market nearby, and for the commons to endure it must be protected from these. It needs some kind of built-in border patrol or annual perambulation, a defense against the undue conversion of use rights into rents or the fencing of open fields into sheep pastures. Among by definition, the commons needs to stint the market, for if the 'free market' is free to convert everything it meets into an exchangeable good, no commons will survive." p. 44.

"....The point of stinting a...commons is to assure that the forces of enclosure never deprive the commoners of their use rights, the background fact being that the liberties of comic [i.e., generative] and encumbered selves are sometimes prior to those of the free market's purportedly self-reliant individuals." p. 249-250

Hyde jokes that Garrett Hardin's original 1968 essay on the "tragedy of the commons" might be better called "The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Common-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Non-Communicating, Self-Interested Individuals."