‘Every region has its wilderness. There is the fire in the kitchen, and there is the place less traveled. In most settled regions there used to be some combination of prime agricultural land, orchard and vine land, rough pasturage, woodlot, forest, and desert or mountain “waste.” The de facto wilderness was the extreme backcountry part of all that. The parts less visited are ‘where the bears are’. The wilderness is within walking distance—it may be three days or it may be ten. It is at the far high rough end, or the deep forest and swamp end, of the territory where most of you all live and work. People will go there for mountain herbs, for the trapline, or for solitude. They live between the poles of home and their own wild places. (…)

Between the extremes of deep wilderness and the private plots of the farmstead lies a territory which is not suitable for crops. In earlier times it was used jointly by the members of a given tribe or village. This area, embracing both the wild and the semi-wild, is of critical importance. It is necessary for the health of the wilderness because it adds big habitat, overflow territory, and room for wildlife to fly and run. It is essential even to an agricultural village economy because its natural diversity provides the many necessities and amenities that the privately held plots cannot. It enriches the agrarian diet with game and fish. The shared land supplies firewood, poles and stone for building, clay for the kiln, herbs, dye plants, and much else, just as in a foraging economy. It is especially important as seasonal or full-time open range for cattle, horses, goats, pigs, and sheep. (…)

The commons has been defined as ‘the undivided land belonging to the members of a local community as a whole’. This definition fails to make the point that the commons is both specific land and the traditional community institution that determines the carrying capacity for its various subunits and defines the rights and obligations of those who use it, with penalties for lapses. Because it is traditional and local, it is not identical with today’s ‘public domain’, which is land held and managed by a central government. Under a national state such management may be destructive (as it is becoming in Canada and the United States) or benign (I have no good examples)—but in no case is it locally managed. One of the ideas in the current debate on how to reform our public lands is that of returning them to regional control. (…)

The commons is the contract a people make with their local natural system. The word has an instructive history: it is formed of ko, ‘together’, with (Greek) moin, ‘held in common’. But the Indo- European root met means basically to ‘move, to go, to change’. This had an archaic special meaning of ‘exchange of goods and services within a society as regulated by custom or law.’ I think it might well refer back to the principle of gift economies: ‘the gift must always move.’ The root comes into Latin as munus, ‘service performed for the community’ and hence ‘municipality’.

Gary Snyder, The practice of the wild.