Session 10. 7.

The increasing frequency of forest fires globally emphasizes the critical role of commoning practices for community resilience. Facing worsening climate-related emergencies, communities are adopting collective strategies to address shared threats and preserve vital resources. From 2001 to 2023, global forest fire areas increased by about 5.4% annually (World Resources Institute), with Mediterranean regions like Sicily experiencing a surge. The summer of 2023 marked Sicily’s worst fire season in a decade, affecting both rural and urban areas and with 24% more land burned than in 2021 (ARPA Sicilia), highlighting the need for adaptive, community-focused responses.

Muschio Ribelle’s squatting of the Funtanazza building on Monte Bonifato in Alcamo (TP) exemplifies such emergent commoning practices. Through the reclamation of Funtanazza—an abandoned site—they have modelled sustainable, collective management and active stewardship of the Bosco d’Alcamo. Their efforts emphasize environmental care and community-driven fire prevention. Through “guardiania,” a proactive fire prevention initiative, they achieved Monte Bonifato's first fire-free summer in five years, demonstrating the effectiveness of community-led risk mitigation.

Since its liberation in July 2024, the squat has become a hub for community gatherings and sustainable practices, managed inclusively by both long-standing residents and newcomers. Weekly assemblies gather community members for discussions on land care, social justice, and resilience. This approach to collective urban civic use aligns with similar commons-oriented initiatives spreading across Italian cities like Naples, where urban spaces are reclaimed as shared social, cultural, and ecological resources.

Despite successes, Muschio Ribelle faced forced eviction from Funtanazza in October 2024, interrupting its transformation into an urban emerging common. Nevertheless, the assembly remains undeterred, advocating for Funtanazza’s recognition as a community-managed commons. This effort challenges conventional property frameworks, asserting that shared resources should be democratically governed rather than privatized.

This experience shows how emergencies can catalyze emerging commons—collective spaces managed for the benefit of both people and the environment. Through democratic assemblies, consensus-based decision-making, and mutual support, Muschio Ribelle exemplifies the transformative power of commoning practices, where resilience and cohesion fortify communities, fostering sustainable futures amid climate-driven uncertainties.

In this paper we will present the emergent concept of “weather commoning” which we are exploring in the Weather Commons Research Group based at the Faculty of Collaborative Regional Innovation (Ehime University, Japan) but with collaborators worldwide. Our group is situated within the Japanese Moonshot Goal 8 project for the “realization of a society safe from the threat of extreme winds and rains by controlling and modifying the weather by 2050” (https://www.jst.go.jp/moonshot/en/program/goal8/).

By investigating the relationship between weather-related emergencies, technological interventions, and commoning practices, we hope to contribute to understanding(s) of how communities can collectively build worlds for "living well" with increasingly “bad” weather.

As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, and new techno-solutionist countermeasures (including but not limited to Moonshot Goal 8) are being developed, communities will need to adapt and collaborate in unprecedented ways. In contrast to the climate (longer term, spatially broad, slower change) weather is shorter term, more spatially focused, and relatively variable. The concept of weather commons, then, has a much closer connection to the rhythms of our everyday lives in a spatial and temporal sense than the idea of climate commons. If we (tentatively) define weather commons as social-ecological systems that enable collective stewardship of weather-related resources and processes, by promoting cooperation and trust between actors across scales then weather commoning could be the activities of engaging in social practices and provisioning forms of peer governance that enable the constitution of such a weather commons.

In this paper we will put the work of our Weather Commons Research Group and it into conversation with existing and emergent commons theory and practice to discuss how communities interact with the weather before, during, and after crisis situations, as well as in their everyday lives as “weather commoners” and also consider the potential impacts of weather modification technologies on the emerging weather commons.

In a 2024 community based production, Disaster at Vogelmorn, in Wellington New Zealand, The Playful Revolution practised with theatre technologies to bring artists and non-artists together to rehearse for a disaster. Theatre was central to bringing people toward a sense of shared need, of timely actions, of Yamori’s notion of intrafestum, to produce what we call convivial commoning.

What does this case study of community theatre environment teach us about practices of sharing resources, including labour, for a non-disaster context? We will discuss the immediacy of disaster and the states of resource sharing before, during and after the production.

A scientific confirmation of technologically capable life beyond Earth, though often relegated to the realm of science fiction, would represent a paradigm-shifting discovery, and fundamentally reshape common understandings across all sectors. The field of post-detection SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) emphasises pragmatic research aimed at defining preparatory and speculative protocols for such a radical more-than-human event: towards "ready-ing" (Nora Bateson's term) for speculative, dramatic shifts in planetary politics and material conditions, and the ontological, epistemological, semantic and ethical domains. Anthropologist Kathryn Denning clarifies that we may usefully approach some of the unknowable questions around the existence or non-existence of ETIs (extra-terrestrial intelligence) by considering the management of the commons.

This presentation shares work on commoning across Post-Detection SETI: the tending of a transdisciplinary and creative research culture that studies the planetary, political, societal and cultural transformations that discovery could bring. The Post-Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews convenes researchers to cooperate across differences and respond to Post-Detection questions in Working Groups and commons-based research activities integrate imaginative and diverse knowledge practices with scientific methods. Our wiki.seti-hub.org offers a collective post-detection Wiki, drawing on disaster studies and resilience research, adapting open-access knowledge tools and emergency-inspired, community systems to expand participation and collectively tend a robust and informed resource. A shared bibliography grows on the work of the SETI Primer (Oman Reagan et al. 2017): a resource integrating varied approaches to SETI science and human factors, including social sciences, history, anthropology, futures and Indigenous research.

The Post-Detection Hub and Wiki aim to grow a longterm lively commons that support diverse responses and dialogues across silos, whilst protecting authorship and contributions. Rooted in shared responsibility, reciprocity, creativity and curiosity, and an ethics of welcome and respect, this engagement with radically unknown astro-ecologies galvanises fresh approaches to commoning in emergency, and invites the space industries and Academia, to move beyond extractive, reductive modes of working with collective knowledge.