ABSTRACT
Economics is concerned with the distribution of resources; for the majority of readers of this book, the dominant mechanism for distributing resources that they have known is the market. However, in other societies today, and during historical times in what are now the developed Western economies, different methods are used to meet needs, what we might refer to as ‘provisioning’. This chapter will explore the idea of sharing resources through systems of common rights over land and its production, and will contrast this system with the market system we live with today, from the perspective of their impacts on the environment.
