For the commons.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

Here at The Progressive, we were all taken aback by the news that Wangari Maathai died on September 25. She was one of our heroes.

Our colleague Amitabh Pal had the pleasure of interviewing her for the cover story of our May 2005 issue, a year after she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first African woman ever to have such an honor bestowed on her.

She was most famous for launching the Green Belt movement in Kenya, where she was born.

"Nobody would have bothered me if all I did was encourage women to plant trees," she told Pal. "But I started seeing the linkages between the problems we were dealing with and the root causes."

One of those root causes was corruption.

Another was sexism.

And another was what she called the privatization of common goods.

She had an expansive field of vision, which allowed her to see how interconnected everything is. And when she accepted her Nobel Prize, she issued a warning: "The extreme global inequities and prevailing consumption patterns continue at the expense of the environment and peaceful co-existence. The choice is ours." It still is.

This month, we explore the privatization of the commons here in the United States. Anne-Marie Cusac investigates what it means for state parks in Ohio and, by extension, other public lands elsewhere in the United States. And Antonino D'Ambrosio visits public libraries and warns of the cutbacks that many of them face. We are in an age where conservatives claim that everything public is suspect and everything private is sacred. The entire concept of "public goods" or "the commons" or "the commonweal" is under assault. We need to defend it.

David Barsamian has another great interview for us this month. It's with Jodie Evans of Code Pink. His interview with Chris Hedges in August brought a lot of positive response from readers, and I hope this one will, too.

Barsamian found himself in the news on September 23 when the government...