Welcome to Great Lakes Commons Map.

Unlike most maps, this one is collaborative so that anyone with an interest in making the Great Lakes a Commons can add their voice.

As with many other ecosystems, the Great Lakes are under threat from many sources such as over-use and pollution. But one of biggest threats these lakes face is that the 40 million people who depend on them daily don’t yet see one integrated bioregion that is in desperate need for a Commons approach.

A Commons approach (or narrative) to the Great Lakes is best described in the Council of Canadian’s report Our Great Lakes Commons: A People’s Plan to Protect the Great Lakes Forever and can be downloaded from their website. The report notes:

“A Commons narrative asserts that no one owns water. Rather it is a common heritage that belongs to the Earth, other species and future generations as well as our own.”

Some of these 40 million people have started to educate and organize around this approach directly and indirectly through conservation, clean-ups, ecological education and restoration, citizen activism, speaking and walking tours, historical markings, and by building new water partnerships between people and places.

This map is unique because it’s yours. Use it to mark, share, and inspire change for a Great Lakes Commons. Rather than organizing information by time, source, or topic, these water stories will be organized on a map by its collaborators – that’s you. Collaborators can watch, read, and hear other people’s perspectives or share their own with videos, text, photos, and comments.

By working to make the Great Lakes a Commons, we also need to change how we think about the roles of our governments, our use of resources, the power and rights of citizens, and the needs of future generations and non-human species. A big challenge, but we are living in extraordinary times with the ability to learn from indigenous wisdom, historical abuse, technological connectivity, and past social movements.

The ultimate goal of this map is to use the energy of the crowd (crowdsourcing) with the power of networked media in order to create biosphere consciousness – a mind-shift that understands our interdependence with all of the earth’s elements.

The map organizes key information into categories for easy use such as: personal stories, threats, education & organizing, events, and ecological features. This is all possible with Ushahidi’s open source (a commons approach to software) mapping platform.

The spirit and form of this new map embodies that of the Commons. When we participate willingly from our own location and with the ‘bigger picture’ in mind, we can see how much we share and also how much we have to lose.

Please explore this site and kindly share your experience.