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When I moved to Newburyport 25 years ago, I was stunned to see so much open land running along Route 95 just south of the Route 113 exit — fields and wetlands that, in any other context along the I-95 corridor, would long since have become developed.
Today that expanse of land looks exactly the same. It has a history many residents don’t know, but one that matters more right now than it may appear to.
In 1635, the settlers of the Newbury Colony held land in common. The tract they called The Common Pasture was a remarkable shared open space, but it was also a governance decision. What we still call today The Common Pasture, was a legally structured answer to the question of how a community survives when its members depend on resources that no single person can own or protect alone. Livestock needed grass. Families needed milk and wool. The pasture made that possible not by assigning private ownership but by defining shared stewardship. For nearly two hundred years, it worked.
The custom the settlers brought wasn’t a utopian experiment. English villages had governed common grazing land since the medieval period through manorial courts that set strict limits on how many animals each household could put to pasture, enforced through graduated sanctions and community accountability. The commons was neither purely public nor purely private — a third thing, defined by shared use rights and collective governance. When the colonists arrived, enclosure — the conversion of shared land into private property — was actively dismantling these arrangements back in England, dispossessing thousands of rural families and catalyzing, in part, the emigration that brought them here. They transferred to the New World what was being destroyed in the Old.
That history matters because the problem the Common Pasture solved has not gone away. In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin gave it a name: the Tragedy of the Commons. Here’s an example of what he meant: when a herdsman adds one more animal to a shared pasture, he gains the full value of that animal while the cost of additional grazing is distributed across every user of the land. So the rational choice is always to add another animal — until the cumulative effect destroys the pasture everyone depends on. The tragedy isn’t greed but structure: a system that makes overuse individually rational and collectively catastrophic. Hardin concluded that shared resources require either privatization or state control. It was an influential but incomplete diagnosis.
The political scientist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 by demonstrating what Hardin missed: that communities can govern shared resources sustainably, without heavy reliance on either private ownership or top-down regulation, when they design the right institutions.
Her eight “design principles” emerged from studying over 800 real communities worldwide: 1) clear boundaries, 2) rules proportional to local conditions, 3) collective decision-making by those who live under them, 4) monitoring, 5) graduated sanctions, 6) accessible conflict resolution, 7) local autonomy, and 8) coordination across multiple governance scales. The commons fails not because sharing is unworkable but because governance structures fail to match the complexity of what’s being shared.
Both outcomes are visible from the Northern New England coast. The Grand Banks cod fishery collapsed in 1992 after decades of “rational choices” made first by fisherman and then by industrial-scale fishing operations that led to massive overfishing — forty-two thousand livelihoods gone overnight, an ecosystem that has not recovered in thirty years, and a social fabric left tattered across Canadian coastal communities — a textbook Tragedy of the Commons.
Meanwhile, Maine lobstermen built something closer to what Ostrom envisioned. Through informal territorial systems, local fishing councils, and norms developed and enforced by the fishermen themselves, they created a self-governing commons. The lobster stock has remained robust for generations because the people most dependent on it held real authority over the rules governing it. The community accomplished this, not a federal agency.
Today, Newburyport faces three commons problems that are, at bottom, one problem.
Water is perhaps our most important common resource. The Common Pasture serves as the city’s primary groundwater recharge zone — a vast natural sponge feeding the aquifer that supplies 20% of our drinking water. The state’s own Source Water Assessment recommends acquiring land within recharge zones because protecting the aquifer now costs a fraction of treating contaminated water later. The aquifer doesn’t observe property lines or municipal boundaries, and the governance that protects it can’t either. We need to protect the aquifer and enlarge our protection of our surface water reservoir — the Artichoke. I don’t know about you, but I’m not fond of drinking trace amounts of jet fuel in our local water. This is the consequence of surface water sources versus naturally-filtered water coming from an aquifer. Water that comes from the ground is naturally filtered, which results in less treatment prior to that water reaching our taps..
Affordable housing is the same structure in a different register, and Newburyport has made it harder on itself by giving away the tools that could have addressed it. Former public school buildings — constructed with public money, maintained by public tax dollars, embedded in neighborhoods for generations — were sold to private developers rather than converted directly into affordable housing. A magnificent Greek Revival building that anchored the civic landscape was transferred to the museum that leased the site rather than the city retaining it under a lease arrangement. These were commons assets. Once sold, they are gone — not just the buildings but the leverage they represented, the city’s ability to direct their use toward the common good rather than toward maximum private return. Communities that retain governance authority over shared assets can adapt their use across generations. Communities that sell them get one transaction and no future options. That window has closed. The question now is whether Newburyport treats what remains of its common assets with the institutional seriousness the original settlers brought to a pasture on the Merrimack plain.
Then there is the waterfront, the current school campuses, the Bresnahan-Senior Center campus, and the parks and public spaces that constitute the civic commons itself. The decades-long battle over the waterfront revealed the same spirit in Newburyporters that preserved the Common Pasture. In the end, Citizens for an Open Waterfront won the greater cause by using sustained civic activism to stymie commercial development — a community governing its commons the hard way, without Ostrom’s framework but entirely in keeping with her findings. That victory is not permanent. If development decisions migrate toward private negotiation, if public space is enclosed through swap deals with developers or incrementally converted to fee-based access, the result is the same as the enclosure of the English village fields — not dramatic expropriation but the accumulated weight of small decisions that together convert shared space into space that serves only those who can pay.
The school campuses and the Bresnahan-Senior Center represent the same stakes: public land, built and maintained by the community, whose long-term use should be determined by the community, not surrendered piecemeal through decisions that can’t be undone.The Common Pasture survived because enough people understood, at a critical moment, that some things cannot be disaggregated into individual decisions. Clean water, affordable housing, public space — these are the conditions under which a community remains a community rather than a collection of private interests temporarily sharing a zip code. Four centuries after the first settlers drew those boundaries on the Merrimack plain, the question they were answering hasn’t changed: what do we hold in common, and how will we govern it?
John Giordano
Newburyport resident
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