Some things have always been free, because there was no way to charge for them. The rain fell. The air came in through the window. The stars came out. Anyone with eyes or lungs got their share.
That has been changing.
Some of the change is happening close to home. Some of it is happening overhead. Here are three pairs of short stories — one from each side.
Water
The bottling plant
The water company pays the town a small fee each year. In return, the company pumps water from beneath the town — from the aquifer that took rain ten thousand years to filter down through limestone. The water comes up clean and cold. The company puts it in plastic bottles. The bottles go to supermarkets across the state. They cost a dollar fifty each.
The town has been on a boil-water notice three times this year. The pipes are old. The town has applied twice for federal money to replace them. Both applications are still in review.
The bottling plant runs three shifts. The trucks leave full every hour.
What had been a thing the rain made — slow, free, sufficient — is sold in plastic now, individually priced, owned in transit by a company two states over.
The rain barrel
Across town, a woman put a barrel under her downspout. When it rains hard, the barrel fills in eleven minutes. She uses the water for the tomatoes and the rose bush and to wash the dog.
Her brother in Colorado used to live somewhere this was illegal. It is legal now. The law changed in 2016.
A few blocks over, the city is digging up a creek. The creek had been buried in a concrete pipe for ninety years. Cars drove over it on a four-lane road that nobody loved. Now the road is being narrowed, and the creek is coming back to the surface. There are stones being placed by hand. Schoolchildren stand at the chain-link fence and watch.
The creek has a name. People are starting to use it again.
Air
The refinery
The refinery has been at the edge of town since 1958. The company publishes a quarterly air-quality report. The report says emissions are within limits.
A woman two blocks from the refinery has a daughter with asthma. She has another daughter without it. She has tried for years to figure out which days are bad and which days are clear. The refinery report averages emissions over three months. It does not say anything about Tuesday afternoons.
When she calls to ask, she is told the readings are proprietary.
What had been the air she taught her daughters to breathe — what came in through their bedroom window every night of their lives — is a thing the company gets to describe in its own language, on its own schedule.
The porch sensors
A group of neighbors bought small air-quality sensors online. They cost about fifty dollars each. They plugged them into outdoor outlets on their porches. The sensors send readings every minute to a public website.
Now anyone with an internet connection can see what the air does on a Tuesday afternoon. The readings show that on certain Tuesdays — when the wind comes from the southwest — the sensors closest to the refinery jump.
The woman with two daughters sent the data to a local reporter. The reporter wrote a story. The company has been asked to come to a community meeting. The meeting is on the calendar.
The air still does not belong to anyone. But the words for what the air is doing — those used to belong only to the company. Now they don't.
Light
The satellites
There are more than seven thousand new satellites in low orbit. There will be many more. They are owned by three or four companies. The companies sell internet service. The service is fast.
The satellites are visible at dusk and dawn. They move in trains across the sky, sometimes ten or fifteen in a line, all the same brightness, all the same direction. An astronomer in Arizona has been photographing the night sky for forty years. Her photographs now have streaks across them. The streaks are the satellites.
She has stopped sending her photographs to journals.
What had been above us all — the wheeling stars, the dark between them, the thing every human being who ever lived once looked up into — is also a freight corridor now.
The dark hour
A small town in Iowa decided to turn off its streetlights one Saturday a month, between midnight and one in the morning. They called it the dark hour. It was the librarian's idea.
People came outside with blankets and lawn chairs. They lay on their backs in the middle of the street.
There were children who had never seen the Milky Way. They saw it on the first dark hour. Some of them cried, embarrassed themselves, laughed, looked up again.
The town has done it every month for a year. Two neighboring towns started doing it too. There is talk of a regional dark hour, on a Saturday everyone can agree on.
What had been there the whole time — the river of the galaxy, visible from anywhere with a clear sky — comes back when a switch goes off.
The other direction
The fence is being built in different ways now. Sometimes it is a permit to pump from beneath a town. Sometimes it is the right to publish, or not publish, the readings. Sometimes it is seven thousand small lights moving across the sky in formation, sold to subscribers.
But on a porch with a small sensor, in a barrel under a downspout, in a town that flips a switch one Saturday a month, something is going the other way. Not at scale. Not fast. Just one reading at a time. One rainfall at a time. One hour at a time.
These are the older commons — the ones nobody owned because nobody could. Air. Water. Sky. They were free for the longest time, in the way that things are free when no one has yet found a way to charge.
That has changed in our lifetime, for all three.
The work of putting it back, where it has begun, is being done by people who are not famous, in the time left over.