Jonathan Rowe Book Release Event

Celebrate the publication of Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work, by Jonathan Rowe, edited by Peter Barnes, to be released in late April 2013.

Saturday, May 4, 5-8pm

at the Dance Palace Community Center(link is external)

An Evening Celebrating JONATHAN ROWE and the PUBLICATION OF HIS BOOK

Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work

Co-sponsored by Point Reyes Books, West Marin Commons, and Mesa Refuge

• Soup, bread, and conversation
• Reflections by Peter Barnes, Our Common Wealth editor, and others 
• Video clips from Corey Ohama's work-in-progress, A Local Commons

Please purchase event tickets and reserve a copy of book in advance at Point Reyes Books or online at www.ptreyesbooks.com(link is external)

Tickets: $15 includes supper

Funds raised will support West Marin Commons, the community organization Jonathan Rowe co-founded, including the Town Commons, www.commonsconnect.org(link is external), and the completion of the documentary about West Marin Commons.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME. No one turned away for lack of funds.

www.commonsconnect.org(link is external)

www.ptreyesbooks.com(link is external)

www.calhum.org(link is external)

www.mesarefuge.org(link is external)

Who was Jonathan Rowe? http://jonathanrowe.org/about(link is external)

Jonathan Rowe was a writer who wrote about the commons(link is external),diseconomy(link is external), economics(link is external), economic indicators(link is external), corporations(link is external), and many other subjects.

Jonathan was an editor at the Washington Monthly(link is external) magazine and a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor(link is external).  He contributed to Harper’s(link is external), theAtlantic Monthly(link is external), Reader’s Digest(link is external), Washington Post(link is external), Columbia Journalism Review(link is external), American Prospect(link is external), Adbusters(link is external), and a host of other publications.  He was a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly(link is external) and YES!Magazines(link is external); and he served on the boards of WhoWhatWhy(link is external), Take Back Your Time(link is external), and the Marin Media Foundation.

Jonathan co-founded the organization On The Commons(link is external), which promotes commons-based solutions to problems.  He was a founder and co-director of the West Marin Commons, which works to create spaces for spontaneous sociability, and also an infrastructure for the sharing of knowledge and resources, on the western edge of Marin County, California. In the latter half of the 1990s he worked at Redefining Progress in San Francisco, and was the lead author of a critique of conventional notions of economic growth that became a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly called “If The GDP Is Up Why Is America Down?(link is external)” He was a key advisor to Commercial Alert(link is external), an organization that opposes commercialism. He was associate director of Citizens for Tax Justice(link is external), where he helped start a coalition of labor and citizen groups to push for fairer tax laws. In the early 1970′s, he worked for Ralph Nader(link is external) and was one of the early “Nader’s Raiders.”

Jonathan also served on staffs in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.  For several years, he worked for U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan(link is external).  He worked on the staff of the Washington, D.C. city council.

He did a weekly radio show on KWMR-FM(link is external) in Point Reyes Station, California, and contributed to the local papers there – the West Marin Citizen(link is external) and Point Reyes Light(link is external).

Jonathan authored the books Time Dollars(link is external) (with Edgar Cahn), about the non-market economy and the emergence of service barter networks; and Tax Politics(link is external) (with Robert M. Brandon and Thomas H. Stanton).

He died on March 20th, 2011.

Who was Jonathan Rowe? http://jonathanrowe.org/about(link is external)