The twin emergencies of climate change and biodiversity loss have led to a revived interest in the past and future of “the commons”—in land that exists prior to or beyond private property, where social relations and natural resources are governed without the regulation of the state. To what extent do historical, existing, and imagined examples of the commons—from the precapitalist village, the urban commune, or the global commons—offer models for sustainable and democratic forms of political ecology? How might renewed attention to the commons allow us to reconsider the environmental consequences of previous and ongoing processes of enclosure and dispossession? The habitability of the planet depends on the fate of our planetary commons in the earth, atmosphere, and ocean (phytoplankton, wetland plants, soil biota etc.). In pointing beyond the traditional institutions of the state and the market, the commons offer ways of rethinking the societal, spatial, and ethical dimensions of climate change, reorienting our understanding of the relationship between urban and rural, local and planetary, the global north and the global south, the human and the non-human.