I spend a lot of time pondering your questions of what’s changed and what about now?

I think you nail something quite profound – we knew we needed each other when people lived closer together and closer to the land. Those times are irrevocably gone due to many circumstances, but that does not mean they can’t inform our learning.

With so many of us in urban settings it is much easier to be ignorant of the delicate threads that weave a community together.

I see great hope and possibility as people wake up to the fact that neither of the two major models for organizing ourselves in the 20th century work very well.

We can’t pit the interests of the individual against the community, nor can we pit those of the community against the individual. This either or thinking is not sustainable for either the individual or the community, and as we are seeing it has tragic consequences for other life as well. So something else must emerge.

Some kind of model that is combines supporting both the individual-in-community and community-in-individual seems to be emerging in some areas.