Model Intentional Community

Dave Pollard idea - give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered species and try to build their populations back up in "natural" settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not in order to learn how to "survive" it, but to learn how to be part of and at peace with it.

What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism for determining who the members of the communities would be.

Building on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each Community could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without rules, if it so chose (Anarchism)).

It cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the 12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we show people another model now, a better way to live, maybe it's not impossible to believe that people will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our population is down below one billion and we can all live this way. We could therefore do what early "civilizing" cultures like the Anasazi and Incans (Tribalism) perhaps did, when, after experimenting with urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life. (Collapse Of Complex Societies)

Dave Pollard Aug16 follow-up

reminds me a bit of the Dovetail community in Diamond Age

(Intentional Community is a term often used for Commune) - http://www.ic.org/