Discuss: Where Have All the Joiners Gone?

I don’t believe that all farmers have become completely independent. I live on a farm and we often “share” things with our neighbour farmers, whether it be borrowing a bull to help produce calves or to borrow a piece of machinery to help get some fieldwork done. However, this could be because the farms in our area are those “family-farms”.

This article made me realise how much our dependence on oil has changed our daily interactions with other people. I don’t know my neighbours well even after living in the same house for the past 3 years.

Strange!  Last night I had a dream that told me to start a website to create a social movement to help us get back to community, neighbors, family and friends.  Then I googled the keywords that were in my dream, and I found this website.  So maybe I just jump on this band wagon that’s already built.  I love your content, and I’m not sure how I can help but we need to bring it to a granular, local level…to our blocks, our neighbors, our homes, and it needs to be simple and easy.  Last month I was visiting my mom in Mexico, and we drove by an old friend’s house (mom borrowed many things from them in the past), and without hesitation she said, let’s drop in and say hi.  I was very hesitant at first because I’m not used to just “dropping in”, we always call ahead or plan it.  We stoped in just the same, and we spent two hours having the most delightful conversation.  When we left I felt sad we couldn’t do that more often with any of our friends.  Everyone is so “busy” that we’ve forgotten the art and we’ll need something to help us remember who we truly are.

Millie, see my previous comment for some books and links relevant to “getting back to community…”  I’d now add the Transition Initiative movement that’s spreading virally; maybe start at http://transitionus.org/

I should have made the reference to my previous comment easier to find: it’s #17 on Page 3.

All of the points that Bill McKibben makes are 100 percent logical and clear. Taking up farming once again and living in a local-set-of-mind is definitely a way to get to “350.” However, it is important to remember that if one fully devotes his/her time to farming, it automatically means that everything else comes second. Yes, it brings families closer. Yes, it creates a sense of neighborliness that is nonexistent right now (for the most part.) But how are we going to advance in technology? Curing diseases that kill millions? If we are toiling our land all day, how are we going to study and research? The reason we got this far in technological advances is that we began to rely on mass farming as a source of nutrition. If we step back now, then we would step back in mostly everything. Living in a local-set-of-mind can change everything.
Not only that, but perhaps the reason that people no longer “need” a god is that we do not rely on each day’s weather for our sustenance; we do not see the daily importance of nature. In addition to what Bill was proposing about farming re-creating a more livable and friendly world, it would make people more appreciative about nature.

Being encased in steel, glass and plastic how can it not impact our interactions.  In many places the center of town, the place for chance meeting has been destroyed by strip malls and instead of walking from store to store people drive.  It is often in the chance meetings that real life discussions about events and issues takes place.