Barbara,
Even though I am a therapist I believe along the lines of Paul Shephard in Nature and Madness, that human beings thrived for thousands of years in small bands or groups and that it is only in the last few thousand years that we have been tied to agricultural and technological societies that we have lost our way." By isolating individuals from the nonhuman world and abandoning the harmony of wild ecosystems as a social model, agriculture 'made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured'" (Kirkpatrick Sale on Paul Shephard.) He sees the distortion of human growth patterns and arrested adolescent development as a function of the distortions of technological culture, as do I.(He convinced me.) If we Mudcatters were a small band of people living with each other we would heal, help and share. Whether people will ever do this without being forced to do this when we use up all our resources or blow ourselves up is up to us.We can do it now as we have deomonstrated. In small bands people forced each other to reconcile. I'm not an anthropologist and someone probably can prove me wrong but it's an important dialectic argument to me. . Let's get back there in the twentyfirst century...for our children...harpgirl p.s. alison=I believe in sharing the men!!!