Little Hawk; thank you for the eloquent postings, but there was a minor thing diggin' at me: a lot of the things you claim don't exhist in the natural world actually do, in higher mammals, anyhow. Many of the more social creatures on the earth have some form of group law, community ethics, and certainly suffer from separation anxiety when distanced from their group. There are also nearly always 'rogue' animals who prefer to be solitary, or have been cast out by the group, but there is a certain solidarity of 'us' that people don't seem to have anymore, the link to one another is gone, so what makes us care about the whole? (an' not just 'whole' as in our own families or communities, but 'whole' as the entire planet)
~JE