Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Mark Nagel <activism98201@verizon.net>]

The recent discussion about communes brought up some responses that I thought 
were heavily laden in myth.

The point that raised my eyebrows was that we can expect things to decline 
and for the majority of people to not cooperate.  Most assuredly there are 
_some_ people that won't cooperate just as they don't cooperate now.  But 
what is the REAL nature of our social behavior?

Someone noted that we'll become more animal-like.  Well, we ARE animals.  
Besides, animals can show us a lot on how to actually work together (there 
was a recent program on PBS's Nature about some townsfolk in Autralia who 
years ago actually worked with Orca whales to kill large whales!).  And we're 
most certainly going to have to depend upon one another MORE in the future (a 
future with less machines).  We'll have to share labor and knowledge more 
closely (we're kind of doing that here in this list, but in the future we may 
not have the luxury of the Internet for knowledge sharing).

We here in this list are trying to live closer to the land at a time in which 
the established controlling systems are fighting hard to maintain their 
control [over all things].  Like many of the other big lies that we hear on a 
regular basis, those who are behind the lies would like us to believe that we 
need them and that without them we would collapse into a world of 
competition, a nasty and brutish world.

The truth is that we're not predisposed to compete with one another: that's 
the myth propped up by the elite's system.  The elite like to misinterpret 
Darwin's message, to scare us into believing that it's a world where only the 
survivial of the fittest rules out.

I offer the following resource for those who would like it demonstrated that 
human nature is about cooperation more than competition.  As the author of 
this piece, Peter Kropotkin, states, we wouldn't have gotten this far without 
cooperation (ruling over competition).

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution"
(http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html

NOTE: It's a fairly lengthy read.  The Indroduction is probably enough to 
convey the basic premise.

NO man/woman is an island.  We all depend on others somewhere along the line, 
and they in turn depend on us.  Kropotkin uses the phrase "mutual aid."  What 
could be more natural?