I can tell you that   my experience is that intentional communities  are not only not fun, but a disaster.   00:51:53 And one of the reasons they're both not fun and  a disaster is that they have a mission statement.   They already know where they're going and there's  some abstracted map-like idea that everyone thinks   that they're cohering to. But then it turns  out that everyone actually interpreted that   differently and the way they interpreted it  yesterday changed. And so that thing becomes   00:52:16 the territory on which you are in polarity with  each other and not the thing that you agree about.   The thing you fight about most is the mission  statement.

If I can pick up on that, Rex is going back to   something I said a little bit earlier about  unsustainability, or at least unsustainable   00:46:47 behavior being a natural phenomenon, because  we are far better than any other species   at exploiting our habitats.

Well, I'll say there's a danger in that question.  It's a good question and it's a question we should   be asking, but there's a danger, and that  is that we're going to come up with a model   for ecological community and then we're going  to make it happen. And that right away violates   everything that Nora just pointed out. That's  absolutely critically important.