My last entry raises a couple of questions. Why is it that the quality of life in the Findhorn Community is high even though the economic standard of living is relatively low? And why is it that money and the things it can buy are less important here than in mainstream society?

The answer in a nutshell is community life. But community doesn’t just happen, it has to be built. And to build community, there must be a ‘glue’ that holds its members together. In traditional societies, that glue was provided by a shared sense of place, by extended family relationships, by shared beliefs, myths and values, by common celebrations and rituals, by economic necessity, and by the link between personal identity and community. In modern societies, those glues have been dissolved by mobility, individualism, family breakdown, the loss of old religious beliefs and values, the transformation of cooperation into impersonal economic transactions, the professionalisation of the arts and entertainment, and so on.

So intentionally rebuilding community requires that we recreate the glue, or find a new one. Intentional communities around the world demonstrate many forms of glue. Perhaps the commonest is religious faith or the less dogmatic and vaguer ‘spirituality’. In the last few decades there has been an upsurge of ‘ecovillages’ committed to developing a sustainable lifestyle and living in harmony with nature. Other communities have a common purpose, like Kitezh which cares for Russian orphans, or the Camphill communities in the UK which care for people with learning disabilities and mental health problems. In many cases, the practical business of earning a living provides powerful ‘glue’, as at Twin Oaks in Virginia where growing food, and making hammocks and tempe are major parts of community life. Shared activities are also an important constituent of glue in most communities, whether that be helping each other out, caring for land and buildings, preparing and eating communal meals, celebrating birthdays, seasons and other meaningful events, having fun together, or even business meetings.

Findhorn is a spiritual community that coalesced around shared beliefs and values, but includes most types of ‘glue’. In the early days, its spiritual life was closely aligned with western esoteric traditions such as the Rosicrucians, Theosophy, and teachers like Alice Bailey and Madame Blavatsky. To these was added a deep and distinctive connection with nature when Dorothy Maclean, one of the founders, began to get instructions on growing plants from their Devas and Nature Spirits. Indeed, Findhorn first came to the attention of the outside world when a handful of people began to grow giant vegetables.

Today, the situation is quite different, although we are still a spiritual community in co-creation with nature. Many first-time visitors to Findhorn find it hard to see our spirituality. There is no Teacher, Guru or spiritual leader. There is no grand temple, just a variety of small, simple meditation sanctuaries. There are no common beliefs or practices. Instead there are a few hundred people from many different religious and spiritual backgrounds living together in harmony. There are still some from the western esoteric traditions, but most now come from various Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. There are many who follow shamanic paths, and New Agers of all shades. We share beliefs in the reality of the spiritual realms, in the possibility of communicating with and being guided by nature, and in the power of collective meditation. And we share a commitment to spiritual growth, and daily life and service as a spiritual path.

The people drawn to Findhorn are mostly disillusioned with modern consumerist society. They are more interested in personal and spiritual development than in career, status and possessions. They want to be more deeply connected with each other and the natural world, to demonstrate another way of being – both as individuals and a community. They want to pursue their own creativity in whatever form that may take, and to promote compassionate and loving change in the world. And we aim to live together in integrity, peace and harmony – which means acknowledging and dealing with the inevitable conflicts rather than pretending they don’t exist. These values are expressed in a Common Ground statement which all members sign.

These shared beliefs and values are important, and are supported by other strong glues. Of great importance are Community celebrations that bring us together for fun and fellowhip, sometimes mixed with a more serious purpose. Community sharings when we entertain each other with music, dance, comedy, stories and other performance arts are pure fun – as are the popular traditional Scottish Ceilidhs (country dances). Celebrations of the seasons, full moon, ancient Celtic and other religious festivals mix fun and deeper meanings.

Closely related to celebrations, but more individual, is the glue of creativity. This is a Community of artists and crafts people including theatre, dance, music, song, storytelling, clowning, pottery, weaving, furniture making, wood carving, painting, drawing, jewellery, photography, poetry, and more. The strength of this strand of community life is demonstrated by the regular Craft Fairs, and the opening last year of a new Arts Centre costing close to £750,000 (US$1.5m). The vision and leadership for this project was held for a decade by one person, Randy Klinger, but he couldn’t have manifested it without the support of many community artists.

The Findhorn Community is also united by a sense of purpose. As already noted, it was giant vegetables that first brought the Community to the world’s attention. Today, it is often said, we grow people instead. This ambition is reflected in our diverse educational programmes that draw 3,500 people a year from around the globe. These programmes include not only personal and spiritual development, but also UN endorsed trainings in ecovillage development and other aspects of sustainability, and a study abroad semester for college students accredited by the University of Massachusetts. Our biennial Conferences often have lasting effects. One on “Soul in Education” sparked a series of such conferences around the world. And one on Communities led to establishment of the Global Ecovillage Network, whose headquarters has been based here for some years. We share with other ecovillages the intention to demonstrate a way of life that is ecologically, economically, socially and spiritually sustainable. We may disagree amongst ourselves about what this means and how to balance these four factors, but such active debate is itself a form of glue rather than division.

Finally, we are bound together by the need to earn a living – both individually and as a Community. Today, there are about 35 businesses and charities within the Community, although many members still work outside. The biggest business is the Findhorn Foundation, which directly supports about 120 members. But there are many others including a store, printer, publisher, manufacturer of solar water heaters, a building company, organic horticulture, flower essences, wind farm, and more.

In my last entry, I focused mainly on how individuals cope with the lack of money. The Community as a whole has taken a couple of initiatives to address this issue. It is not possible to set up a community bank under British law, but a way was found by which individuals could invest in the Community. This has raised several hundred thousand pounds for various projects including the community store, and the wind farm. The second initiative is a community currency, the Eko. There are two main benefits of having our own currency. First, Ekos are only accepted by local businesses, and hence circulate locally rather than leaking out to line the pockets of supermarkets, big banks, oil companies etc. In this way they can boost the local economy without anyone needing to earn more $ or £. Secondly, community currencies often run at a profit which can be reinvested in the community. This is because some notes are not redeemed when the issue closes – at Findhorn, some may be kept as souvenirs by visitors, and others are lost or put through the washing machine!

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There, in brief, are my perceptions of the ‘glues’ that hold the Findhorn Community together. What can we learn from this experience for life elsewhere?

First, it’s important to recognise that the Findhorn Community is not utopia and we cast a large shadow as well as shed a bright light. We are simply humans trying our best like everyone else to find our way through the challenges of life. And so we often fail to live up to our values and achieve our aims. But we are nevertheless a living example of how 25 nationalities and many spiritual traditions can live closely together in harmony and (often) joy with a much lower ecological footprint than most of the developed world.

I think the main lesson is the importance of community life. In the past, there was a sense of community even in big cities, particularly amongst the poor. But mobility, suburban lifestyles, commuting, consumerism, the entertainment culture, and turning services and relationships into commodities have combined with other factors to destroy community. It will take a lot of effort to revitalise it, but, as I argued in my blog on beating climate change, I believe it is a key to a sustainable future.

Community requires trust, shared values, goals and activities, and a commitment to work through differences and conflicts rather than retreating into opposing camps and demonising ‘them’. As climate change, peak oil, and other pressures bite in the coming years and decades, life is going to get tougher for most of us. We have a choice. Either we can metaphorically build defensive walls and pull up the drawbridge, retreating into isolation and opposing camps. Or we can take the risk of reaching out in trust, seeking the common ground of our humanity, of building bridges between each other, and recreating community locally and globally.

But where to start? I’m no expert and cannot advise from personal experience. But it seems to me that a first step is to look at our own values, goals and needs, and then to look around for others who share at least one thing with us. Perhaps it is no more than your desire to care for your kids, and the need to transport them to and from school, or to find a ‘babysitter’ for evenings out. Or perhaps your challenge is to care for an aging parent, or a wish to grow food, or beautify your neighbourhood, or save energy ...

Imagine how cooperation between two families on the school run could help you both and might lead to a larger cooperative group. Imagine how shared transport might grow into collective activities such as picnics and outings, or an evening entertaining each other. Relaxing together and having fun is a great way to build trust, and find the common ground. And who knows where from there? Perhaps ideas will surface for creating a garden in a vacant lot, or sharing trips to the supermarket, or buying in bulk at wholesale prices, or ... Cooperative solutions to whatever challenges life throws at us. The only limit is our imagination.

We’re very blessed, living as we do on the edge of woods with a choice of walks. Spoilt, I’d almost say when I get bored with the same paths, the same old friends, the trees; when I long for more distant, less familiar places.

Recently, they began harvesting some of the trees. It’s thinning, not clear felling. I can see it’s needed to make space for the remaining trees to grow on to maturity, and open up the ground to the light and allow the monoculture plantation to diversify. And it will raise funds to manage these public lands. But I hate the destruction; the uncaring savagery of modern logging; the indiscriminate tracks of heavy machines going hither and thither; the broken young trees, and shrubs; the churned and compacted soil; the scatter of trashed branches, the severed stumps, and the sad stacks of battered trunks awaiting sawmill or chipper. There is no love, or compassion.

It’ll be long before the scars heal, and then it will be time to start over.

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I cycled to the beach on Sunday, picking up stones for Christine to decorate with Celtic symbols as gifts for Thai hosts. The tide was low, a wide expanse of drying sand glistening below the bank of varicoloured glacier-worn stones.

Dark and cloudy at first; rain forecast from the south-east. Then the cloud cleared. Blue sky, sunshine, breeze warm for winter.

Task complete, I wander along the sands. Pebbles nestled in their water-sculpted hollows - eyes with laughter wrinkles where the water ebbed. Stems of storm-torn kelp, waiting for the rising tide to sweep them on again to who knows where. The low winter sun casting long, longing shadows towards the freedom of the sea from every stone, and kelp stalk, and sand ripple.

Gulls wheeling, plummeting into waves, bobbing. Footprints in the shining sand - sea birds amongst the stranded weed, and humans taking their Sunday stroll. Kids running, shouting on the wind.

And always the white-noise continuo of waves against the shore; the white-lace foam washing the soul clean and leaving virgin sand. The wind sweeping the cobwebs from my mind, and drifting the smoke of drying sand into silvered hollows.

I feel my legs, reluctant to stretch at first. Then hips relaxing, stride lengthening as I tune in and let go. It’s a while since I’ve been here, close though it is. Always nourishing. Especially when the seals are basking. Why so long? Immersed in my self-created busyness, forgetting the truly important things in life.

My thoughts drift. Surfacing from the depths come sadness, anger, grief at the destruction we have wrought, are wreaking, will wreak on mother Earth. Is it time for humans to leave? Or Gaia to remove us? I often comfort myself with the thought that Gaia will survive no matter what we do; that it is beyond even our destructive power to kill the Living Planet; that within a few millennia of our demise, there’d be little left to remind the aliens or newly evolved consciousnesses of our existence.

But it’s cold comfort. What a tragic loss if all humanity’s striving came to nought. All our passions, loves and hates, our suffering and compassion, our joys and despairs, our creativity and hard-won knowledge ... What a tragedy to lose the wisdom of the Buddha and Jesus, the insights and cadences of Shakespeare, the celestial sounds of Mozart, the imagery of Michaelangelo and Picasso, the science of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, and all the myriad humbler shoulders these giants stood upon. To lose all this in our foolishness! Is it all in vain?

And yet, in time, it is bound to be. Whether through our own greed and blindness, or through the passage of evolutionary time, there will come a day when humanity as we know it will be no more. Will we transcend our current selves, shed our shadows, and rise into more glorious light? Or will we sink deeper into the dark mire? Surely, it is worth the struggle, worth the effort, worth all we can give to the effort to steer us onto the transcendent path.

As I mount my bike, the wind has risen and I battle homewards into the teeth of the gale.

Today, I want to connect a few dots that bring a new perspective to my reflections on the future of humanity in my last entry.

We hear a lot these days about ‘tipping points’ from climate scientists and activists. The idea is that as the planet warms, so processes are being set in motion that cause further warming, thus creating a vicious cycle, or positive feedback loop. Several such processes have been identified already. These include the release of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, by thawing of the Siberian permafrost or melting of methane hydrates on the ocean floor, accelerating collapse of the polar ice caps, weakening of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream, and desiccation of the Amazon rainforests. And there is growing evidence that such feedbacks have been associated with dramatic shifts in global climate in the distant past.

Last week, I read in New Scientist about a new strand of evidence that has emerged. Over the last decade or so, we’ve got used to the idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact. Many scientists have come to believe that other mass extinctions had similar causes, but the evidence was patchy. Now, a new research tool called biomarkers is revealing that the dinosaurs may have been an exception.

Biomarkers are like molecular fossils. They are stable, long-lived organic molecules found in rock pores. Some of them are made by just one or a few types of organism, so that their presence is a sure sign that these organisms were there when the rock was formed. Unlike ordinary fossils, these biomarkers enable tiny, single-celled organisms such as bacteria to be identified.

250 million years ago, in the greatest mass extinction Earth has witnessed, 95% of marine organisms and 85% of land plants and animals disappeared from the fossil record. One biomarker molecule from this period has now been found in several places around the globe. It is made only by green and purple sulphur bacteria which use sunlight in photosynthesis, but cannot tolerate oxygen. Instead, they thrive on hydrogen sulphide (H2S) which is toxic to most plants and animals. Their presence in sediments suggests that the water was shallow enough for light to penetrate, but had no dissolved oxygen and was saturated with H2S. In other words, the oceans were poisonous, and enough gas may have escaped into the atmosphere to kill land organisms too!

So where did all this H2S come from? The organisms that produced it left no biomarkers, but they were probably bacteria that live in stagnant water. But how could the vast oceans possibly become stagnant? One hypothesis is that it was the result of global warming triggered by the release of greenhouse gases in the massive volcanic eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps basalt.

One of the effects of greenhouse warming is that temperatures increase more near the poles than at the equator. This reduces the temperature differences that drive planetary weather systems and ocean currents. And it is the winds and currents that put oxygen into the water. So a strong greenhouse effect could result in the oceans stagnating. In a nutshell: release of greenhouse gases ended up poisoning the oceans and atmosphere for most forms of life.

As we know, life wasn’t extinguished, but it was a close call for multi-cellular plants and animals. For a while, it looked as if single-celled organisms would take over and rule the biosphere, as they did for the first 3 billion years of life on Earth. There is accumulating evidence that other major extinction events, with the exception of the dinosaurs, may have been the result of similar processes.

Our existence today, and the nature of modern life, tell us that Gaia can recover from such shocks. But there is no guarantee that Gaia will always succeed in pulling herself out of such positive feedback loops. Some scientists fear a runaway scenario in which Earth ends up like Venus. At the very least, recovery may take many millions of years – far too long for human civilization, or perhaps even humanity, to survive.

But all is not lost. There is still hope that we can avert such a catastrophe. Paradoxically, it is a hope that rests on the power of positive feedback, just as the apocalyptic scenario does. Research on complex, chaotic, self-organising systems shows that, at certain times, they are extremely sensitive to small disturbances. Just a small nudge may be amplified by positive feedback to totally transform the system. There are many millions of people and tens of thousands of organisations around the world working to change human behaviour. Gaia is not yet beyond any irreversible tipping point. Our individual and collective efforts may be just what is needed to turn the tide; the last straw that tips the balance back again.

To repeat: no action is futile or worthless. Every action, however small, is potentially significant. What if we all followed Rapunzel’s example as expressed in On the Wisdom Trail:
“I'm going to make a list of tools and skills that I have to share and offer them to the four neighbors I just slightly know right now. What if we all only needed one lawnmower for every 4 or 5 houses, one circular saw, maybe just one vegetable garden? What if we all knew someone who could do carpentry, or plumbing, or who could paint, and we could all take on more projects to make our world better a little at a time, right where we are?”

What if we all found our own small, sensible ways to contribute? Let’s go for it.

I was planning to write at least one more full-length entry before I leave home, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. So apologies to all my regular readers. It will probably be a month now before I have time and energy to write again.

Christine and I leave home on Tuesday for 6 months, until early September. For the last few weeks we’ve been slowly organising ourselves for departure, sorting and packing away our personal possessions to leave the house clear for the friend who will be renting it in our absence. It’s been more unsettling than we expected, and I found I simply wasn’t in the mood for blogging. I like the security of routine and a well-established home, and become anxious about the uncertainty of travel.

For 4 months, I will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia where I used to be on faculty. On the way to Perth, we will spend 8 days in Thailand at the Wongsanit Ashram. I will be running a weekend workshop on my book, “The Science of Oneness” and giving a lecture on “The Crisis of Civilization: A 10,000 year perspective”. Christine will be talking with local healers about her work, and giving some healing sessions. In Australia, I will be helping to run 9 public evenings on community action for climate change, as well as doing research on sustainability. Christine will also be involved in healing work.

George Monbiot is a regular columnist in the highly-respected Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of the book “Heat: How we can stop the planet burning.” In that book, he talks about ‘love miles’ and how love may destroy the Earth. Love miles occur when people are separated from those they love – whether just across the city, or across the globe.

It’s hard now to travel without guilt, even though we will be contributing to action on climate change and sustainability in Thailand and Australia. Our journey to Australia is mostly love miles. Both Christine and I have family there – our children and, in Christine’s case, her grandchildren. Having chosen to live in the Findhorn Community a decade ago, where we feel at home and can make a worthwhile contribution to the future, we now face the dilemma of either not seeing our families, or accepting our contribution to love miles. As we prepare to board the plane, this awareness is never far from our minds. There doesn’t seem to be any solution.

Such dilemmas will become common for many of us as action to curb climate change gears up.