When We Humans Lived in Community in Nature

Sterling makes periodic references to learning and community and correctly notes that when we humans lived in community in nature, our sources of satisfaction were rich, varied, and consistent with our needs and a right relationship with other humans and the living Earth. Our neural circuits evolved to support learning and life in a living community.

The contrast that Sterling draws between our experience of daily life as participants in Earth’s community of life and our experience of daily existence in the sterile, manufactured, mechanistic, regimented, money-driven setting of consumer society is foundational to a fuller explanation of why we accepted the cultural manipulation and economic restructuring that now threaten our existence. - David Korten