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PROPHETS AND LOCAL ECO-COMMUNITIES 289
etc. institutions (Miller 2019). Institutions make certain acts possible for people or
organizations and prevent (or hinder) others.
One often ponders which social actors would be able to provide the spark for the
emergence of a new culture and hence,for the Great Ecological Turn. The most
promising chance is for ecologically committed but individually weak people to
join forces and form (micro)communities, practically groups of friends, which may
become nuclei of the crystallization of a new culture by creating new institutions
and spreading a new mentality. One of the most hopeful expedients from the
ecological crisis is therefore the supersession of the atomization of society!
Why does the re-discovery of small communities appear a realistic option? In
the overwhelming majority of the some 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens
(Marean 2015), people lived in small hunting-gathering communities, and when
agriculture began to appear, a good ten thousand years ago, more and more people
began to live in village communities. As late as in the early 19 century, 97-98
% of the global population lived in villages or pursued a nomadic way of life as
animal herders and hunter-gatherers (Ponting 1991), i.e., they existed in
communities. The prevalence of the spectacular social atomization of “one-person
groups” (Csänyi 2002) is the outcome of the mass urbanization which began in
the 19% century and came to the fore in the late 20" and 21* centuries. In a
historical perspective, current atomized societies must be seen as anomalies, and
therefore it would not be alien to human nature to find a way back to communities.
What is more, in the decisive majority of us human beings there is a distinct desire
for communal life, and we sorely feel the more or less universal absence of
communities today.
What sort of communities are meant here?
It must be clarified what is currently understood by community. This concept has
been given widely different interpretations by many, even in the social sciences
(for a good overview, see Légman 2012), not to mention its connotations in
colloquial usage.
Communities are currently taken to possess all of the following features. Firstly,
the members of the community are in regular and frequent personal contact with
each other and at regular intervals communicate in a common space. Thus, virtual
communities do not belong here. Also, regular and frequent personal interactions
are mostly possible when the members of the community live in the same
settlement, or in settlements very near to each other. It is partly in this sense that
we can speak of local communities. However, “local” means more in the present
case: a sort of localism or local patriotism, the love of the place, attachment to the
place, and a preference of locality over a larger spatial unit.
Secondly, the members of a community are tied by a similar order of values and
worldviews, that is, their mentality is fundamentally similar. The communities at
issue here are generally linked by an ecological awareness, which also differentiates
them — often in the same settlement — from majority society. There are, however,
examples — in Hungary, too — that a religion-based or traditionalist mentality
cements a community and (at least primarily) differentiates it. The latter approaches