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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
