In our commitment to foster dialogue on emergent communities, we would like to offer a links page that will serve as a networking hub for existing communities, projects in gestation, tribes, alternative gatherings, earth-honoring festivals, and other social experiments.

All Gaia's subsystems have become what they are by adaptation—the process of evolution. But the rate of extinction of species is now very high due to human impact. The human species itself is currently encountering a huge range of changes, to which it may or may not be able to adapt.

In our developing view of future communities, we propose to take extinction as a challenge to embrace rather than a threat to be avoided (or ignored). Most scientists now agree that we are deeply into the sixth major extinction to be undergone by the planet in its 4.3 billions years of life. Whatever this prospect may imply on the biological level, and whatever catastrophic changes it may entail globally, on the social level it certainly means that the systems in which we currently live are unsustainable. It is good common sense—or, to coin a phrase, basic future sense—to question the value of doing things to "improve the system." By analogy to the Titanic, let's ask: Are we concerned with serving organic meals in the main salon, or are we looking to the condition of the lifeboats?

But what are the "lifeboats" that will carry humanity, or some portion of it, into the uncharted seas of the coming extinction?

The lifeboats are the communities and groups that exist now, or are coming into existence, outside the social system that is no longer sustainable. In fostering these communities and developing these groups, we can realize how we are a species of distinction, able to adapt to extinction, because we forsee it and can envision a way through it. Until now, our self-delegated superiority has proven to be an illusion, and a destructive one at that. It would be far better to admit that we are not superior to any other species, but, at the same time, to allow that Gaia herself presents us with a unique challenge, due to the very potential she has endowed in us through evolution. We are the singularity in her evolutional process. Not the supreme species, not the lords of the planet. We are, perhaps, the relay team in Gaia's periodic large-scale shifts. We, of all species, are gifted with imaginative and planning skills that allow us to work through time and, possibly, to reach the future through what we do in the present.

Please contact us to be featured in our links, or to contribute networking ideas.

And remember, festina lente. Make haste slowly.