Bill McKibben has an excellent piece online at Orion Magazine’s site, Where Have All the Joiners Gone?:

CHEAP FOSSIL FUEL has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich, powerful—Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise! But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the routines of your daily life wouldn’t change.

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For the rest of us, who aren’t planning to actually till the soil ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the farmers’ market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per visit as they do at the Shop ‘n Save).

It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls on our shingles—and, of course, it means buying that beer from the local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of the XM satellite-from-nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.

It means embracing nonindependence—which to us may seem un-American, but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners. We’ve gotten away from that—become a nation of drive-around-by-ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a neighbor is what you’ll need most.

The irony here is almost overwhelming. At a time in our development of computer technology that’s dominated by networked configurations and “mesh” computing, we’re neglecting the most basic form of networking of all, people-to-people relationships. To add another layer to this lasagna of weirdness, it’s networked computers–as in the one you’re using this very nanosecond–that’s helping to accelerate this breakdown.

In the early days of the web (as opposed to the early days of the Internet, which is markedly older), there was considerable optimistic talk about the social and educational possibilities this new medium was creating. People could spend just a few minutes and find out about practically anything on the planet, and do it from just about anywhere on the planet. The potential was breathtaking.

The reality, of course, has turned out to be far less Utopian and far more polarizing. Instead of using the Internet as a learning tool, many of us use it simply to marinate ourselves in our own special interests. Whatever your personal fetish, from food and wine to politics to cars to energy and environmental issues to chess to build reproduction medieval musical instruments to investing to flying sailplanes to lacrosse to, well, the more traditional (a)vocations people usually refer to as fetishes, you can find all manner of online “communities” devoted to the objects of your obsession. A few quick Googles and you’ll soon have a list of discussion boards and web sites and downloadables that you can burn endless hours on, sometimes without even trying, under one pseudonym and manufactured persona or another.

Yet how many of us with an “active” online presence know the names of every neighbor who lives at the dozen addresses closest to our own? I’d fail that test, I’m ashamed to say.

All is not lost, of course. Even today, not all participation in online communities pushes us further into isolation, into a virtual world spinning forever down the ringing grooves of sameness, to bastardize Tennyson. We often find people online who become part of our real world community. I’m a perfect example, thanks to the people I met online associated with several local environmental groups, not to mention the local lacrosse community and team my work for them as team photographer.

But far too often the online world remains not merely a separate realm from reality, but a corrupting one. We shun new information in favor those who agree with and reinforce our own views. We become ever more attached to and self-identified with our positions, with a further, detestable and intractable polarization of society being the emergent property of that hardening of the attitudes. Given the astonishing gift of the world spread before our fingertips, we choose instead to narrowcast ourselves into the merest slice of that spectrum and become part of the problem instead of the solution.

Can we do better? Can we wake up, use information technology in much smarter and more productive ways, both related to energy and environmental issues, and not? Perhaps I’m too naive or optimistic, or maybe I’m just overly influenced by my personal experiences with online communities, but I’m convinced we can and we will make that change. It will take longer and happen more in response to genuine economic pain than most of us would prefer, but we’ll get there.