![]() Q The councils' mission is to tap into the wisdom of community elders as a way to address local and global environmental problems. We're hoping to see 10 or 20 CECs start in the Twin Cities in the next six months, and 50 to 100 more across North America in the next year. Peter, and another in the Dinkytown area being started by a group of University of Minnesota students and retired professors. There's a campus Earth Council being started by students at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. In this era of electronic communication, Web-based social networks like MySpace and Facebook can facilitate connection and community-building, but they can't replace real, place-based, face-to-face community. I think people just naturally crave community. But is a similar goal still possible in our txt-msg world?Ī Even more so today. Q Your vision for neighborhood salons became a huge success. We asked him about his new vision for Community Earth Councils (CEC), which bring "elders" (50 and older) together with "youngers" (ages 16-28). Now 61 and a grandfather, Utne is back and more charged than ever. In 1991, Utne, who founded the Utne Reader seven years earlier, proposed the creation of neighborhood "salons," in which readers could gather with others in their ZIP codes to preserve "the endangered art of conversation and start a revolution in their living rooms." The radical idea took off like wildfire, with more than 10,000 responses and 500 salons set up across the United States. Nearly a decade before Robert Putnam's groundbreaking 2000 book "Bowling Alone" became a cautionary tale about our increasingly disconnected society, Eric Utne of Minneapolis was talking about the very same need to reach out to one another the old-fashioned way, neighbor to neighbor - and not just talking, but doing.
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