"It's not an easy question to answer, except that there's no existence without hope," he said. "I think constantly of the future of the children, and of the need for all children to go into the future as a single, sacred community. The children of the trees, the children of the birds, the children of the animals, the children of the insects -- all children, including the human children, must go together into the future."

His last sentence brought me up short. Of course I knew that trees and birds and animals have children, and that all life is interdependent. But when I hear "children," my mind is conditioned to picture the human variety. And when I hear "community," I think of the bonds between human beings -- which, God knows, are challenge enough to forge and sustain.

Yet at some level, doesn't all community require bridging the gap between ourselves and the "other" whom we perceive as different and separate from us? Doesn't it require resisting the conditioning that tells us who belongs and who does not?

In this issue we have tried to look at some efforts to build community across difference -- difference in nationality and race, religious denomination, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability. We have highlighted, especially, the frontier that Berry points to -- our need to live in community with the earth -- because we believe what Larry Rasmussen (interviewed in this issue) says: Any community-talk that does not include the whole of creation is obsolete.

The natural world is more than a stage for human activity. People and place are bound together intimately. There is no hope for the future if we exclude anyone's children.

-- Marianne Arbogast,
associate editor