First, communities are not planned or permanent. Wendell Berry once wrote, "We live the given life, not the planned." This is particularly true of communities. Planning may go into the creation of a community, but like the planning of a farm, life takes over.  Communities are contingent things—they are placed within the contexts of place and people, so they are dynamic and always shifting. To have a community that does not change is, to borrow from Nietzsche, to mummify it, making it brittle and prone to decay.  Planning is what happens at a desk—community is what happens outside in the sunlight.

Second, communities are tied to places. Online "communities" are not communities—they are forums. Thick, robust, authentic community is tied to place. Place grounds it, ties it down, so that the hard work of building and growing might be done. When people think of authentic community, many think of the Amish, and what the Amish have is place.  They have farms and businesses that have been built over generations, and they stay put long enough to know the landscape and build wealth upon it. 

But place also forces us to be a part of a community that is not entirely chosen. C.S. Lewis once said that he liked church because he had to kneel beside the town’s green grocer whom he despised. Placed community provides this. We are brought together less by shared interests or common goals as by the fact that we live together and we must work something out. Place keeps us from the limited viewpoint that can often come from being only with those we like or who share our views. 

This last point is a crucial one for those of us in the environmental movement. We will be ineffective as long as we just hang out with our friends from the local chapter of the Sierra Club. We need to learn to talk about global warming with those who are honest skeptics. How are we going to have those conversations if we are only with our own kind? Being a part of a place is a good opening for this possibility. Without this placed, unplanned, unchosen community, we would end up with only special interest groups. With a true community, we open up the possibility for diversity and conversation. That way, we can all find an answer to the question: How do we live here now?