E.O. Wilson is a scientist who, among other things, studies this kind of social interaction with our environment. He calls this study sociobiology, a hybrid discipline incorporating social dynamics, ecology, genetics and biology. His work helps explain how people adapt to their environment and why they do the things they do. Dr. Wilson writes with a grace and precision that has won him two Pulitzer Prizes. Dr. Wilson is considered one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, not so much because he takes things apart to look at them, but because he takes the long view, he looks at the humans species from a long way off, from the long end, of the telescope. That way he can see not just the actions, he says, but the interactions.

He calls these interactions biophilia, the innately emotional affiliation humans have for each other and other living things. When this natural drive for contact is frustrated, we demonstrate our stunted sociability in the most unsociable ways. "When human beings remove themselves from the natural environment," Wilson explains, "the biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally adapted to contemporary technological features of life. Instead, they persist from generation to generation, atrophied and fitfully manifested in the artificial new environments."

The problem with artificial environments is far more insidious than inner city decay or overcrowding, and for many who make that argument much closer to home. Less obvious, but increasingly devastating, is the in-human techno-landscape we're creating in our market places and on the outer fringes of every urban center. Here we have an unlimited access to television channels, foods, all manner of household gadgets, the world wide web and a universe of information, but when it comes to human contact we are often at a loss. It is in our new edge cities in the clean, quiet, well-mannered and often empty streets of our new multicultural suburbia where the population explosion is actually taking its highest toll.

When I moved to the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a decade ago, the mesa west of here was a high and empty desert. There was nothing there but nature's work, a rising slope of gamma grass and yucca cactus as far as the eye could see. A new city, Rio Rancho, has now grown up there. In many ways Rio Rancho is no different from the edge cities that now ring every urban core, right down to the fast-food franchises, strip malls and the floor plans of its modest single family homes — all built to accommodate the automobile, wired for 110 cable channels and internet access, but not for human exchange.

Rio Rancho is perhaps more unsettling for me, because it covered so quickly my desert backyard as well as its own high mesa views of the Sandia Mountains. But the city itself is the same as countless others, and a breeding ground of a new and dangerous strain of social isolation and ennui, a disease the symptoms of which are the targets of so many behaviors our social marketing campaigns try to change.

From the air Rio Rancho looks like a giant version of the Pentium microprocessor that its chief employer, Intel, produces there. There are few signs of biological life. Its four-lane thoroughfares lead to a rectangular grid of streets, which lead to identical sixteenth-acre lots, each one approachable by a driveway leading directly to a garage, an airlock of sorts through which residents come and go forever hidden from view. Driving Rio Rancho's streets, even the houses are barely visible. Each one sits wrapped behind a concrete wall. A traditional aspect of Mexican architecture when it stood four feet high, these walls are now built six and seven feet tall, precluding a view of the street or, in the back, a neighborly chat. In the old days, walls like these were defenses keeping marauders out and families safe. Now we've walled the community out and no one feels safe.

Cruising these wall-lined streets, one is reminded of the plywood maze in which we drive laboratory mice mad as they struggle to meet another mouse or a chunk of cheese.

It's no surprise that suburban Rio Rancho, not the ethnic enclaves of Albuquerque's South Valley or the transient trailer parks in the poorest parts of town, lays claim to some of our states highest rates of troubling behavior. Here is where the social workers burn out in waves under mountainous caseloads of child and spousal abuse. These are the streets that produce our most surprising tide of violent crime. Here are some of our worst outbreaks of sexually transmitted disease. Behind these walls are teens especially likely to do drugs, be involved in alcohol-related driving accidents, or in one of the grimiest symptoms of social isolation, take their own lives.

By some estimates over 50 million Americans now live in developed suburban communities of one sort or another, and this number is expected to double in the next decade. Over four million more live in more exclusive gated communities where their own private governments regulate everything from the color of a person's house to the kinds of toys that can be left in the driveway. But these exclusive enclaves are a warning of another kind of isolation, not a Balkanizing of America by race or income or regulation, but a Balkanizing by choice. The middle and lower income communities like Rio Rancho are simply a part of our new techno-landscape. For the millions who live there, these deceptively hostile environments are the only affordable place they can find.

What's missing in Rio Rancho are the opportunities for the simple sociability that lubricates our lives. A place where people are likely to bump into one another. The kinds of places conducive to what evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright calls "regular random encounters." These places include front yards and porches, parks, public markets, town squares and playgrounds where we keep an eye on each other's children, have a chance greeting, share the news (good or bad) or release some simple irritation or vague frustration in a harmless exchange that lets us let off steam without blowing our top.

The problem is neither size nor density. As cities grew larger they may have taken us from the landscape, but they gave us something in return. In their complexity and the bustle of their market places there was the constant collision of human nature, of each other brushing elbows in the street. This brownian hubbub that you feel in Manhattan or San Francisco, or any port town, ties us to our organic origins, soothes us with humanities' good and acquaintance us on occasion with its darker side.

We are designed by nature to be with each other in this way. We are psychologically and biologically lubricated by such interactions. Our brains are genetically designed to work that way.

For more than 99% of human history, people have lived in bands and clans as hunters and gatherers intimately and instinctively involved in some kind of natural environment. "During this period of deep history, and still farther back," E.O. Wilson explains,"...the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-related one." Urban environments today are our new natural environments. They too have an opportunity to connect us with other living organisms, primarily our fellow human beings in all their idiosyncratic and distinctive disguises.

The city can be a species rich environment. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called it the "Living City." He saw the concepts of freedom, individuality, creativity and architecture inextricable linked. "Democracy," he proclaimed, "is the sovereignty of individuality...habitation not habituation is the great educator."

But like other species rich environments — coral reefs, river systems, marshes, bosques and old growth forests — the city too is being drained of its biophilic vitality, and as E.O. Wilson explains, a defining part of the human experience is being developed out of existence.

Our politicians exhort us to find some crucial common ground, a conceptual middle place between the rights of the state and the rights of the individual, between rich and poor, public and private, right and left, one race or another. That common ground is not only someplace in our hearts and minds; it is a place in time and space. It is a neighborhood place where we rub elbows and say hello, a park, a town square, a front yard, a farmer's market.

Our cities and neighborhoods are a reflection of us in concrete and glass, more accurate and more enduring than our media images on celluloid and video tape.

One has to wonder what the results might be if we took all the money we're now spending to "unsell" teen pregnancy and used it instead to build more town squares or front porches. A place where people can see one another and be seen, mingle, talk, laugh or exchange the story of their day.

Before we saw ourselves in the movies, or read about ourselves in books, or took psychology or the hidden self seriously, looked at supportive or abusive parents...before there was even such a thing as media violence, our public spaces told us who we were, and architecture shaped our lives.

When we saw God in the heavens, we built spired cathedrals. When we saw God in the earth, we built pyramids. When we see God in commerce, we build office complexes, factories, roads and ports. When we fail to see God in each other,

We build gated communities and streets without sidewalks, walls without windows, and a town square on the internet instead of in the center of town.

We truly are a product of our environment. When it comes to our communities and cities, our environment is as powerful a shaper of our behavior, and seemingly as much beyond our control, as our genetic code.