Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[<pbunch@cox.net>]

The following is a quote from Schmacher's "Small is Beautiful." It is in a 
chapter on development but I think it reflects a lot of the discussion on 
this list. It was written or at least published in the early 1970's.

Why is it so difficult for the rich to help the poor? The all- pervading 
disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and 
countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth, power, culture, attraction, and 
hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The 
city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. 
Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a 
sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural 
areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, 
while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place 
in the countryside. The prevailing lack of balance, based on the age-old 
exploitation of countryman and raw material producer, today threatens all 
countries throughout the world, the rich even more than the poor. To restore 
a proper balance between city and rural life is perhaps the greatest task in 
front of modern man. It is not simply a matter of raising agricultural yields 
so as to avoid world hunger. There is no answer to the evils of mass 
unemployment and mass migration into cities, unless the whole level of rural 
life can be raised, and this requires the development of an agro-industrial 
culture, so that each district. each community, can offer a colourful variety 
of occupations to its members.