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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: <pbunch@cox.net>
  • To: livingontheland <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Small is Beautiful
  • Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:48:41 -0700

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.




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