Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[mdnagel@verizon.net]

“I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in this country”.

- William Jennings Bryant


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


Jun 28, 2010 08:20:26 PM, livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
> >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.
> >_