permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

The death of the Russian village | openDemocracy
http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/matilda-moreton/death-of-russian-village

Traditionally Russia’s agricultural land was subdivided into a patchwork of
villages and fields,
interspersed by forest and marsh. Now the villages are deserted and
crumbling: the state closes
them down, often on a whim, and young people leave to find work elsewhere.
Matilda Moreton tells the tragic story based on fieldwork in the Russian
North.


Abandoned village in Karelia, Russia.
http://pinterest.com/pin/108156828521860549/

One of many thousands of villages just like it scattered all across the
vast Russian territory.
This is the Russia of Andrey Rublev's peregrinations. He would feel right
at home amid this picturesque decrepitude.
Another six-seven hundred years from now -- when people of the Earth either
will have long since reverted to their cave-dwelling
past as a result of a couple of unfortunate nuclear altercations or become
totally immortal and autonomous from their bothersome
bulky bodies and independent from the shackles of geography and the basic
laws of physics, having successfully colonized most
of the planets in the solar system and capable routinely of covering in a
matter of minutes the distance between their offices on the
Moon and their summer houses on ruggedly beautiful Uranus, say -- this
village, and thousands of other Russian villages like it,
would still look exactly the same.