Return to the Land
From Megacity to Megarual: On How People Need to Move Back to the Countryside
Many of our modern ills can be better understood and better managed by a very simple and by now old idea: Return to the land.
Deep in every person, isn’t there a longing for a piece of land to call one's own? For centuries, hasn’t it been a goal — an unobtainable dream of millions and millions of serfs and slaves who came before us — to have one's own farm? One’s sheltered land?
In a strange paradox, today at the height of human civilization, rural landscapes are being depopulated as humans everywhere move to cities and amass in the world’s ever-expanding megalopolises
Rural communities are going extinct throughout the world due to the market logic of today's hyper-ventilated capitalist system that is literally able to create food and sustenance out of almost anything, anywhere. Therefore, the need for farmers and burghers is nigh zero, so says the market logic.
In this fanciful new reality, the anti-farm market forces want to make it seem as though humanity has reached the end of its age to need to produce food in order to live.
The vertiginous growth of urban landscapes eclipses nearly anything imaginable 300 years ago. Our world has become a science fiction novel.
The countryside, in this modernized world of “non-things” — the lived urban environment — is a plaything and hardly lived at all by the majority of those living in urban environments.
This urban future is expected to only grow in the decades to come as rural places continue to depopulate and turn back to the wilds.
The number of farmers, of course, is declining rapidly, we are told, because traditional farming has become obsolete. These trends are only expected to accelerate as developing countries in Africa and Asia become ever more mechanized, modern and industrial.
Amidst all of this gloomy science fiction future, there is also a definite trend away from the cities and back into the countryside.
Clearly, small towns and country villages are proving to be much more reliable environments in which to raise families as compared to urbanized and atomized urban families.
As with anything to do with the countryside, this movement toward the rural and local is very slow but it is logical and organic.