Rural Growth Wales

As a result of moving into the countryside once again, the opportunity arose to create a new 'space' that might act as a focus and a hub for many.

Opening up such a space in a city often creates a gathering point but in the middle of Rural Green Hills and Valleys, there needs to be something rather different about the space created for it to have a similar effect.

City Growth has been the subject of many studies and because it normally demands high labour, there has always been spare analysts around to stick statistics onto damn statistics and publish wads of stuff on every aspect of city commerce, manufacturing and social interaction.

Even when a manufacturing base is set in rural countryside, it is characteristic of a city development upon a country location and not characteristic of the country or country life even though it supports the Rural Economy.

Rural Growth seems a contradiction for when most cities grow they expand into their suburbs which in turn expand these suburbs into their surrounding countryside.

With this 'fate' in progress, you might expect rural areas to get swallowed up thus shrinking the potential of 'Rural Growth' but rural growth can happen in the heart of cities.

Sense of Place
Close to the soil and seasons, true rural communities sustain both their ways and the health of the land they tend. Care well for land and you can survive with what it can be asked to produce. But to provide for those who do not work the earth, land and water can be forced to produce more with a big dollop of fertiliser, tons of insecticides, medications, genetic engineering and industrial scale harvesting. But forcing more out of the pot than you are prepared to put into it, is malpractice, and eats away at the future's ability to keep things in balance.

No generation should harbour those with malignant happy-go-lucky attitudes that hamper future generations then escape to their own Happy Hunting Grounds. This 'hit and run' route may lead past momentary prosperity for some but Mother Earth needs to be healthy and around for a long long time till we find another place to live.

Organics
"Some Farming parents objected to their children doing projects on organic farming at school so we stopped" (said to me by a Headmaster of a Rural School about farmers adhering to the more city-based commercial world system). Sad hey! The easiest way of perpetuating problems, be they agricultural, social or political, is to be always selective over that which we teach our children.

Maybe tomorrow people will assume that their ancestors did not care about them - that no wise rara avis existed to guide. But if those who do care, now, do not make waves, we ourselves will perpetuate this illusion and may just help extinguish all that we are working to create.

You can be in-tune or in discord with self and surroundings no matter whether you are in a city, suburb or countryside. But if you want the happy hunting grounds to remain happy, a little bit of real Rural Growth needs to be spread further into the commercial world system to balance it, and we all need to value what we instinctively know is right for the future.

Real Rural Growth leads to better-tuned thinking and the spread of it supports us all.

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Posted by grant at August 8, 2006 08:11 PM