Cities give us wealth, countryside gives us Life
“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.”
― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered