WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT, CITIES OR LAND?

(Oh, this is the same post as it was last week. But no one seemed to care much about the flooding of Louisiana. I wondered if they would be more interested in the concept of whether cities or food are more important? Or maybe they think that cities are more important than land. Do people think the world advances because of brilliant individuals, or by the caring labor of thousands, if not millions, of minds? Are any of these things related?)

They made the decision today to release water upstream from New Orleans. I understand the thinking behind that difficult decision. They had to weigh the needs of a few thousand people against the needs of many thousands more. I don’t know what is right.

But I do know the decision is very much a modern decision, and may prove short-sighted. They have basically decided that a city is more important than a farm. When inflation increases the price of food and there is no food to buy, the decision may look less compassionate.

One of the reasons this decision was made is that in the past sixty years we have moved people off the land in massive droves, and into the cities. So now very few people live on the land and many live in the city. Compassion would lead one to spare the city. But the people were moved off the land, supposedly in the name of efficiency. Large corporate farms being considered more efficient than the family farm.

But it is a false efficiency. No one ever has time to do sloppy work, and the modern corporate farm is sloppy farming. Eventually the exhausted soils, the erosion, the mono-cropping, the failure of pollinators, the energy expenses of plowing and shipping will overwhelm the system and it will collapse. When bad work is done the future will pay the price, and it will be very expensive in suffering.

As I look at cities with high buildings, slums, industrial blight, sameness and masses of people, I sense the loneliness and the lack of dignity. Each individual vies to be considered an individual, to be noticed. We glorify the individual in the celebrity culture. If one fails at gaining individual attention they fade into the anonymity of the city and abandons personal responsibility.

The real genius in the world is not individual genius. It is in the minds and hands of 10,000 individuals going about their business sharing ideas, helping one another and collectively finding what works in society. The genius of human culture is long, deep and slow. Sloppy work looks efficient. The city is always in a hurry.