We have had an ambivalent relationship with villages over the last hundred years or so. They have gone from communities to either city commuter havens unaffordable to locals or otherwise left as husks in abandoned industrial regions. Along the way, most have suffered a diminishing of the health that good communities afford; facilities, interdependence, knowledge and continuity. It takes a village to raise a child. And we have not replaced those communities. Workplaces are fragmented monocultures, and social media promotes conflict more than consensus (conflict attracts more eyeballs).
The thought occurred as I read in the FT Magazine over the weekend that younger generations rely on email and messaging to talk about problems more than face to face conversations with friends. It was compounded listening to Farming Today commentators on the pressures of industrial-scale farming as supply chain fragility bites. At one level, reliance on crop monocultures (large scale potato farming being …
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