Long ago our ancestors lived outside the bounds of the money economy, and so as long as they had salt, there was no need to buy anything. [21] "Farmer" means a person who does a hundred different kinds of work, [22] and originally the farmers did everything for themselves, supplying their own food, clothing, and shelter. They wove cloth, and they made sandals. They dug wells, and they thatched roofs. They made ropes, and they gathered firewood. Not only that, almost all the materials they used were recyclable products of the fields and forests (I will later discuss the necessity for the tools -- hatchets, sickles, and saws -- they used to cut and assemble these materials). "As long as they have salt..." I wrote, but even if they do not have salt the farmers can somehow get along. Wild animals such as squirrels, raccoons, and monkeys do not ingest so much salt, but they maintain themselves in perfect health. It is only human beings who eat too much, thereby suffering from hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure. There is plenty of salt contained in natural foods; Nature, I expect, made human beings the same way it made squirrels and monkeys. * * * Since the city depends mainly for its existence upon nonrenewable underground resources, its functions will of course be paralyzed, and its activities will come to a halt, when the resources run out. The cities, therefore, will perish first with the discontinuance of the money economy, and second with shortage of natural resources. The country can always get along without such underground resources, just as wild animals and primitive societies do. Next (and this is directly related to my remarks on money), the cities will disappear with a cutoff in the supply of food. The reason the cities will perish if there is no money is because, first and foremost, it is money that the city uses to plunder the country for food. As I have said time and again, the city itself is nonproductive, and cannot supply its own food. It cannot continue to survive without robbing (this includes imports) every last grain of rice from the country. A cutoff in the food supply is the best means of triggering the fall of the cities. It is the city which, for its own benefit, and for progress and development, continues to control and destroy the natural environment, and it is the country that lives by being in accord with the flow of Nature. This is the decisive difference between the city and the country, and the all-important fork in the road where we separate that which perishes from that which will endure.