Urban ecology (Sociology) -- Japan; Urban renewal -- Japan
A social structure in which few farmers feed a great number of
idlers forces the farmers into labor-saving, high-yield,
mass-supply agriculture, and this necessitates the heavy use of
agricultural chemicals and chemical fertilizers, as well as
making the farmers neglect the application of compost to the
land. The inevitable result is oil-soaked fields and a kind of
agriculture characterized by contamination, plunder, and
destruction. One could also say that the idlers, by means of the
progress of science and technology, have promoted the
mechanization and contamination of agriculture, thus making it
possible for a handful of farmers to feed legions of idlers. The
city sucks up everything.
Therefore food contamination is, simply put, brought about by
the social structure, not by the laziness and greed of farmers.
Needless to say, the contempt for agriculture and the priority of
the secondary and tertiary industries are also causes of the fall
in the farming population. When over half the people were
farmers, half the content of our language and song books were
based in the farming villages, and the stories and songs
glorified agriculture and the farmers, but now that less than
half the population are farmers, such stories and songs have all
but disappeared. For the same reason, one rarely if ever sees the
farming villages or the farmers in television shows or in the
piles of magazines and novels.
In this case it is an inversion to say that the contempt for
agriculture and the respect for urban industries have brought
about the reduction in the farm population. Changes in the social
structure are brought about by the power relationships of
material productive capacity (or the money economy); social
trends and consciousness is merely a reflection of such.
Therefore the contempt for agriculture is not a problem of
education or attitude, but decidedly one of social structure.
47
This is the main theme of this chapter, and so I will write in
more detail about this later. But now I would like to emphasize
here that increasing the agrarian population (that is, sending
the secondary/tertiary population back to the farms), getting
everyone to pull weeds by hand, make compost, give up
agricultural chemicals, and produce modest quantities of clean
vegetables, while being our goal, is quite impossible and
unrealistic unless we solve the land problem.
48
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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