Eclectic Amateur

Jeff Culbreath outlines Why Rural Life Is Better For Children:

After 20 years of town-dwelling, I’m probably more suited to city life than country life. My five or six years on the farm in my boyhood gave me a love for the countryside, but it didn’t really make a farmer out of me, nor did it give me the skills I would need as homesteader. So I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I’ll always have a job in town and will never make a living from the land.

We moved to the country primarily because I am convinced that rural life – so long as it is not lived in front of TVs, computers, and video games – is much better for children. This isn’t intuitively obvious to everyone, so I’ll list a few reasons here:

I am in a similar spot, although change “five or six years” to “eighteen years.” Also, scratch the part about being pretty much resigned to my fate.

It’s a good list of reasons, and a good discussion. Read the whole thing.

The full story is at NewFarm.org.

As Pavel Chichikov says, so much can be summed up by “How could it hurt?”, followed by “How could we have known?”

The Ann Arbor News ran an article Sunday on the decline in local agriculture and the businesses that support farmers.

It finally dawned on me — I’m entirely through his cycle of the months, and into the regional essays, and the glaring difference between Leopold and Wendell Berry hits me: Leopold keeps talking about his farm, but he never gets around to actually farming. Hunting, yes, but so far not a word about actual farming. It’s puzzling. Maybe it’ll become clearer in the rest of the book …

I’m working my way through A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find and read it, given how highly Wendell Berry (and others) praise it.

Leopold is nearly as quotable as Chesterton. Here’s a sample:

There are two great spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.