3 March

This is a false distinction that I often post about. City v country. These aren’t two things, they’re one thing. Neither exists without the other. They’re a single form of life. There was no country without cities, and vice versa. What this single form of life doesn’t have, is any meaningful connection to the landscape. The city builds all over it, the country clear-fells and ploughs most of it. No conception of place, of any other living thing except humans. Not even of functioning geography, like flowing clean rivers. Meanwhile both city and country folk see the countryside as more of a view, a theme park selling a bucolic idyll. Again, no real relationship with any of the geography, flora or fauna, either killing and clear-felling it or treating it like a sanitised zoo exhibit. The city/country cultural form has no idea about place. It lives on, rather than in, the landscape.