In Our Rurban Age —To know the countryside you must live in the city

In his book Badgers, the naturalist Michael Clark describes surveying the animal Christian Dior Watches back in the 1960s. Calling at a farm cottage, he asked an old countryman whether he knew of any badgers living nearby. "What's badgers?" came the reply. The countryman, Clark writes, "genuinely did not know of the species".You can be a countryman, it seems, and know little of the country. But traditionally, country folks are regarded as being in tune with the land. They live there, don't they? What can townies know of the "way of nature" ?This assumption infects much of our culture. It predicates the existence of a clear division between town and country. It enables the rural Concord cheap Links Of London lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture, its "native" traditions and pastimes (hunting, fishing) threatened by an oppressive urban majority. The underlying message lies in that the countryside is best managed by country people. After all, they know about such things... Unfortunately, too often, they don't. As the historian Keith Thomas showed in his study Man and the Natural World, the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by correcting the "vulgar errors" of country people. And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800, that process continues today—what country dwellers take for granted is still being confounded by the careful observation of reality. A study, From York University, has cast strange The message of studies such as this is that natural systems are complex, unpredictable: understanding them requires patient observation and careful new light on the farmers' enemy foxes. The more |y why traditionally, people think, "the t foxes a farmer kills, the more lambs he appears to lose to foxes. That is because; new foxes will almost certainly occupy the slain animals' territory, and new animals , unused to the terrain, may then choose more obvious prey—such as lambs.analysis. The lack of these conditions explains why, in the early modern era, grass snakes were killed as venomous, and gardeners destroyed worms because they were thought to gnaw plant roots.The assumption that country people "ought" to know about such things is based on an urban-rural divide that opened up in the 18th century. For a couple of centuries, city and country people did inhabit separate realms. But the car, Patek Philippe the phone, the media and the Internet have contributed to the unifying tendency of Links Of London Charms what we call modern lifestyle; and the vast population outflow from cities into rural areas blurred the difference between urban and rural. Thus, a new word—"rurban"—has been Swiss coined to describe this condition. Most of us now work indoors or in an Watches office, and even if we are involved in our primary industries, we are far more likely to be staring at a computer than communicating with the landscape. Human life has turned generally into a monoculture by work, sleep, shopping and TV—all actually identical whether performed in town or country.