The Rural Question: a Pathology of the Planning of the Countryside

Abstract

The paper analytically laments the ever hastening decline of the countryside, seeing this as not just a matter
of bucolic witlessness and weak-kneed policy but rather as a something quite structural and historically
inescapable and the reforce a result of a process as ill-defined as irreversible and wide spread. This process,
in its turn, is berated as being born of deeply rooted mental attitudes that run from shifting of responsibility
unworthy of Pilate, a capacity for doubt fit to beggar St. Thomas Didymus and sheer treason enough to
shame Judas. The author furthers his job in hand by making an analysis the all-Spain minimum cultivated
lot as an example of parochial blindness as to un-stoppable breaking down of the working countryside, by
then turning on the gentle habits of the Law as with illegal building and present day planning policy. As the
author understands the matter, were anything of any worth to be politically undertaken to hold back, amend
or off set this sad state of affairs, this would needs originate at levels of government of much greater
administrative and civic scope and impact than those at which any remedy could hope to find its first movers
thanks to the matter being decided upon but locally and this by a host of mutually obstructing minor bodies
of competence each making its own piddling decisions for its own mole -sighted reasons and thus contribution
to its own and everyone’s slow but eventual disaster. The author concludes that only when the situation has
irreversibly climaxed beyond all amending and with ecological reform become an impossibility will the
powers that be become aware that something is indeed seriously amiss to then react no doubt too late and,
by then, to no point.