Quotes about Rural Depopulation

Tom Vilsack

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

Thomas Malthus

The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than anywhere else; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.

This was a tragic prediction for some as it was used as a theoretical reason for little intervention in the Irish famine a few decades later. The then population density is exceeded by many countries today.

Michael Pollan

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

Charles Kennedy

A perennial problem that has faced the Scottish Highlands is that, time and again, too many of the more talented young people have had to move elsewhere - even abroad - through a lack of opportunities that should have been available.

David Simon

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution.

Tom Vilsack

More than half of America's rural counties are losing population and with it, political representation.

Rachel Griffiths

People going into the cities for the opportunities and the towns are getting older, no young people.

Mahatma Gandhi

Urbanization in India is a slow but sure death for her villages and villagers.

Joseph Hume

Destroy or take away the employment and wages of those artisans - which the corn laws in a great measure do - and you will, ere long, render the land in Great Britain of as little value as it is in other countries.

Willie Nelson

We're still here trying to get the word out that 330 farmers are quitting every week.

Oswald Spengler

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

Spengler and some others viewed with alarm the urban migration that had come with the industrial revolution. That migration was relatively minor compared to what took place in the remainder of the 20th century. In most developed coutries the rural population has become very small and the urban and suburban totally dominant.

Oliver Goldsmith

But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose.

Ebenezer Howard

It is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts.

Howard was one of the first people to recognize the migration from the country to the cities brought about by the Industrial Revolution and then suggest solutions. He advocated planned suburban communities that had some elements of the country, but allowed a density of people to function in an industrial economy. He called them “Garden Cities”. Forest Hills in New York and other American planned communities were much influenced by his thinking as were many other new communities since.

Rural Depopulation Quotes