Quotes about Locality

When the Apostles were taken away, Christianity did not at once break into portions; yet separate localities might begin to be the scene of internal dissensions, and a local arbiter in consequence would be wanted.

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs.

My old friend, Gene Logsdon, who's a fine writer on agriculture, and lately a novelist, once asked an Amish factory owner, "Do you have a toxic effluent from your factory?" And the owner looked at him in horror. He said, "Our children play around this factory." If you had a local slaughterhouse patronized by local people, who could watch the slaughtering and butchering of their own animals, you wouldn't need the government to inspect for sanitation.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.