Redistribution, Redistribution, Redistribution!

Digging a well sounds so biblical, at least to me, from a place where water comes out of taps connected to the Water Board's supply system.  And really I had thought the spring was enough.  But if the ecohouse is to be truly and reliably self-sufficient then springs are not enough.  In part it's technical and in part it's bureaucratic - obtaining permissions to drill and build is possible now but might not be as restrictions tighten round a scarce resource; and when there are lots of people the spring-fed water supply is too close to the edge for our water-consuming habits.

There used to be a family of fifteen living at the ecohouse when the farm was a full-time occupation and source of income;  but they didn't have three bathrooms.  They didn't have any bathrooms, or electricity, or heating other than the open fire in the central kitchen and the beasts stabled on the ground floor under the living quarters.  We forget how close such deprivation lies, the family were there until 1953 and the great abandonment of the land lasted for twenty years, from the early 'fifties.  It's all been put into reverse now and, as usual, it's the rich that gets the credit and the poor that gets the blame.

The poor get the flat-bound periferia  of the towns and cities, not even the beautiful, historic centres, and that's it.  The isolation, the silence, the views, the woods and  pastures, the dawns and sunsets, the groves and gardens   - all the compensations for the cold, the dark, the loneliness the deprivation, are taken by the owners cocooned by modern technology (and bathrooms.)  The classes who kept these landscapes for centuries couldn't begin to afford them.

Everyone can walk and picnic through our woods; the hunters are welcome to cull the deer and boar (but not kill the birds and hare), keeping it functioning costs far more than it yields in output of wood and oil (and terrible tomatoes), but there remains an immense social and economic disjunction.   Without the rather miserable modern world there cannot be the (rather miserable) modern populations.

It worries me: if anything goes wrong, even by narrow margins, individual opportunity to act effectively in straitened circumstances is minimal to non-existent.  Notions of 'fairness' and 'aspiration' are irrelevant politico-economic categories except in the current settlement. 

Something, and someone, has got to give.