Page 14 RAIN June 1982 ACCESS Shared Houses, Shared Lives: The New Extended Families and How They Work, by Eric Raimey,1979,216 pp., $4.95 from: St. Martin's Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010 Raimey describes the origins of the communal household, explores the significance of this growing trend, and offers the budding life-sharer a fairly comprehensive guide to joining or setting up a shared household. We were turned on to Appendix C, "The Communal Home Ownership Agreement," by some friends who used it to help draft out a contract when they bought a house together in the city. We found a copy in our library— you might, too. “General Agreement and Attunement,” donation plus .500 p&h from: The Matrix Institute PO Box 240 Applegate, OR 97530 The absolutely best way to design your communal land or home ownership contract, of course, is to find a successful example to use as a model. If you ask around enough, you may find some folks in your area with contract exp>erience and a willingness to share it. Then again, you may not find anyone who knows what you're looking for. To help you out, we're making our contract available through the Matrix Institute, a non-profit research and educational center with operations based on our land. The newly-formed Matrix Institute is organized in part to help people get on land and stay on land — through information access, integrated ecological systems, and attunement to people and nature. Contact us if we can be of assistance! Of Land and the City by Patrick Mazza The most profound economic truth I ever heard came not from a professional economist or a university professor, but from an old farmer in Quincy, Washington. "All wealth comes from the land," he told me. That simple statement focused my thinking in a new way. It gave me a tool for understanding economics that many conventional economists seem to ignore. It made clear to me that rural areas are of fundamental importance to the entire economy, that cities are completely dependent on what they import from the country. The modem, industrial city is like a space stahon. It requires uninterrupted shipments of food, energy, raw materials and sometimes even water from planet earth. The city must keep its vital connection with the land, for the land is the source of its life. Yet as significant as the countryside is, its importance is not acknowledged in the basic economic relationships that govern our society. The American countryside is in the same position as any Third World country. Its raw materials are sold to the industrial metropolis for low prices, and re-purchased in much more costly processed form. The city sets the terms of the market, so the price of raw materials does not keep pace with the cost of industrial goods. The flow of wealth is from the countryside to the metropolis. This unequal relationship leaves mral areas economically and ecologically damaged. The impacts include depopulation of the land, generally poor incomes, disastrous soil erosion, depletion of water, mutilation of forests and employment of rip-and-run mining practices. Increasing amounts of rural land, especially in the Western U.S., are being sacrificed to the energy god. Now, more than ever, the question must be asked — Will our rural areas be merely resource colonies for the cities, or will they be renewed as living communities? Urban as well as rural people have an interest in a sound answer to this question, for while rapid and cheap extraction of resources benefits cities in the short run, in the long run it means disaster. Destroying rural economies drives people into the cities, thus increasing unemployment and competition for available jobs. Ruining rural ecosystems erodes the basis of urban civilization, which is the ability of the land to produce surplus wealth. Without a sustainable and healthy rural economy, the cities too will be economically sick. The illusion of separation cannot last much longer. We truly are all connected. That consciousness is perhaps farther advanced in the countryside, if for no other reason than that rural people are experiencing firsthand the devastating effects of the exploitative economy. The economic depression that has hit many cities has already spread through most American rural areas. Where most of the cheaply extracted trees or minerals have been removed, there is massive unemployment. Where farmers have become heavily dependent on increasingly costly manufactured fertilizers, chemicals and equipment, which is virtually everywhere on this continent, they are findng it tougher and tougher to stay afloat. The desperate economic condition of rural areas is a result of control by urban institutions that have little interest in the longterm cultural and ecological integrity of the countryside. The people who live in a place generally realize there is a limit to how much they can foul their own nest. They have a stake in its fate. This is not true of
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