A new life model

Giv­ing up city life to be­come a farmer used to be a ro­man­tic ide­al­i­sa­tion that aroused cu­rios­ity and a cer­tain in­ter­est, but was still seen as an ex­trav­a­gance. How­ever, things have changed a lot lately, and today more and more ur­ban­ites con­sider start­ing a new life as farm­ers, liv­ing off the land and live­stock in the coun­try­side. If a few years ago the “ne­orural” move­ment was an echo of the “hippy” move­ment, what is hap­pen­ing today is not a fad, but the re­sult of re­flec­tion by the gen­er­a­tions most threat­ened by the fail­ure of cities as sus­tain­able life mod­els in a world threat­ened by cli­mate change. Life is not re­turn­ing to what it was and as our so­ci­ety builds a lot of “new nor­mals”, mov­ing from the city to the coun­try­side may be one of them. It is not a re­turn to the land to live a bu­colic life, but a change of life to sur­vive ac­cord­ing to a more re­al­is­tic life model: less con­sumerism, less glob­al­i­sa­tion, less pol­lu­tion, less stress, and a new con­cept of “wealth” and “qual­ity of life”, which is not that ex­ported by busi­ness schools. More and more fam­i­lies are will­ing to un­der­take this life pro­ject away from what cities rep­re­sent today, and go to live in a small vil­lage or town. Tech­nol­ogy also pro­vides many ser­vices that were in­ac­ces­si­ble in the rural world until a cou­ple of decades ago. The con­cept of “liv­ing well”, under the new par­a­digms im­posed by the cli­mate cri­sis, is no longer a syn­onym of op­u­lence and ma­te­r­ial pos­ses­sions, but of hav­ing healthy food for the body and the planet, breath­ing cleaner air, work­ing not to pro­duce more and get richer every day but to have a bal­anced and happy life, to give chil­dren a fu­ture in a world of per­ma­nent changes and crises. This has noth­ing to do with any­thing bu­colic, but it is rather quite ra­tio­nal. It is a change that is tak­ing place in some Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, and more and more in Cat­alo­nia, with a gen­er­a­tion of young en­tre­pre­neurs choos­ing the rural world, not based on large farms, but on the re­cov­ery of crops, on restau­ra­teurs and the gen­eral pub­lic valu­ing local prod­ucts, and on the high qual­ity and so­cial re­spon­si­bil­ity of work­ing the land with­out de­stroy­ing it.