| Popis: |
has primacy. I do not mean to suggest that people are unimportant to rural folk-far from it. But even rural socializing and recreation are much more closely tied to nature. If urban folk are people watchers, as Jane Jacobs once suggested, rural folk are nature watchersweather watchers, animal watchers, mountain, desert, or lake watchers, whatever the relevant nature may be. Recognizing the fundamental importance of nature and its resources to rural life and its quality also helps us to recognize what rural diversity is primarily about-and what produces it. Diversity in the physical geography of rural America, together with history, is the basic source of diversity in culture, organization, and wealth-from the fishing villages of New England to the irrigated farm communities of southern California. The difference between rural and urban is of course a relative one-cities are not (yet) totally artificial environments. Yet, it is a difference of fundamental importance, for it means that the quality of life in rural areas depends much more directly on the management and governance of natural resources, which present quite different management and governance problems due to their commonpool and/or flow characteristics. This strongly suggests that one important branch of rural studies is the study of common-pool resources and common-property institutions. Much progress h s occurred in the study of "the commons" over the last fifteen years, advances that should form part of the corpus of rural knowledge (see Bromley, Ostrom). Having distinguished the countryside, Castle proceeds to consider the normative base for a separate study of the countryside. He finds such a justification not in pure science but in applied science. Pure science suggests that "rural-urban" is a single variable, and to study the effects of that variable, it is necessary to observe its variation-to observe both rural and urban together. Applied science, however, is necessarily contextual. In this case, "rural" is not simply one category of an independent variable but a distinct context that potentially affects the relationships among a host of variables and constrains the application of general knowledge. Applied science also, as Castle indicates, requires a normative base. Here, Castle is in venerable company. Plato recognized the importance of the normative base of political inquiry precisely because he viewed it as an applied science. He proposed in part 1 of The Republic that politics and, by implication, the science that would improve it, be considered a "Techne" in the Greek, a craft or applied science that, like medicine, serves the good of its subject. From this presupposition proceeded centuries of productive political inquiry devoted to increasing the good of the governed. Applied science depends on conceptions of the good to be served. It seems a relatively short step-though one that required centuries to take-from the good of the governed to the consent of the governed as an instrument for securing their good. OrigThe author is in the Political Science Department, Houghton College, Houghton, New York. |
