With industrial systems, profits and growth take precedent over personal relationships and social responsibility. Specialization and standardization separate people within families and within communities and devalues human relationships. Relationships among people are reduced to buying and selling or other forms of legal transactions. As relationships become distant and impersonal, exploitation of workers, consumers, and taxpayers becomes accepted business practices. The social, ecological, and economic degradation of America is no different in concept from the demise of our family farms and the ecological, economic, and social decay of our rural communities. The linkages between cause and effect are just easier to see in agriculture.
