Interesting Global News

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/hous-qst/ch03b.htm

On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication — presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production — would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins when one undertakes "from existing conditions" to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be solved.

It's why I'm Team Degrowth and a big believer in art nouveau. We need simplified, localised, non-commodified production and consumption. Craftsmanship and home economy, alternative agriculture systems which support individual families and immediate communities, mutual aid networks, severe regulation of resource extraction and pollution, centralised state control of those industries with a focus on becoming an ecological civilisation, and funding rural communities more to encourage a more even population distribution that's still in line with the carrying capacity of the land. China has been pretty good about tackling a lot of these problems in recent years but I think a real solution is a more radical reorganisation of supply-side economics and infrastructure to make the countryside more evenly developed at a lower scale than industrial society.

edit: John Bellamy Foster's work is invaluable if these problems interest you. It centres around this idea and the underlying idea of the metabolic rift.