The rural environment is composed of landforms and settlement patterns dominated by land use. These landscapes have a distinctive character which largely reflects its use for plant production as a primary input to the human food chain.   The structure and land use pattern reflects the multitude of individual decisions made by resource users. These decisions have led to an increase in the variety of enterprises. This has, in turn, led to increased diversity in the rural environment. use of resources.

Today, ruralism is much more than a countryside characteristic or trait.  It has come to denote all those social, cultural, political, and economic ideas and actions about rural peoples and places that have been devised and implemented by urban-based elite groups. Globally, rural cultures have to comply with urban-centered programs of economic and social transformation which have an impact on the countryside environment and the everyday life of people who live there.Such programmes also induce rural people to comply with the specific ways of thinking and acting adopted by urban dwellers.

The modern issues of ruralism are exemplified by the English who were the first to experience the denudation of the countryside of its population and the desires of urbanites to protect it as a haven from industrialism. It is appropriate therefore to examine the present prediction for change in the English landscape because it is likely to be a template for the futures of global rural development.

Many see the countryside as a symbol of national identity. Both town and country dwellers feel they have a stake in England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. On top of this, we feel ourselves to be a crowded island with limited space. This intensifies competition over the use of land, making changes to the appearance of the countryside contentious.  In the heart of most urban dwellers is an unfulfilled desire to return to their rural homeland as soon as possible.  This demonstrates that first 'good' that is purchased after one's sustenance is the quality of life we associate with rurality. The nurture of the countryside is the first long- term aim of those who live in it, belong to it and wish to transfer it intact to their heirs.

Currently, twenty-eight per cent of England’s population – just over 14 million people – live in predominantly rural areas. Between 1981 and 2000, the population of these areas grew almost three times faster than in urban areas. This trend seems set to continue, driven by an overall growth in the number of households and continued counterurbanisation. Despite significant brownfield development, by 2020, perhaps as many as two million new homes will have been built in rural areas

Three inter-related processes fuel counter- urbanisation – quest, flight and overflow.

The employment and earning prospects of people who live in the countryside will depend on their economic focus.

Four economic ideotypes of countryside can be recognised – commuter countryside, country towns, farmed countryside and ex-industrial areas – each with different prospects for the future.

For many, it is the physical environment that makes the countryside distinctive and desirable. The quality and experience of that environment are, therefore, key factors in creating a feeling of wellbeing.

The rural environment is particularly influenced by land use and transport infrastructure.

Land use

Land use and farming practice have created much of today’s countryside. Present drivers of change are, however, pushing in different directions.

Transport infrastructure

UK road traffic will increase by nearly 50% by 2031, according to the RAC. As population grows, employment relocates to the countryside and rural tourism expands, the English countryside will be greatly affected.

Longer traffic jams will produce a crisis for the rural economy, with rising business costs and undermined profitability.

Yet easing congestion will be fraught with difficulty. Road tolls are unlikely to be popular. New road or rail links would be widely seen as damaging, with opposition supported by town- dwellers who feel they have a stake in the appearance of rural England. Also, experience shows that building more roads simply means more cars use them. Park-and-ride schemes will spread, as will road charging, but with low popularity and limited effect.

Will people seek electronic forms of communication instead and spend more time working from home? Or will they learn to live with even higher congestion, as they use voice- activated commands to order their shopping while they queue in traffic?

A second dimension of well-being is whether people feel in control.

For the countryside, political autonomy is particularly significant. Key determinants will be the future pace and scale of devolution, the representation of rural interests, and the distribution of power within the countryside.

In our highly centralised state, decisions affecting the countryside have largely been taken by Whitehall. As regions, rather than states, become the key players in the global economy, this centralisation will prove increasingly untenable. Regional government will become more important.

However, the extent and speed with which power is devolved, how far urban interests will prevail over rural interests, and who exercises power within the countryside remain unclear.

A third core dimension of well-being is the quality of relationships. A strong sense of community has traditionally been the stuff of the countryside. People felt they belonged. Rural communities are still widely regarded as more vibrant, and there are several drivers that could maintain or reconstruct communities. Working against these, however, are powerful forces of social fragmentation. How will these two sets of forces play out in the next two decades? Key factors in the process are social exclusion, new communities and crime.

Social exclusion

In response to the global economy, the UK is increasingly concentrating on high value-added products. This is creating a growing demand for both traditional and new skills. Acute skills shortages, already present, may force employers to recruit from those on the edge of the labour market – for example, by packaging jobs to make them more attractive to workers above retirement age, and by using technology to make jobs more friendly for out-of-work disabled people or increase the value added by low-paid workers.

All this could benefit poor people in rural areas. New technologies tend to raise the productivity of higher paid jobs first, but benefits cascade down subsequently. Are we about to enter this latter phase of information technology, with the prospect of narrowing the income gap and reducing social exclusion?

Likely trends

New communities

In the countryside, as in society in general, interest groups, ‘virtual communities’ and sub- cultures have proliferated at the expense of traditional local communities. In the global context, local communities are increasingly squeezed between the forces of globalisation and neotribalism.

These trends will continue. Broadband will make it easier to be involved in more groups simultaneously. In a ‘pick‘n’mix’ world, people will self-assemble their own futures, creating room for life-paths to diverge even more sharply. Rural society will fragment still further.

But there is a counter-current. The ‘community vacuum’ will prompt people to place a high value on ‘place’ – in effect to create a ‘symbolic community’ in which they feel at home. While they will initially identify with the place rather than the people in it, the longer they live there the better they will get to know, and interact with, their neighbours.

This phenomenon could bring both cohesion and conflict.

Attachment to place will create opportunities to bring fragments of the countryside together – in effect, to create new communities. But there is a danger the countryside will become a battleground instead – between, for example, business interests and ‘not-in-my- backyard’ protestors, or landowners defending their property from ramblers claiming right of way. The countryside may increasingly become a flashpoint, forcing government to intervene.

Crime

In an unstable and anxious world, concern about and fear of crime will increase – and the countryside will not be exempt. Already, while there is still less crime in the countryside than in towns, the gap may be narrowing. In the future the two will converge even more. In some places this will be especially charged, and seen as a symbol of rapid and unwanted change in the countryside – a reminder of all the other ways in which ‘things are not what they used to be’.

The outcome will be that more powerful and affluent groups will withdraw into themselves. They will be more cautious about letting their children outside. They will be more suspicious of strangers. They will set up Neighbourhood Watch schemes, install burglar alarms, and CCTV cameras, and in some cases employ security guards. Some will retreat into gated communities. They will, in effect, push crime away from themselves, to poorer and less protected neighbourhoods. Poor people are already most likely to be victims of crime. That trend will continue, and rural society will become more fragmented.

Meaning

The fourth element of well-being is a sense of meaning. In the past, the combination of farming, as the supplier of the nation’s food, and its related landscapes, as ‘quintessentially English’, made the countryside a rich source of meaning. This vision has largely disappeared. What will replace it?

The answer will depend on those living in and using the countryside, and the meanings they attach to it. We can identify four broad groupings.

As these different groups jostle for position, what new vision will replace the one based on the countryside as a source of food?

Will the pragmatists ‘win’? A key factor will be the need to resolve differences in rural England - a driving force behind the ‘pragmatic countryside’. Conflicts will become more numerous as the rural population grows, and differences will be resolved on the (utilitarian) basis of what works for most people rather than by appeal to any shared ideal about the countryside. Pragmatism also reflects and reinforces postmodern values in society at large, as people increasingly live mosaic lives jumping from one network, sub-culture and value system to another.

The absence of a lofty ideal may, in fact, make it easier for the most powerful to prevail. The triumph of pragmatism may mean that there is no court of values to which the weak can appeal. The lack of an overarching vision for rural England may, therefore, enable ‘what works best’ to become ‘what works best for the strongest group’.The world is changing – rapidly and profoundly. Of course, every generation has felt this – and worried about it! At the beginning of the 21st Century, however, things are changing faster and more deeply, and people are more anxious as to what the future might hold. Perhaps, also, people feel more responsible for the sort of world that our children and grandchildren will inherit – a concern that is, after all, at the heart of the idea of ‘sustainability’.

Awareness of the speed and rapidity of change and anxiety about its outcomes, has prompted many people to think more about the future - and to devise systematic ways of doing so. Such ‘futures thinking’ stimulates new ways of looking at things - to ‘think out of the box’ and to ‘take the long view’. It also helps society today to understand better how decisions now will serve or thwart aspirations for tomorrow.