Principle 8

A New Agrarian believes in the importance of place—that localities should be distinctive and that how one lives should be tied to where one lives.

The centrality of place to an agrarian way of life is so important that I could have listed it first, as the foundation of New Agrarian thought. I have chosen instead to express it as the culmination. Agriculture, if it is to be thoughtful and sustainable, must be sensitive to place, must let its methods be determined by the land to which they are applied. Informal and voluntary means of social organization are possible only when the individuals thus organized know one another and determine for themselves, locally, the shape of their organization. Large scales make concentration of power both necessary and possible. One can only unify life's economic and spiritual sides on a small scale, locally and individually; to do it on a large scale would mean enforcing the spiritual beliefs of one person or group at the expense of everyone else.
But place is more than just a necessity of an agrarian way of life. It is a positive good in itself. To be not only sensitive to the place in which one lives but also a part of that place makes possible a deep, multifaceted integration with nature and with community. New Agrarians are interested in other places and eager to learn from and about them, but they do not spend their lives wandering the globe doing so. Each New Agrarian prefers to make his or her own place, neighborhood, community, locality all that it can be. The New Agrarian is neither cosmopolitan nor xenophobic, but embraces instead an "enlightened parochialism" that seeks to blend local tradition with thoughtful progress.
Calls for diversity too often forget diversity of place. The New Agrarian sees it as the foundation and the culmination of positive, meaningful life on earth.