In praise of the humble stone and the genius and craft of ancient civilizations, applicable to many of todays rural community challenges:
There is a reason why today we can still look upon acient monuments, water works, canals with awe and wonder as to their continued functionality and longevity.
Someone took the time to make it that way.
Not aliens from outerspace but master craftspeople and consulting enigneers from ancient civilaztions .
The key component to all this - stone. they built in stone. The writer has had the good fortune to both study and work in this medium for many years in both an ancient and modern context. Tremendous and good works await with traditional stone work, sometimes complimented carefully with selective modern technology at certain stages (especially water resources). There is that old saying, do it right the first time. There is an added advantage in rediscovery of pride in culture, artistry and craft that has lagged these last few centuries in certain communities, but which is still inherent and reclaimable to common benefit, building self reliance.
This observation calls into focus the need for a broad base of contributors to adress commnity needs, not just engineers and technical people, when it comes to physically constructing something of true benefit. There is exciting, quality work ahead . Work that can endure for centuries. The observations of social scientists integrated with those of technical people are critical and it is agreeable to work toward better planning within this framework to make up for the mistakes of the the past where one or the other faction competed unproductively with each other resulting in many failed projects.P7
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