Where and Why to Start in Rural and Small Town America

If You Aren't Talking about These in the Rural, You Aren't Talking Rural

I had always assumed my mother’s family had been too poor to afford electricity back in the Great Depression, but then I learned about the Rural Electrification Act (REA) of 1936, which finally offered solutions for places like Bland County, VA to get lights...Thus, my mother’s rural sharecropping family got electric some forty years after the big cities.

I liken this to the rest of America’s similar awakening about the problems in rural America--and, once again, about forty years late. Rural regions developed as resource reserves have seen their jobs in the last forty years or so fully automated or off-shored away. Our tillable land along shores or around cities has been sucked into suburban or vacation housing developments, ruining previous centuries’ work of building rich soil and grasses needed for livestock and dairy farms.

The rest of America has woken up shocked that somewhere, someone else gets up, puts on a non-ironic name-patch work shirt, and goes and works the rig, mines the coal, or drives the truck that makes the goods and services on offer in big cities and suburbs appear seamlessly while back at home, their own local single economic sector town shrivels up, their first cousin overdoses on meds originally prescribed when he slipped a disk working the logging truck, a brother comes back from Afghanistan without a hand, then, his kids move away, ‘cause there aren’t any jobs.

Yet, every few years a patrician presidential hopeful musters up an American macho and walks out in a beard and lumberjack shirt, or a cowboy hat, or a trucker hat, and then this usually tuxedo-ed high-bred highbrow talks beer joint for a few months and overpromises. At least Slick (like city slicker) Willy sounded like us. And, well, then, this last guy: where the hell out here is our hope?

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As a researcher of rural economic and community development with a case study of central Appalachia, I focus on what to do about these rural problems narrated above. The points below offer very solid starts.

1. Other countries have a national rural policy. We need an explicit United States National Rural Policy that outlines an American approach to rural areas and small towns that is separate from the conflated ag interests of the Farm Bill. This policy should address first and foremost people and land stewardship.
2. We must create and support rural economic sectors in which jobs cannot be automated away. ALL large scale industry is in the business of not hiring people, whether that industry be coal, renewables, agriculture, textiles, manufacturing, etc.
3. Single sector rural areas gutted due to automation and externalizing environmental costs must engage in two issues: A. How many people can their locality actually economically support? B. How can the place where they are be rehabbed and made more habitable now (such as a Rural Broadband Act or more money for building deconstruction or brownfield rehab)? The European Union had a long program on this through the 2000s called Shrink Smart. We have not even started a national conversation on this.
4. The federal government must create a Rural Task Force on Health. Piloting urban solutions in rural areas does not work. We are already beset by huge numbers of drug injectors and addiction here in rural America. There must be a national task force and national discussion on this as both a health and a workforce issue and its solutions must be scaled to the rural, and, most importantly, funded.

Seems the latest president patrician in a trucker hat will ratchet up fossil fuels, as cheap energy drives economic growth and he has that in common with the economic dinosaur model of Russia, but, most of that drilling and pumping out in the rural can be done now by multicorps’ big machines, and manufacturing driven by cheap energy is going to locate, or is already located, near ports. Same old, same old for us out here in suck it dry and leave us holding the empty bag land.

Rural folks can take a lot, but we’re dying out here where you fly over. Our towns are dying or dead. Our people are dying or dead. Do you care? Are you listening now, the rest of America? We are supposed to be in this all together and you’re at least about forty years late to this, this thing we are in. But, well, you listening now? You and us, we got some catching up to do.