"Small Towns Now Bear the Brunt" of Harvey

That's part of a headline from today's New York Times, which includes this line (see bold, which reflects my emphasis), which sums up so much about rural America and service delivery:

But as Houston, the urban behemoth that has so far been the focal point in the unfolding drama of Hurricane Harvey, began gingerly to assess the devastation, the storm marched on to conquer a vast new swath speckled with small towns that are home to millions of people who were shocked anew by Harvey’s tenaciously destructive power. Officials faced a population in dire need, but far more difficult to reach.

The story quotes a FEMA official as saying,

There are a lot of places that are not accessible by car or truck or boat, and we need to get to the survivors to get them critical aid.  

The story, dateline Newton, Texas (population 2,478 and therefore barely rural by the U.S. Census Bureau definition), reports several anecdotes from different "small towns," including from Batson, Moss Hill, Bon Weir, Aransas Pass, Port Aransas, Ingleside and Rockport. Of course, it treats towns like Port Arthur, population 55,000, as "small," which would not necessarily meet my definition, but you get the idea. In fact, the story mentions that the 50 counties affected by the flood include more than 300 towns and "small cities."
Here's a quote from a resident of Moss Hill:

Ms. Price said she knew how widespread the storm’s toll was, and she knew that in the past rural areas like this one did not always get the most immediate aid. 

“We’re not forgotten,” she said. “It just takes them a little longer to get to us.” 

Rural residents insisted that they were used to being far from outside help and that self-reliance and an ethos of neighbors helping neighbors came with the territory.

This story from earlier in the storm centered on hard-hit Rockport, population 8,766, in Aransas County.  It featured this lede, which in turn featured a very colorful 16-year-old character:

In the days since Hurricane Harvey slammed into his hometown, Colin McBurney has become his own first-responder – a 16-year-old in a backward baseball cap with bare feet, a pistol and a truck. He drove to the houses of his neighbors all weekend, checking on the people no one had heard from. 

One friend made the kind of request people make in this bay town of nearly 11,000 whose spirit is equal parts fishing village, millionaire’s retreat and working-class country – please get the horse.

This story yesterday was more about events (rescues, to be precise) in Houston and its burbs, but it included this line that struck me as reminiscent of rural as much as of working class (again, see bold for my emphasis):

The volunteer rescue boat and many others like it are a sign of how the response to one of the worst disasters in decades in Texas has been, in many ways, improvised. Recreational vehicles — airboats, Jet Skis, motorized fishing boats — have rushed to the aid of people trapped in their homes, steered by welders, roofers, mechanics and fishermen wearing shorts, headlamps and ponchos. The working class, in large part, is being saved by the working class.

Indeed, the little crew of men Manny Fernandez featured in this story had driven to Houston from Lufkin, Texas, population 35,000, once they saw the need.  Lufkin is 120 miles northeast of Houston, in "deep East" Texas.        

California's most rural Assembly member becomes minority leader

Brian Dahle, the assemblyman represented California's most rural district, Assembly District No. 1, became the chamber's minority leader last week.  Dahle is a third-term Republican from tiny Bieber, population 312, in the northern reaches of Lassen County.  Prior to his election to the California State Assembly in 2012, Dahle served for 16 years on the Lassen County Board of Supervisors. 

I know a bit about Dahle--or feel like I do--because he was generous enough to come speak to my Law and Rural Livelihoods class this past spring.  I found him to be a straight talker, middle-of-the road, Republican.  He has strong feelings about issues you would expect:  how public lands/forests are managed by the federal government, mostly in relation to fire (Smokey Bear is a culprit) and rural broadband.  He also talked quite the Republican talk on job creation, suggesting that public sector jobs don't count.  Dahle's bias is toward private sector jobs, not least because he and his wife own a small business--they have a seed farm.  As for those public lands and forestry management, Dahle said that as Lassen County Supervisor, he had more experience lobbying in Washington than in Sacramento because of the presence of so much public land in far northern California. 

One striking fact I learned about the district, which spans all or part of nine counties (all of Lassen, Modoc, Nevada, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, and Siskiyou counties, and portions of Butte and Placer) is that it takes eight hours to drive from one end of it to the other.  The southern most reaches are on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, and it stretches through the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains into the Cascades and all the way to the Oregon state line.  It's got to be hard to keep up with constituents under those spatial circumstances. 

Dahle's district includes the bulk of what would be the State of Jefferson (read some earlier posts on the topic here, here and here).  When our Law and Rural Livelihoods class asked Dahle about the State of Jefferson issue, he said that he was happy to talk about it but that it would "never happen."  That is, the State of Jefferson will never secede from California--and if it tried, it would not be permitted to do so.   He also suggested that many who support the State of Jefferson movement are economically disaffected, perhaps because they own a home and/or land in the district, but struggle to make a living there. 

The leadership position for the Republican Caucus came open when Chad Mayes was forced out of the role over his support of the gasoline tax that passed this summer.  Interestingly, Mayes also represents a rural-ish area, Yucca Valley, in southern San Bernardino County.  According to the Los Angeles Times, Dahle is also considered more conservative than Mayes, though he came across as quite centrist when he visited my class.  Here's a quote from the Los Angeles Times story about the leadership transition:

Other Republicans said Dahle has the leadership and bridge-building skills to heal the rift in the party, and a willingness to sit at the table with the majority party without surrendering on conservative principles.

“He’s a gifted leader,” said Shawn Steel, a Mayes critic and one of California’s two representatives to the Republican National Committee. “He’s an effective unifier of the caucus, and we really needed that. I’m so glad the drama is over. Chad was just not the right leader at the right time.” 

Mayes also praised his successor. 

“I’m actually very excited about Brian taking over as Republican leader,” Mayes said, standing next to Dahle in a state Capitol hallway. “He has proven himself to be a very strong leader, somebody who is of great character, who has a heart for California and a heart for the people of his district.”

As for me, I'm interested to see if Dahle's leadership position permits him to get more rural issues on the Assembly agenda--and to get those issues, e.g., rural broadband, acted on in a way that benefits rural communities and residents.  Prioritizing--or even equalizing--rural is a tough sell in a state where just 6-7% of the population live in rural places. 

On the total eclipse and rural gentrification

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 21, 2017

I've spent the last week or so in the rural West, between Bozeman, Montana and Jackson, Wyoming.  I've become what they call a shadow chaser, I guess, having been drawn here for the total eclipse of the sun.  Right now, I'm in Moose, Wyoming, in the midst of Grand Teton National Park.  (Moose is populated primarily by families with "inholdings," wikipedia tells us).  Moose is about a dozen miles north of posh Jackson Hole, which I've long considered a prime example of rural gentrification.  (Some prior posts mentioning Jackson Hole are here and here).  I'm ready for today's total eclipse, ensconced in the Dornan's complex (where I'm staying in a cabin), which has security posted to keep out the hoi polloi--those who have not bought a "ticket" to be here, one such ticket being a $60 lunch.    Another "ticket" is being a passenger on one of the two busses who've apparently purchased the right to be here.  Dornan's has closed all of their businesses until after 1 pm, about the time of the fourth contact (a/k/a the end of the eclipse).

Dornan's complex, Moose, Wyoming, looking toward the Grand Teton Mountains

Anyway, the New York Times posted this story last night, showing a location very near where I am.  The headline is "Before a Solar Eclipse Crosses 14 States, a Great American Road Trip."  We pulled into Jackson from Yellowstone on Saturday afternoon, and the traffic wasn't too bad about 40 hours before the eclipse (though plenty of slow, thoughtless RV drivers failed to use the turnouts, which did slow us down).   However, as we plotted a trip into Jackson for dinner on Saturday night, the traffic entering town put us off, and we returned to the Dornan's complex for a mediocre pasta meal.

What has been remarkable to me is the air traffic coming into Jackson Hole.  Our cabin is in the flight path, and I cannot imagine that as many commercial, scheduled planes come into Jackson Hole as we are hearing and seeing--even in high season, which we are in--on a typical summer day.  Some folks I met here said their friends are coming in on a private jet from Seattle, and they had been told that there was no flexibility to change their flight window because the airport will be so busy today.  I just checked this morning's flight arrivals in Jackson Hole, and the last four planes to land have been private:

Flight log into Jackson Hole Airport, morning of August 21, 2017. 

In an earlier post about the eclipse, I wrote about the plight over very small towns--including Glendo, Wyoming, that were likely to be overwhelmed by eclipse visitors.  Glendo had set up a "Go Fund Me" account to help defray the costs of porta potties and post-eclipse clean-up.  One had the feeling that Glendo would just as soon not be in the path of totality.  Not so with Jackson Hole.  The town has street banners touting the eclipse, and lots of eclipse paraphernalia and T-shirts for sale, including one that says "The Hole Eclipse" (which I'm hoping gets marked down before I leave town!).   The Jackson Hole Police had a pop-up tent "booth" on the town square and several officers on horseback. Needless to say, a different group of folks are flying into Jackson than are driving into Glendo, and that's a reflection of the places' respective economic fates and geographic features.  In short, it's a reflection of rural gentrification vs. plain old rural (or even rural decline, rural population loss).

Horse-back riding police officer in Jackson Hole, August 20

Yesterday, we rode bikes to South Jenny Lake, inside Grand Teton National Park.  Along the way we saw lots of porta potties stationed along the road.  We also saw signs touting places for eclipse viewing in the park--apparently the efforts of the National Park Service to channel visitors (in one case, into a large open plain).  Many RVs were parked along the roads in the park, perhaps intending to be there for the duration.  Certainly, I wouldn't want to be moving anywhere in a vehicle at this point on August 21, 2017.

As a ruralist, I'm thinking it might have been more interesting--if more stressful--to have visited Glendo for the eclipse.  But I'll have a ready opportunity to visit a low-population and high-poverty rural locale for the 2024 eclipse.  My hometown, Jasper, Arkansas, will be barely in the zone of totality for that one, and I plan to witness it there.

Wildfire in the rural West, from Montana to California

A few weeks ago I heard a short news story on NPR on a Sunday evening about the residents of  Missoula, Montana lining up along the roads by which the vehicle carrying the body of a fallen firefighter would travel.  The body of Brent Witham, who had died when a falling tree hit him as he fought the Lolo Peak fire, was being returned to his southern home, via air transport from Missoula.  The corresponding story from The Missoulian newspaper reads in part:

The body of California Hotshot Brent Witham will be transported to the Missoula Airport Monday morning in a procession that begins at 9 a.m. in Missoula.

The route will start at Garden City Funeral Home, 1705 West Broadway St., and head west along Broadway to the Aerial Fire Depot.

The Forest Service organizers are asking people to line Broadway between the funeral home and the Reserve Street overpass by 8:30 a.m. For safety reasons, the public is asked not to line or park on Broadway west of the overpass.

I thought when I heard the NPR story:  what a "rural thing to do."  Maybe, in particular, it is a western rural thing to do--honoring a fallen firefighter who was doing a very risky job to protect people he didn't even know.  Montanans understand that risk and sacrifice, as do so many other rural folks.

Witham was with the Vista Grande Hotshot crew based in Riverside County, California, part of the San Jacinto Ranger District of the San Bernardino National Forest.  When his body returned to California, he was not similarly honored by the people in his community.  Instead, fire vehicles driven by firefighting professionals joined a vehicular procession to remember and honor him.

I wonder what to make of this difference between Montana (where Missoula is actually "urban") and California, especially given the rural base of the Vista Grande Hotshots, near Idyllwild.  

I'm in Montana now, the southwestern part, en route to Yellowstone National Park.  A cover story in  yesterday's Bozeman Daily Chronicle was about a recent small fire north of Three Forks, a bit west of Bozeman.   Two youth were being charged with setting the fire, which burned about 250 acres.  A heading on the Chronicle's website is "Fire Line," and another story there is "Western Montana Full of Fire Activity."  Folks in the lovely shops on Main Street yesterday mentioned that the air in Bozeman had only just cleared, thanks to rain, from the smoke of a nearby fire.  

Poignant tale of a return to Mexico, from rural Iowa

This is from Jack Healy's NY Times piece, dateline Hampton, Iowa, titled "Stay, Hide or Leave?  Hard Choices for Immigrants in the Heartland." 

Now, at this tense juncture for immigrants and their adoptive hometowns across the conservative swaths of rural America, Ms. Rivera planned to sever one last tie. She was returning to Mexico — and to her husband — with Steven, 13 years old and American-born. 

Some politicians call it “self-deportation.” She called it her family’s only hope of being together. 

Edith Rivera's husband was deported in 2015.

The heartland is freckled with Hamptons and Ediths. In small agricultural towns that supported President Trump by 20-point margins, residents are now seeing an immigration crackdown ripple through the families that have helped revive their downtown squares and transform their economies.

The story also features the role of the local Franklin County sheriff, Linn Larson, who was elected on promises to crack down on undocumented immigrants.  Previously, the county was on national lists of immigrant safe havens.  Franklin County's population is just over 10,000, and it is northwest of Cedar Rapids.

While the paragraph above refers to "conservative swaths of rural America," it also depicts Edith Rivera's strong connections to the community, including to non-Hispanic whites.

On "barefoot lawyers" (a/k/a paralegals) serving rural India

The New York Times ran this fascinating little piece last week about Namati, an organization that trains paralegals in rural communities in India, (villages, I suppose they would say) to help fight for rights, including clean air and other environmental rights.   Tina Rosenberg's story, part of the Fixes series, describes an environmental injustice in Bogribail, a village in India, where IRB Infrastructure Developers is the culprit.  But the reason to read this story is to learn about India's "barefoot lawyers," paralegals who are also community organizers who teach residents to press administrative agencies for relief.   Here's an excerpt about what happens next in Bogribailt, after, that is, villagers asked the government for compensation were denied:

 Villagers did not ask IRB or the government to stop or diminish the pollution, because they didn’t know that the factory’s practices violated numerous regulations. 

Then Maruti Gouda took the case. 

He’s the opposite of a superlawyer.  He is 29 and not a lawyer at all, actually — he attended college but didn’t graduate. Like his father and most of the people in his nearby village, he’s a clam harvester. 

Gouda is employed by Namati, a nonprofit organization that works in a number of countries in Asia and Africa, as well as in the United States, "to democratize law."  Vivek Maru, an American lawyer, founded the group in 2011.  Here's a quote from Namati's home page:

More than four billion people around the world live outside the protection of the law. They are driven from their land, denied basic services, and intimidated by violence.

We advance justice by helping people to understand, use, and shape the laws that affect them.

The Namati website also has this description of these paralegals:

they are trained in basic law and in skills like mediation, organizing, education, and advocacy. They form a dynamic, creative frontline that can engage formal and traditional institutions alike.

The term "barefoot lawyers" is a play on "barefoot doctors," the term sometimes used for Chinese rural peasants who were trained to dispense health advice and health care during the cultural revolution.

The absolute best line of the NYT story is from Maruti Gouda's boss about the role of Gouda and his "paralegal"colleagues' key roles on their home turf:

We can always teach them the law.  We can’t teach them to be from here.

I can't help wonder about the ways in which this model might work in the United States to empower rural residents who are afflicted with environmental and other injustices.  A little cultural competency from locals, who will also be able to cultivate trust from community members, seems critical.  Unfortunately, I could not find any examples of Namati's work in the United States on the organization's website, though a search for "United States" on the website did bring up a number of institutional connections, including, for example, to the Environmental Law Institute and to studies of access-to-justice issues in the domestic context.

On Sears Roebuck and its demise

The New York Times has a big feature today on Sears, "The Incredible Shrinking Sears."  Of course, the entity used to be Sears Roebuck and Company, and it was associated with the massive catalog that showed up one a year in your mailbox, in late summer, with a smaller follow-up for the Christmas season.  The focus of Julie Creswell's story is how a "financial wizard took over" Sears and "presided over its epic decline."  But I want to take a moment to be sentimental about what Sears used to mean in rural America.  Here's a salient except:

At the turn of the 20th century, as Americans established roots across the nation, they turned to Sears. Through its robust mail-order business — some catalogs were more than 500 pages — Sears shipped groceries, rifles, corsets, cream separators, davenports, stoves and entire prefab houses to some of the most remote regions of the country.

As Americans moved from rural communities to larger cities, many no longer needed to shop by thumbing through the catalog; they preferred to visit dazzling department stores. Sears began opening hundreds of stand-alone retail stores, some with soda fountains, dentist’s offices and pet shops alongside tombstones and farm tractors.

The comparison to amazon.com is inevitable, of course.  Sears was the amazon of its day.  The rest of the story is, quite frankly, too depressing to describe--read for yourself what Edward S. Lampert, that Wall Street wiz kid, has done to Sears Holding Company, all while essentially telecommuting from his home in Miami, rarely setting foot in a Sears store.

Eclipse visitors expected to overwhelm pockets of rural America

Eclipse craze has hit the nation, and in the West, where I live, I'm starting to hear a lot about the impact that eclipse tourism is going to have on rural communities.  One data point I heard is that the population of Wyoming is expected to double on August 21, eclipse day.  Of course, that's not saying a lot, one might say, given that the state's population is only about 585,000, and it's a big state (the 10th largest in land area) with lots of eclipse territory, so it won't take a lot for visitors to overwhelm residents.  

This piece on The Outline is datelined Glendo, Wyoming, population 205, a town that has run a crowdfunding campaign to help defray expenses (e.g., portable toilets, extra trash cans) associated with the anticipated tourism overload.  Here's an excerpt that highlights the rural angle on the eclipse.

The total solar eclipse, the first visible in the U.S. since 1918, has been named the “Great American Eclipse” and could shape up to be the country’s biggest temporary mass migration to see a natural event ever. And it is bringing rare economic opportunity and attention to small towns along the eclipse’s path of totality, or the area where the full eclipse will be viewable. 

Along with the potential to rake in significant tourist dollars comes the fear that small, rural communities do not have the infrastructure to accommodate an influx of visitors. At least one town, Glendo, Wyoming, is looking to crowdfunding for help. The town is home to 202 people and takes up less than half a square mile of land. But thanks to its prime solar eclipse viewing location, it is expecting 70,000 to 100,000 visitors. Town clerk Brenda Hagen has launched a GoFundMe campaign on behalf of Glendo to raise $20,000 to pay for sanitation expenses like portable toilets and trash cans. 

Like other rural eclipse hotspots Driggs, Idaho; Madras, Oregon; and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Glendo residents have the opportunity to earn good money renting rooms, homes, and temporary campgrounds the night of the eclipse. What’s less sure for Glendo and communities like it is what the cleanup will look like and how many strangers will be willing to help. As of this writing, the town’s campaign has raised just over $3,000.

I've also seen/heard a few stories featuring Carhenge, in rural Alliance, Nebraska, population 8,491.   Here's a story in the Denver Post, and here's one from NPR.  What follows is from the Post:

Townspeople here in western Nebraska’s sandhills have been toiling for three years to get ready — right down to the logistics of diesel backup power and baking cookies for foreigners. 

They’re bracing for a potentially chaotic rush of people converging on the eclipse’s 67 mile-wide “path of totality,” which runs from Oregon beaches to South Carolina, spanning Wyoming and Nebraska. This ranks among the most accessible total eclipses ever, with an estimated 47 million Americans living within an hour of the shadow. Suddenly humans, whose ancestors feared eclipses as harbingers of disruption, are flocking like crazy to be in them. 

But no matter how much planning towns and cities do, the unexpected and irrational loom.

* * *

But for residents of Alliance, with its brick streets and 1880s buildings, the eclipse is emerging as a tangible and overwhelming reality requiring wide preparations. And, in an isolated rural town, mobilizing for a deluge of unknown guests is done with a sense of duty. 

The crowd will include visitors who think nothing of paying as much as $10 for a hamburger, Solar Eclipse Task Force co-chairperson Becci Thomas told residents last week at a final prep session. But merchants must not gouge, she said, repeating a civic warning leaders have been repeating for months. 

“This is your chance to shine,” she said. “You’re having company. Be as nice as you can.”

As for the piece on NPR, it said some of the same things, but particularly encouraged tourists to take advantage of the spreads of food that the churches in Alliance would no doubt have on offer.   Kevin Howard of the town's visitors bureau is quoted:

Howard says the town is planning concerts, a 30-team softball tournament, a Native American powwow, plus all the churches will put out their best spreads. "There's nothing better than a meal at the church," he says. "Those ladies put out the good stuff."

Like the Post reporter said, the folks in Alliance realize it's best to hope you can entice visitors back again, not to treat them as one-time prey.

Space, time and maternal mortality in rural America

That is the subject of the Wall Street Journal's latest installment in its series, "One Nation, Divisible."  The story by Betsy McKay and Paul Overberg is titled, "Rural America's Childbirth Crisis:  The Fight to Save Whitney Brown."  An excerpt follows, with a focus on time, distance and--implicitly--how distance is time.  Certainly that was the case for Whitney Brown, the woman whose death in childbirth was featured to illustrate the perils.

Since the start of the century, it has become more dangerous to have a baby in rural America. Pregnancy-related complications are rising across the U.S., and many require specialized care. For some women, the time and distance from hospitals with the resources and specialists to handle an obstetric emergency can be fatal. 

In 2015, women in rural areas died from pregnancy-related complications at a rate 64% higher than the rate in large cities, a reversal from 2000, when cities suffered a higher rate of such maternal deaths.

The reasons reflect shrinking resources, worsening health and social ills. Most rural hospitals don’t have high-risk pregnancy specialists who can treat sudden complications. Many don’t have cardiologists or anesthesiologists on staff. Making matters worse, rates of obesity, a major risk factor for pregnancy complications, are higher in rural than urban areas. 

Many rural hospitals have eliminated labor and delivery services, creating maternity deserts where women must travel, sometimes hours, for prenatal care and to give birth.

Over the decade between 2004 and 2014, the number of rural hospitals offering such services declined by 15%, compared to a 5% decline among suburban and urban facilities.  Among the reasons for the decline:  the closure of hospitals, a decline in birthrates, and challenges securing malpractice insurance.  The story notes that some women in rural Tennessee get no pre-natal care whatsoever.

The personal face of this story is Whitney Brown, a young woman who died after giving birth by emergency C-section.  She died, at least in part, because she could not be transported quickly enough from the rural hospital in McMinnville, Tennessee, population 13,605, to Chattanooga for specialist care.  One reason:  only two of Warren County's five ambulances were allowed out of the county at any given time, leading to a 3-hour delay in the transfer of Brown, whose heart stopped shortly before she reached Chattanooga.

Incidentally, The Economist has a story this week about the high U.S. maternal mortality rate, compared to other developed countries.

John Ikerd on "Economic Colonialism" in rural America

John Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri, delivered a stirring key note address at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Columbus Ohio on July 29.  That lecture has now been reprinted in Rural America In These Times.  Here's an excerpt:

I think “a growing sense of impotence and dread” accurately describes the prevailing mood of people in rural America. Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished scholar at the Leopold Center at Iowa State University, has observed that the “predominant attitude toward rural communities is that they have no future. In fact, this attitude seems to prevail even within rural communities.”

He quoted from a 1991 survey conducted in several Midwestern rural communities indicating that people in most rural towns harbored one of two visions for their communities. “One vision sees their town’s death as inevitable due to economic decline.” The other vision is also of “a dying town” with only a fading hope that “they can keep the town alive by attracting industry.” The widening rural-urban divide since the early 1990s seems to confirm a transition in rural attitudes from impotence and dread to desperation and anger.

That was Ikerd's first point in agreement with Margaret Wheatley.  Read the whole piece to learn more about the other two points with which he agrees with her:

1) “A growing sense of impotence and dread about the state of the nation,”
2) “The realization that information doesn’t change minds anymore.”
3) “The clarity that the world changes through local communities taking action—that there is no power for change greater than a community taking its future into its own hands.”

Number three, as you might imagine, is the most hopeful.  

Trump's trade policies hard on farmers (or at least on agribusiness)

While some political commentary suggested that many rural Americans were drawn to Donald Trump's candidacy because of his tough stance on trade, it turns out that some rural areas--or more precisely, some types of farmers--may be badly hurt by the ditching of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade pact negotiated by the Obama administration.  Politico Magazine ran this big feature a few days ago, "Trump's Trade Pullout Roils Rural America."  The dateline is Eagle Grove, Iowa, where a massive new meat processing plant is being built.  But the story illustrates the risks from the current trade environment to rural America and/or to farmers by reference to an agribusiness enterprise--the one building the Iowa facility, but which is based in North Carolina.  There's actually not much emphasis on individual producers.  Here's an excerpt:  

The gleaming new factory is both the great hope of Wright County, [Iowa] which voted by a 2-1 margin for Donald Trump, and the victim of one of Trump’s first policy moves, his decision to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

For much of industrial America, the TPP was a suspect deal, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which some argue led to a massive offshoring of U.S. jobs to Mexico. But for the already struggling agricultural sector, the sprawling 12-nation TPP, covering 40 percent of the world’s economy, was a lifeline. It was a chance to erase punishing tariffs that restricted the United States—the onetime “breadbasket of the world”—from selling its meats, grains and dairy products to massive importers of foodstuffs such as Japan and Vietnam.

The decision to pull out of the trade deal has become a double hit on places like Eagle Grove. The promised bump of $10 billion in agricultural output over 15 years, based on estimates by the U.S. International Trade Commission, won’t materialize. But Trump’s decision to withdraw from the pact also cleared the way for rival exporters such as Australia, New Zealand and the European Union to negotiate even lower tariffs with importing nations, creating potentially greater competitive advantages over U.S. exports.

A POLITICO analysis found that the 11 other TPP countries are now involved in a whopping 27 separate trade negotiations with each other, other major trading powers in the region like China and massive blocs like the EU. Those efforts range from exploratory conversations to deals already signed and awaiting ratification. Seven of the most significant deals for U.S. farmers were either launched or concluded in the five months since the United States withdrew from the TPP.

Here's a piece on Trump and NAFTA from the AgLaw Blog back in March, 2017.

Rural Virginia as sanctuary from the city, and from fame

This is a major theme in a piece that ran this weekend in the New York Times about Jeanette Walls, former NYC gossip columnist at New York Magazine made rich and (more) famous about a decade ago from the sale of her memoir. The Glass Castle, which spent seven years on the NYT Bestseller List.  Now that a film based on the book will be released this week (starring Brie Larson as Walls and Woody Harrelson as her father), Walls is getting renewed attention, including this piece by Ruth La Ferla.  Here's a nice summary of the book and movie, which also serve to foreshadow Walls' rural retreat from NYC to Orange, Virginia, population 4,721.  

Hasty retreats are a theme in the film, as they are in Ms. Walls’s 2005 bookof the same title. It is an alternately wrenching and exhilarating yarn of a childhood spent shuttling with her willfully shiftless parents from one parched Southwestern locale to another, and finally, when the family’s resources dry out, settling in Welch, the dilapidated West Virginia mining town that was her father’s childhood home.

La Ferla also writes of Walls' parallel adult decision to retreat from the city after her book became a bestseller:

She had few qualms about abandoning the cocktail-fueled chatter and red-carpet extravaganzas for the verdant seclusion of a 205-acre horse farm in Virginia.

And then she quotes Walls at some length, too, about what the move to rural Virginia means to her:

I know I’ll be O.K. here.  In New York, I’m not so sure. A lot of those gossip columnists, they lose their platform. Walter Winchell spent the last part of his life hanging out on street corners and handing out mimeographed columns. That was just an eye-opener for me. 

I wanted a place where I could go broke and still grow vegetables, bail water out of the creek and shoot deer.  If worse comes to worst, I’ll survive.

As for the city she left behind, Walls explains:

The city is like an old boyfriend with whom I amicably split.  

I read The Glass Castle back when it was released and seemed to have a love-hate relationship with it.  It was powerful indeed, though also uncomfortable  at many turns.  For me, it was a real tear-jerker, some of the characters a bit to close to the bone, too close to some folks from my own childhood.

This feature about Walls reminds me of this piece about Robert Duvall's Virginia retreat, from the Wall Street Journal a few months ago.  The Duvall story focused more on seclusion than survival, but also evoked the rural idyll.  Duvall calls Byrnley Farms, his property, "choice land."

The air is clean, which he appreciates. Mostly what he likes about it, though, is that it’s not the city. “The great Texas playwright Horton Foote once said a lot of people in New York don’t know what goes on beyond the south Jersey Shore, which is true,” Mr. Duvall says. “I mean, New York is a wonderful place. But it’s not the beginning and end of America. Nor is L.A.” 

The Duvall farm, is in The Plains, Virginia (population 217), in Fauquier County (population 65,203), but part of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area.  It is one of the fastest growing and highest income counties in the United States.  Orange, Walls' home, is in the more central part of the state, not far from Charlottesville.

My Rural Travelogue (Part XVIII): The Lost Sierra

Sierraville, California, July 16, 2017

A few weeks ago I had occasion to re-visit the Sierra Valley, a massive valley that straddles Sierra and Plumas counties in California.  Head up Hwy 89 from Truckee, and about 25 miles ahead you'll descend into it, an area some have called the lost Sierras because it's relatively little known.  As you pull into Sierraville at the southern edge of the Valley (coming from Truckee), one of the first things you'll see is this sign, Eat Beef.  Sierra and Plumas County Cattle Women.  When I first drove through the valley about four years ago, on a business trip to Plumas County, I was too rushed to stop and take a photo, a mistake I did not repeat this time around.  In fact, running ahead of schedule to drop my son off at a camp in Graeagle--another 21 miles north--I stopped at Sierraville Service and Country Store, a well stocked establishment (with immaculate public toilets...but no Perrier or other fizzy water for sale, at least that I could find).  As is often the case on scenic northern California's highways, lots of motorcyclists were hanging around, taking advantage of the facilities, the store, and the opportunity for a break from the winding roads.  A "pop-up" display of rocks and geodes and such were for sale next to the store's picnic area (you can see just the edge of a table to the right of the sign in the photo), which was beautifully accented with blooming plants and a rickety old wooden wagon.

Sierraville Elementary School, July 16, 2017

Out behind the grocery/service station I spotted the "Report Agricultural Crime" sign offering a reward of up to $2,500 for anonymous information.  It was the first like this I had ever seen, even as I have traversed some of the state's most rural reaches.  Of course it resembles other signs encouraging people to report crime, signs you often see in metropolitan areas, but I note that this one specifies "agricultural" crime and that the hat the silhouette image of the "bad guy" is wearing appears to be a cowboy hat--as opposed to the fedora one sees on the standard sign.

Behind Sierraville Service and Country Store,
July 16, 2017

Sierraville boasts Sierra County's only stoplight--according to wikipedia.  At that stop sign, Highway 89 joins Hwy 49 to head north and east to Loyalton or north and west to Graeagle.  Not far from Sierraville Service and Country Store--and right across from the post office--is the elementary school shown above.  I wonder if there was ever  high school in Sierraville and where high school age students are bussed?  Probably Loyalton's Sierra Pass High School, which I see has a total of 109 students, 9-12 grades.

Before you leave Sierra County along the latter road you hit Sattley, population 49, and the memorable Sattley Cash Store pictured below (does "cash" mean they don't grant credit?).  Some beautiful old homes--not all still inhabited--punctuate the valley's sprawling pastures.  

Sierra County's population is just 3,240, the second least populous in the state.  I'm going to return with another post soon about the rest of my drive through the county.  On the return journey from Graeagle, I descended down Highway 49 (south), from near Sierraville, over the Yuba Pass, into Sierra City, Downieville (the county seat), North San Juan, Nevada City and down to Auburn where 49 meets Interstate 80.

Sattley Cash Store, July 22, 2017

Closing up shop in rural America (Part I)

The New York Times ran a story last week, dateline San Luis, Colorado, about a "mom and pop" grocery store--the oldest in Colorado (because San Luis is the oldest town in the state).  The long-time owners of the story are in their 70s and want to retire, but no one has stepped up to buy the store, to take over its operation.  Here's an excerpt from the story, "Who Wants to Run that Mom-and-Pop Market?  Almost No One" that puts it in national perspective.  

Across the country, mom-and-pop markets are among the most endangered of small-town businesses, with competition from corporations and the hurdles of timeworn infrastructure pricing owners out. In Minnesota, 14 percent of nonmetropolitan groceries have closed since 2000. In Kansas, more than 20 percent of rural markets have disappeared in the past decade. Iowa lost half of its groceries between 1995 and 2005.

* * *

The phenomenon is a “crisis” that is turning America’s breadbaskets into food deserts, said David E. Procter, a Kansas State University professor whose work has focused on rural food access, erasing a bedrock of local economies just as rural communities face a host of other problems.

* * * 

[I]n this ranch town, where the closest reliably stocked market is 40 miles away, the threat to R & R Market raises questions about the community’s very survival.

This matter of community survival is a topic of prior blog posts, some of which are here, here and here.  The Center for Rural Affairs wrote about the issue here, with links to earlier related entries and sources on their website.

Julie Turkewitz, the journalist who wrote the story, quotes Bob Rael, director of the county's economic development council, 

If that little store closes, it’s going to be catastrophic. Reality is going to set in. Who let this happen?

That's an interesting quote, not least because I'm not sure what any private individual has the power to do about the closure.  So who might/will be to blame if it does come to pass?

The population of Costilla County, the ninth least populous in Colorado, is 3,524, and it lies on the border with New Mexico. Turkewitz makes this poignant observation about the place:

To visit San Luis is to enter a world that has persisted despite, or perhaps because of, the most extreme of circumstances.

* * *  

In town, residents still speak the Spanish of their ancestors. And on the outskirts, fields of alfalfa sip from an irrigation ditch that those settlers dug by hand. 

This is high desert country, where a few inches of rain fall in a year, winters dip far below zero and the big city nearby is Alamosa, population 9,918. There is no bank, no gas line, and the electricity sometimes goes out for hours.

Turkewitz also explains that taking on a business like a grocery store is a high risk venture, especially with the Trump administration proposing major cuts to programs that support rural America, including SNAP (food stamps) and small-business loans.  Thirty percent of the county's residents receive SNAP.

This is a beautifully written story with lots of historical, economic and political context.  The photographs are exquisite, some quite poignant.  

I'm going to return soon to the topic of business closures--or at least businesses for sale--in rural America.  In that future post I'm going to draw on a recent drive through California's Gold Rush country (Hwy 49--named for the forty-niners--through the northern Sierra) and the many for-sale signs I saw there.  

Why don't you just move to the city?

That is the implicit message (sometimes explicit!) to rural folks when they complain about what they don't have service-wise, when they complain about their crummy labor markets, when they point out what it's like to be on the crappy end of the digital divide.  Rather than attempt to alleviate inequities across the rural-urban axis, many think rural residents should just move to the city if they are unhappy with what the government is not providing in rural places.

I have argued elsewhere that one problem with this posture is that it assumes mobility--it assumes that people can just pick up and move.  And that's not really a fair assumption, especially for low-income folks.  Moving is expensive, and it can be risky.  (Of course, this advice also ignores rural attachment to place, but that's another issue).

Now, the Wall Street Journal has published the third installment in its "One Nation, Divisible" series, and it's all about rural lack of mobility.  Here are some key excerpts from "Struggling Americans Once Sought Greener Pastures.  Now They're Stuck" by  Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg.

[O]verall mobility of the U.S. population is at its lowest level since measurements were first taken at the end of World War II, falling by almost half since its most recent peak in 1985. 

In rural America, which is coping with the onset of socioeconomic problems that were once reserved for inner cities, the rate of people who moved across a county line in 2015 was just 4.1%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That’s down from 7.7% in the late 1970s. It has fallen faster than the mobility rate in metropolitan areas, which the rural rate is now slightly below. 

This drop in mobility is not only keeping rural residents from climbing a ladder to better livelihoods, it is choking off the labor supply for employers in areas where jobs are plentiful. This limits the economic growth that naturally occurs when people and capital cluster together, says David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School who has studied the issue.

* * * 

Economists say there are several practical reasons for the declining rural mobility—the first being the cost of housing. While small-town home prices have only modestly recovered from the housing market meltdown, years of restrictive land-use regulations have driven up prices in metropolitan areas to the point where it is difficult for all but the most highly educated professionals to move.

The story's dateline is West Branch, Michigan (population 2,139), which is in Ogemaw County (population 21,699) in the northern part of the state, more than three hours from Detroit.  Adamy and Overberg also touch on the rural vote and how the inability to migrate to cities is fueling the nation's burgeoning inequality gap.  And they acknowledge that "cultural" issues, as well as economic ones, may lead rural folks to stay put.  

Civic leaders here say extended networks of friends and family and a tradition of church groups that will cover heating bills, car repairs and septic services—often with no questions asked—also dissuade the jobless and underemployed from leaving.

Tom Quinn, president of the local Kirtland Community College, says the rationale boils down to: “I’ve got good social services. I’m stuck in one big rut. If you ask me to go to Indianapolis, I can’t—even if there’s a job there.” 

“People can’t move,” says Mandi Chasey, county economic development director.

I have written about the significance of these small-town and rural networks of kith and kin--and of informal economies--here and here.  

Another aspect of the "cultural" barrier to relocation relates to trust, or the lack thereof:

Economists have tried to measure whether Americans’ eroding trust in one another is damping mobility—such confidence helps ease the transition to a new town—and found signs that this sliding trust may be keeping people from uprooting.

According to the GSS, the share of Americans who agree with the statement “Most people can be trusted” has fallen over the past four decades to 31% in 2016 from 46% in 1972.

The story provides some interesting anecdotes illustrating this trust/distrust point, and some of the are decidedly raced, e.g., rural northern Michigan vs. Detroit. 

The economic slice of this feature reminds me of a comment Assemblyman Brian Dahle made when he visited my Law and Rural Livelihoods course in the spring semester of this year.  Dahle represents California's 1st District (stretching from north Lake Tahoe to the Oregon line) in the state legislature, and he lives and farms in tiny Bieber, in the northern part of Lassen County.  Talking about the State of Jefferson movement and why so many far northern Californians are so agitated, Dahle said, "I think a lot of people are angry because they own a house in Bieber."  From this I understood him to say that some folks are stuck in a rural place with/by home ownership (and a housing market without a lot of churn and perhaps declining property values)--but without a good job. 

This WSJ piece also reminds me of the "just transitions" literature, which considers what we owe people who are left behind as local economies, e.g., coal extraction, shift.  Does the government owe the folks of West Branch government assistance so that, if they desire to do so, they can "move to town"?

Post script on August 12, 2017.   Here is a piece from Dame Magazine titled, "Can't Find Work.  Trump Says Just Move to Wisconsin."  As that headline suggests, it's apropos to this blog post.  The piece is by Megan Carpentier, who writes from an unidentified "village" in upstate New York.  An excerpt follows, quoting a then-recent Wall Street Journal interview with President Trump:

I still don't want to live there, but I do understand better that where you live is, for many people, much, much more than what you do and where you can do it. Someone, though, perhaps should've told President Donald Trump, who in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday explained that the people still living where I grew up should simply abandoned their homes and their communities and move to Wisconsin. 

"I'm going to start explaining to people, when you have an area that just isn't working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you'll have another area 500 miles away where you can't get people, I'm going to explain, you can leave," he told the [Wall Street Journal's] editors and reporters. "It's OK. Don't worry about your house." 

Now, maybe it's hard for people that didn't grow up upstate to understand the dynamic of a downstate businessman-president city-splaining to us rubes that we're foolish to hold on to something as meaningless as real estate when there's a $54,000/year job to be had 864 miles away in Kenosha, Wisconsin**, but let me try. 

Fuck. You. 

The just-abandon-your-property-for-greener-pastures plan has been a complete disaster for Detroit. It drives down property values overall, decimating what financial legacy those low-income and middle-income workers can provide to their heirs in order to influencetheir social mobility (and the lack of inherited wealth is a significant cause of continuing racialized economic inequality), reduces the tax base, undermines the provision to remaining residents of necessary services and rips established communities asunder. 

Hunting as a (multi-dimensional) rural livelihood

Blake Farmer of Public Radio's Marketplace reports today from Tennessee about hunting, which he says once was a way to feed your family but now is more a sport for the affluent.  This is interesting --and I would suggest, "wrong"--because I am convinced that many rural folks --especially low-to-modest means folks--still use hunting and fishing to feed their families, not merely for recreation.  (This was a significant theme of my article here, as it explored the disconnect b/w working class and middle class/professional/managerial class --or b/w rural and urban).   Here is a salient except from Farmer's story, "Amid Urbanization and Expense, Hunting Declines as a Hobby":

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife data, the number of licensed hunters is down from a high point of nearly 17 million in the early 1980s to roughly 15 million today. The national drop has come over a period that the country has grown by nearly 100 million people, meaning the percentage of Americans who hunt is down considerably. 

Still, Konyndyk's state of Tennessee is near its all-time high with 717,000 permitted hunters, and the participation rates vary widely by region. Census data from 2010 finds that hunting is most popular in the East South Central region, which includes Tennessee and Kentucky, where 11 percent of the population claims to hunt. In the Pacific region, however, just 3 percent told Census takers that they hunt.

* * *

The headwinds against hunting are pretty simple: An industry analysis from IBISWorld published this year says that as the country continues to urbanize, exposure to hunting becomes more limited, and more people see the activity in a negative light.

As this excerpt highlights, Farmer arguably misses an important point.  Hobby be damned.  Hunting is still very much about livelihoods for many people in this country.  Sadly, those folks remains invisible, forgotten, unseen, so that Farmer is only talking about "hobbies" and hobbyists.

This reminds me of how commentators like Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd ridiculed Sarah Palin for hunting, one of them commenting that she "eviscerat[ed] animals for fun."  These New York Times columnists were oblivious to the fact--or simply didn't care--that they were also ridiculing folks who hunt to feed their families, who hunt as a livelihood/provision strategy.   Read more here on that theme.

See one of my former student's posts about how hunting regulations evince metro centrism here and another's posts on children and guns here. Some other former posts about hunting are here and here.