When you think about the main street in your hometown, or your parents’ hometown – about why it’s now all boarded up or why your classmates all moved away – what are your assumptions? Maybe that it was inevitable? Or that people didn’t try hard enough to save it?
A new book called “Reviving Rural America: Towards Policies for Resilience” argues those assumptions are often based on old mythologies of ruralness. Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards spoke with author Annie Eisenberg about how to replace those myths with a modern vision for the future of rural America.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Annie Eisenberg: I first started thinking about kinds of narratives and myth-versus-fact during those first two years I did in West Virginia, from 2014 to 2016, where I was just having some cognitive dissonance about my lived experience versus the things I would hear about West Virginia. This was a region that I thought was beautiful and complex and interesting and very challenged. There were obviously a lot of poverty issues with poisoned water [and] sickness, and then I would go outside the region and people would make distasteful jokes about it. That was really, really troubling to me.
So that's where I wanted to sort of understand the mythology of place when you start pulling the thread on rural stereotypes. We all know them, right? I think that ends up factoring into political conversations in important ways. Then I got interested in myths about the economy and how they all sort of interact together to paint a really negative picture of a dead, old, useless place, when we're talking about millions of people who provide the nation's food and energy. So there was a lot to work with there.
Melodie Edwards: I found it fascinating reading your book about how that then leads to ways in which we find that natural resources from our economy are funneled out and then that feeds urban wealth. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship there?
AE: That's been part of what's fascinating and makes all of this all the more complicated as you have an increasingly urbanized society. That majority urban and suburban population then does have this tendency to kind of look down on the rural population, while at the same time deriving and extracting all of these values and benefits.
It's easy for stereotypes to take hold instead of firsthand knowledge. It's been very normalized that we have distant and visible places that get depleted. But if you're someone who doesn't really have to look at it, it seems natural. The first piece of that is trying to persuade the majority of the country that it is worth doing more to fix.
ME: Yet another one of those stereotypes is this idea that rural depopulation is just something that happens naturally. Can you explore that in some more detail?
AE: It gets wrapped up in this narrative of, ‘Well, yeah, modernity is urban. When you become modern, when there's progress, everyone moves to a city.’
But you're always gonna have to have somebody who we call “left behind” to produce the food and the energy or whatever other goods require working with raw materials. Then there's also this question of what happens when a place depopulates. The way our society has failed to intervene when the rug gets pulled out of a small town, when a plant closes or something like that. I don't think that's normal. I don't think we should say this was anything other than a tragedy.
ME: Maybe we can explore some of the myths more specifically. I'm really interested in why you feel like there's a myth about rural empowerment. That one was kind of a surprise.
AE: I tend to start with the premise, when I'm talking about rural economic challenges, that I am talking about a disadvantaged class. But the response that I often get is, ‘But they have so much more voting power. Rural places or red states get so much more federal funds.’ So you get this image of a powerful “taker class,” instead of how I think of them as, on average, there is a class-based disadvantage of rurality.
Whatever power rural populations get from our electoral systems isn't bearing fruit for improving the material conditions of rural populations. We get a disservice in the form of the election maps that you see on election night, where it's just ‘red, red, red,’ or ‘blue, blue, blue.’ And I think that really sort of warps the actual realities on the ground.
ME: What you end up exploring towards the end of your book is an idea to reconceptualize rural America as a commons. I wonder if you can define what you mean by that and explore how that could work?
AE: Conversations on renewable energy right now are that we, the urban majority, are entitled to put utility-scale solar and wind farms on rural land. There's a sense of urban entitlement to rural resources.
Let's assume that's true: There are these shared or stacked sets of entitlements where it's like, ‘Well, local folks have a claim to a resource, but also we're saying the national public has a claim to a resource.’ We have governance schemes and theories and literature on how to govern common goods or things called commons, right?
But the one point I really wanted to make is, ‘Well, if it's a shared resource, then we as a society have to take care of it.’ I think that's where the grand twentieth century failure has come in. If rural America holistically is a valuable resource in and of itself, which I think it really is, then we, as a society, have an obligation to steward it and do a better job of governing it at these multiple levels of stakeholder and involvement.
No matter how you slice it, the divide between places is artificial and we're all in it together. If flooding is happening here, it's going to affect people downstream, metaphorically and literally. I think the whole us-versus-them thing needs to go, because our fates are really interconnected no matter how you look at it.
