Reviving Rural America: A Modern West bonus
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 of Resilience” argues those assumptions are often based on old mythologies of ruralness. I sat down for a thoughtful conversation with author Annie Eisenberg about how to replace those myths with a modern vision for the future of rural America.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Melodie Edwards: I wonder if you can just start by telling me a little bit about yourself, about your own background and how you kind of ended up in rural West Virginia and what put you on the path to writing this book?
Annie Eisenberg: Sure, I'm a law professor back at West Virginia University. After a few years away living in South Carolina, I got into rural development issues, I would actually say for the first time, when I served in the Peace Corps. So doing two years in, in a remote area of Morocco and starting to think about how does law work here? Because it was definitely different sort of out in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. I ended up in West Virginia actually because it was the closest job I could get to upstate New York where I'm from.
And so that's how I somewhat randomly rolled the dice on moving to West Virginia and taking an academic fellowship, site unseen, trying to get back closer to home. Then it was actually really noticing the parallels between West Virginia and Morocco and issues of energy development, and who benefits, and where, and why. That kind of set me off on this mission to try to understand geographic inequality.
ME: I thought it was so interesting when I went and looked at your book and the table of contents, the chapters all begin with the phrase, “the myth of,” and then go on to talk about all these different myths that we have about rural America. I wondered if you might just start by talking about why it is that we do have so many myths around who are people living in communities in rural America?
AE: This thing that we call the urban-rural divide that pops up in news stories as if it's this sort of modern new phenomenon is actually really old and complicated. I first started thinking about kind 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. Like, 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 sickness. Then I would go outside the region and people would make distasteful jokes about it, and that was 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 sort of rural stereotypes, that's a huge one. Just that in and of itself, and we all know them, right? And so I think that ends up factoring into political conversations in important ways. Then I got interested in sort of myths about the economy and how they all sort of interact together to paint a really negative picture of like 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.
ME: I found it fascinating reading your book about how that then leads to ways in which the economy that you just mentioned, we end up finding that natural resources are kind of funneled out, and then that feeds an urban wealth. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship there?
AE: That's been sort of part of what's fascinating and makes all of this all the more complicated is that you have an increasingly urbanized society. At this point, our national population is probably 80 to 90% [urban] depending on how you measure it. And 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. You have the consumer places and the consumer classes just more distant, so it's easy for stereotypes to take hold instead of firsthand knowledge.
Basically the sort of extraction-consumption, production-consumption regional relationships are relatively old in this country. 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 unsustainable basis of a bunch of rural economies that go back to bad planning/exploitative practices 150 years ago, it is admittedly a hard thing to fix. But the first piece of that is trying to persuade the majority of the country that it is worth doing more to fix.
ME: We have sort of these assumptions and not yet another one of those stereotypes is sort of this idea that rural depopulation is just something that happens naturally. Can you explore that in some more detail?
AE: In my mind, urbanization is kind of novel and radical as a societal phenomenon. I kind of wanted to normalize rural depopulation. 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. I question whether it is natural, good or sustainable to have urbanization at this level of dramatic mega cities and population inequality that we see.
Then there's also this question of what happens when a place depopulates and 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: It seems like another issue that is tangled up in all of that is just how then, when that community starts to really struggle and fall into despair, that then there's sort of a tendency to blame the victim. And then that circles us back around to that whole question of how urban wealth is being fed by rural poverty. That those are so linked.
AE: Yes, absolutely. So the stereotypes are really exploitative and unsustainable. Economic decisions that have happened over the course of decades then get wrapped up with and feed off of the stereotypes about the people, the politics, [and] voting patterns. There's this sort of ‘culture of poverty’ narrative, a lot of responses that lack both empathy and understanding of the circumstances that I think have really been imposed upon people structurally from a society that hasn't treated them very well.
ME: I'm really interested in why you feel like there's a myth about rural empowerment? That one was kind of a surprise.
AE: So over the years, as I've presented this work to urban audiences, the myths in the book are kind of designed around addressing the FAQs that I get all the time. So I might go present a paper saying, ‘Hey, here are some concerns about rural poverty and economic decline. And it would be great if we could think policy-wise about better interventions.’ 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.’
My colleague Lisa Pruitt and her co-author, Casey Lee Klein, wrote an article called “Rural Bashing,” and they really investigated this thing of, is the voting power actually disproportionate? They looked at the electoral college, they looked at the Senate, they debunked these arguments a little bit. A related issue that comes up from ‘rural bashing’ is subsidies: rural places or red states get so much more federal funds than blue states. So you get this image of kind of a powerful ‘taker class,’ instead of how I think of them as, on average, I believe there is a class-based disadvantage of rurality. In my mind, whatever power rural populations get from our electoral systems, isn't bearing fruit for improving the material conditions of rural populations.
Of course, then the FA-Q’s I get for that is, ‘Well, isn't that because they don't vote for Democrats?’ That's a really complicated one too. When you break down the voting patterns in the places we're talking about, it is never a hundred percent red. In a state like West Virginia, you have one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country. There are a lot of places where people feel dejected and disenfranchised. We get a disservice in the form of the election maps that you see on election night where it's just like red, red, red or blue, blue, blue. I think that really sort of warps the actual realities on the ground, both in terms of how much power rural folks actually have and in terms of kind of masking the political complexity of rural regions.
ME: Another one of the myths that you explore that I found so interesting was this idea that these rural communities are failing because they're just not sustainable. What's the thinking behind that mythology?
AE: There's a myth about rural that has a counterpart with myths about cities. Cities are self-sustaining and dynamic. They're the future because you can have maybe a metro system, it's a more efficient use of transportation dollars. Then when you talk about a rural place, when you're thinking about infrastructure or service provision like a rural hospital, people will get kind of skeptical about, ‘Well, hey, isn't that more expensive if you've got a hospital for 500 people instead of 5,000? Is that the best use of our dollars as a society?’
First off, I actually think our society does need a rural population. There is the moral baseline of, what are we doing here as a society in terms of access to services, even in diverse geographies. We used to, as a society, just have a lot more legal requirements for geographically spread out service. Even within my lifetime of the past few decades, I've seen transportation deregulation play out in ways that are personally quite inconvenient for me. I think for a lot of us, anyone who wants to go from point-A to point-B in the United States, what are the chances you can take a train or a bus or a plane and have it not take three days?
I was excited to discover this tradition in the earlier half of the 20th century when we had less geographic inequality, that the law was doing a lot more to sustain rural places by saying, ‘Hey, bus company, even if you make a little less money, you still gotta go between these two small towns. Sorry, the public interest requires it. We're gonna find ways to move money around to cover your costs.’ My takeaway from that is, places are sustainable if we choose to sustain them. We have the tools to do it, and we should be doing it more.
ME: There's sort of this assumption that that markets can fix the problems of rural poverty, and you took issue with that and found that problematic. Can you explore why?
AE: This again comes back to sort of the grand myth, which is that rural places are the past, cities are the future. Markets have dictated this like mother nature. That's where I think it's so important to look at just the legal history of transportation. We used to intervene ever so gently, just a little more, to direct markets to help provide essential services to rural places. It isn't a law of nature that markets dictate who lives and who dies. That's a value judgment.
ME: What you end up kind of exploring towards the end of your book is an idea to reconceptualize rural America as a commons. I wonder if you can kind of define what you mean by that and explore how that could work.
AE: Amidst all these FAQs that I get, I will also hear urban folks say that they're just as entitled to rural resources as rural people are. So environmental protection, for example, where it's like, ‘Well, that species belongs to all of us, right? And so it's okay to restrict what people can or can't do on their land because I'm actually entitled.’
That's a heritage or a common good. Conversations on renewable energy right now, – ‘We, the urban majority, are entitled to be putting utility scale solar and wind farms on rural land right now.’ So there's a sense of urban entitlement to rural resources.
Okay, let's assume that's true. There are these sort of 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.’ Okay, we have governance schemes and sort of theories and literature on how to govern common goods or things called commons, right? But the one point I really wanted to make was, ‘Well, if it's a shared resource, then we as a society have to take care of it.’ I think that's where the sort of grand 20th century failure has come in is, 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.
ME: I wonder if you have an idea of how that could be done in collaboration between an urban and a rural community. I can imagine – being from a very red Wyoming – that there could be pushback from an idea of an urban world that would be “stewarding” a rural world, that that could be problematic. Where do you see an ability to more collaboratively find a relationship that's a little more healthy?
AE: I think it's helpful to drill down on a specific example. So one example I talk a little bit about is agricultural land. So agricultural land, obviously that's so local, right? At the same time we're seeing kind of a national problem with agricultural land being bought up by hedge fund owners as this commodity, and so that's where I wonder, is there space for the national community, national governance, state level governance to not dismiss agricultural land as like, ‘Oh, well that's a rural thing off there.’ Could we be doing more to improve access for first generation and diverse farmers?
I think one of the points of the theory is just to say rural issues are not niche issues. The urban majority should care. The big risk is that there is a long history of non-rural folks passing bad rural policy.
I think one thing that folks don't fully appreciate, that I'm just starting to explore, is how much the sort of urban-rural divide and the distant producers and the distant consumers, how much that is related to climate change and environmental degradation. I don't think that urbanites, who tend to have strong environmental sympathies, I don't know how much folks appreciate how importing everything from elsewhere is really a problem 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.
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