Energy poverty burdens rural America, especially as the climate warms

Mt. Sherman, Arkansas 

Credit: Lisa R. Pruitt, 2009

Rural areas produce much of the energy that our nation relies on. 60% of coal plants are located in and 83% of wind, solar and geothermal energy is produced in rural areas. Even so, families living in poverty in rural areas are more likely to experience energy poverty. Energy poverty is the inability to pay utility bills to heat or cool a home. A report by the Island Institute explained that the median energy burden (percent of income spent on energy bills) is 33% higher for rural households than the national median. 

Inability to pay for utilities can increase exposure to heat or cold, leading to various health risks such as respiratory issues, heart problems, allergies, and kidney disorders. Climate change has exacerbated exposure risks due to a greater frequency of extreme weather conditions.

Rural areas face these energy inequities because of rising energy costs and a lack of investment. Across the country, residential electricity costs have increased 30% since 2021 and residential gas costs have increased 40% since 2019. The geographic isolation of many rural areas makes it more expensive to deliver energy and provide energy efficiency upgrades. 

Investor-owned utilities in the early twentieth century didn't want to provide the same service in rural areas as in urban areas because the lower population densities in rural areas made profits too low to justify construction and investment. In 1935, the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) was created. The REA utilized a "rural cooperative model" which allowed for publicly owned and controlled electricity. Although, these rural cooperatives often lack capacity and resources to invest in more comprehensive energy efficiency programs. 

Additionally, rural areas are more likely to have older homes with worse insulation. On top of older homes, 20% of rural households live in manufactured homes (commonly mobile homes), which are significantly less energy efficient and more costly to repair than traditional housing. 

AC Unit on Mobile Home

Credit: Creative Commons

How do we currently address energy poverty?

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is a federally funded program that provides assistance to low-income households who face a high energy burden. Assistance can range from one-time financial assistance to free energy efficiency upgrades. A study done by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that weatherizing a home for families living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line can save an average singe family household $283 per year and manufactured home households $458 per year.

Katrina Metzler from National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition explained that rural areas have a harder time accessing LIHEAP benefits because the resources are not centralized as they are in urban areas. A 2024 survey found that only 17% of households that qualify for LIHEAP assistance utilize the program. 

LIHEAP's funding formula has historically provided more funding to cold-weather states. But climate change has caused a shift in the historical energy burden being faced by rural communities. Extreme heat is now the primary cause of weather-related deaths, with 2,302 heat-related deaths in 2023. This is a 44% increase from 2021. With rising temperature, regions such as the South and Southwest have greater cooling needs, while the heating needs in regions such as the North and Northwest become less extreme. 

LIHEAP is still using a funding formula from the 1980s to determine how funding is distributed to states. With changing climate, it may be time to shift the funding formula to better aid states struggling with extreme heat. 

Credit: ACEEE

What are states doing?

9 states have implemented percentage-of-income payment plans (PIPPs). This type of program caps energy bills at a specified percentage of household income for low-income customers to keep them affordable. 14 states provide low-income households energy at a discounted rate to keep costs low.

Additionally, 10 states offer arrearage management plans, which forgive a portion of debt for each timely payment of a new bill. This helps to defeat the energy bill debt cycle than many households in energy poverty face. One missed payment can turn into growing debt that threatens disconnection from service, forcing households to pursue risky options such as emergency aid or high-cost loans. 

The Rocky Mountain Institute modeled the cost of a universal PIPP, capping bills at 4% of annual income. They determined it would only cost $9.3 billion to fund this program, 0.14% of federal spending in 2024.

In 2024, Congress appropriated $4.125 billion in LIHEAP funding. Last April, the Trump administration sought to completely cut funding for the LIHEAP program, but full funding was eventually included in the appropriations package passed in February of this year.

LIHEAP is an essential program to ensure that rural households have some assistance with the crushing costs of utilities. Implementation of PIPPs, ideally at the federal level, could drastically reduce the burdens of energy costs on low-income rural families and prevent them from having to choose between buying food or having air conditioning during severe heat. 

The burden of the "American Dream" on rural communities

Photo Credit - Chelsea Peng 2025 "The end of the American Dream and why it’s OK"

On March 14, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing called “Empowering Rural America Through Investment in Innovation.” Subcommittee Chairman Jake Ellzey told the room that “as the demand for AI accelerates, America’s digital infrastructure is rapidly expanding into rural communities.” He promised that for every data center job created, seven more would follow in the surrounding community.

I have spent this semester writing about technology arriving in rural America. The promise is always the same: innovation, jobs, progress. The pattern is also the same: the benefits flow out, and the costs stay.

Three posts, one pattern

In my first post, I wrote about a $25 billion AI data center planned for Tonopah, Arizona, population a few hundred. Backed by a billionaire venture capitalist and a Trump mega-donor, the project would consume as much electricity as a million homes and drain aquifers that residents depend on for drinking water. The tech consumers served by the facility live in cities. The residents of Tonopah got noise, light pollution, and a fight they lacked the political power to win.

In my second post, I stepped back from tech to look at the framing. I had caught myself thinking that rural investment came at urban expense. That zero-sum instinct turned out to be the wrong lens. The federal government spends $850 billion a year on defense and asked $1.8 billion for the Legal Services Corporation. The scarcity pitting rural against urban is a policy choice, not a fact of nature. Rural and urban working people have lost ground to the same forces and share the same interest in functional public services.

In my third post, I wrote about robotic strawberry harvesters arriving in Salinas Valley. Immigration enforcement had squeezed the farm labor supply. The federal government’s response was to lower guest worker wages, and then automation filled the gap. The robots cost $300,000 each, priced for corporate farms. Small growers and the farmworker communities who built Salinas for generations got nothing.

Each story has different characters and geography. But the structure is identical: federal policy creates or worsens a rural problem, and capital arrives promising solutions. The benefits accrue to investors/urban consumers and the people who already live there absorb the costs.

Photo Credit - Will Robinson 2020 "Is the American dream dead?"

The packaging

This pattern persists because it is wrapped in a story that Americans have been told their whole lives: that progress rewards hard work, that innovation lifts all boats, that the people who struggle simply need to adapt. This is the "American Dream," and I have come to believe it is one of the deepest sources of political paralysis in this country.

I said something like this in class a few weeks ago. I told Professor Pruitt that the American Dream is this country’s “original sin.” She pushed back, fairly, and pointed out that there are things about this country that are more original and more sinful. She’s right. Slavery, land theft, and genocide are the material foundations. But the American Dream is the legitimating story that makes those foundations look earned. It converts structural advantage into personal merit and structural disadvantage into personal failure.

I know this because I lived it. I grew up male, Mormon, white, healthy, and financially comfortable. My family believed fiercely in individual agency. I followed the rules and concluded that people whose lives were less "successful" than mine were in that position because of their own bad choices. It took college and a lot of unlearning to see that my “good choices” were only available because the structure was built for me.

The same logic operates at the community level. When a rural hospital closes after Medicaid cuts, residents blame the hospital, not the lawmakers who voted for the bill. When a farmer in Colorado threatens to mechanize rather than pay overtime, the framing is that labor protections killed the farm, not that the farm’s business model depended on paying workers less than the legal standard in every other industry. The American Dream teaches people to punch down and look away from the hand above them.

What would it look like to say no?

There are signs of resistance. At least 25 data center projects were cancelled across the United States in 2025 after community opposition, four times the number in 2024. Rural school voucher programs have been blocked by rural Republicans who understand that their public schools are the backbone of their communities. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew 10,000 people to Greeley, Colorado, a conservative town in Weld County, on a message of class solidarity across the rural-urban divide.

None of these are sufficient. But they share a feature that the American Dream framework lacks: they start from the premise that rural communities have the right to decide what happens to their land, their labor, and their resources. That premise is incompatible with a system that treats rural space as a site of extraction and rural people as obstacles to progress.

Congressman Ellzey’s hearing promised rural America seven jobs for every data center. Nobody on the panel asked how many jobs, aquifers, and night skies those same communities would lose. Until that question gets equal time, the American Dream will keep doing what it has always done: blaming the most vulnerable among us for their poverty and lack of resources, while lionizing the most powerful people in this country as they get increasingly wealthy. 

40 hours or 60: who decides what rural labor is worth?

Sugar beet worker in Colorado (1938). Source: Library of Congress 

In 2011, this blog post observed that farmworkers:

[R]eceive little protection from the law...[and] are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act.

The National Labor Relations Act gives workers the right to unionize, and the exclusion of farm workers is part of a broader pattern. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 similarly exempted agricultural workers from overtime protections; a carve-out that persists at the federal level today. As the National Employment Law Project has noted, Congress approved this exemption as part of a:

[G]rand compromise that excluded farm and domestic workers - who were overwhelmingly Black - from the protections being afforded to other workers.

Colorado is now testing whether states can succeed where the federal government has not: extending overtime protections to farmworkers without triggering the very harms those protections are meant to prevent. 

In 2021, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill ("SB") 21-087, the "Farmworker Bill of Rights," which brought agricultural workers under state overtime rules for the first time. The law was phased in gradually, initially kicking in at 60 hours per week, then declining over time. Currently, the law operates through a bifurcated system: workers harvesting outside the peak season are generally paid overtime after 48 hours, while peak-season workers receive overtime after 56 hours. 

Now, five years later, Democrats in the state legislature are split over what comes next. One bill would lower the threshold to 40 hours, matching the standard for other industries. A competing bill would raise it back to 60, essentially returning to where the phase-in began.  

Senator Jessie Danielson has introduced SB 26-081, which would lower the threshold to 40 hours per workweek or 12 hours per workday, matching the standard for most other Colorado workers. Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez is expected to introduce a competing bill that would raise the threshold to 60 hours before overtime applies. 

Farm operators argue that a 40-hour threshold could be fatal. Don Brown, a Yuma County farmer and former state agriculture commissioner, told Colorado Politics:

[If the 40-hour bill passes,] we will have to figure out how to eliminate jobs and mechanize more. 

Peach picker in Palisade, CA (2015).
Source: Library of Congress. 

Bruce Talbott, owner of Talbott Farms, the largest fruit grower on the Western Slope, recently built a new bunkhouse to spread hours across more workers and minimize overtime. Talbott stated: 

All businesses have to live within their means. In the end, it's the farmworker who gets hurt. 

The industry also faces broader challenges. The director of the Colorado Department of Agriculture's market division noted that net farm income is projected to drop to $1.8 billion in 2026 - $400 million lower than the previous year - citing fluctuating markets and low commodity prices. 

Farmworker advocates see the issue differently. Betty Velasquez of Project Protect Food Systems Workers argues:

[Farmworkers] are the people providing food on our tables. They should have access to earn more money as well. 

Advocates also contend that the industry has not produced data showing overtime rules specifically cause harm, and that reduced hours have given workers more time with their families. Yet, the empirical picture is also contested. 

A 2023 study by UC Berkeley researcher Alexandra Hill found that California's overtime law led to reduced hours and earnings for farmworkers after employers shortened workweeks to avoid overtime costs. Hill's continued research found that by 2022:

[California farmworkers] earned about a hundred dollars less per week on average than they would have without the law in place. 

The Colorado debate exposes a structural tension in rural livelihood policy. Agricultural exceptionalism - the legal tradition of treating farm labor as categorically different - was born of a racist compromise in 1938. States like Colorado and California are now experimenting with alternatives. Those experiments produce uneven results, with some states like New York and Oregon offering tax credits to offset higher labor costs while others press forward without such cushions. Workers and operators each claim to speak for the rural interest. 

Senator Danielson insists the state should be doing more to protect farmworkers. Senator Rodriguez frames the dilemma as "death by 1,000 cuts" - water shortages, tariffs, and now labor costs. 

Both are Democrats. Both represent rural livelihoods. Neither has a clean answer.

The dual edge of isolation: escaping to and surviving in rural Alaska

Looking at the shore off a cruise ship,
Alaska (2012)

When I was 12 years old, I went on an Alaskan Cruise. Our cruise stopped in Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway, Sitka, and Haines. While in Ketchikan, a tour guide showed us around town and talked about what it is like to live in Alaska. My cousins and I asked the tour guide what they like to do for fun in Alaska. He replied that many locals tend to enjoy nature, go fishing, and hunt.

When we asked about movie theaters and TV shows, he mentioned how the town didn’t have a theater, and many locals lacked televisions or internet access. As teenagers, we gasped at the thought of being so disconnected. While I could not imagine myself living in Alaska, this is the reality for some.

It made me wonder, who would live in Alaska? The Census Reporter estimates that Alaska’s current population is just above 740,000 with a predominantly white population, with Native American Alaskans as the next highest race. While the population seems to be increasing, there are losses in the working-age population.

Tourists visiting Nugget Falls in Juneau, Alaska (2012)

Alaska has long captured the American imagination as the ultimate frontier for a fresh start. The state actively incentivizes newcomers through the Permanent Fund Dividend, which pays residents simply for living there for a calendar year. Beyond financial perks, the profound remoteness of the state offers a unique social refuge. People fleeing restrictive pasts often migrate to the state specifically because of its remote nature and anti-establishment culture.

For some, this seclusion provides a necessary second chance. Individuals with criminal records sometimes flee to Alaska to avoid restrictive public registries and social stigma. The harsh climate forces communities to rely on one another for survival, fostering an environment where neighbors judge each other by current actions rather than past mistakes. However, this "leave me alone" culture has a devastatingly dark side for vulnerable populations.

While property crime in the state has dropped to its lowest levels since 1985, violent crime remains staggeringly high. Alaska Beacon discusses how Alaska’s rates of violent offenses have outpaced the national average since 1993, driven heavily by severe rates of rape and aggravated assault. In fact, the rate of reported rape in Alaska has consistently hovered between three and four times the national average for the last decade. It is no surprise that the crime rates in Alaska are so bad considering the lack of law enforcement (read more about that in an earlier blog post here).

This social crisis is further compounded by a severe lack of public infrastructure, another direct consequence of rural isolation. NPR investigated the conditions of rural schools in Alaska. Because shipping heavy equipment and housing skilled workers is astronomically expensive, basic maintenance is frequently abandoned by the Alaskan government. As a result, rural Alaska Native communities are left with schools that are literally collapsing into the permafrost, filled with black mold and structural hazards. Read more about rural Alaska school funding issues here.

This structural neglect extends to basic household utilities, with more than 200 rural Alaskan communities currently facing inadequate access to water. Residents without piped water are forced to survive on less than six liters of water a day, severely impacting public health.

Conclusion
Ultimately, the isolation of rural Alaska acts as a double-edged sword. It acts as a hiding place for outsiders or people with a record seeking to disappear, while simultaneously trapping its marginalized residents in a cycle of violent crime and infrastructural decay. Reflecting back on that cruise I was on in 2012, it’s wild to think that my biggest concern was just a lack of internet or a local movie theater. I was completely blind to the harsh realities of what extreme isolation actually means for the people living there.

Spain's rural de-population . . . and maybe repopulation

In the Fall of 2019, I went to study abroad in Salamanca, Spain. My undergraduate institution paid me an additional stipend of around $1,500 to go since I had never been abroad before. I am part Spanish, although my great-grandmother's birth records have since been lost to us. My mother often told us stories of the days when the Spanish and Native American part of the family had a small farm in Texas. They were always juxtaposed with how things went horribly wrong in my grandmother's marriage and the relocation of my mother's family to Mexico. My great-grandmother, born Josephine de la Garza in 1898, had thirteen children and lived the life you would imagine befitting rurality before the Great Depression. She, her husband, and her children including my grandmother, milked cows, had chickens, and made ends meet by picking cotton for other people. Subconsciously, I always associated rurality with Hispanidad or Spanish-ness. 

I learned many things when I went to Spain. My brother who went before me, Ian, was right that we get many of our cultural cues from Spain. The type of dry, morbid, blunt, and sometimes insensitive humor I got from my family was ubiquitous in the part of Spain I studied in. Unlike in America, no Spaniards stopped being friends with me because a joke landed the wrong way. In some ways, Spain's politics felt less divided than in America, even in the midst of the Catalan separatist referendum on the other side of Spain. Spaniards on the left seemed more socially conservative than their American counterparts, with one self-described feminist Spanish language professor calling the term "latinx" grammatically incorrect. Spaniards on the right were far more fiscally progressive than their American counterparts. I recall that my conservative friends from the local fencing club were immensely proud of Spain's socialized healthcare system. If you've seen my previous posts, this should ring a bell. Rural Americans tend to poll as more socially conservative and fiscally progressive than their metropolitan counterparts. Among other things I learned, I quickly became aware that Salamanca, Spain was a culturally rural place, with many of the people I interacted with either growing up rural or whose families moved to the city in the previous one or two generations. 

Spain's population dilemma

With a population of around 47,000,000 people, Spain also has some of the most densely populated cities of Western Europe and least densely populated countryside. The rapid industrialization of the 1950s and 1960s brought the vast majority of Spain's rural population away from the villages and into its cities. Exacerbating the issue is Spain's low birth rate, where the average number of children per woman fell to 1.10 in 2024. 

In Spain, each Autonomous Community ("Comunidades Autonomas" are Spain's rough equivalent to states) has different recorded birthrates. Some communities like Madrid are very urbanized while others like Asturias are rural and mountainous. The Instituto Nacional de Estadistica records birth rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancy at birth, and the proportion of people over certain ages by province. The site also differentiates between total births, births from exclusively Spanish mothers, and births from foreign-born mothers. The last delineation is helpful in assessing one proposed solution for Spain's depopulation, which is the encouragement of immigration to Spain from the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. In 2024, the provinces scoring the highest birth rates to mothers of Spanish origin are Ceuta and Melilla, two of Spain's remaining urban port enclaves in North Africa. The two cities are also undocumented immigration hotspots for Spain. Ceuta had a rate of 7.17 births per 1,000 inhabitants, and Melilla had 7.54 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Counting Spanish and foreign mothers, the rate rose moderately to 8.22 and 9.19 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Just across the Strait of Gibraltar, Andalucia and Murcia boasted comparatively high numbers of children born to Spanish mothers, with 6.45 live births per 1,000 people and 6.81 live births per 1,000 people respectively. Calculations with foreign mothers yielded a very mild increase to 6.95 in Andalucia and a moderate increase to 7.93 in Murcia. According to the Spanish Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentacion (Agriculture, Fish, and Food), Andalucia, Murcia, Melilla, and Ceuta appeared to host significantly more urban communities when compared to autonomous communities in the interior of Spain. The most rural autonomous communities were Extremadura, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y Leon, and Aragon. ("Las comunidades autónomas con un mayor porcentaje de población censada en municipios rurales, de un 30% a un 50%, son Extremadura, Castilla–La Mancha, Castilla y León y Aragón.") According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica's 2024 data, Aragon, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y Leon, and Extremadura had birth rates of 5.27, 5.76, 4.57, and 5.82 per 1,000 inhabitants respectively. Counting foreign mothers, the rates increased to 6.33, 6.71, 5.23, and 6.20 per 1,000 inhabitants. Today's immigration may prove to be a long-term solution to Spain's rural depopulation crisis.

Credit: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentacion.

While the comparatively lessened birth rates in rural Spain might seem like a cause for alarm, it is important to consider that the median age in rural Spain is much higher. In many cases, however, young people whose families left Spain's rural villages have been the ones trying to revive Spain's countryside. 

Immigration in Spain

Anecdotally speaking, I made friends with many immigrants in Spain: a Venezuelan family that owned a bar in the middle of my 35 minute walk to religious studies class at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, an Ecuadorian churchgoer, an Argentinian fencer, a Chinese fencer, and a Black American Navy veteran who found work as an English professor. I never heard anything negative about Spain from any of them. Most Spaniards I met welcomed me, although they often mistook me for an Italian or Central American from my accent. Most never guessed me to be an American due to my obvious lack of North European features or (thankfully) fashion sense. My family wholeheartedly believed in the melting pot theory of America, ultimately resulting in this mix of Spanish (1/8), Native American (1/8), Jewish (3/8), Sicilian (1/8), and probably Mexican (1/4) blood. I suffered the quiet social consequences of my impurities in the racial cliques of the public school system where I grew up. To me, Spain looked like the real melting pot. Nonetheless, like every nation, Spain has its prejudices. The four main nationalities I heard negative comments about were the English, the French, the Catalans, and the Moroccans. The sad part about the Moroccans is that there is probably more (apart from religion) cultural similarity between Spain and Morocco than between Spain and France. In Spain's case, old grudges die hard. 

Spain is an immigration hotspot in two ways: it is the bridge between Africa and Europe, and it has a long-standing policy of giving immigrants from its former colonies an expedited path to citizenship in the hopes that such immigrants remain in Spain. Most preferred immigrants come from Latin America, but the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea are also on the list. Even dual Latin American-United States citizens are eligible for the two-year fast track. Conversely, Spain generally does not have birthright citizenship for being born on Spanish soil. The contrast in treatment creates a strong preference for immigrants from the former Spanish viceroyalties in Latin America. The Instituto Nacional de Estadistica traces both immigration and emigration data for Spain, among other demographic data. South American immigrants, not even including Central and North Americans, outnumbered all African immigrants by a ratio of 335,185 to 128,527. Despite its preferred status, the Philippines only contributed 3,305 immigrants. With over 600,000 residents emigrating annually, most of whom are foreign-born, Spain has issues retaining immigrants. Nonetheless, with a total immigration of 1,288,562 in 2024, Spain still has a positive balance of net immigration. Furthermore, for both male and female immigrants, the single largest age cohort of immigrants is between 23 years of age and 33 years of age. In other words, Spain receives statistically prime working age immigrants.

Spain's most anti-immigration party, VOX, is split on the issue of immigration from Latin America, with younger party members opposing all immigration. Establishment party members believe that Latin Americans share a cultural and linguistic heritage with Spaniards that prime them for citizenship. Partido Popular (PP), the center-right party, outlined its 2026 immigration platform calling for tougher enforcement of immigration laws and stressing the meteoric rise of the population born overseas by 1.5 million people over four years. Reading between the lines of its five principles, "Order & Legality," "Contribution Should Be A Condition For Remaining," "Integration With Demands," and "Zero Tolerance For Crime," it is clear that Partido Popular does not share concerns about immigrants competing with Spaniards for employment opportunities. Explicitly under their 2nd proposal prong "employment as a port of entry," Partido Popular says that Hispanidad, understood as a shared space of language, history, and values, will be a positive factor in the evaluation of visas. ("La Hispanidad, entendida como espacio compartido de lengua, historia y valores, será un factor positivo en la evaluación del visado.") Unlike with VOX's split, PP does not appear to be advocating for a change in Spain's immigration structure, but rather stricter enforcement of existing law. With a mere half of Spain's extreme right turning against immigration from Latin America, it looks like Spain's incentives for Latin American immigration will remain in place.

For reasons likely dating back to long-standing historical grievances, VOX and Partido Popular, the center-right party, oppose North African immigration. In Moorish Blood: Islamophobia, Racism, and the Struggle for Identity in Modern Spain, Fernando Bravo Lopez acknowledges that the long Moorish occupation of Spain resulted in various reactions to that part of Spanish history. Modern Spanish reactions range from an attempt from Spaniards to erase marks of the occupation to an embrace of the past occupation as a part of Spanish history. 

The currently governing PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol) on the left appears conciliatory toward irregular migrants, most recently granting amnesty to 500,000 undocumented immigrants and allowing immigrants without legal residency access to Spain's public health services. It goes without saying that PSOE is also perfectly fine with immigration from Latin America. In any case, the proportion of Latin American migrants has eclipsed migration from North Africa, and given the political landscape, will likely continue to do so.

Foreign-Born Population of Spain by Region of Birth, 1998 and 2022

Source: Claudia Finotelli and Sebastian Rinken, Migration Policy Institute

In particular, rural communities came to rely upon Latin American immigrants who work in the agricultural and hospitality sectors of the economy. South American immigration has revived some rural villages in Teruel, Leon, and Palencia, proving that the system can work at scale. A 2023 piece Is Spanish depopulation irreversible? Recent demographic and spatial changes in small municipalities by Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Isabel Pujadas-Rubies noted factors aiding or hindering the recovery of rural Spanish communities from depopulation. The researchers concluded that while immigration has historically benefitted Spain's rural communities, migration patterns depend upon the health of the economy. Migration growth was also mostly able to compensate for negative natural growth most cases.

Credit: Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, Isabel Pujadas-Rubies. Charts derived from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE)

Infrastructure and grassroots efforts

While helpful to the recovery of Spain's villages, immigration can only go so far. Infrastructure is needed to keep rural communities livable, connected, and economically viable in the 21st century.

Illustrated by this video from early 2026, the resettlement of Spain's villages carry different challenges. One isolated Aragonese village named La Estrella in the mountains, until very recently inhabited by an elderly couple, is less likely to be repopulated than the long-abandoned village of Sarnago in the Castilian plains. Aside from access, one key ingredient to the revival of Sarnago is the fondness that the descendants of former residents still hold for the village. Once a week, the relatively young descendants of Sarnago's villagers converge upon the village to repair its buildings in the hopes that the site one day can become livable. The group even created a museum out of an old schoolhouse, potentially attracting some small measure of tourism. Illustrating further the difference between Sarnago and La Estrella is the 2023 piece by Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Isabel Pujadas-Rubies addressing whether Spanish depopulation is irreversible. The researchers ultimately concluded that while rural communities may survive through bonds with larger municipalities, rural communities which are distant from metro areas will likely never recover.  

Villages in Western Castilla y Leon experienced the most population loss in the twenty years preceding the 2020 pandemic, followed by small municipalities in Aragon, Castilla La Mancha, and Extremadura. Some "villages situated far from the coast in Galicia, Catalonia, and Andalusia" also suffered heavy population losses. In total, the researchers concluded that 40% of Spain's municipalities face "a bleak demographic future." Nonetheless, efforts against rural depopulation continue on the activist level, the national level, and even at the level of the EU. The new President of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, "created a Vice-Presidency for Democracy and Demography." The office will be responsible for assessing the link between rural demographic changes and access to services. EU efforts on rural depopulation will need to be covered in a different blog post. 

Local passion met institutional support as early as March of 2021 when the Spanish government introduced a $11,900,000 plan to improve internet infrastructure in the countryside. The plan came as part of a greater effort to bring digital nomads to Spain during the pandemic years. Sarnago was among the villages attempting to attract digital nomads. By late 2024, Spain continued efforts to extend 5G internet service to rural areas with the collaboration of private companies like Vodafone and Telefonica. As of 2025, Spain's fiber optic internet connectivity coverage reaches 46% of the rural population. According to the Spanish Ministerio del Economia, Comercio, y Empresa (Economy, Commerce, and Business), rural internet coverage exceeds the coverage available to rural French, German, and British communities. ("La cobertura de fibra óptica en las zonas rurales alcanza al 46% de la población, duplicando la media europea de cobertura rural y muy por encima de la cobertura de Francia (12%), Alemania (6%) o Reino Unido (6%)")

In spite of the federal and grass-roots support for the restoration of Spain's villages, some efforts find themselves halted by local governments themselves. In 2023, the Autonomous Community of Castilla La Mancha threatened to fine or imprison a group of young Spaniards seeking to revitalize the village of Fraguas because the village site now lies within a natural park.

Tourism: a problem in the cities and maybe a solution in the country

Spain is a major tourist destination for both global and local tourists. The site of a confluence of Celtiberian, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic, and Moorish civilizations in addition to the native Spanish Catholic peoples in Spain, the nation hosts fifty UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Four of the World Heritage Sites are national parks. 

Recently, however, urban Spaniards have protested against the tourism industry for raising the cost of living in Spain's cities above the budget of many native Spaniards. In a seeming contradiction from Spain's earlier efforts to attract digital nomads to its countryside, Spain's government recently proposed a 100% tax on property purchases by non-EU citizens. While tourism may strangle the budget of locals in already saturated cities, it may at the same time provide a lifeline to rural communities. 

I specifically recall during trips from Salamanca to Valladolid, Madrid, Toledo, Avila, and Zamora that the train or bus would pass by old medieval watchtowers and beautiful scenery. There is little doubt that Spain's countryside holds untapped potential for tourism. 

The Camino de Santiago, a set of pilgrimage routes, stretches across Spain and ends at Santiago de Compostela in Spain's Northwestern corner. Each of the routes necessarily pass through stretches of rural lands and communities which could use the business more than big cities like Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid. 

Credit: https://www.pilgrim.es/en/routes/

The pilgrimage is traditionally completed on foot and most of the routes run through the rural regions of Extremadura and Castilla y Leon before ending in the comparatively urbanized Galicia. The two most urbanized routes appear to be the Portuguese route and the Ruta Norte (Northern Route), which runs through the Cantabrian Mountains on Spain's northern coast. Pilgrims stop along the route in hostels specifically for pilgrims or "albergues." Most albergues will be located in urban centers, but it is conceivable that some pilgrims need to stop between cities due to lengthy distances. Furthermore, the albergues are relatively inexpensive, and in many cases, managed by the public specifically to host pilgrims rather than general tourists. For example, between Caceres and Salamanca are numerous smaller cities and villages whose economies could be bolstered by the presence of publicly funded albergues. While urban Spaniards rail against the tourism industry for the rising cost of living, rural Spaniards could preserve their communities with the aid of rest stops for weary and hungry pilgrims. 

Credit: Google Maps

Conclusion

Spain's rural depopulation crisis may seem insurmountable. Gil-Alonso, Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Pujadas-Rubies were not optimistic in their article Is Spanish depopulation irreversible? Recent demographic and spatial changes in small municipalities. However, a number of unique solutions through Hispanic immigration and tourism are available to Spain. Furthermore, strong institutional support from the Spanish government and the EU may extend the services and internet connectivity needed for geographically distant villages to survive and maybe flourish. Finally, if Spain could come back from an even worse episode of depopulation during the Reconquista, it can come back from this. 

Gabbs, Nevada is a real place

During Thanksgiving Break 2024, I traveled with my partner at the time to visit her family in Gabbs, Nevada. Leading up to the trip, I told my friends and family where I was going by saying the name of the town, waiting for a second, then dramatically saying "population: 58." This usually got a bit of a puzzled reaction, but I felt it conveyed my bewilderment effectively. It seemed like an impossible place to me, far more remote and isolated than anywhere I had been.

A faded sign outside of Gabbs with a list of obsolete churches and social clubs, November 2024 

It turns out the population is certainly larger than 58, with the most recent numbers I could find putting the population at 237. I'm not sure if the discrepancy was because of my ignorance or some miscommunication. Regardless, the town was certainly isolated. It was about seventy miles away from the nearest gas station and grocery store, deep in the magnificent beige of the Great Basin Desert. 

I was perhaps too unbothered by the isolation, as I neglected to fill up my car at my opportunity to do so. As Interstate 80 changed to US 50 which changed to NV 361, the setting sun cast a lovely red glow on the desert, before turning into a pitch darkness that properly spooked me. I love a good country drive in pitch darkness, but the lack of trees or any shapes for my headlights to bounce off of was causing a low-grade panic to set in. My paranoia about running out of gas certainly did not help. 

NV 361. I swear this was terrifying at night. November, 2024

We did arrive safely, not quite sure if we were going to spend that night with our hosts or at a local motel that one Yelp review referred to as "Norman Bates scary." We thankfully did not have to find out what that meant, and spent the night on the couch after some stargazing and exploring our hosts' underground library. The lack of light pollution and 

We talked with our hosts quite a bit about life in Gabbs. They were my partner's great uncle and aunt, and they were constantly on the road. They spent about half of the year driving to visit friends, preferring to hole up in Gabbs in the more temperate seasons, leaving mainly during winter and summer. For them, the remoteness was peaceful, and it was where my partner's great aunt and grandmother grew up.

Gabbs was founded around a magnesium mine in 1941, when demand for the mineral was high due to World War II. Though demand dropped off sharply after the end of the war, operations in the mine continued, and the town was built up with a library and a k-12 high school, where my partner's grandmother attended while growing up there through the 1950s. She mentioned seeing nuclear blasts on the horizon growing up, likely seeing explosions from the Nevada Test Site, which operated continuously through the 1960s.  

Wide-Lens Shot of Gabbs, a view from the desert. November, 2024.  

The next day we had a two hour excursion of wandering in the desert and exploring the town. While the previously cited Nye County Civic-Plus source indicates that the town has an operational school, library, and community pool, it was clear from our exploration and conversations with my partner's family that this was no longer the case. The pool was dry and overrun and the library and school were just empty facades with decayed interiors. Apparently the town had been losing population over time and the population was now mostly retirees.  

An abandoned pool in the center of town, November, 2024. 

 Our discussions of rural disadvantage in week five reminded me of wandering around Gabbs. The readings around the crises facing rural schools brought the image of the empty school back to my mind. This simply seemed to be a later stage of the problems described in those articles. I am now struck by how Gabbs is so remote that its decline is not noticed at all by the outside world. There is so little information available about this town even in our age of information. If I had not been there, it would have been impossible to understand it as a real place.   

 On the drive back home I appreciated the beauty of the desert a good deal more. I am also happy to report that I did not run out of gas, though it got a bit too close for comfort at the end there.  

SNAP under fire

Credit: USDA, May 2010
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) has played a pivotal role as one of the most effective tools for combating food insecurity at a federal level. Food insecurity and food desserts often go hand in hand, and this blog has previously discussed their impacts. The current administration has proposed major changes to SNAP under the Make America Health Again (“MAHA”) campaign but what exactly is happening?

In July 2025, Congress passed H.R. 1 (the "One Big Beautiful Bill"), which introduced significant federal cuts to a range of social programs, including SNAP. Beginning in October 2027, the law will change SNAP’s work requirement policy, payment error rate policy, and the share of administrative costs covered by the federal government.

SNAP time-limit work requirements require participants to spend at least 80 hours per month engaged in allowable activities such as employment or job training. Previously, applied these requirements only to “able-bodied adults without dependents.” This group included people between the ages of 18 and 54 without children or a work-limiting disability, and excluded those who were pregnant, veterans, experiencing homelessness, or youth aged out of foster care. The new law expands these requirements. Non-disabled adults ages 55 to 64 without dependent children and non-disabled adults ages 18 to 64 whose youngest dependent is between the ages of 14 and 15 must now meet the work requirement. In addition, the law removes previous exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and youth who aged out of foster care.

Beyond work requirements, the law also changes how states are held accountable for SNAP benefit distribution. SNAP defines the payment error rate as “the measurement of the accuracy of active case review.” In simple terms, the rate reflects the percentage of SNAP benefits that states issued incorrectly, including both overpayments and underpayments. In the past, states with high payment error rates were required to implement corrective action plans and could face financial penalties only after sustained high error rates over multiple years. Under the new law, states with payment error rates exceeding six percent will be required to absorb a portion of their SNAP benefit costs.

However, past data suggests that this threshold is set too low. In 2024, only seven states reported payment error rates below six percent. Additionally, in an effort to increase cost-sharing, the federal government has reduced the percentage of administrative costs it will cover, lowering the federal share from 50 percent to 25 percent. Administrative costs include staffing, case management, eligibility verification, IT systems, and customer service infrastructure. Cutting federal support in half places a higher burden on state budgets and makes it difficult for states to reduce payment error rates and properly enforce SNAP eligibility requirements.

Consequently, this cost-sharing structure will likely impose the greatest hardships on under-resourced states. For example, based on Ohio’s previous error rates, the state could potentially be on the hook for $318 million in SNAP benefit costs.

In addition to restructuring how SNAP operates, policymakers have also pushed to change what participants can purchase with their benefits. The MAHA movement has pushed to restrict the types of food that can be purchased with SNAP benefits. For decades, federal policy allowed SNAP benefits to be used to purchase any food item except alcohol and ready-to-eat hot foods. Any additional restrictions required states to obtain a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). While these federal rules remain in place, several states, encouraged by the current administration, have applied for waivers that would prevent SNAP benefits from being used to purchase “junk foods.” Beginning January 1st, several states, including Utah, West Virginia, Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana, implemented restrictions preventing SNAP participants from using their benefits to purchase soda.

Supporters of the MAHA movement frame these changes as necessary to combat a national health crisis, critics disagree. Opponents highlight the barriers that many rural communities already face when trying to access food. In some areas, residents may only have access to gas stations or small convenience markets as their primary food sources. Additional restriction on eligible food purchases could leave SNAP participants with few practical options for using their benefits. Furthermore, health policy experts note that limiting choices does not guarantee that individuals will make “healthier” decisions. Instead, these restrictions that limit food purchasing options may undermine participants’ autonomy and dignity.

Taken together, these changes represent a significant shift in the federal approach to SNAP. Expanded work requirements, increased state cost burdens, and new restrictions on eligible food purchases may share how participants access and use benefits. These changes will be felt strongly in many rurall communities with limited food access.

The ronda and the rope: parallel justice systems and the dangers of legal abandonment in rural Latin America

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala delivers a speech in rural Puno.
Humala ran on a campaign with ethnonationalist tones. He is currently serving a 15 year sentence for his involvement in the Odebrecht scandal, the largest corruption scandal in Latin American history.
© Presidency of Peru, 2015 

Much has been written about the lack of access to legal services in rural areas of America. Savvy writers usually stay clear of making worst case scenario predictions. This is understandable, as nobody wants to be the person who says the sky will fall down. I shall not make such calamitous predictions either. What this article contains is instead a view into a place in which legal systems have failed and given way to other forms of justice.

This article is a small survey of parallel systems of justice in rural and remote areas of Peru, a country with which I am intimately familiar. Over the course of this piece I will go through the circumstances that led to the formation of such systems, their current status, and some of their worst excesses. Peru is not the United States. Its geography, history, and demographics are radically different. The underlying conditions that produced these parallel systems are not, however, unique to Peru. It is worth asking what fills a vacuum when the courts do not play a role. In Peru, we have some answers. Whether the same questions in rural America would ever be answered in like manner to Peru is for the reader to imagine.

The geographical roots of legal absence

A lone truck challenges the curves of the Pasamayo Serpentine.
The trip is usually made harder by fog and wet asphalt. Hundreds of people have fallen 300 feet to their deaths in this road over the last couple decades.
© Santiago Stucchi, 2008.

Peru's geography represents a major obstacle to the nation's political integration and by extension, to its legal system. Peru is vertically split in half by the Andes mountain region, it is flanked on its east by the Amazon rainforest and on its west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru's capital of Lima holds 1/3 of the nation's population. The result of this is an extremely centralized nation, dominated by its political and economic coastal elites. Its mountainous terrain makes transportation quite difficult as well, with some highways like the infamous Serpentine of Pasamayo (an extremely narrow 14 mile stretch of highway which has mountain on one side and abyss on the other) being the only way to make way through the country.

In many remote areas, especially in the Andes, there is very little formal policing. The courts are a distant, nonoperative institution. Language barriers do not help either, as about 15% of Peru's population speaks Quechua as their main language, but much of the population, and especially those working in government, do not speak it at all. Historically, communities in such areas have governed themselves with little involvement from the central or even regional government. Often, they handled disputes through informal assemblies or through respected community leaders. The first rondas campesinas (meaning "peasant patrols") were established in the northern Andean region of Cajamarca, in the late 1970s. These early rondas were primarily created to deal with property crimes (the main one being cattle theft).

Sendero Luminoso and the militarization of the rondas

A painting displayed on the First Military School of Sendero Luminoso.
On the left, the students. On the right, Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzman. Above him the figures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

In May 1980, the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (literally "Shining Path"), a primarily rural Andean movement, declared war on the Peruvian government. It was led by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy at a university in Ayacucho (a region in the south Andes). Part of Sendero's strategy was what they called "batir el campo" (meaning "scouring the countryside", destroying all non-Sendero authority in such regions). Initially, many rural communities sided with Sendero, agreeing with their message of discontent against the neglect the government had for the people of the Andes. When confronted with the violent revolts happening in the Andes, President Fernando Belaunde dismissed them, assessing the threat as nothing more than small issues with cattle rustlers. Sendero held "people's trials" against those it considered "antirevolutionary elements". The subject of these trials were often community leaders, and the price of resistance was massacre. The most notorious of these was the Lucanamarca massacre of 1983, in which over 60 people (ranging from ages of 6 months to 70 years of age) were killed with machetes and axes, in retaliation for the killing of one of Sendero's commanders. What followed were years of massacres in the Andes, with much of the human cost falling on the rural communities that lived there.

Eventually, in the early 1990s, the Peruvian government found its footing in the fight against Sendero, and the war started to turn. Under the leadership of President Alberto Fujimori, the rondas started being armed and supported by the government. This cooperation proved instrumental in defeating Sendero in rural regions, and displacing them into other areas where the government had an easier time fighting them. On September 12, 1992, Sendero's leader Abimael Guzman was captured in a safehouse in an upper class neighborhood in Lima, where he was being hosted by a wealthy classical dancer. That was game over.

Constitutional recognition

After the inflection point of Guzman's capture, Fujimori moved forward with a series of reforms. Chief among them was the Peruvian Constitution of 1993. In its Article 149, the constitution recognizes the authority of the rondas campesinas within their jurisdictions, as long as they "respect the fundamental rights of people". The same article calls for the cooperation of the "traditional" judicial power and these parallel systems of justice in the future.

How the project of cooperation and respect for the fundamental rights of people is going is difficult to assess with precision. But, where statistics are scarce, it is always good to tell a story.

A Canadian in Ucayali

The village of Nuevo Jerusalen in the Ucayali Region of Peru.
A village such as this was where the events described below took place.
© Vratislav S, 2012

Imagine you are a young (ish) Canadian man. Like many of your peers, you seek enlightenment. You doubt Western medicine and respect indigenous cultures. So, you decide to look into the real stuff. You travel south, to Peru, perhaps further south, to the Ucayali Region (in the Amazon rainforest). You do ayahuasca, it changes your life, you seek to go further down the rabbit hole. You seek a teacher, Olivia Arevalo Lomas, a well known elder, healer and community leader. You dedicate ten years of your life to this. Then one day, a bang, and your teacher is dead, three gunshot wounds. The police eventually show up (it takes them some time), and everyone is really angry. Even worse, they think it is your fault. Oh no. Facebook posts start to be circulated. "WANTED" they say, then a picture of you, then a plea for clues on your whereabouts. People in the comments express their wishes that you are brought to justice, others propose rewards for hunting you down. Things are looking really bad for you. But actually, these latest developments are not that bad, since you are already dead. Police soon find a phone which contains a video recording of your last moments. A mob got to you (quickly, well before the police ever got there, since you are conspicuously foreign). There was no trial, no evidence, no attorneys. You have been lynched, and your manner of death was strangulation. Your family says you were really nice, hated guns, and just loved ayahuasca. The locals will remain convinced it was you. The rest of the world will never know. This story is not a thought experiment. These events happened to Sebastian Woodruffe, a Canadian tourist. His death drew international attention before disappearing from the news cycle within days.

Gerardo's choice

If you are in any way like me, you may have heard the story and said to yourself, "only one way to avoid a similar fate, stay as far away as possible from that region if you are not a local." However, this is not a solution. In 2007, in the village of Patascachi (near the border with Bolivia, population around 1000), a mob descended upon the house of Gerardo Parisuana, a farmer. Nearly the entire town was there. The occasion? Gerardo's son Gary was accused of being a cattle rustler, and the mob had had enough of him. The evidence against him? A gang of cattle rustlers, upon capture, had accused Gary of being their leader. The police arrested Gary, but found insufficient evidence to hold him and released him shortly after. For the rondas, however, the "trial" had already happened, the verdict was in, and there was no room for appeals. Gerardo now had a choice: to lynch his own son, or to have the rest of his family share his son's fate. Gerardo made his choice. According to witnesses, the crowd tortured Gary before Gerardo hanged him.

The mayor on trial

A sign near the city of Ilave, in the Puno Region.
The city of Ilave is at an elevation of over 12 thousand feet above sea level.
© TeshTesh, 2015

Not even money and power are enough to protect yourself from such a fate. In 2004, in the city of Ilave (in the Puno Region, near Lake Titicaca in the heart of the Andes), the mayor of the city, Cirilo Robles, was lynched by a mob. It all started with a protest sparked by allegations of corruption and embezzlement. Aymara-speaking peasants made camp in front of the municipality's doors, protesting that the mayor had promised to pave the Ilave-Mazocruz highway, and the promise was yet to be fulfilled. The mayor left the city as soon as the protests started, and only came back weeks later. When he finally came back, he held a meeting with his council at his private residence, in which he resolved to resign. The mob found out about the mayor's return, and soon thereafter they descended upon his home. They breached the house and dragged the mayor after giving him a beating. He was tortured for hours before being hanged in the city's square. His lifeless body was found under a bridge. Later that year, Peru's Government Accountability Office investigated the allegations against him. They found no evidence of embezzlement, and they exonerated him. The Supreme Court of Peru sentenced two members of the mob to 30 years in prison. The mayor's successor, Miguel Flores, closed this somber chapter with a phrase that could be considered the most Peruvian aphorism, "Everything remains the same for us."

Conclusion

The rondas campesinas are not just a series of horror stories. They emerged from genuine necessity. They fulfilled a role that no one else could. They even have constitutional recognition. But the results they tend to generate speak for themselves. Formal policing and legal institutions are not perfect, but they tend to produce something different. 

Peru is not the United States. The Andes are not Appalachia. The Amazon is not the Ozarks. But legal vacuums do not know borders, and the dynamics that fill them may follow recognizable patterns. Whether those patterns may ever extend to America is, as said in the introduction, for the reader to imagine.