Legal Ruralism

CEDAW and Rural Development: Empowering Women with Law from the Top Down, Activism from the Bottom Up

2012-01-26T05:50:00.000-08:00

My third article on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is forthcoming shortly in the Baltimore Law Review. The focus of this piece, co-authored with a former student (Marta Vanegas, Class of 2011), is Article 14(2)(e) of CEDAW, which requires Member States to support the establishment of rural women's self-help groups and cooperatives. Our article discusses how Article 14(2) has facilitated women's grassroots activism, which effects rural development in a range of ways. A full abstract for the article follows:

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is one of the most widely ratified human rights treaties in history, yet many view it as a failure in terms of what it has achieved for women. In spite of the lack of a meaningful enforcement mechanism and various other shortcomings, however, CEDAW has inspired feminist activism around the world and helped raise women’s legal consciousness. While CEDAW itself is widely viewed as a product of feminist activism in the international arena, this essay explores the Convention’s role as a source of — and tool for — grassroots feminist activism. Our focus is on such activism in rural areas of both developed and developing countries, places where law is often functionally absent.

CEDAW recognizes rural women as a particularly disadvantaged group in need of additional rights. Article 14 addresses rural women exclusively and specifically, stipulating that they — like their urban counterparts — should enjoy a panoply of rights: education, health care, and an array of civil and political rights. Moreover, Article 14 enumerates for rural women rights related to participation in agriculture and development more generally. It also includes the right for rural women to organize self-help groups and cooperatives for purposes of obtaining “equal access to economic opportunities through employment or self-employment,” a right not mentioned elsewhere in relation to all women. Finally, Article 14 enumerates for rural women a wider range of socioeconomic rights than CEDAW elsewhere recognizes for all women. These include rights to various types of infrastructure, including water, sanitation, electricity, transport, and housing.

This essay first considers how Article 14 is consistent with contemporary feminism’s greater focus on socioeconomic rights as a reflection of women’s material concerns and lack of economic power. It considers these rights against a rural backdrop, where socioeconomic deprivations tend to be greater and where Member States face spatial and other distinct challenges to economic development, as well as to the provision of basic services such as healthcare and education. We examine Member States’ responses to their Article 14 commitments to empowering rural women, with particular attention to how Member States have encouraged and facilitated self-organization by women, as required by Article 14(2)(e). Member States’ periodic reports to the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women indicate that governments seek to achieve rural women’s empowerment through the women’s grassroots activism, including via local self-help groups (SHGs) and cooperatives as envisioned by 14(2)(e). Indeed, some evidence suggests that Member States benefit directly from rural women’s self-organizing when women’s SHGs and cooperatives go beyond facilitating women’s economic empowerment to become vehicles for delivering health, education, and other services in rural areas. These women’s organizations thus do a range of work under the ambit of rural empowerment.

The essay next considers local women’s organizations in four Member States, two developed nations and two developing ones. We analyze how these organizations draw on and benefit from CEDAW’s Article 14(2)(e) mandate (however weak a mandate it is, practically speaking) to encourage women’s collective mobilization. Thus, the essay sketches a portrait of the potential and actual symbiosis between top-down lawmaking and bottom-up activism to empower women. In short, we focus not on CEDAW’s role as an enforceable human rights treaty, but rather on its function as an expressive document that has fostered and facilitated applied feminism.

My other articles about CEDAW's Article 14 are Migration, Development and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women (2009) and Deconstructing CEDAW's Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference (2011).

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XCVI): Jail costs suddenly skyrocket

2012-01-25T06:10:00.000-08:00

The big above-the-fold headline in the January 11, 2012, issue of the Newton County Times is "Jail cost increased $250,000." The lede states:

The cost of constructing the new Newton County Jail went up $250,000 and uses the maximum amount of money the county has available for the new facility. The quorum court released the funds Tuesday, Jan 3, at is regular monthly meeting.

This represents an increase of more than 30% over the bid price of $840,000, and the story provides little in the way of explanation for the dramatic jump. What it does say is that the project manager for Davis Construction, which won the bid, "told the quorum court ... that the bid price was based on drawings provided to the construction firm at the time of the bidding last September. The project has been expanded and items have been added including a sprinkler system, additional toilets, shower stalls and other facilities to meet state requirements."

Conveniently (though perhaps not coincidentally), the increase raises the total construction price to $1,090,000, which is exactly the amount the county has available through a bond issue funded by a half-cent sales tax dedicated to the facility's construction. How the bid was let with specifications that failed to comply with state requirements is not addressed in the story, but this would seem to be a major oversight by the quorum court (the Arkansas term for the county board of supervisors) and any professionals advising them.

Sheriff Keith Slape indicated that he is counting on state grants to pay for items such as a video system.

Back to the land: A Greece-U.S. comparison

2012-01-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

A front-page feature in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago reported on a trend in Greece--a trend for people to get back to the land, back to agricultural livelihoods. Journalist Rachel Donadio links that trend to Greece's economic crisis and the fiscal austerity with which the government has responded. Of course, it's also become trendy in the United States (though not necessarily a widespread phenomenon) for young(ish) people to get back to the land, to take up farming of certain types, e.,g., organic, boutique. So I thought I would compare and contrast what is happening in Greece with what is happening in the United States. "Apples to apples" data are not available for the two countries, but a partial look at the who, what and why of "new" farmers is possible.

Greece: Donadio writes of an "exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation's rich rural past a guide to the future." With Greek unemployment at 18% and as high as 35% for those between the ages of 15 and 29, the agricultural sector is bucking this trend, having added 32,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010. Significantly, "most of them [have gone to] Greeks, not migrant workers from abroad." While the story features two 30-something couples who have moved to the island of Chios ("closer to Izmir, Turkey than to Athens) to take up smallish agricultural enterprises, Donadio reports that the greatest increase in new farmers has been among those aged 45 to 65.

Donadio doesn't make a big deal of the distinction between agricultural entrepreneurs and farm laborers, though she mentions both in the story. (A Legal Ruralism post about this distinction is here.) Regarding the entrepreneurs, Donadio writes:

In Greece, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, most families have traditionally invested heavily in real estate and land, which are seen as farm more stable than financial investments, and it is common for even low-income Greeks to have inherited family property.

Donadio quotes the president of a farm school in Salonika, where applications have recently tripled: "young people frequently come to him and say, 'I have two acres from my grandfather in such-and-such place. Can I do something with it?'"

Agricultural roots seem to have influenced the decisions of the two couples Donadio features, both of which moved to Chios, where they had family connections. One couple, trained as agriculturalists but working in other sectors in Athens until a few years ago, are growing edible snails for export. They used $50,000 in family savings to get started. The other couple are cultivating mastic from 400 trees in southern Chios. Neither couple has yet to turn a profit, and the mastic farmers have turned to ecotourism to supplement their income. The edible snail farmers will have their first harvest this year. Both couples expressed confidence in their undertakings, and one is quoted:

In big cities, there's no future for ... young people, the only choice is for them to go to the countryside or to go abroad.

The same can hardly be said of the United States, where the fiscal crisis that began unfolding in 2008 has not been as acute as in Greece. I doubt that many young Americans take up farming because they feel they have no choice. Rather, those set to inherit farms still take over from their parents because of attachment to the lifestyle and place. In addition, the newfound popularity of certain types of agricultural undertakings seems attributable to rising attention to where our food comes from--to locavore, vegan, and organic trends. My students and I have discussed these trends here, here here, and here. A story in the Sacramento Bee in April, 2010 suggests that--as in Greece--those starting up small farms in the United States are typically urbanites and suburbanites drawn back to the land. (A related post is here). As in Greece, younger people in the United States are increasingly the ones drawn to these sorts of farming. (I'm reminded of the distinctions between how the working class raise their children and how the professional/managerial class do so. Working class families raise their offspring to work hard, be dependable, keep their noses clean, be reliable laborers--in short to be self-disciplined. The professional/managerial class, on the other hand, raise their children to self-actualize, to follow their dreams, do what is fulfilling--and the professional/managerial class can typically bankroll their childrens' dreams to some extent. Read more here. Something tells me that most young people getting into farming these days--especially trendy, boutique farming--are from relatively affluent families who are, in short, self-actualizing. They can afford the luxury and have been encouraged to take such risks).

While Donadio reports that many Greeks have access to family land, the same cannot be said of the United States. A recent survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition found that access to land was a major obstacle to those desiring to farm in the United States, second only to the barrier presented by lack of access to capital.

Based on Donadio's story, it seems that those who have recently started farming in Greece include not only the youngish in their 20s and 30s looking for an out from the economic disaster, but also the middle aged. In the United States, farmers tend also to be an aging group. As of 2007, about 30% of U.S. farmers were 65 or older, and the age of principal farm operators was 57 years. According to a recent publication of the National Young Farmers' Coalition, one in four farmers will retire in the next 20 years. So, even as fresh blood is flowing into farming, the business/vocation remains dominated by the middle aged. What is not clear is the extent to which the middle aged--whether new to farming or not--engage in intensive production agriculture or in smaller-scale boutique and organic farms. Either way, it seems that the demographics of farmer/entrepreneurs in the two nations are similar. Another similarity between Greece and the United States is that agritourism (especially in relation to boutique agriculture) is helping keep farms out of the red. See earlier posts here and here.

One distinction between Greece and the United States, however, may lie in who is doing the agricultural labor--versus the agricultural entrepreneurship. Donadio reports that most farm jobs in Greece are going to Greeks. In the United States, however, little doubt exists that immigrants do the vast majority of agricultural grunt work. Read more here, here and here.

Donadio makes no mention of what, if anything, the Greek government is doing to foster the back-to-the land movement. Of course, the USDA has several programs that seek to assist would-be farmers with obstacles to getting started, though the recent Young Farmers publication suggests that the programs are insufficient.

A final similarity is worth pointing out: what I label the "back to the land" movement is not subsistence farming in either the U.S. or Greece. These farmers are relying on markets for their products--and those markets appear to be very often associated with foodie trends and relatively affluent consumers. What better example of this than edible snails for export?

See another post about Greece that links agriculture to rural self-sufficiency here. Listen to yesterday's NPR story about Arizona farmers reclaiming land sold previously sold to land developers; that story notes that both established and new farmers are taking advantage of the land available--though the new and younger farmers are typically able only to lease, not to buy. A recent story about how the South African government is encouraging a new generation of farmers is here.

Cross posted on Agricultural Law.

Social Security and presidential politics

2012-01-23T00:11:00.000-08:00

In many ways, 2012 will be defined by November's presidential election. Primaries, caucuses, conventions, and debates will fill the airwaves. Signs and bumper stickers and t-shirts will fill our neighborhoods. And with presidential politics in the air, we will begin to hear more about domestic issues big and small--the economy, immigration, national security, etc. In rural America, one of those issues will likely be Social Security.

Almost 77 years after Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, over 50 million Americans--1 out of every 7--receive benefits each month, and more than 90 percent of all workers are in jobs covered by Social Security. It has becomes, according to the Social Security Administration's history, "an essential facet of modern life." This is especially true in rural America.

Using data from the Social Security Administration, Daily Yonder co-editor Bill Bishop and Dr. Roberto Gallardo (a research associate with the Southern Rural Development Center at Mississippi State University) highlighted the important role that Social Security plays in rural America in their October 2011 article, "Rural Counties More Dependent on Social Security":

In rural counties, 9.3 percent of total personal income came from Social Security payments in 2009, according to an analysis of government data. That is almost twice the rate found in urban counties, where 5 percent of total income came from monthly Social Security payments.

In counties with small cities (under 50,000 population), Social Security is also a larger part of the local economy. In these so-called 'micropolitan' counties, Social Security accounted for 8.2 percent of total personal income.

Nationally, Social Security makes up 5.5 percent of total personal income.

Using the same data, the National Academy of Social Insurance created a visual representation of the facts: a map illustrating the percentage of total income coming from Social Security by county in 2009. And in a November 2011 article, Bishop and Gallardo looked at the state-by-state impact of potential cuts. For example,

In West Virginia, 24 percent of the total population receives a monthly check from Social Security. In Washington, D.C.--where decisions are made about this program--only 12 percent of the population are Social Security recipients.

On its web site, the League of Rural Voters offers further "sobering" statistics:

Over 90 percent of counties in America with high senior populations are rural.
13 percent of rural seniors live in poverty, compared with 9 percent of metropolitan seniors.
15 percent of rural women over aged 60 are poor compared to 11 percent of men.
80 percent of rural seniors over aged 85 with incomes of less than $10,000 are women.

Social Security is not just important to rural individuals, but also to the rural counties where inhabitants could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in income if Social Security were to undergo significant cuts or changes.

Congressional budget crises aside, Social Security seems to be an issue that is only debated with any real intensity during an election year. Even now, in the thick of the Republican primary season, there does not seem to be significant discussion on the subject. The four candidates still vying for the Republican Party nomination (New Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum) make no substantial mention of Social Security in the informational materials on their web sites. And although his views on Social Secuirty are available on the White House web site, President Obama's campaign web site doesn't mention Social Security.

By contrast, Social Security is one of only ten "issues" listed on the League of Rural Voters web site. Still, the subject does come up, and the candidates' opinions are across the board.

According to CBS News, Ron Paul thinks Social Security is "technically unconstitutional, a mess and a failure" and as president, he would begin a transition out of the program into privatized options. The Washington Post reports that Newt Gingrich would keep the current system but also offer a private market option that would be backed up by the U.S. government. Mitt Romney has advocated for overhauling the program by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for wealthy individuals, but has stopped short of advocating for privatization. Rick Santorum's plan is perhaps the most drastic, calling for "immediate" cuts to Social Security, according to Huffington Post. President Obama is opposed to privatization and advocates instead for "protecting & strengthening" Social Security.

In this economy, many voters may be more concerned with finding a job now than with having security in the future. Nevertheless, as The Washington Times points out, seniors (both rural and urban) are a key voting block and are looking for "commitment" to the program from the candidates. And as the race narrows and heats up this fall, both candidates will speak more and more about the big issues facing the country, including the health of Social Security. And they can bet that rural Americans--who stand to gain or lose so much from potential changes--will be listening.

Call for Papers: Rural Sociological Society's 75th Annual Meeting

2012-01-20T08:26:00.001-08:00

I plan to attend the Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society (RSS) for the fifth time this year--and to participate in the organization's celebration of its 75th anniversary. The meeting will be July 26-29 in Chicago, right back at the Palmer House Hotel where the inaugural meeting was held in 1937. Ag law folks may know that 2012 just happens also to be the 150th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Participating in RSS meetings has proved an important source of ideas, inspiration and contacts in relation to my scholarship about the intersection of law with rural livelihoods. In fact, I often declare RSS my "favorite meeting of the year" because everyone there cares about rural people and places. Taking rural livelihoods seriously is the shared foundation. As readers of the Ag Law Blog will appreciate, such is hardly the case at most law prof conferences. Rather, attending law prof meetings (even warm and fuzzy ones like Law and Society's Annual Meeting) often reinforces the sense that I am writing my way into the very obscurity associated with rural people and places. "Rural people, you say ... how interesting, even exotic, but that has nothing to do with me and my scholarship." By extension, the message seems to be that rural people and places have nothing to do with anything that matters. And so the legal academy steams forward, oblivious to its metro-centrism.

With that endorsement of RSS, I am hoping to attract some ag law scholars to this year's meeting. I'm getting lonely being the only lawyer at RSS, but that's not the only reason you should attend. Like me, I suspect ag law folks have a lot to learn from rural sociologists. In particular, ag law profs may find of special interest sessions organized by the Sociology of Food and Agriculture Research Interest Group. I have presented my work at RSS every year I have attended, and I have found that it fits nicely on the panels of mostly rural sociologists. Plus, the meeting has become more cross-disciplinary in recent years, with scholars from geography, anthropology, and various branches of the humanities also participating.

My final endorsement is based on my attendance of last year's "pre-conference" of the RSS annual meeting in Boise. I participated in one of many field trips on offer, traveling with other scholars to Idaho's Magic Valley to visit a dairy farm. (Photos top and left of field trip, Jerome, Idaho. Yes, those are rural sociologists in a milking parlor). Did you know that Idaho is now the third largest milk-producing state in the nation? Field trip participants considered a number of aspects of the growth of the dairy industry in the Magic Valley: environmental, labor, immigration. Ag law scholars would have felt right at home.

Here's the call for the 75th meeting, with a February 15, 2012 deadline for abstracts and proposals:

Increasing inequality of wealth and income in the United States is a symptom of a deeper problem of increasingly concentrated power wielded by distant actors with no sense of commitment to place. Corporate consolidation and the federal government's commitment to the fetish of free trade have created an economic system disembedded from social life as lived by most citizens. The twin processes of consolidation and separation threaten the social contract upon which our society is based. This contemporary legitimacy crisis has spawned a curious ideological consensus between Tea Party advocates and Progressives who share a common fear of the big and distant.

Inequalities exist within and between communities and regions, and of course between nations. Everywhere we simultaneously see conspicuous displays of wealth and landscapes of despair. Over the past half century and more, rural sociologists have chronicled the steady decline experienced by many parts of rural America due to decisions made far away in corporate boardrooms and legislative bodies. Parallel changes have affected urban industrial centers through government acquiescence to or even encouragement of corporate disinvestment.

Reform of this economic system is made difficult by the mutual dependence that big corporations and big government have upon each other.

Resistance to distant forces is increasingly visible as each neighborhood fights a big box development, as each community invests in a local food system, and each time a group of citizens bands together to fight threats to environmental and public health which governments are happy to permit as the price of economic growth. Higher energy prices and technological developments are likely to create new opportunities to build local economies around local needs and resources.

The movement towards localism is inspired by the idea that the economy is something we participate in, not something that is done to us.

In this conference, we encourage participants to explore the potential that localism has to create vibrant economies that offer not only a market alternative but a values-alternative to our contemporary economic system.

Go here to submit your abstract.

If you plan to attend RSS in Chicago, please email me offline. I am hoping to organize a round table of legal scholars at this year's meeting (assuming we can get a critical mass to the meeting) to have a discussion about what a "law and rural society" thread of scholarship might look like. After all, Law and Society is a flourishing sub-discipline. By carving out a scholarly space for legal scholars interested in food, agriculture and the rural, we are likely to reveal Law and Society's metronormativity--just like the establishment of the Rural Sociological Society's founding in 1937 highlighted the implicit metro bias of the American Sociological Association.

Cross-posted to Agricultural Law Blog.

The geography of the 1%

2012-01-16T07:21:00.001-08:00

The New York Times ran a lengthy feature yesterday that profiled the 1% (wealth-wise). The headline was "Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations," and the point was that the top earners in this country followed a variety of paths to get to that lofty 1% and that they live in a variety of places. Still, some trends among this group are discernible. First, they work long hours, and while married 1 percenters are as likely as other married folks to have a spouse who works, men in these couples tend to be the big breadwinners.

Not surprisingly, the one percent are also more likely to live in cities than in rural places, though I suspect quite a few of them have second (and even third) homes in amenity-rich rural locales.

The authors of the story, Shaila Dewan and Robert Gebeloff, also note that being in the "local 1%" takes a lot less income in some places than in others. This, of course, also reflects uneven development and the fact that wealthy people (and some of the best jobs) tend to be clustered in certain places. Here's an excerpt:

Aspen's 1 percent is very different from Akron's. In some areas there are so many 1 per centers that the whole income hierarchy can shift. It can take $380,000 to be in the national 1 percent, but it takes $900,000 to be among the top 1 percent of earners in Stamford, Conn. Compared with that, the price of admission to the 1 percent in Clarksville, Tenn., is a bargain at $200,000.

The story reports the income level required to be in the top 1% is lowest in Jamestown, New York, at just $176,000. Here's where that 1% threshold falls in other cities:

Dover, DE: $266,000

Boulder, CO: $463,000

Boise, ID: 306,000

Tacoma, WA: $287,000

Eugene, OR: $301,000

Des Moines, IA: $350,000

Pueblo, CO: $258,000

Las Cruces, NM: $242,000

El Paso, TX: $257,000

Shreveport, LA: $326,000

Biloxi, MS: $313,000

Daytona Beach, FL: $312,000

Louisville, KY: $320,000

Kenosha, WI: 356,000

Chicago, IL: $480,000

Peoria, IL: $388,000

Fort Smith, AR: $301,000

Duluth, MN: $362,000

The story features this interactive map, which readers can use to see in what percentage their income lands them in different parts of the country.

I note where an income of $100,000 places an earner in each of these places:

Nonmetropolitan West Virginia: top 11%

Nonmetropolitan Montana: top 14%

Billings, Montana: top 17%

Nonmetropolitan Utah: top 16%

Salt Lake City, Utah: top 22%

Nonmetropolitan Arkansas: top 9%

Metropolitan Arkansas: top 17%

Nonmetropolitan Idaho: top 12%

Albuquerque, New Mexico: top 18%

Nonmetropolitan, New Mexico: top 12%

Sacramento, California: top 25%

Nonmetropolitan California: top 17%

Nassau County, New York: top 44%

San Francisco/Oakland, California: top 40%

Portland, Maine: top 23%

Nonmetropolitan Maine: top 14%

Flint, Michigan: top 7%

Kansas City, Missouri/Kansas: top 23%

Nonmetropolitan Kansas: top 12%

In general, then, cities dilute the power of one's wealth vis a vis others because people in cities tend to earn more than their nonmetropolitan counterparts.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XCV): Ground broken on new county jail

2012-01-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

I've written a lot over the past four years about Newton County's jail travails. Some of the earlier posts are here (May, 2009), here (November, 2008), here (January, 2009) and here (March, 2009). My first post about the jail dilemma is here (June, 2008), and some decent photos of the old jail are here. That old building, a historic structure, is currently serving as the county's Christian Food Room.

Well, after about four years of fiscal wrangling and hand wringing, the county has finally broken ground on a new jail, the jail its residents agreed to pay for with a tax increase in November 2008. To be more precise, though, the jail is not truly new. In fact, the county will be working to convert an existing structure--a metal building that the story refers to as a "well-appointed residence"--into a jail. That existing structure, which ironically sits right next to the old jail, is shown in the photo above, which was taken in mid-November, 2011. The then owner of the building is pictured moving some things out, perhaps in preparation for turning it over to the County.

The December 7, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times shows a number of officials at the ground breaking ceremony, among them County office holders (including Justices of the Peace), several sheriffs deputies, the Newton County District Judge, officials with the construction company that won the bid to do the renovation, and a staffer from the office of U.S. Senator John Boozman. Each is holding a gold-painted shovel, though the significance of the gold paint escapes me.

The structure that will house the jail measures 57 feet by 80 feet, and it sits at 105 Elm Street. According to the specifications of the bid, it will feature five felon men cells with two beds each, two felon women cells with two beds each, a male dormitory with six beds, a woman's dormitory with six beds, a holding cell, a cell that meets the American Disability Act, and a control room. In addition, the jail will include a dormitory for eight state inmates under the Act 309 program, an ADA-compliant public restroom, an industrial kitchen, two inmate visitation rooms, two exercise areas, a laundry room, an inmate property room, a booking room, a record room, two men's showers and two women's showers.

Davis Construction of nearby Harrison won the bid to renovate the structure. Many of the home's fixtures will be "carefully removed and put up for public auction," with proceeds going toward construction costs. The county sheriff joked, "I don't think the judge wants to send a convicted criminal to a five-star hotel." Davis Construction's winning bid was $840,000, well below the $1.5 million to be raised by the tax increase passed more than three years ago to finance the jail's construction. I do not recall seeing any notice in the newspaper of how much the county paid the building's prior owner for the land and structure.

Rural Iowa: waste-toids, meth-addicts, and elderly people waiting to die

2012-01-12T00:44:00.000-08:00

How’s that for a sensational headline? I would take the credit for the creativity, but these are not my words. These are the words of Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa in an article that he published in The Atlantic in December.

Bloom, a New Jersey native, reflects on the twenty years he has spent as an Iowa resident in an attempt to educate readers about the state as the Iowa Caucuses approach. Page three of the article focuses on rural Iowa. Bloom brings the idealistic and mythical view that he claims that outsiders have of Iowa- the one where:

The fairytale rendering is pastoral and bucolic; sandy-haired children romping through fecund, shoulder-high corn with Lassie at their side. It's Field of Dreams meets Carousel with The Waltons thrown in for good measure. The ruddy, wooden Bridges of Madison County (where John Wayne was born) may be in the background as the camera pans wide.

Bloom spends the next several paragraphs with a harsh rebut to this myth. He cites a faltering economy, loss of jobs, and a surge of undocumented immigrants being mistreated while working dangerous factory jobs as characteristic of rural Iowa. While many of these points appear to be well-taken, he seems to go pretty extreme when describing the inhabitants of rural Iowa:

Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that "The sun'll come out tomorrow.”

The article, particularly the description of the inhabitants of rural Iowa, has unsurprisingly offended many Iowans. Bloom, who is a visiting professor at the University of Michigan this year, has reportedly received many threats and fears for the safety of his family. The reaction hasn’t been limited to angry citizens and commenters, - many of his peers in Iowa have been blasting Bloom as well.

Bloom certainly has the right to his opinion, but one can’t help but point out the irony in Bloom’s attempt to dispel one stereotypical view of rural life (the idealistic version of “the country”) while promoting another (residents are all lazy, drug-addict, white-trash wastes of space). It is terrible if Bloom’s family is receiving threats, but at the same time, he might have realized that people would be highly offended by those remarks.

Child labor and US farms

2012-01-11T00:06:00.000-08:00

That’s right, in the United States, children as young as twelve can legally work in the fields. They can pick your berries and even drive a tractor. But recently, a slew of articles have been published about new child labor regulations in the U.S.; you can find them here, here, here and here. Even The Daily Yonder featured the story in one of their Tuesday Roundups.

The media interest in this issue has been triggered by new rules from the U.S. Department of Labor, rules aimed at improving safety for children in the fields. The new rules include a ban on farm workers under the age of 16 handling most “power-driven equipment” (such as tractors) and from contributing to the “cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco.” Further, it would prohibit children under the age of 18 from working “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.” According to a report called "Occupational injuries among young workers," most youth work fatalities occurred in agriculture and about two thirds of these fatalities were attributed to transportation accidents, particularly accidents, which occurred either by truck or by tractor.

In fact between 1993 and 2002, tractor accident counted for a quarter of all youth worker fatalities. The proponents of the legislation say these changes are in response to these shocking statistics and insist that they are “not talking about the children of growers, but children employed as farm workers.” Secretory of Labor Hilda Solis insisted this would not apply to children who work on farms operated or owned by parents but rather is to protect “Children employed in agriculture [who] are some of the most vulnerable workers in America. Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach.” Many farmer groups and rural-state politicians disagree. They are up in arms about these proposed changes as they feel it will stop many farming families from employing their underage children.

Rachel Leven’s piece in The Hill takes a refreshing rural-urban perspective on the situation. A group of more than 70 House representatives sent a letter to DOL indicating the rule “challenges the conventional wisdom of what defines a family farm in the United States.” In response to the law, Representative Denny Rehberg states

You’ve got a president of the United States … from Chicago, you’ve got a director for secretary of Labor who’s pushing this from Los Angeles, and you have to think to yourself, do you have any idea what it’s like not just to run an agricultural business in a rural state … but to raise a family in one?

Leven summarizes this quote as mean that Rehberg feels these “proposals are coming from officials who do not understand rural life.” While there are exemptions for family run farms, these exemptions would not apply if parents did not full ownership (which is a common situation today). Further, many feel the necessary precautions are already in place. For example, current regulations allow children to operate heavy equipment if they have taken a safety. A letter written opposing this regulation and signed by more than 30 Nebraska state senators further insisted that "[d]oing away with this exemption will not only reduce the number of youth getting proper training on operating power equipment, but will deny them the experience and responsibility associated with learning to operate the equipment safely and effectively." Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard however insists these farm regulations are not a rural-versus-urban issue. Rather, she feels the “focus needs to be that there are an estimated 400,000 children working on farms that are not owned by family members and those children are not being protected by our current labor laws.”

I am personally conflicted. On the one hand, I support farmers, their sustainability, and their unique understanding of how best to live and thrive. However, I cannot get over the BPL analysis (weighing the burden of taking a precaution against the probability times the gravity of loss if the precaution is not taken) that I learned in my first year law school torts class. The statistics make me believe that the risk is simply too high, and the farming communities need to find alternative ways to teach the next generation of farmers that does not put our nation's youth at fatal risk.

The challenges of serving an acutely remote (and very cold) place

2012-01-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

Those challenges are highlighted in a drama playing out now in the Bering Sea, as reported here in today's New York Times. There, a Russian tanker carrying fuel, the Renda, accompanied by a Coast Guard icebreaker, the Healy, are 140 miles south of Nome, Alaska. Nome, in far northwest Alaska, is running out of fuel because its final shipment of the year, typically made in early fall, was waylaid by bad weather. Now, the 4,000 residents of Nome (included in the 9,492 residents of the Nome Census Area)--along with the various oil exploration interests in the area--are anxiously awaiting the arrival of fuel reinforcements.

An excerpt from William Yardley's story follows. It compares the current drama to a 1925 one in which diphtheria swept through Nome. "No roads led [to Nome], flight was ruled out and Norton Sound was frozen solid." The life-saving treatment was ultimately delivered by sled dogs in what became known as the Great Race of Mercy, and that journey is still commemorated by the Iditarod each year. Yardley writes:

The tanker is slogging through sea ice behind a Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to bring not medicine but another commodity increasingly precious in remote parts of Alaska: fuel, 1.3 million gallons of emergency gasoline and diesel to heat snow-cloaked homes and power the growing number of trucks, sport utility vehicles, and snow machines that have long since replaced dogsleds.

For the moment, this latest tale appears less likely to produce a warm children's book than an embarrassing memo, and maybe a few lawsuits, about how it all could have been avoided

The story includes lots of interesting detail about the effort, including the distinction in capabilities between a medium-duty icebreaker like the Healy and its "heavy-duty polar" counterparts, which were not available for the effort. But it might all be summarized with the old adage, two steps forward, one step back. In short, no one is sure the Renda is going to make it to Nome this winter, in part because ice closes in around the Healy before the Renda can follow through the path cut open.

The drama of getting fuel to Nome aside, who's to blame for the failed autumn shipment? Who will be suing whom? And what is the role of the government in solving the problem? According to Yardley, many blame Bonanza Fuel, "one of two local companies that barge in fuel and the one that failed to ensure its fall delivery made it. But the fuel company's owner blamed the barge company for delaying shipments." Flying fuel in would add about $3/gallon to the cost, which is already $6/gallon in Nome.

As for the government's role, some ask whether "tiny Nome [is] worth all the effort"? But the situation has highlighted issues (such as Coast Guard capacity) that are likely to arise as Arctic exploration and Arctic shipping burgeon. Nome Mayor Denise Michels picks up on this theme in discussing the government's role (here, primarily in the form of the Coast Guard assistance) in getting Nome out of this pickle:

Why should we be treated any differently than the Lower 48? ... We keep saying we are an Arctic nation.

Michels notes that the Coast Guard provides escort for commercial shipments through ice and difficult conditions in the Great Lakes and elsewhere.

The story reminds me of the isolated, "fly in, fly out" mining communities I heard so much about when I was in Australia last year. It also reminds me of the Australian designation of "remote" communities, which are distinct from -- perhaps a subset of-- rural ones. Certainly, Nome would qualify as remote. Indeed, it may be sui generis in the U.S. context.

Elsewhere in Alaska, the coastal city of Cordova is snowed in See NPR coverage of both Alaskan events here. Another report on the record snow fall in Cordova, and what's being done about it, is here.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art reaches out to local schools

2012-01-08T02:36:00.001-08:00

A recent New York Times feature story about the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art recited the now familiar spiel on the location of the institution, the pet project of Wal-Mart heir, Alice Walton, which opened in November, 2011. Roberta Smith calls the museum's home, Bentonville, Arkansas, a "small town in northwest Arkansas."

As I have noted in earlier posts, Bentonville is hardly a "small town." In fact, is in a metropolitan area with nearly half a million people, but Smith is not the first to characterize it as such. See earlier posts here and here. And admittedly, the immediate setting of the museum is bucolic, as the top photo suggests.

But Smith is more focused on the museum and its collection than she is on its location, and she concludes her opening paragraph with this assessment:

But there it stands, a big, serious, confident, new institution with more than 50,000 square feet of gallery space and a collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars in a region almost devoid of art museums.

Smith mentions an interesting gap in the Crystal Bridges collection--indeed an ironic one: "the almost complete lack of paintings by largely self-taught or folk artists."

This omission is especially noteworthy because rural America is so often associated with the common man, as well as with other connotations of folksy.

And, indeed, the museum is reaching out to the "common man" or--more precisely--the common child. Smith notes the museum's "ambitious education program, which will reach out to more than 80,000 elementary students in the area."

Related to these programs, I assume, is the Crystal Bridges Fenceworks exhibit, which sits at the entrance to the museum grounds.

The art fence caught my eye when I visited the museum on its opening day, Nov. 11, 2011. I took the photos below of the artwork of students at area schools, including Springdale, Bentonville, Fayetteville, West Fork, Elkins and many others. Some of the scenes depicted are very local--such as that of the Rodeo of the Ozarks. You can see that one painting is in a van Gogh style, another a la Monet. I wonder how long Fenceworks will remain, and if it will be a rotating exhibit, with new paintings by area children each year. The sign on it suggests that the exhibit will grow.

Uranium mining blocked at Grand Canyon

2012-01-07T17:36:00.001-08:00

Read the New York Times story here, for which the lede follows:

The Obama administration is set to announce on Monday that it will block new uranium mining on one million acres in northern Arizona near the Grand Canyon, lobbyists and Interior Department employees who had been informed about the decision said on Friday.

Such mining has been the subject of an interim ban since 2009. In proposing an extension of the ban, Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, cited "potential for pollution in waterways and harm to wildlife, desert vegetation and air quality."

Felicity Barringer's story offers this political perspective on the moratorium:

The long moratorium has been opposed by the region's Congressional Republicans. They argue that it would prevent the creation of thousands of jobs and upend a 28-year-old compromise on land use forged by environmentalists and mining proponents during the Reagan administration.

Once again, then, the story is spun as one that pits rural economics against environmental protection. See a recent, related post here.

A subsequent New York Times report is here.

New York Times again turns attention to Post Office closures

2012-01-05T00:27:00.000-08:00

Campbell Robertson reports in today's paper on the grassroots efforts of communities in rural north Arkansas to save their post offices. While I've been writing about such efforts in the context of northwest Arkansas (in particular, Newton County, see posts here, here and here), Robertson's focus is a bit farther east, mostly in Stone County, population 12,394. The story also includes mention and photos of the post offices in Witts Springs (Searcy County) and Tilly (Pope County), which I mentioned in this post a few weeks ago.

The story refers to the same sorts of practical arguments I've recited in my coverage of the issue (e.g., delivering medicines to the elderly, lack of broadband), but Robertson's headline, "A Fight for Post Offices and Towns' Souls," highlights what I see as the most interesting part of the story. It is the nostalgia angle--the place-as-identity angle--which is reflected in this quote:

The deeper anxiety [among rural residents fighting to keep their post offices] is an existential one. Prim, Tilly, Ida, Fox--all of these communities were named into existence decades ago, and in some cases more than a century ago, by a postmaster. While the postal authorities insist that there will be alternatives to stand-alone offices--for example, an outdoor bank of boxes--residents fear that place that began with post office buildings could simply cease to exist with their departure.

Of course, this is a point I have made in my earlier posts, too, but it's a little different when the New York Times gives it a platform. I also appreciate this quote from Stanley Morrison, identified as a 59-year-old rural Stone County logger and justice of the peace:

There are those who have been downtrodden so long, they can't get back up. And there are others who've been downtrodden so long they decide to fight back.

Another rural resident, this one in Tilly, commented, "I don't remember an issue where we had to pull together like this." Rural Arkansas communities are indeed organizing to fight the closures, but the effectiveness of their efforts remains to be seen.

Robertson notes that the junior U.S. Senator from Arkansas, Republican John Boozman is departing from his small government philosophy to propose "legislation that would ban the closing of any post office if the nearest one is more than 10 miles away."

There are times it's not as profitable, but it's important to provide that service.

Robertson's focus on Arkansas is apparently based on the fact that the state stands to lose one third of its post offices under the current round of proposed closures.

Don't miss the slide show accompanying Robertson's story. It features photos of many rural post offices in the area, and a few of their post masters, too. An earlier post about the New York Times coverage of the proposed post office closures is here.

Pulling out all the stops to save a rural school (Part VI): The value of the "isolated" school designation

2012-01-04T04:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote in recent posts, here and here, of the efforts of the Deer-Mt. Judea School District in the Arkansas Ozarks to attract Oark school patrons away from the Jasper District, their current home. The Jasper Board of Education passed a resolution at its December 15 meeting "resolving not to cede territory to other school districts," according to the December 21, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times. An excerpt from the Jasper District resolution follows:

Whereas in the eight years since the merger, the resulting school district sand its school administration team have made substantial improvements and repairs to the physical plant at Oark Campus, substantially increased the salaries of the former Oark School District employees, and has spent countless hours forging a healthy and productive relationship with the students, parents and community members in Oark;

The resolution also referenced a December 17, 2009 public meeting with Oark school patrons at which none of the 100 or so in attendance expressed a desire to leave the Jasper School District to join the Deer-Mt. Judea district. This suggests, of course, that the issue of Oark joining Deer-Mt. Judea was on the table as recently as two years ago.

Also at the December Jasper Board of Education meeting, the members of the board and the superintendent explained that the petition recently submitted by those purporting to be Oark School patrons did not feature the requisite 75 "verifiable signatures"--meaning registered voters in the school district. The Board therefore decided not to meet with the petitioners because it was not required to do so under Arkansas law. The District's lawyer advised that doing so might set a bad precedent by which future disgruntled patrons, though few in number, might expect an audience with the Board of Education regarding grievances.

One thing the Jasper Board of Education resolution did not mention is the state funding it receives because Oark is an isolated school. I wrote an earlier post about funding for isolated schools, but I have recently learned more about what qualifies as an isolated school and a bit more about how much state funding is associated with the status. First, to qualify as an isolated school, the school must meet four of these five criteria:

There is a distance of twelve (12) miles or more by hard-surfaced highway from the high school of the district to the nearest adjacent high school in an adjoining district;
The density ratio of transported students is less than three (3) students per square mile of area;
The total area of the district is ninety-five square miles (95 sq. mi.) or greater;
Less than fifty percent (50%) of the bus route miles is on hard-surfaced roads;
There are geographic barriers such as lakes, rivers, and mountain ranges that would impede travel to schools that otherwise would be appropriate for consolidation, cooperative programs, and shared services.

The law that provides this definition (Arkansas Code Annotated Section 6-20-601) goes on to state that an isolated school is eligible to receive isolated funding if three criteria are met:

the school district's budget is prepared by the school district with Department of Education approval;
the school district has a prior-year three quarter average daily membership of less than three hundred fifty (350); and
the school district and each school within the school district meets the minimum standards for accreditation of public schools prescribed by law and regulation.

So, just how valuable is this "isolated" designation? According to this 2005 news story, up to $4.8 million dollars is available each year to be divided among the state's 27 isolated schools. An excerpt from that 2005 story follows, providing background on the "isolated" designation and what lawmakers saw as at stake. The excerpt begins with a quote from the law's sponsor, Representative Roy Ragland of Marshall, in Searcy County:

"This is probably the most important bill for me and my district," [Ragland] told colleagues. The bill would deliver about $4.8 million to the state's remotest schools in an effort to help them meet new education requirements, such as an increase in the state's minimum teacher salaries.

If the schools can't meet state standards, the state could close them, forcing even longer bus rides for students in those districts.

SB 191 passed 70-11 and now goes to the governor.

Ragland told House members there is not a companion appropriation bill. Rather, the $4.8 million would come out of the regular general fund, but only if available.

To illustrate the need for additional funding, Ragland used the consolidated Huntsville and St. Paul School District, located in his North Arkansas district.

The new district is paying about $200,000 annually to keep the tiny St. Paul schools open. If those schools close, students there would have to be bused more than 60 miles to schools in Huntsville.

Also, the rugged back roads would make the bus trip very dangerous, he said, adding that there are 27 isolated schools in the state, with about 7,000 students, which would split the $4.8 million.

"This is to subsidize those schools," Ragland said.

More recent data indicate the following amounts associated with the isolated school funding at Deer, Mt. Judea, Oark, and Kingston. I also note, for the sake of comparison, how much the Huntsville district gets for the St. Paul isolated schools (referring to all grades, K-12, not literally to multiple schools), to which Ragland referred in his 2005 comments. Note that it is substantially less than the Jasper District and the Deer-Mt. Judea districts receive.

Deer-Mt. Judea District (for those two campuses): $210,968

Jasper District (for Oark and Kingston): $296,874

Huntsville District (for St. Paul): $24,233

These payments, in February 2011 (click on "Isolated" in right hand column), represent one of two "isolated" payments to each district for FY 2011. However, the second of the two payments for FY 2011, in June 2011, are much smaller, e.g., for Jasper just $98,958 and for Huntsville, just over $8000.

Looking at the payments to all of the Arkansas school districts, the Jasper District (for Oark) receives more than any other district, following somewhat closely by the Ozark Mountain District (which covers parts of Newton County and Searcy County), which receives $232,347, and the Cossatot River District, which receives $245,538 for tiny schools at Umpire, all in Polk and Howard Counties.

In a future post, I will discuss the Ozark Mountain District's recent decision to annex an additional school, the one at Lead Hill.

Nouveau riche in North Dakota

2012-01-03T04:50:00.000-08:00

This story in the New York Times a few days ago was chock full of rural themes: Lack of anonymity, attachment to place, and rural economies--including their association with extraction industries and farming. A.G. Sulzberger's story is headlined "A Great Divide over Oil Riches" and it tells of those who have gotten rich--and those who haven't--in the state's oil boom. In some ways, the story is the same one we're hearing more and more these days in the United States--the story of a burgeoning income and wealth gap. The difference with this one is that it presents income inequality in the microcosm of a nonmetropolitan area where, even more than than in the U.S. generally, the existence of class stratification is often vehemently denied.

The dateline is Stanley, North Dakota, population 1,301, and the story features a number of members of the community, including some long-time farmers. Some of those farmers got rich thanks to the mineral rights on their land--and some got even richer because they happened to own the mineral rights on others' land. (North Dakota happens to be a state where mineral rights can be separated from the underlying property). Here's an excerpt that provides an overview of the story and what has happened in Mountrail County, population 7673.

Sure enough, money is flowing by the barrelful into Mountrail County, transforming a tiny community once proudly situated in the middle of nowhere into an unexpected oasis of prosperity at the heart of the nation's biggest oil play.

The number of households earning more than $100,000/year spiked last year to 21%, from 6% a decade earlier. The median income rose more than 50% in the last decade, the fifth-highest rise in the nation. Deposits are one Stanley bank are now at $135 million, up from $43 million at the start of the boom.

Sulzberger's story highlights how the lack of anonymity that characterizes rural places can aggravate the awkwardness of the newfound and increasing income and wealth gap:

As with any major boom--from real estate to tech stocks to natural resources--the sudden split between the winners and the witnesses has been painful. But this is happening in a small town, where proximity and familiarity make a sudden re-ordering all the more difficult.

"It's not all good," said Leslie Anderson, who is among the lucky locals who sometimes make more from a single month of oil payments than he used to earn in a year of farming. "There are a lot of families fighting that got along before."

Sulzberger also provides a vignette of rural frugality, writing of a newfound oil millionaire living in a trailer home. Lenin Dibble farmed his whole life, but now receives as much as $80,000 a month in oil royalties. He's not spending it, though. He says he can live comfortably off his Social Security and payments he receives from leasing his farm. He's saving his oil wealth for his adult children. Dibble does complain about some of the changes the oil boom has brought:

What he and others in town notice more than the newfound money are the problems: locking the door to his house, taking the keys out of his car and seeing a quiet community where everyone knew everyone overrun by the bustle of strangers.

"I wish it had never happened," Dibble said.

Other residents may not be talking about their oil wealth, but hints of it are found in the fact that they are driving their first new car--and perhaps taking their first-ever vacation, to boot.

The trend of population loss of the high plains has also been reversed as a consequence of the boom. Mountrail County's population up nearly 16% over the past decade. And this relates to another rural phenomenon-- the attachment to place that the county's young residents can now indulge themselves, given the plentiful jobs.

The rest of Sulzberger's story is worth a read for its many rich quotes from Mountrail County locals.

An awfully rosy portrait of rural Iowa

2012-01-02T03:41:00.000-08:00

A front-page story in today's Washington Post paints a very rosy portrait of Washington, Iowa, population 7,135, in the southeast corner of the state. Here's an excerpt from Eli Saslow's story, which contrasts how good things are in this Washington, with the bleak national portraits painted of Washington, DC and the nation by those vying for the Republican nomination for President:

What could be better at the beginning of 2012 in this other city called Washington, a rural town of 7,200 surrounded by the corn and soybean fields of eastern Iowa? This is the Washington with a 4 percent unemployment rate, with record-breaking hog and cattle production, with a new high school and a $6 million library, with a newspaper that doesn't bother to print a crime blotter, with heated sidewalks in front of the bank so customers never have to walk in the snow.

In fact, Washington is not "rural" by official U.S. Government measures, one of which sets the threshold for a rural place at fewer than 2,500 in population. Furthermore, Washington County--of which Washington is the county seat--is part of the Iowa City, Iowa Metropolitan Area. No mention is made of population loss, with which the midwest is so oft associated; indeed, Washington County's population grew about 5% in the past decade.

Never mind those so-called ecological measures of rurality. The place Saslow depicts certainly sounds rural, marked by lack of anonymity and an informal way of handling problems--problems like missed loan payments. The bank official who is the focus of the story, 62-year-old Keith Lazar, tells of how he has learned lessons regarding these matters. He recalls how, several years ago, he initiated the seizure of 25 cattle and 365 hogs from a farmer who defaulted on a loan. The seizure took seven trips, and the farmer watched from his porch for its duration. It was very tense. The banker felt awful the next day, and he hasn't handled problems the same way since.

Now Lazar abides by the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The bank manager now grants a payment extension on a small business loan to a customer encountering a sudden turn of bad luck.

Saslow suggests a link between such policies and success of Lazar's bank, which was established decades ago. The bank has had a great fiscal year, with $2.7 million in profits for 2011, $1.5 million being paid in dividends to the bank's 430 shareholders (many of them local) and $300,000 in bonuses to staff, "including greeters and tellers without college degrees." In fact, only 17.9% of Washington County's residents have a bachelor's degree or higher--about 10% below the national average. That's about the only measure by which Washington County looks less salubrious than the nation, though. Consistent with other rosy economic metrics, especially for a county with such a small population, Washington County's poverty rate is 10.9%, well below the national figure.

And the story does refer in passing to less affluent members of the community who are also bank customers, noting one seeking a loan for a mobile home. Part of the story's message--whether an accurate depiction or not--is that folks who live in mobile homes, too, are members of the community--able to pop into the bank manager's office.

Finally, the story touches on the role of civic institutions in communities like Washington. Saslow explains that folks in the Kiwanis Club--including the middle school principal, the dentist, the sheriff and the hospital president--would rather "pitch in a few $20s than raise taxes or rely on government to fix their problems." So they "solicit community improvement donations"--which they've used in the past to fund a weight room, a park fountain, and a bandstand.

Can life really be this good? Who's to be trusted to enhance our quality of life? the "state" or our neighbors? should the answer vary from rural to urban?

One thing is clear: Saslow's depiction of "rural" Iowa reflects the "love" end of our nation's love-hate relationship with rural America. But I'm always skeptical of the accuracy of any depiction of rurality that is so clearly love or hate.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XCIV): Training law enforcement officers

2012-01-01T13:45:00.001-08:00

A few stories in the Newton County Times in recent months have highlighted the issue of financing, hiring and training local law enforcement officers. In prior issues, I have discussed law enforcement staffing in the county, including a plea last year by Jasper residents to have 24-hour patrols--that following a spate of burglaries. Read more here.

Now, the October 5, 2011 issue of the paper reports that the Western Grove City Council is discussing the municipality's need for law enforcement. Western Grove is Newton County's largest city, with a population of 518 (sign above shows the 2000 count), though Jasper is the county seat (2009 population down to 357). The story indicated that the city was considering contracting with the Newton County Sheriff's office to station a deputy in Western Grove. This could be a win-win for both city and county since the Sheriff's office has recently reduced its staff due to budget cuts. The Sheriff said he was working one day recently as a bailiff in the Newton County Circuit Court, the implication being that he has no staff to perform this function. The same story provides the September, 2011 Activity Report for the Sheriff's office, which shows 29 arrests, with 29 inmates housed in out-of-county detention facilities for 234 total inmate days at a total cost of $8,155. The Sheriff's office patrolled 14,299 miles, used 841.09 gallons of fuel, issued 86 citations, served 31 warrants and tuned over $1,087.83 to the Circuit Court. The office reported 40 felony and 24 misdemeanor cases for the month.

A front-page story from the November 30 issue of the Newton County Times reports that Jasper Police officer James R. Wright was one of 42 officers from around the state who completed Basic Police Training Course 2011-B at the Black River Technical College Law Enforcement Training Academy in Pocahontas. The 13-week course includes instruction in "standard police tactics, firearms, legal, educational, technical skills and practical exercises." The story does not indicate whether Wright paid for his own training or whether the City of Jasper financed his attendance at the course.

A December 14, 2011 story features the headline, "District trying to lock up criminal justice grant." It reports on the Jasper School District's application for a $40,000 grant from the Arkansas Department of Career Education to provide a course in criminal justice for Jasper District students, grades 9-12. A representative of the Dept. of Career Education had recently visited the Jasper campus to inspect its "distance learning classroom" because the program would transmitted simultaneously "between the Jasper, Oark and Kingston campuses." The program would be taught three days a week at Jasper and one day each at Kingston and Oark. Once in each nine-week period, students would meet in one location "for physical training such as learning proper handcuffing techniques." The grant would provide the school district with finger print kids and other basic equipment. The district would have to hire a certified law enforcement officer to teach the course. The Jasper Police Department and the Newton County Sheriff's office have written letters in support of the program, according to the news story.

The story also noted the significance of such career courses for students not interested in a traditional curriculum tracked toward college. The District's assistant superintendent suggested that securing this program is an urgent matter because, without it, some students feel they have no reason to stay in school. The visiting administrator from the state office of Career Development noted that the program encourages students "to provide services to the community, like directing traffic at ball games and parades and other tasks that give them some limited authoritative responsibilities."

New haute cuisine movement focuses on the South

2011-12-29T05:40:00.001-08:00

A headline in yesterday's New York Times is "Southern Farmers Vanquish the Cliches," and in it Julia Moskin reports on a trend among Southern farmers and chefs in the region to revive or remake (depending on your perspective) Southern cuisine. Moskin describes a

thriving movement of idealistic Southern food producers who have a grander plan than just farm-to-table cuisine. They want to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions and dignity, and if all goes according to plan, completely redefine American cuisine for a global audience.

Their work is being encourage, and sponsored by a new generation of chefs who have pushed Southern cooking into the vanguard of world cuisine--and who depend on these small producers to literally flesh out their ambitions.

California readers, hold onto your hats, because Moskin continues thusly:

Like California in the 1970s--when Alice Waters collaborated with farmers, foragers and cheesemakers on the food at Chez Panisse--the South today has just the right combination of climate, culinary skill, regional chic and receptive audience.

That the South is experiencing a time of "regional chic" is news to me, but I did get a kick out of the chefs and purveyors interviewed putting down Paula Deen as representative of all that is wrong--but too often associated with--Southern cooking. I also learned a trendy word to refer to this revival of Southern cooking and its focus on pork, "lardcore." In fact, the latter surprised me because I don't think of pork as a critical component of the food with which I grew up, though one of my sets of grandparents did raise a pig or two at a time for slaughter, along with a cow or two, lots of chickens, and a big garden. Unlike the fine charcuterie products discussed in the NYTimes article, bacon grease (a form of lard, right?) was ubiquitous. In my opinion, however, there was nothing haute about any of it.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XCIII): Year-end wrap up

2011-12-28T07:54:00.000-08:00

In this post, I will catch up on various law and order news for Newton County, Arkansas for 2011.

The really big news is that Newton County finally broke ground on a new jail, but that news is so big that I'll save it for a separate post.

The Oct. 5, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times reports that the 14th Judicial Drug Task Force arrested 28-year-old Billy Joe Lewis when a probation/parole visit by the Newton County Sheriff's office revealed 19 grams of meth on Lewis's person, as well as marijuana growing at his Marble Falls residence.

The Oct. 26, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times reports that the Jasper City Council passed an animal ordinance, this after twice tabling it. The ordinance was "prepared" by the city's attorney, Dawn Allen, and it is apparently based on a similar ordinance in effect in the city of Eurake Springs. The ordinance notes that the city has no animal shelter, so animal owners must "maintain proper care over them and are encouraged to cooperate and abide by the provisions of the ordinance." Further, "the burden for animal treatment, removal or disposal falls entirely on the owner of the animal or property owner." The ordinance requires both dogs and cats to be vaccinated, and dogs must have both a collar and a tag. The newspaper reports:

Dogs are not allowed to run at large on public property unless the animal is under voice control and would be prohibited to run at large on private property without the owners permission." The ordinance also addressed vicious animals, animal cruelty and the disposal of dead animals' bodies.

Responding apparently to concerns that the ordinance represented "too much law" and insufficient deference to the informal order that has previously prevailed, the mayor announced that he was "not going to be out looking for stuff." He said he didn't expect the city to be getting a call every time a dog crossed onto someone's property. He said if the city gets a call, he will simply call the owner and "tell them to take care of it." The ordinance sets a $50 fine for a violation, and a fee of up to $250 may be assessed if the owner refuses to respond to a violation. An earlier report on this proposed ordinance is here.

The Nov. 9 issue of the Newton County Times reports that a 52-year-old woman was formally charged in September, 2010, with two counts of aggravated assault, two counts of permitting abuse of a minor and a single count of battery in the second degree, all Class D felonies. She entered a no contest plea to those charges on Nov. 3 and was ordered to six years of probation and a fine of $3,500. The charges stem in part from the woman's failure to respond to an admission from her 14-year-old son that he had engaged in sexual contact with his two sisters, aged 13 and 11, and that he continued to to have sexual contact with the older sister. In addition, when the 11-year-old girl wrote a letter to her mother detailing the sexual contact, the woman hit the girl in the face, knocking out a tooth. The woman was charged with aggravated assault for sitting on her 13-year-old and pressing the minor's face into a pillow, and also for hitting the child with a board on her buttocks and the back of her legs. The woman also allegedly stuffed socks into the 13-year-old's mouth and "punched her." The story does not indicate whether the woman retains custody of her children.

A 28-year-old man was sentenced to six years of probation and $1000 fine after pleading guilty to to theft of 24 oxycodone-acetaminaophen tablets and possession of marijuana. In exchange for the plea, a charge of residential burglary was dropped.

A 50-year-old man was charged with possession of a firearm, aggravated assault and possession of a controlled substance (marijuana) following an incident at Marble Falls, when the man shot in the direction of law enforcement officers who were investigating a methamphetamine lab. In a plea deal, the man was sentenced to 30 days in jail and payment of $1000 in fines and court costs.

A 35-year-old man was charged with delivery of a controlled substance and related charges after he distributed marijuana he received by Federal Express from California. He was sentenced to three years in the Arkansas Dept. of Corrections but given a five-year suspended sentence and fined $1000 plus costs. The man was also ordered to forfeit items seized in the investigation.

A 24-year-old man was charged with stealing a 1985 Chevy Blazer and leading police officers on a high-speed chase through southern and western parts of the county, over many miles, including parts of Highways 16 (Ponca to Mossville), 7 (Deer to Jasper), and 374 (McIlroy Gap toward Vendor). At one point, the man even ran a police roadblock. In a plea agreement, he was sentenced to two years in the Arkansas Dept. of Corrections "with a judicial transfer to a regional punishment facility, followed by a three-year suspended imposition of sentence and a one-year sentence in jail, all concurrent."

The Nov. 30, 2011 issue of the paper reports that a 53-year-old man from Deer, Steven Moore, was charged with aggravated assault after he shot at his brother and swung a machete at him on August 31, 2010. The brother under attack eventually tackled the aggressor brother and pinned him to the ground, which was the situation when Jasper Police Chief Peter DeChant arrived. In a plea deal, the aggressor was sentenced to 12 months probation and ordered to pay a $500 fine plus court costs.

Other reported cases arose from a March, 2011, assault on a Newton County Sheriff's Deputy in the context of an arrest and an incident in which the man came onto another person's property and pointed a firearm at the landowner. The aggressor was charged with terroristic threatening, among other crimes.

Chinese villagers' revolt attracts worldwide attention; will more villages follow suit?

2011-12-28T07:07:00.001-08:00

A story out of Wukan, China has attracted persistent coverage during the past few weeks. I first heard of Wukan (a/k/a Wuhan) on December 15, 201, when this story appeared in the New York Times and NPR also ran a story. Here's the lede from that mid-December story.

A long-running dispute between farmers and local officials in Southern China exploded into open rebellion this week after villagers chased away government leaders, set up road blocks, and began arming themselves with homemade weapons, residents said.

The conflict in Wukan, a coastal settlement of 20,000 in the country's industrial heartland in Guangdong Province, escalated Monday after residents learned that one of the representatives they had selected to negotiate with the local Community Party had died in police custody.

* * *

Spasms of social turmoil in China have become increasingly common, a reflection of the widening income gap and deepening unhappiness with official corruption and an unresponsive legal system. But the clashes in Wukan, which initially erupted in September, are unusual for their longevity--and for the brazenness of the villagers as they call attention to their frustrations.

The story goes on to report that the essential dispute regards whether farmers were adequately compensated for land that went to developers. In fact, the "discontent in Wukan has been simmering for more than a decade" because "land seizures began in the late 1990s, when officials began selling off farmland for industrial parks and apartment complexes."

A second story, which ran about a week ago, credits the Wukan villagers for their success in attracting attention, calling them "canny." It tells of how villagers have grasped the power of the media and bloggers to cover their plight, even as they have asked journalists not to label it an "uprising."

Revolt or not, the protest over land sales here, which began months ago, was sustained in its final and most perilous phase by the villagers' canny interactions with journalists from foreign and Hong Kong news organizations. Mainland Chinese news media were barred from reporting on Wukan, but dozens of reporters for foreign publications arrived here last week after being alerted to the protest by an article in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. They slipped through a police cordon by traveling on motor rickshaws along winding dirt roads and, in one case, by hiring a boat to reach the harbor.

The villagers threw open their doors. They now had the means to wage a propaganda war.

A retired Chinese professor notes that Guangdong's situation near Hong Kong has been critical to these events because villagers like those in Wukan get their news from Hong Kong rather than from China Central Television. This gives them a "better understanding of civil society and the rule of law."

The most recent story suggests that the problem for the Chinese government goes beyond Wukan. The latest story appeared under the headline, "A Village in Revolt Could be a Harbinger for China."

There are 625,000 potential Wukans across China, all small, locally run villages that frequently suffer the sort of injustices that prompted the outburst this month in Wukan.

One China expert opined that 50-60% of Chinese villages "suffered governance and accountability problems of the sort that beset Wukan, albeit not so severe." The story continues with a discussion of local government in China:

On paper, the Wukan protests should never have happened: China's village committees should be the most responsive bodies in the nation because they are elected by the villagers themselves. Moreover, the government has built safeguards into the village administration process to ensure that money is properly spent.

Village self-administration, as the central government calls it, is seen by many foreigners as China's democratic laboratory--and while elections can be rigged and otherwise swayed, many political scientists say they are, on balance, a good development.

Time will tell, of course, whether protests like that in Wukan spread, from country to city, and around the vast nation.

Bittersweet homecoming for rural troops

2011-12-27T15:38:00.000-08:00

December 17, 2011 marked the last troops to leave Iraq. These soldiers are happy to return home, many to the open arms of their loved ones who have missed them while they were deployed. But after the joy of homecoming dissipates, these men and women will have to face the bleak economy the rest of America has been battling for the past few years.

1% of the people in the nation serve in the military, and within that percent rural communities are overwhelmingly overrepresented. The Jobs and Economic Security for Rural America White House report states: “Although rural residents account for 17% of the population, they make up 44% of the men and women who serve in uniform.” The Daily Yonder has been outspoken about rural over-representation in the army since their inception, but their post earlier this year questioned the veracity of the 44% statistic quoted by the report. Their findings were actually lower, finding that “rural residents were joining the Army at rates 21.5% above the national average.” However, they insist this number is nothing to scoff at and admit that it’s “significant”.

The VHA Office of Rural Health released some astonishing disparity in veteran health in rural areas.

Prior cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that veterans who live in rural settings have greater healthcare needs than their urban counterparts. Specifically, rural Veterans have lower health-related quality-of-life scores and experience a higher prevalence of physical illness compared to urban Veterans.

Yet despite the greater need, veterans in rural areas are less likely to get the services they need. It is not surprising that spatial isolation plays a large role. Indeed the report mentions, “travel barriers including greater distance to care and lack of public transportation contribute to limited access to care for rural as compared to urban Veterans.” Further, a post in the Huffington Post this summer reported that “five million rural residents live in "shortage areas" defined by the federal government as counties with less than 33 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents. The number is continuing to decrease.” Further, “per capita in rural areas there is less than half the number of surgeons and other specialists.”

The war may be over but the horrors and ghosts of the war will follow these soldiers home. A December 20, 2011 Chicago Tribune article states that “[m]ore than 2,200 Iraq-era cases of PTSD are being treated in Illinois, in addition to more than 400 cases of traumatic brain injury, a medical condition caused by head trauma.” The VHA Office indicates that “[w]hile prevalence of most psychiatric disorders is lower for rural compared to urban Veterans, rural Veterans with psychiatric disorders are sicker as measured by lower health-related quality-of-life compared with urban Veterans.” Rural folks will feel the mental health ramifications hardest due the lack of mental health services and the transportation challenges. One article found that “more than 85 percent of the 1,669 federally designated mental health professional shortage areas are rural. And only in rural America did the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health (1993) find entire counties with no practicing psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers.”

This year’s Holiday video from President Obama and his family featured the White House 2011 holiday season theme of "’Shine, Give, Share’ which offers an opportunity to pay tribute to our troops, veterans, and their families.” This is on the heels of the White House new “Joining Forces” campaign, whose ads could be seen on every television channel this past month. Our returning forces will struggle to find a job, and President Obama has “issued a challenge to the private sector to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans and their spouses.” But it’s clear that rural Veterans will struggle not only with finding employment, but also accessing much needed physical and mental health services. I hope the White House and Congress will openly discuss this rural-urban disparity and attempt to provide social services to better serve our returning rural soldiers.

The rural purge

2011-12-26T17:03:00.001-08:00

Not too long ago I did a post on new television shows featuring rural themes. In that post, I made the point that these shows are not the rural person’s first foray into the spotlight, but that this is another batch of exploitation and stereotyping. I compared new shows such as Hillbilly Handfishin’ (no “g”) and Redneck Riveria to shows like Dukes of Hazard, Beverley Hillbillies, and The Andy Griffith Show. During my research for that post I learned of something called the Rural Purge—or as Pat Buttram of Green Acres called it, “when CBS killed everything with a tree in it.”

The facts of the inquisition look fairly convincing, below is a list of the shows cancelled, their network, and their Nielsen TV Ranking before cancellation.

Mayberry RFD, CBS, cancellation 1971, rank #15 (in 1969 and 1970 Mayberry RFD ranked #4 in the Nielsen ratings)
The Red Skelton Show, CBS, cancellation 1970, rank #7 (The Red Skelton Show moved to NBC the following year, but changed its format to a variety show and the rating fell to 30)
Petticoat Junction, CBS, cancellation 1970, rank #35.
Green Acres, CBS, cancellation 1971, rank fell below 30, but had a lifetime average of 24.
Beverly Hillbillies, CBS, cancellation 1971, rank in 1971 was 33, top 20’s and even #1 prior to that.
Hee-Haw, CBS, cancellation 1971, rank #16.
The Jim Nabors Hour, CBS, cancellation 1971, rank #2
The above is just a sampling, for a full list of the cancelled show check out the Wikipedia page.

Of course, there can always be other hypotheses for cancellations. One idea might be the actors pursuing other opportunities. But only one show, Gomer Pyle USMC, credits the actor for the cancellation. Or you might think that they were pushed out due to success of other shows. During this time-period, variety shows such as the Mary Tyler Moore Show became immensely popular. However, most of the cancellations took place before variety shows hit their peak after the Purge. You could argue that these variety shows became popular by absorbing rural-TV audiences.

Fred Silverman, the Grand Inquisitor of the Purge, often stated that the need to draw more urban demographics into the networks net combined with the new Prime Time Access Rules by the FCC meant these shows had to go.

The FCC issued the first Prime Time Access Rule in 1970. The rule essentially stated that a network may only have three network programs during prime time hours (a four hour block from 7:00 PM ET until 11:00 PM ET), so something had to give. But the ratings might tell a little different story. Silverman would have people believe that the ratings didn’t warrant a shows renewal, but more urban-friendly shows such as The Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family rarely even cracked the top 30 of the Nielsen ratings.

One theory was that the advertisers demanded urban-centric programming in order to make their ads more effective. And this makes some sense: people with immediate access to your product are more likely to purchase. However, it isn’t clear that content would actually matter.

Ultimately, this is only television and the business-centered explanations make the most sense. Larger sociological concepts are secondary considerations here. But for the sake of reaching something larger than dollars, consider why CBS and advertisers believed rural-centric shows couldn’t sell products. It might be “otherness.” In their book, Rural People and Communities in the 21^st Century, Brown and Schaftt talk about how urban people view rural people, the rural mystique, and similar concepts. Apply that to TV and we see that rural shows might have been successful because it was a spectacle—a type of rural voyeurism. You could think that products might not sell as well when people don’t actually relate to the show. More urban shows, that relate to your demographic, could sell products better because they don’t carry the “otherness” aspect.

And maybe that’s the truth for most rural shows. Behold, the rural spectacle.

Policing the rural

2011-12-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

The Rapid City Journal recently interviewed several police officers from rural South Dakota to discuss the unique challenges and aspects of police work in a rural town. While a simple newspaper story can’t give a complete picture of what it is like to work as an officer in a small town, the interviews provided some valuable insight into the type of person that it takes to be successful in a position that is of vital importance for rural communities.

The officers interviewed for the story work in small towns across Pennington County, South Dakota. The officers have a wide variety of tasks and patrol a large amount of space. One officer said he will drive over 400 miles on any given night. The officers seemed to agree that the biggest challenge of the job however, is the frequent loneliness- particularly during the night shifts. While some nights are really busy, there are often long nights without any calls. This can make it difficult to stay alert on any given night and the amount of time spent without human interaction tends to wear on the officers.

One challenge that the officers seem to enjoy, however, is the trust-building aspect of the job. Police officers in these small South Dakota towns are around frequently and know most of the people in the areas they patrol. Rather than simply be seen as powerful authority figures, the officers need to maintain positive and amicable relationships with residents while still doing their jobs.

Another positive for the officers is that they typically get more time to handle and investigate assignments. The extra time, combined with their familiarity with the residents and the area often leads to smooth, successful results when trying to solve crimes. This makes the officers feel like they are actually making a big substantive difference in the community and brings a sense of satisfaction that other officers in bigger cities might not have.

While it would not be proper to make sweeping generalizations from the article, it definitely seems like it takes a specific type of person to be successful as a rural police officers. Successful rural officers need to possess nearly all of the virtues that human beings universally tend to agree are positive. They need to be patient, trustworthy, and kind to people while still maintaining vigor and passion for enforcing the law. They also need to be able to deal with the more than occasional day or night with nothing to do and no one to talk to. Being a rural police officer demands a lot of a person, but if the small sample of officers that were interviewed in the article is any indication, some of the officers seem to genuinely enjoy their work.

My Rural Travelogue (XV): Christmas Eve in Amador County

2011-12-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

I drove to neighboring Amador County yesterday to pick up some holiday goodies from my favorite bakery, Andrae's. I came back with lots of yummy stuff, though no photo of Andrae's or of the lovely hamlet where it is located, Amador City. I did, however, take these three photographs:

a vendor selling strawberries and oranges at the very rural intersection of Old Sacramento Road and Latrobe Road, several miles west of Plymouth; the Plymouth City Hall, decked in lights and wreaths; and Cooper Winery on Shennandoah School Road, in the heart of the Amador wine region. Regarding the fruit vendor, I was especially surprised to see him in this rural location, where my impression based on past experience is that not a lot of traffic passes, though vendors like him are common in my suburban Sacramento neighborhood. He told me the strawberries were grown south of Los Angeles. He was charging $10 for a bag of oranges, $15 for the case of strawberries.

Cut Down Your Own Christmas Joy

2011-12-24T19:05:00.000-08:00

I went to a holiday party recently hosted by a good friend of mine. She is one of those people who has wholeheartedly embraced many rural-type behavior, such as a boasting a bountiful garden which she tends to with seasonal precision, makes her own jams and jellies, and even blows her own glass. I often listen enviously at her stories about exchanging goods with unique crafters and finding small farms with the best produce. Therefore, I was not at all surprised when she told me that she traveled up the California mountains to cut down her own Christmas tree.

Of course, I had heard of people going to a tree lot and cutting down Christmas trees, even while residing in sunny Southern California. In fact, any average Joe can find the nearest location to cut down their own trees on the California Christmas Tree Association website. But my friend had gone beyond the usual urban elite version of the process. Her face beamed with pride as she told me the details of the adventure. She had a particular tree in mind, a Silver Tip Pine (a picture of which can be found here courtesy of Arizona Traveler Blog), which boasts strong branches and needles that shine with pewter at the ends. The tree is long and lean, with a significant amount of space in between the branches. This type of tree could not be found in any old DIY lot, but she and her boyfriend went to great lengths to find the remote location that would allow them to cut down their very own Silver Tip Pine Tree.

Much like a recent Rural Legalism post regarding “Picker Sisters,” I too struggle with whether “rustic chic” derides, elevates, or co-opts rural culture. My friend’s experience feels more authentic to me then going to more commercialized lots that cater to urbanites’ craving to capture a piece of rural America. But I admit, I find that even the more commercialized lots evoke an appreciation and celebration of rural America and carry with it the American individualist spirit.

But even my friends experience can’t compare to the blog post in Rural Revolution featured earlier this month on the blog author’s own Christmas tree adventure. The blog’s tagline boasts that it is a blog containing “[i]n-your-face stuff from an opinionated rural north Idaho housewife.” The family had spotted a tree that was to their liking on past walks through their area. The family members independently (without the help of a Christmas Tree farmer) hiked to the trees location, cut it down themselves, dragged it home, and made any last minute trimming on the tree for it to be the perfect dimension to fit their home.

The experience described by the Rural Revolution post exhibits the self-sufficiency many associate with rural small towns. However, a comment to that particular post served to remind me that not all small towns have the luxury of a forest or other natural resources that support said self-sufficiency. The comment states:

“I'll probably be the dissenting opinion here, but where I live we don't have any forests in which we can cut our own tree. We could pay $30-$60 in a store or at a Christmas tree farm, but that's a lot of money, at least for me. I invested $13 for a fake one at a local thrift store and this is our 4th Christmas using it. In 10 years, I'll have saved enough for a rifle or handgun. Since a gun can last a lifetime, and will often hold its value, that, for me, is the better investment than a purchased "real" tree.”

The comment reminded me that this is a very idealized version of how we see rural America. We (meaning myself and many urban elites) assume that individuals in rural communities can all cut down their own trees and fail to realize that not all of them have access to forests. We say snobby things like “nothing really compares to a live Christmas tree,” and belittle the celebration of those who may not be able to afford the luxury of spending $30-$60 every year to buy a live tree. It takes seemingly little jabs such as this or President Obama reference to Arugula prices that make urban elites appear out of touch with rural America.

Fire Prevention Fee - Vital or Villan?

2011-12-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

When it comes to fire safety, rural communities suffer from a combination of spatial isolation, lack of public services, and reliance on volunteer services. Yesterday's San Francisco Gate article reported on yet another burden threatening rural areas: a proposed $150 fire prevention fee that will "apply residential and other habitable structures in rural areas throughout the state, where 90 percent of property owners and residents already pay local taxes for fire protection services."

Many rural residents feel a fee, particularly one this high, will divert funds away from local fire safety endeavors. For example, rural voters self-tax themselves in order to meet their fire safety needs and a fee such as this will make it harder get local voters to pay more. Staci Heaton, lobbyist for the Regional Council of Rural Counties in Sacramento, noted, "[w]hen people get a bill from the state, we worry (they) aren't going to be willing to tax themselves again. So if local fire districts need more revenue, they aren't going to get it."

Rural communities are no strangers to fending for themselves. Some believe locals are most qualified to create tailored solutions to their specific problems. No wonder people like John Hallman, a Napa County resident who has lived in rural Berryess Estates neighborhood for more than two decades, is concerned that the fee might make it hard to continue individualized community fire protection efforts. Until fairly recently, the remote town of Berryess Estates held the "dubious distinction of being one of the most at-risk communities in Napa County for catastrophic wildfire" according to a March 2011 article in the Napa Valley Register. This rural town, home to roughly 600 full-time and part-time residents, faces significant spatial isolation, with "the closest volunteer fire department is more than 20 minutes away in Pope Valley (posts on rural communities' reliance on volunteer firefighters can be found here and here), with Cal Fire in Middletown being the next quickest responders" and transportation into town is limited to a narrow two lane road. In an effort to address this problem, locals like John Hallman banded together and worked quickly to create a unique solution for a local problem. They formed the Fire Safe Council in 2004, met with fire prevention experts from Cal Fire and the Napa County Fire Department in 2005 and by 2007 the council was in full active planning. The group sought and received multiple grants and alternative funding, and with the new revenue was able to remove all the dangerous vegetation and have created a firebreak 200 feet wide and 3 1/2 miles long to protect homes.

The local effort has diminished the threat of future fires. This has not only provided peace of mind to those worried about their homes and possessions but has also had the positive economic effect of lower insurance rates for some residence, new insurance services being offered, and slow improvement on overall property values. However, the firebreak needs to be maintained. There is no guarantee that the state would use the funds to maintain it, which would put the burden of approximately $25 a year on the town members. While it may seem nominal to some, Hallman doubts residents would be willing to pay that on top of the hefty $125 fee. After all rural communities were hit hardest by the Great Recession and face higher rates of poverty and unemployment.

Many rural residents don't think this fee will translate into more effective fire prevention, and many have concerns as to the transparency of how these funds will be distributed. However, Governor Jerry Brown and other proponents insist "[t]his funding is vital to support wildfire prevention efforts, arson investigations and other important Cal Fire programs." Its no secret that California is undergoing a budget crisis, but taking money from rural communities who already face a myriad of economic difficulties does not seem fair to me.

If you would like to see if you live in a "state responsibility area" and will be affected by this fee, go to links.sfgate.com/ZLFP

Mining interests weigh heavily in Montana Senate race

2011-12-24T05:33:00.000-08:00

Montana's sole U.S. Congressman, Republican Denny Rehberg, is running to unseat first-term Senator from Montana, Jon Tester, a Democrat. Today's New York Times includes a feature discussing how mining interests in Montana are weighing in on the rase. Rehberg is in his sixth term, and the story discusses and illustrates the pro-mining reputation he has gained during that time. It notes that Tester has hardly been a foe of the mining industry--but his advocacy of mining interests pales in comparison to Rehberg's.

Mr. Tester and other Montana politicians often support legislation that would benefit the coal and minerals mining industry, a bit employer here, or oppose federal mandates that mine owners find objectionable. But it is Mr. Rehberg who has been the most ardent advocate, presenting a case study in how a lawmaker can build his national profile--and campaign war chest--by championing an industry with deep pockets and political clout.

He has repeatedly criticized federal mine safety officials over the past year, charging that many inspection complaints are job killers or ridiculing others as trivial.

The story is chock full of quotes from both sides of the pro-mining/pro-environment divide. One of the most colorful is an official with the United Mine Workers Union who calls Rehberg "more a spokesperson for the industry than a lawmaker." Needless to say, Rehberg is drawing in significant donations from mining interests.

The story explains mining's significance in Montana's history, as well as its significance to the state's contemporary economy. To a great extent, the story reflects the perennial tension of rural states and regions: jobs v. the environment. (Related posts are here and here). But another angle is jobs v. safety, and the story details Rehberg's criticism of the Mine Safety and Health Agency.

Illustrating well the significance of mining to parts of the Montana economy is Stillwater County, home to Nye, the story's dateline. Nye is an unincorporated community in a county with an economy based nearly entirely on mining, making it one of the most prosperous counties in the state. I detailed the county's economic fortunes in this article, which illustrates spatial inequality in Montana and its impact on health and human services. Stillwater County has a population of just 9,1117, but a high median household income ($53,637) and a very low poverty rate (9.3%). This degree of affluence is unusual for a such a sparsely populated county, and it is no doubt a testament to the good jobs associated with mining, as well as taxes paid by the extraction industry.

But mining is also accompanied by human costs that offset some of its economic benefits, and the New York Times story details these, including black lung disease. (Rehberg, as chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee dealing with mine safety pushed a provision that would block enforcement of a regulation that would have reduced by half the amount of ambient coal dust permitted in a mine. The dust is the cause of black lung disease). Indeed, the reason for the Nye dateline is the October death there, at the Stillwater mine, of a 42-year-old miner when his loader ran into a steel bar protruding from the mine wall.

The wheels on the bus may no longer go round and round in rural California

2011-12-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

Riding a yellow bus to school is a rite of passage for many young American students, and it is a necessity for rural students who live on farms, isolated mountain roads, and distant desert properties. In California, approximately 1 million students use bus transportation to travel to school. With upcoming budget cuts, that mode of transportation to schools may soon be limited or nonexistent in California.

According to the Fresno Bee, Governor Jerry Brown announced last week that funding for home-to-school transportation will be cut in half starting in January 2012, a reduction of $248 million. Governor Brown said the reason for the reduction is insufficient state revenues. Funding for bus services has declined dramatically over the years. Around 20 years ago, the state funded 80% of bus services. Now the state funds 35% and soon it will only fund 17%. According to an Associated Press article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the transportation funding reductions are a part of a package of trigger cuts for a variety of state programs. Schools will also see funding reductions in their revenue limit and child development and preschool programs.

The cuts will negatively affect rural areas more than urban metropolises. While a lack of school buses compromises the safety of urban students, there may still be public transportation available to shuttle children to school. Many rural communities do not have public transportation. If school districts can no longer afford to pay for school buses, parents will have to drive their children to school, or the children will have to remain at home.

Donna Linton, a single parent from Santa Ysabel, California, a small, unincorporated community in San Diego County, is one of many rural parents who may suffer if the funding reductions eliminate school buses. According to a San Diego Union-Tribune article, to take her three children to school, she will have to drive 30 minutes one way to Julian, California, population 1,502. Carpooling is not an option as she and her neighbors do not have large enough cars to carry more than their own children. The cost of gas for these trips will also be difficult to bear. Children whose families do not have cars or flexible work schedules will have to rely on neighbors for transportation to school, or they will have to continue their studies at home. Homeschooling may be impossible if the children's parents work and others are unable to care for them.

The amount of funding per student each school district will lose also shows the disproportionate affect the funding cuts will have on rural schools. For example, officials claim that larger school districts in metropolitan areas, like Burbank Unified School District in Burbank, California (population 103,340), will only lose $10 per student with the cuts, while Sierra Unified School District in rural Auberry, California (population 2,369) will lose $355 per student. The areas that will be hardest hit, regarding funding per student, are the ones that need the money most: isolated regions where unemployment is high.

Another issue, which the San Diego Union-Tribune discussed, is that California public schools receive state funding based on attendance. Ramona Unified School District in Ramona, California (population 20,292) buses 1,500 students to school. If only a quarter of those students are no longer able to attend school because of decreased bus transportation, the monetary consequences could be devastating for the small school district.

Rural school districts will have to find other ways to pay for home-to-school transportation. Some may argue it is better to cut transportation funds rather than classroom funds. However, if rural districts have to use their general fund money for transportation, less funding will be going into the classroom. While schools can make cuts in other areas of transportation, according to an article in the Merced Sun-Star, it is difficult to do before this round of cuts because school districts usually hire transportation employees for year-long periods. To continue their transportation services, schools also will likely have to dip into reserve funds, which are supposed to be backup funds for other programs. Once the extra funds are gone, the buses may disappear.

The funding reductions also disproportionately affect low-income and special needs students. Some students take the bus 40 minutes from Ramona, California into the Mission Valley area of San Diego if they are not able to receive proper services in Ramona. Without bus services, these students will not be able to receive the specialized instruction they need. In addition, while public transportation is more accessible in urban areas, families will need to pay for transportation if schools can longer afford bus services. Some may not be able to afford that cost.

The state's largest school district, Los Angeles Unified School District, is trying to use the legal system to prevent the funding reductions. Upon news of the reduced funding, the school board decided to file an immediate restraining order to block the transportation cuts. The California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators are considering joining the lawsuit because of the negative impact the cuts will have on low-income and special needs students. According to an article in the Huffington Post, Governor Brown believes the cuts are legal and that a United States Supreme Court case will give the state greater authority to reduce funding to various programs. It is unclear to which case the Governor was referring. One can hope that Los Angeles Unified is successful and that the government will shift the cuts to another program that does not negatively affect education.

When education funding reductions disproportionately affect rural, low-income, and special needs students, Californians need to rethink how the government should use its resources. This funding reduction seems to be another example of the government forgetting about rural people and places. Over the past four years, the state has reduced education funding by approximately $18 billion. Without a well-educated population, California will be ill equipped to deal with the next economic crisis. To ensure children in California receive an education, we first need to make sure they can get to the classroom.

It burns: the Humboldt pepper spray case

2011-12-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the length of this post, but it's too complex a topic to put in a short blurb.

I learned about the use of pepper spray against protestors on the UC Davis on Facebook. Many people were linking to the first Youtube video of Lieutenant John Pike pacing back and forth spraying the protestors with a large can of pepper spray. It was disturbing and upsetting to say the least. Shortly after the original video came out some of my Facebook friends began posting a case I was very familiar with: Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt.

Seeing that case name again gave me a burning feeling of my own. I felt intense shame, anger, and sorrow because the case was a subject of a difficult time in Humboldt county. The overall outcome of that period has had a negative impact on my family. The case came about due to the Timber Wars that occurred in Humboldt over the fate of the old growth redwoods in Headwaters Forest specifically, and the fate of the timber industry in Humboldt generally. It's a difficult subject that needs a lot of context.

The logging and milling of redwood and Douglas-fir trees has been one of the main industries of Humboldt county since its founding. One of the most important timber companies was Pacific Lumber Company, better known locally as PL.

PL was a good corporation originally. It wasn't the largest private land owner in California (that title goes to Sierra Pacific Industries), but it did hold the largest amount of privately held old growth redwood. Old-growth has a coveted tight grain when cut, and the wood is pest and fire resistant. It is popular for fences, decks, and other outdoor objects because it stands against the elements so well. These factors make redwood very valuable, and PL had a lot of it.

The old PL was owned and operated by the Murphy family, a timber family in every sense. They planned on slowly harvesting the old growth, managing the forests so that PL could operate for as long as there was a demand for lumber. But they made a fatal mistake, in the 1980s the family decided to make PL a publicly traded company. In 1985 PL was the victim of a hostile takeover, bought out by Charles Hurwitz and his company based in Texas, Maxxam. Maxxam was not a timber company, it was a vampire that took over companies with valuable assets and bled them dry.

Almost immediately lines started to be drawn. Three belligerent groups formed: Timber people, Environmentalists, and Maxxam. Maxxam began over logging PL's lands and running the company into the ground. Timber people were mostly from families that had been living in Humboldt before World War II and were very conservative. They hated Maxxam, but the burst in logging created jobs and it was felt that what Maxxam did to the company it owned was up to Maxxam. They thought that after PL collapsed there would still be the other mills of Humboldt to provide jobs.

Environmentalists were mostly people that had either come to live in Humboldt after World War II or came specifically for the protests and had no other connection to the county. They tended to be very liberal. The Environmentalists hated Maxxam for the damage being done by the intense logging.

You would think that the mutual hatred of Maxxam would provide an alliance between timber people and environmentalists, but both sides despised each other. Political and cultural leanings got in the way. Some militant environmental protestors further inflamed the conflict by pulling stunts like pouring sugar into logging tractor gas tanks, cutting fuel lines for loggers pickups, spitting on timber workers, and hammering in metal spikes into trees so when cut the saws would break (putting loggers at risk).

Some loggers would kick and punch protestors that tried to block their way into the forest. Protestors also accused loggers of intentionally falling trees near them when the protestors went into the woods to try and stop operations [after the pepper spray case, a protestor was killed when a tree fell by a logger brought down another tree that in turn fell directly onto the protestor. It was ruled an accident, though some protestors claimed it was intentional].

This is the environment that Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt came to be in. Some environmentalists trying to stop the logging in the Headwaters Forest decided to do sit ins at the offices of PL and the then Congressman for Humboldt, Frank Riggs. Police responded to both scenes, and were confronted by chanting (sometimes screaming) protestors who had placed their arms in metal sleeves to prevent their removal. The sleeves were made so the protestor could lock their arms inside the metal tube so it could only be safely unlocked from the inside with the wearers help. Cutting into the sleeve would have risked serious harm to the protestors.

The police didn't really know what to do; the protestors refused to leave both offices. At some point the decision had been made to use pepper spray. The idea was that the protestors, once exposed, would want to release themselves in order to get relief from the burning. Additionally the decision was made not to spray the protestors. Instead Q-Tips were dipped into cans of spray that had been opened, and the Q-Tips were rubbed on each protestors eyes in a highly concentrated dose. The result was horrible (the police begin to use the spray at 6:30 in the video).

The protestors would sue the county for unnecessary use of force. And the case would become the topic de jour of Humboldt, stirring intense feelings. Many were angry at the police for the harm they caused, but there was also anger directed at the protestors by timber people. Who are these outsiders to come to our county to harm our way of life and then turn around and sue us? The case would become a focal point of the use of pepper spray by police on protestors, especially restrained protestors.

After several appeals and trials ending in hung juries, the third and final jury found the county liable for the excessive harm caused to the protestors and awarded them damages. The total of those damages? One dollar. The protestors claimed that this was fine as they were trying to make a larger point about police force. The jury could have awarded more to the protestors, but there were rumors that the jurors that came from timber families, while angry at the police for using such brute force against the protestors, were also angry at the protestors for all the trouble they'd stirred up in Humboldt. The one dollar award was for them a chance to give the protestors a middle finger. Again, this is just a rumor.

The case would be just one of the first of many events that would be a watershed of change for Humboldt. Politics was swept up in the fervor and Maxxam intensified it's efforts to strip everything of value from PL. The Headwaters Forest was given to the state in a land swap that was meant to make PL look good in the court of public opinion while at the same time minimizing the impact on Maxxam's profits. PL was left a bankrupt shell that was later bought at severely reduced function by Mendocino Redwood Company in 2008.

And PL is not the only victim from the Timber Wars. Many of the major mills either shut down or limited operations in Humboldt in part due to the increased regulation (spurred on by the Environmentalists efforts to stop Maxxam) and from the lost value of timber caused by Maxxam's massive sell off of lumber flooding the market.

This has hurt many timber families including my own. Our trucking fleet went from a high of sixty trucks (with about fifteen of those working two shifts) at the height of the 1990s to twenty-five today with talk of cutting it down to twelve or fifteen, maybe more. This is the same story for all trucking fleets and logging operations in Humboldt. We can all mark the downfall back to the events leading up to the pepper spray case.

So you can imagine the pain I felt at seeing the title Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt start popping up all over Facebook. "Look" my friends were saying "Look, what UCPD did was wrong! Humboldt already had a similar incident! There's precedent." What they didn't know they were also saying "Look Scott, look! We found something painful from your childhood. We found the beginning of the end of your family's way of life."

Some people have been calling the UC Davis incident the "Spray heard around the world." I don't know how sure we can be of its impact quite yet, though it's created to opportunity for a slew of internet memes. But I can say that the Humboldt County incident was the "Spray heard around Humboldt county." And it sounded like a once proud industry dying.

Rural suicide

2011-12-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago the town of Emington, Illinois was shocked by a murder-suicide. The county sheriff issued a statement this past Monday stating that Sara McMeen, 30, was the sole shooter of her 29 year-old live in boyfriend, Daniel Warren, and her three children, 10-month-old Maggie, 8-year-old Skyler Lemke, and 7-year-old Ian.

Emington is a small speck of a town with about 117 residents. McMeen and Warren had recently moved into town and their kids were attending the local school. And while events like these don't comport with rural ideals--of happy homes in small towns, where children lives tranquil lives--the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tells a different story.

On their website the AFSP releases statistics and rural states are consistently in the top ten. So what makes suicide so popular in these states? Part of it could be spending of suicide prevention. Idaho, which recently cracked the top ten, spends among the lowest in suicide prevention. Treatment for depression or any other type of disorder can be very hard to get in a town of 117 people.

And the sources of depression can be exacerbated in small towns. Larger economical effects can have more meaning in some towns. Where the recently unemployed urbanite can go apply for a number of different jobs, the same isn't true for those in rural areas. The lack anonymity can make social situations even more awkward. Consider that in Idaho the second-leading cause of death for boys ages 10-14 is suicide. These aren't boys that are being laid-off from their jobs, these are boys where their social anxiety has gripped their lives. Why? Part of the answer might be their rural culture.

But outside of infrastructure and institutional spending, part of the reasoning could lie in the culture. A big topic in rural studies is rural self-help, the idea that the rural people can do things for themselves. In one vein, this indicates that they would be the last to commit suicide, but in another it might push the issue. Suicide can also be thought of as the extreme version of self-help.

Or consider isolationism. While social scientists often talk about the lack of anonymity in rural environments, there is also a degree of isolation. Growing up in a rural area myself I can tell you that some rural environments can be completely isolationist. Consider one of the accounts of the Emington murder-suicide: one neighbor heard shots and ran outside to see Ms. McMeen holding her baby and a gun. The neighbor then asked her if something was wrong. McMeen replied of course there was something wrong, shot the baby, and then ran away. One article explains that there wasn't a single thing wrong in the children's lives, that they were happy and full of life. The community had no idea.

A recent study called Rural suicide--people or place effects? sought to unravel these same questions. At least people are asking.

South Fulton, Tennessee to rural residents: Pay up or watch your house burn

2011-12-21T11:06:00.000-08:00

What should happen when you see your house burning down? Most people would probably answer that you should call 911 and wait for the fire department to arrive. Then, the fire department should try to save your property.

If you live on the outskirts of South Fulton, Tennessee (population 2,354), taking those steps might not be enough. That's because those residents who live outside the city limits do not receive fire protection unless they pay an annual $75 subscription. And, the punishment for failing to pay your subscription, is to watch your house burn.

As reported by the Associated Press, earlier this month, a couple watched their mobile home go up in flames while firefighters parked down the street and observed. And this isn't the first time this has happened. Last year, national media outlets reported when the South Fulton Fire Department refused to show up to a burning house until a subscribed neighbor called to make sure the fire did not spread to their property. The homeowner who lost his house in that fire claims he simply forgot to pay the fee that year and even offered to pay whatever amount the fire department wanted to put out his house. The fire department refused and he lost everything.

According to ABC News, the city of South Fulton has had the "pay to spray" arrangement in place for more than 20 years. David Crocker, South Fulton's mayor, says that a strict refusal to put out fires for non-subscribers is the only way to ensure that the subscription fees are paid. And the subscription fees are the only way the city can afford to assist rural residents who live outside the city limits. If a single exception is made he argues, nobody will pay their subscription fees.

Although Mayor Crocker might have a valid point, the fire earlier this month was allowed to burn for an entirely different reason. Vicky Bell said she and her boyfriend intentionally did not pay their subscription fee this year because they did not think their house would ever catch fire. For that reason, they also did not have fire insurance on the property. They did not refuse to pay their subscription fee based on a belief that the fire department would show up and put out the fire anyway. Instead, they took a chance and lost.

Mayor Crocker's tough stance might convince some people to pay their fire subscription, but others will continue to play the odds and refuse to pay. If those homes happen to catch fire though, everyone loses. The homeowners themselves will have lost all of their property and nearby neighbors, including those who paid the subscription fee, will be left with a smoldering mess next door. Property values will decrease, insurance rates will go up, and people who once owned a home will be left homeless.

In an era of tight municipal budgets, there does not seem to be an easy solution. Perhaps the city could impose a fine on those who require fire services but are not subscribed to the service. If the fine is sufficiently high, it would prevent people from taking the calculated risk of refusing to pay the subscription fee in favor of picking up the tab if the fire department is ever needed. For instance, if the fine is 20 times the amount of the annual subscription fee, someone would have to decide that they were unlikely to need fire services in the next twenty years in order for it to make financial sense not to pay the fee. The higher the fine, the more likely it is that people will subscribe.

Another alternative would be for the rural residents to quit relying on South Fulton's services altogether and establish their own fire department. As discussed recently on this blog, volunteer fire departments can provide fire services to people in rural areas. The startup cost might make such a move prohibitive however, as fire equipment is not likely to be cheap. The annual cost for residents might not be any cheaper than the system currently in place either.

As governments continue to face budget problems and contract services, it is more and more likely that rural places will face these types of problems. Rural residents are faced with the prospect of less access to government services if they refuse, forget, or are unable to pay subscription fees. If the problem becomes more widespread and the costs are prohibitively high, it seems likely that people will leave their rural homes to avoid the hazards associated with having no fire coverage.

Blood quantum, delisting Indians, and the Indian casino boom

2011-12-21T06:08:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran this piece on the trend among American Indian tribes to de-list members based on insufficient Indian blood, if you will. The tribes' motivation seems to be thinning their numbers so that fewer will share in some tribes' newfound wealth, mostly from gaming enterprises. This trend is especially prevalent in California, which has many small tribes, most of which were "decimated, scattered and reconstituted, often out of ethnically mixed Indians." Here's an excerpt from that story, dateline Coarsegold, California, a Census Designated Place in Madera County.

At least 2,500 Indians have been disenrolled by at least two dozen California tribes in the past decade, according to estimates by Indian advocates and academics. In almost all of those cases, tribal governments--exercising authority recognized by the federal government--have determined that the ousted Indians did not have the proper ancestry.

A great deal is at stake for these Indians--now former Indians/tribe members in many cases--because tribes provide many benefits to members: college tuition, housing, tribal schools and--more recently--a share of casino profits. The 58-year-old woman featured in the Times story, Nancy Dondero, had been a member of the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians her entire life--until, that is, she was recently disenrolled, along with 50 of her relatives. Now, Dondero's daughter has pulled out of a master's degree program because she cannot afford it without her tribe's assistance.

This op-ed in today's Times comments on the trend and situates it in historical legal perspective. The op-ed is by David Treuer, an Ojibwe member, who notes the irony that many Indian tribes use "a system of blood membership that was imposed upon us in violation of our sovereignty," and he recounts the ways in which the U.S. government used blood quantum laws during the 19th and into the 20th Century to deprive Indians of land and other Indian entitlements. Treuer asserts that blood quantum laws served the interest of the federal government because they permitted the government to circumvent restrictions on, for example, Indians selling tribal lands. That is, if the land owner was deemed not to be an Indian, the restriction on selling was relaxed, making it easier to get the land into the hands of whites.

Treuer asserts, "Blood quantum laws have always been about 'the stuff,' and they have always been about exclusion." These days, the "stuff" is more valuable than it's been in awhile, thanks to Indian gaming profits.

"Rustic chic": homage or insult?

2011-12-20T23:40:00.001-08:00

Earlier this year, the Lifetime TV network debuted a new show called "Picker Sisters," in which two interior designers (Tanya McQueen and Tracy Hutson) travel around the country buying up junk that their contractor transforms into art or furniture to be sold in the Los Angeles store. The show's website explains it this way:

With keen eyes for style and intuitive design instincts, they travel far and wide to find jaw-dropping bargains on any interesting materials they discover before driving back to California and transforming them into pieces that will fetch top dollar. Whether it's a tarnished file tank sitting in a junk yard, mangled barbed wire, rusty tire wheels or the weathered wood from an entire barn, Hutson and McQueen meet and negotiation with some of the country's most interesting people willing to part with their belongings...for the right price.

Jackie Cooper, a film critic for The Huffington Post, describes the premise as a "horror film waiting to happen." In most cases, the well-coiffed and fashionable women (often wearing short-shorts) arrive at a property in the "middle of nowhere" and begin bargaining with strangers for junk. Mr. Cooper's review of the show, while positive, is loaded with troubling stereotypes of rural America.

In fact, my first impression of the show was laced with similar stereotypes. I admit that when I saw a preview for "Picker Sisters," I worried that it would be an unfortunate example of "big city" designers talking down to (and ripping off) the "rural folk." I couldn't get past the image of these well-dressed women waltzing onto these rural properties. Videos on the website feature banjo-fueled country music in the background. I imagined uncomfortable culture clashes between the LA-based Hutson and McQueen and the individuals they met in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Or the kind of dumbing-down of (Southern) rural America as described in this New York Times piece and this blog's related post.

I approached the show with suspicion, but my fears of exploitation and stereotyping were quickly allayed. According to the show's website, Hutson and McQueen both grew up in rural Texas. In the three episodes I watched, they were extremely courteous and paid fair prices for their purchases. All of the people they dealt with were smart, savvy individuals who drove a hard bargain because they seemed to understand that the women would resell the pieces for huge sums of money.

However, it is the reselling of the pieces that brought up me to another question: what is with the popularity (particularly among urban and suburban dwellers) of "rustic chic" design? In the second half of every episode of "Picker Sisters," the women return to Los Angeles and viewers get to see the finished product of their picking efforts: an old sign turned into a headboard, rusty tractor fenders turned into chairs, or a log turned into an end table. Beautiful, if not entirely practical, pieces. Rustic chic with big price tags. At this point, I started to wonder, "Who really buys this stuff?"

Despite my incredulity, "rustic chic" design seems here to stay, for a little while at least. Take, for example, West Elm catalog's Thanksgiving table setting (complete with reclaimed wood and hay bales) featured on the design blog Decor Arts Now, pictured at left.

There is an entire website devoted to rustic weddings, Rustic Wedding Chic. Another similar wedding blog is called Sparkle & Hay. Yet another blog, Rustic Chic, is curated by "an interior designer with feet in both urbane Manhattan and rural New Jersey."

The trend continues beyond the blogosphere. Martha Stewart's New York-based former assistant was married in a field in Tennessee and had her reception in a barn. Her wedding was featured on Martha Stewart's website, show, and in her magazine. A hip new bar near downtown Washington, DC called "American Ice Co." advertises itself as "beers, steers and picnic tables," and serves drinks in mason jars.

Words and materials usually reserved for a country house, cabin, or other non-urban dwelling suddenly seem to be everywhere. A March 2011 article from the New York Times describes some followers of the American Rustic ideal:

It is a simpler, more rustic and American-inflected style that is more general store than taxidermy appointed lodge, and that emphasizes objects that are well-made, durable and useful: wire storage baskets, machine-age metal tools, leather couches, canvas bags, colorful woolen blankets and interiors made of barn wood.

In my personal life, I'm no stranger to the phenomenon. My parents live in suburbia, but in a home full of reclaimed barn wood, old windows, and distressed and "rustic" materials strategically used to make the house look much older than it is.

But after a semester in this course and writing and reading this blog, I'm now looking at "rustic chic" through a new lens. Where is this style coming from? Is fueled by nostalgia, a yearning for a "simpler time"? Is there any real connection between rural and rustic? How much of it is tongue-in-cheek and how much is in earnest? Is based in respect, or in co-opting an other's lifestyle? These are all useful questions to consider as I wait to see if "Picker Sisters" is renewed for a second season!

Lawlessness in the Georgia pecan orchards

2011-12-20T06:46:00.000-08:00

A story in today's New York Times about pecan theft in Georgia highlights the ways in which spatiality disables or defeats law and those who are its agents or enforcers. The gist of the story is that, with pecan prices very high ($1.50/pound), pecan theft has become increasingly appealing--and is therefore a burgeoning problem in the state's pecan belt. This is creating big problems for growers.

Kim Severson's story, dateline Fort Valley, Georgia, population 8,106, makes several references to the opportunity presented by the nuts because the orchards are "unpatrolled"--because of the difficulties spatiality poses to protecting them from theft. Here is an excerpt:

To protect themselves, growers have installed security cameras. But since most thefts happen at night, it's hard to identify the culprits. The growers have hired security guards and added fences topped with barbed wire. But the orchards are too large to patrol effectively, and thieves cut through the chain-link fence almost as soon as it goes up.

In spite of these challenges, 50 people have been caught stealing pecans from the 2600 acres that comprise Lane's Southern Orchard in Fort Valley this year. More than 30 people have been arrested for pecan theft in Peach County, population 26,019 (of which Fort Valley is the county seat), while 16 have been arrested in Mitchell County, population 23,808, which has seen 37 reports of pecan theft.

What do MF Global and ranchers in Kansas have to do with one another?

2011-12-16T16:13:00.000-08:00

Well, according to this NPR story, many farmers and ranchers "were major clients of MF Global, buying futures contracts to hedge against swings in the value of their crops and livestock." More than a billion dollars of the cash of MF Global's clients was declared missing when the giant trading company went belly up a few weeks ago. Journalist Lynn Neary interviewed rancher Tim Rietzke, who has spent some time trying to reach MF Global by phone to determine the status of his funds that were held in a brokerage account there.

Rietzke is a well-spoken rancher from nonmetropolitan Comanche County, Kansas, population 1,891. In particular, Neary introduced him as from the county seat, Coldwater, population 828. Rietzke explained the consequences of his missing $30,000 that was being held by MF Global:

Well, much like a household budget, if you had $30,000 in the bank and all of a sudden that money disappeared, it would change your personal life. And it changes your business life much the same. Let's say in the ranching business you wanted to buy some replacement females or breeding stock or a pickup, now you're not sure what should I do. I don't want to put myself in a bind and have to borrow more money.

Also striking to me was Rietzke's response to Neary's question about the size of his operation. He answered instead with this description of where he lives:

Of course, we're prejudiced, but we think we have a beautiful ranch. The cattle are handled just like they were a lot of years ago, all by horseback. Really, I guess if you came out here, you would think that you had gone back in time, but in our county, there are only 1,900 people. There is no stoplight. It's an hour to fast food any direction. It's an hour to Wal-Mart in any direction, but we like that.

That strikes me as quite an expression of rural attachment to place.

The next long quote from Rietzke's suggests something akin to the informal order and general absence of law typically associated with rural places, with the final bit suggesting discomfort with the web of fiscal globalization that links his life to Wall Street and European debt.

[A]lot of people out here still do business with a handshake. So in other words, I'm going to buy hay from somebody and he said, okay, I'll see you hay for $100 a ton and you shake hands, they deliver the hay and you write them a check.

And I don't need to give him down money. I don't need to write a contract. And there's still an enormous amount of Business done in our area just like that. So this is really a different part of the world. When I had a hedge account to protect my prices, I didn't want to invest in European sovereign debt. I didn't want to invest in MF Global. I had nothing to do with their business.

Four angles on fracking

2011-12-15T06:28:00.000-08:00

In just the last few weeks, the New York Times has published four stories on hydraulic fracturing. The stories' angles on this increasingly controversial technique for releasing natural gas from shale formations range from the legal to the environmental to the political.

One was this story in the New York Times, which highlighted the disappointment of many landowners who have leased their land for natural gas exploration. Here is a brief except from the story by Ian Urbina and Jo Craven McGinty:

Americans have signed millions of leases allowing companies to drill for oil and natural gas on their land in recent years. But some of these landowners--often in rural areas, and eager for quick payouts--are finding out too late what is, and what is not, in the fine print.

Elsewhere, the journalists again pick up the rural economics theme, stating that many of the lessor/landowners are "residents of rural areas where jobs are scarce and farmers and ranchers have struggled to stay afloat."

Energy companies assert that standard leases include language that protects landowners, but the Times story goes on to list trends regarding what is in the leased, based on the Times analysis of 111,000 leases and related documents.

Fewer than half require the energy company lessees to compensate landowners for groundwater contamination.
Most leases grant gas companies broad rights regarding where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads, and drill.
Most leases do not describe to landowners the environmental and other risks associated with fracking, though these risks must be described to investors under federal law.
While most leases are for three to five years, two third include provisions permitting the lessee to unilaterally extend the lease for two years, without additional compensation to the landowner.

Urbina and McGinty note that some landowners have joined class action lawsuits against energy companies. The journalists' use of the descriptor "rural" to describe many of the landowner/lessors and their attention to the economic duress of many of these landowners may suggest that landowners are less savvy than their urban counterparts when it comes to negotiating with corporations. On there other hand, their attention to the economic duress which many of these landowners are experiencing may suggest an unfortunate of some judicial decisions I cited in my Rural Rhetoric article, decisions that linked rural gullibility to the need for law's solicitude to their low level of education. Here is my string cite (footnote 39) from that article:

Adkins v. Adkins, 186 Cal. Rptr. 818, 820 (Cal. Ct. App. 1982) (describing respondent as having been “raised in an isolated rural background and [having] received only a third grade education” as partial justification for releasing him from a marital settlement agreement into which he entered without advice of counsel); People v. Vigil, 489 P.2d 588, 589–90 (Colo. 1971) (stating that a criminal defendant from a poor, rural family, who spoke broken English, required “solicitude” of legal system, including more explicit Miranda rights); Lacour v. Sanders, 442 So. 2d 1280, 1283 (La. Ct. App. 1983) (trial court referred to both defendants as “uneducated” men who lived in a rural community); State v. Hamrick, 236 S.E.2d 247, 247 (W. Va. 1977) (describing defendant as “a poor, uneducated, non-verbal resident of rural West Virginia”).

Another is this story regarding the EPA's finding that hydraulic fracturing in Wyoming has caused contamination of groundwater in the so-called Pavillion field. Here's the lede to Kirk Johnson's story:

Chemicals used to hydraulically fracture rocks in drilling for natural gas in a remote valley in central Wyoming are the likely cause of contaminated local water supplies, federal regulators said Thursday.

The draft report, after a three-year study by the Environmental Protection Agency represents a new scientific and political skirmish line over whether fracking, as it is more commonly known, poses a threat in the dozens of places around the nation where it is being used to extract previously unreachable energy resources locked within rock.

The study, which was prompted by complaints from local residents about the smell and taste of their water, stressed that local conditions were unusual at the site ... in that gas wells were far shallower than in many other drilling areas around the country.

The Pavillion fields are located predominantly in vast and sparsely populated Fremont County. The county's population is about 40,000, and the population density is a mere 4.4 persons per square mile.

This December 14 story by Sabrina Tavernise discusses political conflicts that have arisen in southwestern Pennsylvania over what government entities should regulate energy companies exploring for natural gas. The dateline is South Fayette, Pennsylvania, population 13,042--apparently exurban Pittsburgh--and the story highlights the conflict between municipal officials who wish to regulate hydraulic fracturing--to zone it out--and state lawmakers who would allow it more liberally. The story's lede follows:

As energy companies move to drill in densely populated areas from Pennsylvania to Texas, battles are breaking out over who will have the final say in managing the shale gas boom.

The fight, which pits towns and cities against the energy companies and states eager for growth, has raised a fundamental question about the role of local government: How much authority should communities have over the use of their land?

The battle is playing out in Pennsylvania as the Republican-controlled legislature considers bills that would in their current form sharply limit a community's right to control where gas companies can operate on private property.

This quote from Brian Coppola, a self-identified conservative Republican who is an elected official in Robinson Township, west of Pittsburgh, sums up the conflict. He states that the pending state legislation "goes against all my principles. [The legislation] is an enormous land grab on the part of the industry. Our property rights are being trampled." Tavernise's story further details the proliferation of local regulation of the drilling industries, much of which is in conflict with state regulation.

Finally, this story, dateline Youngstown, Ohio, discusses whether fracking and related waste disposal practices are causing seismic activity in places like Youngstown, which had never experienced a quake until March, 2011. Read earlier posts about this phenomenon in central Arkansas here and here.

Calculating distances and closing post offices

2011-12-13T06:06:00.001-08:00

I've written a lot this fall about the U.S. Post Offices of Newton County--and in particular the proposal to close six of the ten. Other posts are here and here. One issue that has arisen at various meetings between district Post Office officials and local patrons is the distance from each post office slated for closure to the nearest remaining post office. At recent meetings, local postal patrons have challenged the district official announcing this information about the distances in the official U.S. Post Office reports. I have yet to see a report of a distance that the U.S. Post Office has gotten right--at least no correct distances have been reported in the paper's coverage. Needless to say the distances announced by the post office official are usually shorter than the actual driving distances. My best guess is that the post office is providing "as the crow flies" distances. I know these are available on Internet sites--as, of course, are driving distances.

A patron at the meeting regarding the Vendor facility challenged the Post Office study statement that Jasper is just 5 - 6 miles from Vendor, asserting that the distance is in fact 11 miles. That patron elaborated that it is "five miles up hill and five miles down hill, with just one passing lane on that stretch of road." The patron asserted that the elevation goes from a low of 1,200 feet at Vendor to a high of 2,000 feet, before the road descends into Jasper.

Vendor residents also noted that if the post offices at Hasty, Vendor, and Mt. Judea (pictured above) are all closed, no post office would exist between Western Grove and Dover. That's a distance of about 65 miles. What the resident and the journalist do not mention is that the Vender and Mt. Judea post offices are less than 3 miles apart, which suggests to me that one of these two is sure to be closed. The Vendor patron also doesn't note that other post offices--like the ones at Jasper and Deer--are as little as 10-12 miles from points along the line between Western Grove and Dover that is currently dotted with post offices. So, no one in that service range is actually going to be quite as far from a post office as the 65 mile figure suggests.

Controversy like that at Vendor arose in Compton regarding the distance of the community and its post office from the nearest other post office. In Compton, part of the debate was over whether Compton is 14 miles or 22 miles from the post office at Harrison, and part of it was about the post office's distance from the post office at Marble Falls, which the district official said was 17 miles. The patrons' correction in this case related to passable roads, as the patron noted that Google details on the route indicated that it required travel on a closed road. As the patron noted, if you want to get from Compton to the Marble Falls post office, you have to go via Harrison or Jasper--in which case you might as well conduct your business at the Jasper or Harrison post office.

Postal patrons at those most recent meetings are also seeking information from Postal Service district representatives about why some post offices in the region have been taken off the list of those slated for closure. District officials have explained that the Witts Springs post office has been taken off the closure list because it has space to absorb the neighboring facility at Tilly, which is located within a grocery store, where space is tight. Presumably, then, the facility at Tilly will be closed.

The reasons stated for taking the St. Paul post office off the closure list are somewhat less clear. The Nov. 9, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times explains that the St. Paul facility is "one of seven offices along a stretch of highway. It was taken off the study list because it is centrally located and has adequate space. Closing it would not be reasonable, [the official] said." I see that St. Paul is on joint Hwy 16/23, but other communities on these highways in southern Madison (e.g., Witter, above left and Pettigrew above right) and northern Franklin and Johnson Counties are many miles away. So, the "one of seven offices along a stretch of highway" is not very illuminating.

One thing is clear in relation to these controversies. The U.S. Post Office should to be able to figure out this distance-to-the-nearest-post office issue. The data it has used in some cases in Newton County makes the institution look ignorant at best, dishonest at worst. And it ought to use distances that relate to passable roads--not "as the crow flies"--unless, that is, it plans to start using carrier pigeons.

Pulling out all the stops to save a rural school (Part V): Economies of scale or empire building?

2011-12-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

This post follows up on a prior one regarding the skirmish between the Jasper School District and the Deer-Mt. Judea School District. The skirmish--if you could call it that--is about which should district should include the school at Oark, which until a massive round of school consolidation in Arkansas in 2004 was its own district. Oark is a tiny school with about 150 students K-12 in remote northwest Johnson County. The earlier post described the school and its situation in more detail. That post reported that a number of Oark patrons are seeking to leave the Jasper District and to have their campus join the Deer-Mt. Judea District. Among other things, these Oark residents have called for an "independent financial audit of the Jasper School District's expenditures related to the territory of the former Oark School."

So, as I wrote in my earlier post, Deer-Mt. Judea needs Oark in order to survive, but the Jasper District is unwilling to let go of the isolated school. Why? Is it as simple as empire building on the part of the Jasper District? Is it down to the Jasper school's longtime rivalry with Deer and Mt. Judea--the same reasons those schools didn't want to join a Jasper District back in 2004?

The reasons are not self-evident, but we can get a sense of some of them in comments that several members of the Jasper Board of Education have articulated recently in the local press. Board of Education member Todd Scarborough doesn't reveal much in his comments. He said only, "We've heard from these people in the past and it seemed to me everyone there voted to stay [in the Jasper District]. I certainly think we should talk to them, but I don't know what difference it would make, at least to me."

Several of the other Board members' comments at the Nov. 14 meeting focused on the request for a financial audit, which would apparently be aimed at seeing how much money the Oark campus garners for the District. Rex Van Buren, who is the Oark campus's member on the Board of Education, said he was "opposed to separating money or anything else by campus" and asserted that the board has "done a good job of addressing needs where they are." Board Member Randy Treat asked the Superintendent to be sure that the names on the petition are Oark residents, not Deer-Mt. Judea residents. In a similar vein, Treat suggested that "somebody from Deer-Mt. Judea [District] wants to know how much money is being brought in. Not the people of Oark."

An article in the Johnson County newspaper, The Graphic, provides more extensive quotes from Van Buren on the matter:

I am completely opposed to the Oark campus leaving the Jasper School District and joining Deer. There is not benefit for Oark going to Deer. We have been in the Jasper School District awhile now, and I know we have gone through growing pains, but I don't think that's something we want to have to go through all over again.

Van Buren went on to comment for that story that the Jasper District offers many benefits to Oark patrons, including a recently passed 0.9 mill property tax increase that is paying for new classrooms in Oark, classrooms he suggest come with a $1 million price tag. He noted that all of the Jasper District campuses are getting improvements thanks to the tax increase. Kingston will get a new cafeteria, and Jasper will get new electrical systems.

At the November meeting, District Superintendent Kerry Saylors opined thought the Board should talk to the petitioners, even if only a few of them prove to be patrons of the Oark school. I note that Saylors, who has been superintendent of the Jasper District for several years now, has taken the District in a direction different to his predecessors. It is a direction that suggests taking good advantage of economies of scale--or empire building--depending on your perspective. He has, for example, brought in two assistant superintendents, a layer of management previously absent. These assistant superintendents oversee "curriculum, instruction and accountability" and "federal programs and professional development," respectively. It would probably be much harder to justify these if the District lost Oark and was left with only two campuses. It would be easier to justify these positions if the Jasper District winds up absorbing Deer-Mt. Judea.

In my next post on this topic, I will discuss what it is about Arkansas's school funding scheme that makes Oark so attractive to both the Deer-Mt. Judea and Jasper Districts.

What's in a name? "country" versus "bountiful"?

2011-12-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

The California Farm Bureau recently announced a change in the name of its "award-winning" magazine and television show. What has for years been known as "California Country" has become "California Bountiful." Here's what the California Farm Bureau said about the change:

CFBF President Paul Wenger said the new title reflects the diversity of farming in California today, and the fact that all Californians benefit from a vibrant, sustainable agriculture.

"Food is typically grown in the country, but it involves people in every part of the state. California Bountiful introduces readers and viewers to the people, places and products that make up the fabric of our rich agricultural environment," Wenger said.

* * *
Under its new name, the California Bountiful television program will reach more viewers thanks to a grant that supports the show's goal of connecting urban and rural California.

I agree that California is bountiful--and I'm all for pointing out to folks the web of connections between rural and urban. Still, I'm wondering if the change reflects the organization's perception that it needs to distance itself from the, well, countrified image associated with the word "country."

Here's a link to the Farm Bureau's press release about the name change.

Upper Big Branch settlement unsettling for miners' families

2011-12-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

News of the U.S. government's settlement with the owners of the Upper Big Branch Mine, site of an April 2010 mining disaster, was met with mixed reviews this week. The U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia announced on Wednesday that Alpha Energy, parent company of Massey Energy, which owns and operates the Upper Big Branch Mine, would pay a grand total of $209 million in restitution and civil and criminal penalties.

But those injured in the explosion and the families of the 29 miners who died in it are not pleased, in spite of the fact that $46.5 million of the settlement money is earmarked for them, $1.5 million per family. The families are unhappy because the terms of the settlement protect Alpha from criminal prosecution, though individual Massey executives are not similarly protected. According to a story in the New York Times,

Many were hoping for criminal charges against the people who ran Massey, the company that, according to the federal government's own review, knowingly put their relatives in harm's way.

"Families believe that senior executives should be prosecuted, but they don't have any great faith that they will be, and that's what they're afraid of," said Mark Moreland, a lawyer who represents the families of two victims.
* * *
But industry observers warned that because of weak mining safety laws, prosecutors face a steep uphill battle pursuing the biggest prize--criminal convictions of the powerful people who ran Massey.

So far, only the mine's security chief, who is relatively low in Massey's hierarchy, is facing criminal charges.

Many agree that the Mine Safety and Health Administration--roundly criticized in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster (read my post on SALTLaw Blog here)--has stepped up enforcement of the relevant laws. But Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis notes the need for tougher criminal penalties for those who violate the law.

Wednesday's agreement does not stop individual families from pursuing claims against Massey, and eight of those suits have already settled. The $1.5 million per family functions as an offset to any additional jury award or settlement each surviving family is able to achieve or negotiate.

The remainder of the $209 million settlement includes:

$80 million to improve safety and infrastructure in all of Alpha and Massey's mines
$48 million to establish a mine health and safety foundation and
$35 million in fines and fees that Massey owed to the Mine Health and Safety Administration

Earlier posts about the Upper Big Branch disaster--the worst mining accident in 40 years--are here, here, here and here.

Efforts to save county post offices more strategic as time passes

2011-12-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

As the January, 2012 closure of numerous post offices creeps nearer, it is time for another post about post offices. This one will focus again on Newton County, Arkansas, my home county, where six of the county's 10 U.S. Post Offices are on the chopping block. Read an earlier post here.

One thing I've noticed in Newton County Times coverage of more recent community meetings about specific proposed closures is that the various communities seem to be learning from prior community meetings and getting more organized and sophisticated in their efforts. That is affecting how they approach these meetings, including the types of arguments they make. In this post, I'm going to discuss the efforts of four Newton County post offices: Compton and Ponca, in the northwestern part of the county, Mt. Judea and Vendor in the south, southeastern part, and Parthenon, which is about 5 miles southwest of Jasper, the county seat. In short, the residents of these communities are invoking both practical and nostalgic arguments for saving their post offices, and they seem far better organized than the communities who met with U.S. Post Office officials earlier in the process, like those reported on here.

The Oct. 26, 2011 issue of the Times reports that patrons of the Mt. Judea and Vendor post offices are using a petition drive and sending form letters to both the U.S. Postal Service and to Arkansas's Congressional Delegation in their effort to avert closure of their local post offices. They have also worked to get people out to the community meetings, one at the Mt. Judea School cafeteria on Nov. 29 and one at the Log Hall Church in Vendor on Nov. 14. Organizers met prior to these formal meetings with district U.S. Post Office personnel, to strategize and make publicity banners. Organizers are taking petitions and comment sheets from home to home to gather signatures and offer assistance with letter writing to the areas U.S. Senator and Representative. The petition cites the needs of "our elderly and handicapped people [who] depend on the post office for many things like their medicine or medical supplies." It continues:

Our small and home-based businesses depend on the post office as well. Some would have to drive twenty to thirty miles, one way, just to mail their packages.
* * *
One of the basic functions of the postal service is to bind our nation together. Our rural post offices are a vital part of our Nation, our culture, and our livelihood.

The Oct. 19, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times announces that a "Grassroots committee" is working to save the post office at Compton. Like many other community meetings, the official opportunity for Compton patrons to meet with the U.S. Post Office representative occurred at a church, the County Line Baptist Church, on Nov. 1. Compton postal patrons have been active since the proposed closures were announced in late July. They immediately erected a banner "along state Highway 43, near the post office that reads, 'Save the Compton Post Office: No Shut Down." The Committee to Save the Compton Post Office is comprised of seven families, including a retired attorney from Harrison. (Co

mpton is on the Newton-Boone County line, and Harrison is the regional center, Boone County's seat). The retired attorney, Scott Covington, is apparently pursuing a legal(istic) argument about the inadequacy of notice of the proposed closures, an argument I saw echoed by a Parthenon resident who is also a lawyer. Along with the Committee, members of the Compton Volunteer Fire Department have circulated petitions opposing the post office's closure.

Subsequent issues of the Times report on the meetings at Compton and Vendor. When asked by a Vendor resident what the community had done to get on the list of proposed closures, the district post official, Shane Davis, replied "less than $50/day in revenue."

One patron noted that he receives medicine via mail from the Veteran's Administration, and he is worried about the safety of getting the medicine delivered to a rural mailbox or cluster box unit. Others mentioned similar security concerns related to receipt of checks.

A highway contract carrier who serves the Vendor and Parthenon Post Offices, in addition to two others in the county, noted that 70 of the 100 miles he drives each day are on dirt roads. (Top photo is of a highway contract carrier delivering mail near Yardelle, Arkansas, November, 2011; smaller photo above right is of U.S. Post Office, Hasty, Arkansas).

State Senator Randy Laverty of Jasper appeared at the Vendor meeting, along with State Representative David Branscum of Marshall, in neighboring Searcy County. The newspaper reported Laverty's comments:

Newton County residents and elected officials face problems daily like no other population group in Arkansas. He noted that almost 60% of Newton County is publicly owned, mostly by the federal government. 'That is crippling for the county.' He pointed out that the Newton County Quorum Court recently had to raise the tax millage to cover a $42,000 deficit. He said the county doesn't have public transportation. 'We depend on a pretty primitive level of support.' He explained that Newton County has 'unique geographic areas, low water bridges and canopies over roadways.' He tipped his hat to rural carriers as they travel the challenging terrain.

Laverty's comments don't seem to have a whole lot to do with the the proposed post office closures, except I guess to make the point that if you live in one of these communities and must travel farther to get to a post office, it's a greater hardship than in a metropolitan area, where the roads are surely better and public transportation might even be available.

Laverty also appeared at the last of the county's meetings, the one in Mt. Judea on Nov. 29. There Laverty argued that the U.S. Post Office has pitted communities against one another by requiring each to prove why it is unique and therefore should be permitted to keep its local post office. As in his comments at the Vendor meeting, Laverty emphasized things that Newton County lacks, including a public transportation system. He also noted that the county had the state's lowest per capita income in 2000. Laverty asserted that these rural communities are more dependent on local postal service than are urban areas.

The transportation challenges associated with Newton County were also discussed at the meeting regarding the proposed closure of the Parthenon Post Office on Nov. 15. One Parthenon patron said that he sometimes has to paddle a canoe across a stream to get his mail, when the rivers are up. At those times, the rural mail carrier leaves mail at the Parthenon post office for residents to collect when they can. Like many patrons at other meetings around the county, those at Parthenon noted that some of them already travel a mile or more just to get to their rural mail box.

At the Compton meeting on November 1, one patron read a letter from Newton County Sheriff Keith Slape, a Compton resident. The letter noted that the county is the last Arkansas County not to be 911 addressed and that local post masters are helpful in directing public safety to the right residence. The sheriff also expressed concern about "people shipping parcels from home," noting that "leaving parcels and money for the mail carrier unsecured invites theft." Similarly, residents at the Parthenon and Mt. Judea meetings spoke of concerns about the safety of their mail carriers if they must conduct postal transactions for customers, a solution suggested by district representatives of the post office. Several former postmasters and current mail carriers mentioned that they are already heavily burdened and do not have time to conduct these transactions for those on their routes.

The efforts of the Compton residents to quantify and document their need for a post office also highlights the digital divide between rural and urban, poor and rich. Compton residents who circulated a petition presented their analysis of it at the meeting. They found that for every person who uses the Internet, two do not. Most who have Internet access have a slow dial-up connection, making the computer unreliable for conducting business. The committee noted that for others, "the purchase of a computer and subscribing to Internet service is cost prohibitive. Cell phone service is also spotty." Finally, Compton does not have any business between the "community limit signs" where a "village post office" could be sited.

At a minimum, the Compton community is asking for a "rural non-personnel" unit that would be housed at the existing facility. Under this proposal--and apparently consistent with postal service regulations--"the rural route carrier would open the office for a minimum of 15 minutes a day at a specified time for customers to come and conduct their business."

The Mt. Judea meeting was one of the best attended, with 147 people present (in sharp contrast to the 14 present at Ponca on Nov. 17). One focus at that meeting was Mt. Judea school's reliance on the post office, and one patron expressed fear that if the community loses its post office, it will be that much closer to also losing its school. (Read more about the state of the Mt. Judea school here). Another patron observed that 10 different communities rely on the Mt. Judea post office, many of which previously had their own post office. Hers were not the only arguments referencing history and invoking nostalgia.

Pulling out all the stops to save a rural school (Part IV): Could Arkansas's three most remote schools be saved if clustered together?

2011-12-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

This spring, I wrote a couple of blog posts here and here about the efforts of the Deer-Mt. Judea School District in the rural Arkansas Ozarks to avoid consolidation. At that point, the District was pursuing legal remedies--or more precisely, a change in the law--that would prevent forced consolidation of the district with the neighboring Jasper District. The reason Deer-Mt. Judea was at risk of forced consolidation is that its student population had fallen below 350, which under Arkansas law is the death knell for a district's independence. The District argued that the state's formula for funding transportation--paying a flat fee of $289/student--is unfair to rural schools like those in Newton County, where transportation per student costs about $900/year.

The legal efforts of the Deer-Mt. Judea District went nowhere with the courts. This is not terribly surprising since no other Arkansas school district has found a successful legal strategy since a major round of forced consolidations in 2004. Also, the trial court hearing the Deer-Mt. Judea case is in Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock; as the home of the state capital, it is apparently the designated venue in which such cases must be filed. Thus, the trial court making the initial determination in such cases is not a local court that is more likely to be familiar with the area--and therefore perhaps more sympathetic to local residents' desire to keep their school. The most recent post about this effort in the courts is here.

That most recent post indicated that Deer-Mt. Judea might make overtures toward the Jasper District about merging, but more recent issues of the Newton County Times indicate that the Deer-Mt. Judea District is now seeking a different partner to avoid consolidation. It is now courting the school at Oark, in Johnson County, to join its District. Oark has about 150 students total (K-12), and the addition of these students into the Deer-Mt. Judea District would save the District, which would presumably keep a campus at Oark. Oark is about 34 miles (more than an hour's drive) from Deer, of which a third are on county roads (which were unpaved when I was growing up and may still be).

The problem facing the Deer-Mt. Judea District as it pursues this new strategy is that the Oark school became part of the Jasper District in 2004, when many schools were "re-aligned" (a/k/a consolidated) after a landmark Arkansas Supreme Court decision regarding K-12 funding and standards. Now, admittedly, this didn't make a lot of sense at the time because Oark is about 20 miles farther from Jasper than it is from Deer. (Nor did the fact that the Kingston school, in neighboring Madison County, also consolidated with Jasper. Kingston is 28 miles/47 minutes from Jasper but just 20 miles on better roads from Huntsville in Madison County). But, perhaps because Oark and Deer were rivals--just as Jasper and Deer were rivals--Oark joined the Jasper District instead of the Deer-Mt. Judea District.

Now, a number of patrons of the Oark school (reports vary on the number, ranging from 75 to 185) have signed a petition indicating they wish to join the Deer-Mt. Judea District. Some of Oark's unhappiness with the Jasper District may be because the Jasper Board of Education recently rejected a grievance by the Oark principal, Anita Cooper, following her dismissal by the district superintendent. According to story in the Oct. 19, 2011 issue of the Newton County Times, many Oark district patrons supported the principal and attended the Jasper Board of Education meeting to advocate for her. The scene highlights the fact that Oark school patrons must find it pretty galling to be governed by a District and Board that is sited 55 miles away, even though the Board has one member from Oark. Moving into the Deer-Mt. Judea District would put Oark residents nearer the governing district's center of gravity, Deer, which probably looks attractive.

In a future post, I'll discuss the Jasper District's response to the Oark petition to join Deer-Mt. Judea. For now, I want to discuss Deer-Mt. Judea's statements regarding what is at stake and what it would take to achieve the move. The superintendent of the Deer-Mt. Judea District, Richard Denniston, told the District's Board of Education at its Oct. 20 meeting, "We're in survival mode" because of the current enrollment figures. He continued:

Eight years ago when we went through the process of choosing a partner (for state mandated consolidation), before Mt. Judea was a player, we were trying to see which direction we were going at public meetings. We had five (Oark) board members and the superintendent attend our public forum, stood up and said, 'we're here to sign with Deer.' At that time, we didn't get a favorable vote. Now, they have a petition by a coalition that they want to come to Deer. They have approximately 185 signatures.

The reporter does not explain Denniston's comment about the lack of a favorable vote--that is, whether Deer voted not to accept Oark or Oark ultimately decided not to join Deer.

Denniston goes on to explain the steps that lie ahead if Oark is to join the Deer-Mt. Judea district now.

Here is the main issue. When you have small numbers you are an isolated school--and it only impacts isolated schools. If you can't meet standards of accreditation and one of which is how many students in each of the 38 courses--and in the upper end those are your physics, pre-cal, transition math and chemistry, etc.--if you can't fill that slot you have the possibility of Deer not getting $1.1 million in isolated funding. If you're at Jasper, the same scenario, they have the possibility of losing $1.5 million of operating funding.

In order to make this work it's just not Oark coming to us. It's Oark coming to us with us getting the state department [of education] or the legislators to agree to an umbrella that will be a consortium for grades 9-12 under one LEA (local education agency). That way you can use aggregate numbers 9-12.

Denniston continued by reference to "real numbers." Oark has seven seniors, Mt. Judea just nine and Deer, 13. With 30 seniors, Denniston surmised the combined District would have a "good chance" of filling the required 38 course slots. Denniston noted the District's current situation in regard to these upper division courses:

Right now at Mt. Judea, five of those classes have one student in each of them. At the start of the year in Deer there was one student.

Denniston concluded by calling the clustering of "the three most remote schools in Arkansas" a safety net. He said the proposed Deer/Mt. Judea/Oark School District would cover about 664 square miles, which is about the size of the current Jasper School District, with its campuses at Jasper, Oark and Kingston. Denniston speculates that Mt. Judea and Oark are "probably the smallest schools in the state." These schools "are more than isolated, they are remote, a term that state officials are hesitant to use."

The Deer-Mt. Judea Board of Education closed its Oct. 20 meeting by passing a resolution that the Board would petition the state Board of Education to "adjust the boundary lines of the Deer/Mt. Judea School district to include the territory of the former Oark School district that is now part of the Jasper School District, and to rename the district to include Oark."

In future posts, I will discuss additional angles on this effort at re-alignment of these schools, including the relevant Arkansas law and the perspective of the Jasper district--including why it finds the Oark school/campus and territory so attractive.

Rural farmworkers win big with $915,000 settlement

2011-12-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

Imagine spending 10 hours a day working in a vineyard and only receiving $20 at the end of that long day. Many farmworkers encountered similar labor practices while working for H&R Gunlund Ranches (Gunlund). Gunlund is in Caruthers, a small town with 2,497 residents located near Fresno, California. Such low wages are shocking, especially in California where the minimum wage is $8. Thankfully, many of the farmworkers who received these wages will soon be receiving a handsome check.

According to a press release from the legal non-profit California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), on November 23, 2011 Judge O'Neill of the Eastern District of California approved a settlement between 82 farmworkers and Gunlund in the Regino Primitivo Gomez et al. v. H&R Gunlund Ranches case. The plaintiffs received $915,000 in the settlement. CRLA as well as a private workers' rights law firm, Talamantes/Villegas/Carrera, LLP (Talamentes), represented the farmworkers.

According to the Associated Press, the farmworkers had numerous complaints. They accused Gunlund of not paying minimum wages and overtime, violating laws relating to meal and rest periods, and not providing proper equipment for work in the vineyards. According to an article in the Fresno Bee, the workers received "piece rate" wages. Gunlund paid the workers for the amount of vines they tied and pruned, the "piece rate", not for the number of hours they worked. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires covered employers, which includes large farms, to pay employees the minimum wage for hours worked. CRLA attorney Felicia Espinosa said Gunlund paid some workers less than $2 an hour.

While this is a grand victory, not all of the money is going to the workers. According to the Fresno Bee, both sides agreed that $490,000 of the settlement would go to the workers. The remaining $425,000 is going towards attorneys' fees. The amount each worker will receive will depend on how many hours the employee worked for Gunlund. Some workers were employees of Gunlund for many seasons, while others just for a few weeks.

The attorneys will be receiving roughly 46% of the settlement, which at first glance may seem excessive, but it is in line with California law. California Labor Code Section 1194 allows successful plaintiffs in minimum wage and overtime cases to recover attorneys' fees and the cost of the suit. Thus, if the plaintiffs had prevailed at trial, in addition to what they deserved to receive from Gunlund, they would also receive attorneys' fees and costs. The amount the attorneys will receive left some people who commented on the Fresno Bee article angry. The attorneys' fees, however, do not detract from the amount the workers should receive based on their claims. The fees are just a bonus that the law provides, most likely to ensure exploited workers can afford legal representation.

The case lasted two years and required two law firms, one of which is looking at funding reductions. Assuming the firms split the attorneys' fees evenly, each organization will receive $106,250 per year of work. For a cash-strapped legal aid organization like CRLA, this is a blessing. Congress decided to cut funding for the Legal Services Corporation by 14.8% for Fiscal Year 2012. LSC will see a total loss of $56 million. LSC helps to fund CRLA, and thus CRLA will likely lose significant funding. Talamantes' mission is to serve employees of whom employers take advantage. This settlement will give the firm more resources and enable them to serve more clients. To survive and continue to serve vulnerable populations in rural communities where attorneys are lacking, CRLA and Talamantes need these attorneys' fees.

In this case, the justice system worked to protect disadvantaged farmworkers. Lawyer Mark Talamantes analogized the case to David and Goliath, and lawyer Felicia Espinosa said "we finally have justice for these workers." As importantly, now many California farmworkers likely have greater confidence in our legal system. Plaintiff Ignacio Hernandez stated:

Being a farmworker is hard, back-breaking work. Underpaying us was unjust and wrong. Many farmworkers would be too scared to come forward, but I knew that this country has laws that protect workers.

Gunlund is not the only agricultural company to take unfair advantage of farm labor. In 2006, CRLA secured recoveries totaling more than $1 million for dairy workers whom their employers forced to work for 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for less than $4.35 an hour. Felicia Espinosa said these practices are also "not uncommon."

While exploitation of labor is not restricted to any geographic area, it seems that agricultural workers are particularly susceptible to unfair labor practices. Employers and employees in agricultural settings are spatially isolated from metropolitan areas where more people might be able to witness the maltreatment of workers. With few people, including attorneys, in areas like Caruthers, it is not surprising that employers believe they can get away with such practices. As this case demonstrates, it is possible to use the law to stop unfair labor practices in rural areas as long as employees demand their rights and accessible attorneys are ready to help.

The farmworkers' battle is not over yet. Some of the workers have filed complaints against Gunlund with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board for unfair labor practices. Many workers claim that Gunlund fired them after they challenged their wages and asked for a raise. The settlement will not affect the complaints and a hearing date has not been set. I hope that these workers will receive a similar result in their future hearing.

Occupy Humboldt, drunk DAs, trucking, and pancakes

2011-12-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

Like most people, I went home for Thanksgiving. As I posted earlier, my mother had surgery the Friday before so my family had a low key Turkey Day with just my parents, two sisters, and myself. But even with the holiday weekend, my father kept an appointment he has every Saturday morning that he is home: breakfast with my uncle Larry and their best friend Frank at Dennys. For as long as I can remember my dad would go to breakfast with Larry, Frank, and maybe a few other people on Saturdays to eat flap jacks, drink gallons of coffee, and discuss various subjects. That Saturday I went with Dad and grabbed a copy of the Times-Standard, the local newspaper, when we got there.

Dad and Larry talked about what was going on with the family trucking company. Construction projects have closed for the winter, meaning no more dirt hauling until spring. Four truck loads of crab pots were hauled down to San Francisco for the early dungeness crab season. And we had a kind of Black Friday haul, a Christmas tree seller realized on Wednesday they had underestimated their original order of trees and needed a truck load of trees by Thanksgiving night. We got some much needed extra income on that haul.

We also talked about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on. A couple of small scale protests are happening in Humboldt county. Eureka's encampment was taking place on the courthouse's lawn, where the protesters have been removed three times by police. The encampment has its supporters, but its reputation has been marred by numerous intoxicated in public arrests and one charge of assault when a woman tried to physically prevent a couple of courthouse employees from entering.

Sensing that some in the community are turning on the Eureka OWS encampment, a new group calling itself Occupy Humboldt is forming. Their goal is to move away from an encampment, and turn towards countywide community outreach and political involvement.

The Occupy Arcata encampment on the city hall lawn has self-imploded. Apparently a fight over the encampment's kitchen and partying broke the group up into two subsets. One, mostly made up of Humboldt State University students, decided to move back onto campus where other students were already protesting. The other, mostly homeless, moved into a camp in the Arcata Community Forest.

It seems like the OWS movement in Humboldt county is at a cross roads right now moving in many directions all at once. Another topic was the pepper spraying at UC Davis and the comparison to the pepper spraying incident in Humboldt during the Timber Wars in the 1990s. But that's enough material for a future post.

Another topic we talked about was the county to the north of Humboldt, Del Norte. In a "why would you do that, you know better" situation, the former Del Norte District Attorney Mike Riese was arrested in August for suspicion of DUI. Because the former DA was involved, the Attorney General sent an assistant to take over prosecuting the case from the DA's Office.

But there was a problem of what to do with the Superior Court judges of Del Norte. The AG requested that all the judges of Del Norte recuse themselves. All the judges sounds like a big deal, but Del Norte only has two, and both have presided over criminal cases involving the former DA. The judges agreed to step aside, so a retired Humboldt county judge has volunteered to hear the DA's case. Just another example of how the judicial system in very rural counties can be a real pain.

We finished up breakfast and the conversation. We went our separate ways and I left with my mind filled with plenty of local scuttlebutt to last me until Christmas time.

Does rurality have an impact on HIV/AIDS transmission and treatment?

2011-12-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

In advance of World AIDS Day, the Reno Gazette Journal published a story reporting that people with HIV/AIDS were living in every Nevada county. In fact, in 2010, 448 people with HIV/AIDS were living in Nevada's rural counties.

This got me to thinking about how living with HIV/AIDS might be different for someone in a rural place rather than an urban one. The Nevada State Health Division's 2008 profile of HIV/AIDS in Nevada recognized the disparate impact that the disease has in rural counties when it stated that although Nevada's rural counties "are small in population, and the number of new cases [reported each year], the impact of new cases in these areas is significant as access to resources and care are difficult in these areas of Nevada." As pointed out in previous posts on this blog, rural people often have a difficult time obtaining access to the kinds of specialized healthcare needed to treat a wide variety of diseases. This problem is likely exacerbated when attempting to obtain treatment for something as complex as HIV/AIDS.

Aside from the difficulty of obtaining a diagnosis or treatment for HIV/AIDS, I wondered how some of the characteristics of rural areas might bear on the disease. For instance, do traditional rural values lead to the generally lower HIV/AIDS rates in Nevada's rural places? Nevada's most populous county, Clark County, led the state in 2008 with an HIV/AIDS infected rate of 334.1 people per 100,000 population. Two places classified as rural followed: Carson City had an infected rate of 310.08 and Storey County had 228.2 per 100,000. Washoe County, Nevada's other metropolitan county, was fourth with a rate of 189.9 people infected with HIV/AIDS. All of Nevada's 13 other rural counties had lower rates.

Could it be that the traditional family values we have discussed in rural places is responsible for these lower rates? After all, it is well known that unprotected sex and intravenous drug use are two of the primary risk factors for acquiring HIV/AIDS. Both factors conflict with the traditional values that most people associate with rural areas.

The data from the 2008 survey of Nevada provides mixed results. Of all people living in Nevada with HIV/AIDS, those living in rural areas had a lower rate of infection as a result of men having sexual intercourse with men (referred to as MSM in the study). Clark County residents with HIV/AIDS had a risk rate of 65%, Washoe County a risk rate of 53%, and rural residents a risk rate of 39% for MSM. This means that the rate of HIV/AIDS transmission as a result of MSM is roughly 15-25% lower in Nevada's rural counties.

This is offset by an increased transmission rate through intravenous drug use however. In Nevada's rural counties, 20% of all people living with HIV/AIDS likely acquired the disease through intravenous drug use. This is much higher than the 11% risk factor for infected people in Washoe and Clark Counties. The transmission rate as a result of heterosexual activity was also higher in Nevada's rural counties. 14% of HIV/AIDS infected persons in rural counties likely acquired the disease through heterosexual conduct compared to 12% in Clark County and 9% in Washoe County.

It is impossible to formulate any general conclusion based on this data in regards to rural places and their traditional values. Perhaps the transmission rate is lower among homosexual men because those populations are smaller in rural places. Or maybe there are similar rates of transmission but not as many rural people with the disease get tested or diagnosed each year. When they are diagnosed, perhaps rural people are more willing to admit to intravenous drug use but not homosexual activity. Any number of explanations might explain the apparent discrepancies in transmission methods between rural and urban Nevadans.

I also wondered how the lack of anonymity in rural places might affect people living with HIV/AIDS. Do more people know about rural Nevadans infected with the disease because of the lack of anonymity? Are they singled or subject to discrimination as a result? This might explain why the numbers of people living with HIV/AIDS in rural Nevada has decreased from a high of 896 people in 2008 to 448 people in 2010. There is also the possibility that infected people left rural places in order to obtain more specialized care in urban areas or for some other reason altogether. Without having information about each person's motivation for leaving rural Nevada, it is impossible to know how rural characteristics such as lack of anonymity and attachment to place might have factored into the migration decisions of infected people.

Before reading the article, I had never really contemplated the issues facing HIV/AIDS infected people in rural places. However, after thinking about it and looking at the data, it is apparent that the challenges they face might be even greater than those faced by their urban counterparts. As noted earlier and discussed several times in class, access to specialized healthcare is severely lacking in many rural areas. Also, if lack of anonymity is prevalent in rural places, it is quite likely that more of their neighbors and friends will be aware of their disease than infected people in urban places. Attachment to place might make it difficult for rural people to make the decision to move to an urban setting where they can obtain more specialized treatment and care. Rural people are hardly ever mentioned when discussing HIV/AIDS, but it is important that they not be forgotten when discussing the topic.

Volunteer firefighting in rural America.

2011-12-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

The gemeinschaft quality of rural communities is exhibited in the culture of volunteer firefighting departments, which are prevalent across the country. In various social and economic ways, ruralities support these volunteers, who play a vital role in the communities in which they serve. Volunteer firefighters are relied on for public health and safety in many areas that lack official fire departments, or are located far away from them.

I spoke to an old friend of mine who serves as a volunteer firefighter in the Capay Valley. I will refer to him under the pseudonym "Jim," since he must purportedly buy everyone in the department ice cream if he talks to the media. Jim lives between the unincorporated town of Rumsey,CA and the town of Guinda, CA, the latter which has a population of 254.

Jim and his wife, who are from the city originally, are newcomers to the Capay Valley and one of the few young couples who live there. They say they decided to move there because they were attracted to the slow-town atmosphere and the farming lifestyle. Jim says that he decided to join the volunteer fire department because it sounded fun and seemed like the best way to get to know people in the community. Being a volunteer firefighter actually helped Jim and his wife to find their jobs and helped them gain credibility in the eyes of locals who were, at first, skeptical that the young couple meant to settle down. Jim says that joining the volunteers was the fastest way to gain acceptance in the tight-knit valley community.

Jim explained that recruits go through extensive fire safety and water rescue training before becoming volunteers. When he is on duty he carries a beeper with him everywhere. If it goes off, he must show up to the volunteer meeting place, no matter what time of day or night it is. His wife said that the volunteers' wives often commiserate over being woken up in the middle of the night to beeping. Even, during the fire off-season, volunteers still respond to a number of calls, many of them car accidents in which the volunteers are often first to respond.

Jim reports that, like the general population of Capay Valley, the members of the volunteer firefighting department are aging . Jim is one of the only volunteers, in the department who is under 40. This raises serious issues for the fire department, which is especially relied upon during the volatile California fire season. Every Capay Valley local remembers the devastating fires of 2008, in which over 2,780 fires burned across the state and 23 people were killed.

Many of these fires were fought by volunteers, some coming from out-of-state, and even out of the country. If younger recruits aren't found for the department over the next ten years, the region could face serious troubles during the fire season. Finding young recruits for a rural volunteer fire department can be especially difficult under the current rural paradigm, in which rural populations in general are rapidly aging.

Low-income Maine residents need heat!

2011-11-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

I have never been to Maine in the winter, but I don’t think I’m going very far out on a limb when I say that it is brutally cold. A working heating system is an absolute life necessity for residents of Maine. Maine residents that cannot afford a good system have relied on Federal assistance in the past. Many of these residents may not be able to do so anymore.

According to the New York Times, President Obama has proposed major cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and Maine is “expecting less than half of the $55.6 million that it received last winter, even as more people are applying.” With rising oil prices, and increasing number of applicants, and significantly less Federal funding available, many lower income Maine residents are potentially looking at a winter with no heat.

There are a few different solutions that politicians and community leaders are exploring. Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) is targeting Efficiency Maine- a quasi-state agency that promotes energy efficiency by offering incentives to home and business owners – as a potential replacement source of funding. LePage views cuts to LIHEAP as posing an immediate emergency threat whereas Efficiency Maine is geared towards a more long-term solution. Efficiency Maine will have an estimated $53.5 million in funding over the next two years gained through electricity bill surcharges along with some federal funding. However, there is opposition from the Democratic Minority, who say that LePage is against efficient energy.

According to the New York Times article, Lepage is also trying to cut “heating oil consumption in half by 2014, partly by bringing more gas lines into the state.” However, this would not do much to solve the immediate potential crisis. A letter sent to the Kennebeck Journal reveals the true scope of the problem from one citizen’s point of view. She claims that low-income and elderly residents will now have to choose between “fuel and food, fuel and medicine, fuel and rent.” She ultimately urges Maine citizens to support LePage’s plan to transfer Efficiency Maine funds to help fund heating for Maine residents.

Organic farming: the wave of the future?

2011-11-30T11:13:00.001-08:00

When I was growing up in south Orange County, California, my mom would exclusively buy organic produce for our family to eat. She insisted that organic food was healthier and safer and she was willing to pay extra money to ensure that we were eating what she thought were the best quality fruits and vegetables. We were the only family that I knew of at that time who did this (my mom often engaged in fervent debates on the subject with friends and family members). Due to the higher prices of organic food, the seemingly harder work that farmers have to do to grow produce without pesticides, and my perceived low demand for organic produce, I have always assumed that organic food was a sort of luxury that was less profitable and more of a holistic enterprise for farmers. Apparently, this isn’t necessarily the case.

As "The Rural Blog" reports, a 13 year study by researchers at Iowa State University recently concluded that organic farms can see much higher economic returns than ordinary farms. According to the study, organic farms can produce the same amount as ordinary farms without the high overhead costs that pesticides and synthetic fertilizer require. Additionally, organic crops sell at a premium rate. The study found that “organic systems return roughly $200 per acre more than conventional crops.”

Moreover, the study found that the benefits of growing organic go beyond the monetary returns; organic farms produce healthier soil. Organic farms don’t use synthetic herbicides or synthetic fertilizer- only natural manure. This increases the nitrogen level in the soil by over 33% and other nutrients such as carbon, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium and calcium were more bountiful as well. The higher quality of soil can increase growing efficiency.

If organic farming is more profitable, efficient, and better for the environment, why doesn’t every farm become organic? As one might imagine, it’s not quite that simple. For a farm to be considered organic, it cannot use synthetic chemicals for three years and the transition from one method to the other can be difficult and time-consuming. However, the study showed that if the transition is done the right way, transitioning farms can stay competitive with other farms even during the transitioning years.

The Iowa State findings complement the findings of the Rodale Institute, which lists even more environmental and economic benefits of organic farming. This website also lists what are typically thought of as the pros and cons of organic farming and opines on the merits of these pros and cons.

A hypothesis for a cure to the brain drain

2011-11-29T23:28:00.000-08:00

Young farmers, or the lack thereof, has come up several times in class. First, we discussed the rural brain drain and its affects on the farm industry. Recently, we talked about young people choosing farming as a career--even in cases where they had no prior exposure to the industry. While the Federal government does provide a certain amount of assistance to these farmer-hopefuls, they clearly have a steep learning curve to till. South Africa, however, seems to have the right idea in addressing that problem.

A recent NY Times article, Sowing the Seeds of Food Security, discusses a South African education policy that uses growing crops as a teaching device. It's called the Organic Classroom Program and for three years it is part of the primary education curriculum in Cape Town. Operated by Schools Environment Education and Development, the program uses organic gardens to teach students science, geography, and economics. The school cafeteria then actually uses the food grown by the students.

While the interdisciplinary benefits are intriguing, the program specifically does what US primary education has not for many years: it teaches young people the principles of agriculture. While South Africa might not be a perfect analog for the United States, the lack of horticulture, agriculture, and similar courses in primary education could be why people just aren't interested in farming. More obviously, it explains why so many young farmers don't know what their doing.

Currently 45% of American farmers are over 55, and experts speculate the average age to only rise. Although the South Africa Department of Agriculture did not have age statistics (at least that I could find), one case study speculates their average age at around 40 years old. A full 15 years younger. While there are certainly different factors at play, it isn't unreasonable to think that the emphasis South Africa puts on agriculture is partly responsible. Of course SEED is relatively new, but a program doesn't become a mandatory part of primary education without some significant societal backing.

And maybe there is a larger sociological aspect here. If primary education is supposed to be the state's device for the inculcation of values, then it places value on more "cosmopolitan" subjects. When I was a high school senior I took AP Calculus BC, AP English, AP Physics, and similar classes that I can't recall. Advanced Horticulture was not offered. Students are indoctrinated with the value of a college education--in fact the need for a college degree. And while there are many college agricultural classes (especially on a campus like UC Davis), the modern idea of education is not one based on farming. Rather, students value AP tests and SAT scores not soil and seed.

Moreover, the law of most states makes primary education mandatory. It takes up about eight hours of their day, even more where they are involved in extracurricular activities. School is the center of their respective universes. If it doesn't include classes on growing, farming, and similar subjects then how can we ever expect people to be interested in the subject.

Quenching India's thirst

2011-11-29T09:50:00.000-08:00

When I first arrived at Beijing one summer for a study abroad program, my program advisor offered me a quizzical piece of advice: stay away from the bottled water sold on the streets. It wasn't until I actually walked by one of these water stands that I understood why. Perched on plastic stools and shirtless, the "vendors" had tubs of plastic water bottles that they were refilling with a water hose that connected to who knows where. From the few feet away where I stood, stunned by the disparate scene, I could see the water was murky -- clearly not fit for drinking. Even more unsettling was the fact that the vendor had customers, albeit none American tourists. When I asked one customer why they were buying that water they answered, "I'm thirsty and this water is better than what I have at home."

My firsthand exposure to a small piece of the water problem in China is even more of an issue in India. According to World Bank estimates, China has been able to store five times more water than India does per person. A past New York Times series examines India's water crisis on a national level. A large part of the problem is the nationwide water distribution network, which insufficiently provides water from the public tap "more than a few hours a day." For rural India, where water is often contaminated with pesticides and agricultural waste, access to clean drinking water presents even more of a challenge. One article indicates:

Conflicts over water mirror the most vexing changes facing India: the competing demands of urban and rural areas, the stubborn divide between rich and poor, and the balance between the needs of a thriving economy and a fragile environment.

The exposure to high levels of dangerous chemicals from the water also leads to health issues requiring medical care. Equally challenging is the issue of getting adequate health care and treatment in rural areas. The problem is largely infrastructural. Professor Pruitt's law review article applies a capabilities-model analysis when discussing India's infrastructural deficits, also briefly summarized in this blog post.

With the entire nation suffering from this problem, some might think resources are best allocated towards urban areas, the centers of water distribution. According to a recent NPR article, however, one incentive for providing rural areas with clean water is that it is actually profitable. Situated in the rural town Rajiana, Healthpoint Services is a company whose goal is to bring clean water and healthcare to rural communities on a "global scale." Since it's inception two years ago, the company's model combines inexpensive videoconferencing, diagnostic tests, and water in one building to bring affordable healthcare and water to low-income people.

By condensing the resources into one building, visits to the hospital could be whittled down to a single visit, which means less transportation costs. While videoconferencing allows patients to meet with doctors two hundred miles away, they are still satisfied because they still personally interact with clinical assistants at the site.

And with eighty percent of all diseases in the region directly or indirectly triggered by drinking contaminated water, Jain has found that providing clean drinking water eliminates the vast majority of health problems in the area. Many households in the region subscribe to Healthpoint's clean water, which comes directly from the clinic's filtration plant. For $1.50 a month, a family could receive 600 liters of water.

The model is also profitable, according to Healthpoint Services CEO Amit Jain. It's a matter of meeting demand -- "even low-income Indians spend money on health care," and for too long, companies "ignored that opportunity to make a profit meeting the needs of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Healthpoint Services currently has eight pilot clinics and hopes to expand globally. Reaching out to social-minded investors internationally, the company has raised an additional $3 million. Company projections estimate services will reach 7.5 million people in India within the next four years. Pilot clinics will also expand to the Phillippines and Mexico.

Jain's goal in establishing Healthpoint Services was primarily based on his social mission and secondarily, on his financial return. While not all companies will necessarily share Jain's benevolent motive, perhaps the profitability of the model might nudge them in the right direction.

Farmville (Part VIII): Got water?

2011-11-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

This past summer, the United States Bureau of Reclamation pledged 1 million dollars towards a water conversion program in the South San Joaquin Irrigation District (SSJID). The federal money comes at a time when Central Valley farmers have been experiencing a dry spell, costing them up to 1.5 billion in lost income. This dry spell resulted from drought and the lack of water.

The Delta Smelt receives a substation portion of water allocation. The smelt is a fish protected by the Endangered Species Act. Conservationists argued that the Smelt were dying in irrigation pumps. Consequently, a judge ruled that the pumps must be shut off for the growing season.

Historically farmers in the Central Valley have irrigated using flood irrigation. Flood irrigation involves building ridges around the land and flooding (or nearly flooding) the crops with water. Though a locally common method of irrigation, it requires large volumes of water. The use of flood irrigation, paired with water droughts and water allocation to the Delta Smelt, has caused competition for groundwater and has put pressure on the water table. Additionally, the water has become increasingly salty, causing lower crop production.

To combat the water scarcity problem, SSJID has been working on an irrigation enhancement project for the past three years. The project will increase the efficiency of water delivery and reduce reliance on groundwater pumping by replacing the current open channel system with a state-of-the-art pressurized irrigation system. In addition to allocating 1 million dollars to the program, the US Bureau of Reclamation has pledged another 5 million to farmers who make related improvements.

Growers in Division 9 of SSJID have already signed onto the program, which will add roughly 100,000 feet of new pipe to deliver water to farmers adopting drip and sprinkler irrigation. these methods allow water to drip slowly to the roots and use less water than traditional flood irrigation. The system is expected to provide better quality surface water while reducing demand on the aquifer. Additionally, the project incorporates automated water delivery controls and updated metering technology. This allows for precise measurement and accounting of water. When completed, the project will also include two seven-acre storage basins and several pump stations. The new system will capture irrigation runoff and divert water into the storage basins for conservation in cases of drought or shortages. SSJID officials project that the project with conserve 3,498 acre-feet of water per year, resulting in energy conservation, reduced air emissions, and improved water quality. Because of these efforts, SSJID staff estimates a 50% reduction in agricultural water use and a 30% boost in farm production. SSJID plans to complete the project by March 2012.

Proponents of the project have touted it as a triumph of improved technology and smart water management in an area plagued by salinity and water supply programs. The project aims to solve an agricultural water shortage problem in the Central Valley, while still conserving water and energy. If the water saving technology is successfully incorporated into SSJID's water delivery program, the project could establish a benchmark for similar projects throughout the Central Valley.