Broad nosed faces

My Grandfather and I in Castro Valley, California, 1996

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

“広い鼻” (hiroi hana) he would tell me, tapping the slope of my nose with the calloused pad of his forefinger.

“アイヌ” (Ainu).

His tone was always reticent. Rooted in the belly of history, in the timbre of family and tradition. Laced with something bitter, a tinge darker. Not quite manifested as shame, never quite asserted as pride. I did not know what Ainu was. What it meant for me and my broad nose. Nor did I ask. Somehow, I knew not to.

Ainu Chieftan

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

A human being

The name Ainu literally translates to ‘a human being’, traditionally contrasted with kamuy, or ‘divine beings'. Historically residing primarily in the Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands, the Ainu are believed to be descendants of the ancient Jōmon culture, which dates back over 10,000 years. Beginning in the 9th Century, Ainu communities began to fall to Japanese subjugation and by the 18th Century they were the target of concerted forced assimilation policies.

Throughout the Meiji Restoration of the 19th Century, Emperor Mutsuhito forced the Ainu peoples off their land, disrupting their relationships with their spiritual heartlands, and terminating their traditional ways of life. As Bri Lambright of Ursinus University notes:

"Ainu land was stolen, and small plots were returned with the express purpose of farming. With traditional hunting practices banned in order to allow Japanese manufacturers to capitalize on exporting deer meat and hides to the mainland, the Ainu were left with little option but to adhere to the government’s plans, lest they face starvation and burial beneath the waves of Japanese settlers who could readily take the community’s place."

Faced with an impossible choice, the Ainu were blamed for the predicament in which they found themselves, as evidenced by letters exchanged between the Nemuro and Naimushō Prefectures dated November of 1882:

“They have brought this difficulty upon themselves since they lack the spirit of activity and progress. In their society in the past there was nothing they needed to record through writing, no stimulus to develop their knowledge through learning; when thirsty they drank, when hungry they ate. They are a purely primitive people.”

Google Translation Screenshot - Ainu

Barbarian, savage, vandal

As the hallowed halls of Edo were devising the extinction of the living, a rising consortium of scientists began to covet the currency of the dead. As Noah Oskaw writes in his piece for Unseen Japan:

"The impetus for the veritable grave plundering of Ainu bones was ostensibly scientific: the desire by Japanese researchers to learn more about the physical and, later, genetic make-up of the indigenous ethnic minorities native to Japan’s northern borders… In both 1864 and 1865, mere years before the fall of the Tokugawa dynasty, the British consul in Hakodate led a group of foreigners interested in uncovering the mystery of the Ainu’s 'Caucasian' features to secretly raid Ainu gravesites… Most infamous of the grave robbers was Hokkaido University Professor Kodama Sakuzaemon, who led various state-sanctioned raids into local boneyards throughout the 1920s to 1970s – all against Ainu protests - sometimes police were called in to help hold off Ainu from physically preventing the unearthing of their ancestors."

Final resting places rendered temporary. Ancestors dragged to lay upon steel tables. Loved ones etched by the scalpels of foreign hands. For nearly one hundred years, the people of Ainu waited.

Interior of an Ainu Home in Yezo, 1906

Photo Credit: Snapshots of the Past

Homecoming

In 2012, a cohort of Ainu elders banded together to achieve the return of their ancestors. Banding together under the slogan, ‘Return the Ainu Remains to the Soil of the Ainu Kotan’, they brought suit against Hokkaidō University demanding repatriation. Mounting political pressures, further exacerbated by Japan’s recent ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes a provision requiring governments to work for the return of indigenous people's remains, resulted in a historic 2016 settlement. The case was the first legal domino of its kind, and a chain reaction of “small but significant” repatriations have followed.

In July of 2007 the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie returned a skull stolen from an Ainu cemetery in Sapporo by a German tourist in 1879. In May of 2023, a set of four skulls were returned from Melbourne, following their 1911 exploitation by a pair of anthropological pen-pals: a prewar exchange by which the National Museum of Australia sent Aboriginal skeletal remains to the University of Tokyo in return for Ainu skeletal material. And next month, officials from the Japanese government will travel to Britain to receive the remains of five Ainu previously housed at the National History Museum in London and the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.

Ainu Woman Playing the Mukkuri

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

Locating the lost 

While the ten sets of returned remains mark a promising trend, the number of stolen Ainu is estimated to be in the thousands, and for a culture on the brink of extinction, preservation has begun to equate survival. Today, only a few isolated pockets of Ainu people remain scattered across rural Hokkaido, with most of the estimated 20,000 Ainu assimilating into cities and towns around the island. After decades of government proscription, the Hokkaido Ainu language is likely extinct, as there remain no known native speakers, and many individuals of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their ancestry or tradition. To state it quite starkly, the Ainu are disappearing.

My Grandfather and I in Hakodate, Hokkaido, 2025

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

Good for breathing 

My grandfather is now 82 and his tone regarding our Ainu heritage has shifted in recent years. What was once coated in a glaze of indignity has come to be considered with a degree of quiet contentment. Now, when he regards the nose his genes placed upon my face, he adds a simple but emblematic qualifier. “広い鼻” (broad nose), “呼吸に良い” (good for breathing). Perhaps, the repatriation movement is not only about reclaiming the skulls of our ancestors, but rather about reclaiming the faces they gave us.

Recent reports identify rural public health interventions, some with potential to mitigate Medicaid cuts

U.S. Department of Public Health Building.
Image courtesy of Boston Public Library. 

Healthcare in rural America finds itself a topic of much discussion lately, with mainstream media coverage of the crisis unfolding after Medicaid cuts by the Trump administration's 2025 budget reconciliation bill, which was signed into law July 2025. By some estimates, the new law will increase the number of uninsured people by 10 million in 2034. Other coverage concerns the fate of a $50 billion rural health slush fund that is yet to pay out in the communities who need it most and the recent slew of hospital closures in rural communities.

While the new restrictions on Medicaid eligibility and reduced federal spending will be felt across the nation, rural communities will be hit especially hard, due to the higher rates of people on Medicaid in nonmetropolitan areas. Sarah Jane Tribble, reporting for KFF Health News, writes: 

People who live in the nation’s rural expanses have more chronic diseases, die younger, and make less money. Those compounding factors have financially pummeled rural health infrastructure, triggering hospital closures and widespread discontinuation of critical health services.

Hospital closures (online tool showing a map of recent closures) exacerbate the present struggle to meet rural healthcare needs, where people are generally more vulnerable and less likely to utilize primary care services due to structural barriers like cost and provider shortages. In 2016, Dr. Julia T. Caldwell et al. published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health, which states that "[r]ural adults are less likely to be insured, less likely to use healthcare, and more likely to delay seeking care than urban residents." To put it plainly, access to acute care is bleak in much of rural America right now, and reductions in Medicaid spending and eligibility are poised to make things worse. 

Rural hospital closures, 2005-2010 (in blue) and 2010-present (in yellow).
Graphic courtesy of Sheps Center for Health Services Research, UNC. 

There is, however, another dimension of the rural health conversation that is gaining traction in public discourse – rural public health. Where the trends in healthcare are alarming, improvement in public health feels tractable. This post focuses on insights from two recent reports – this one from the Aspen Institute (Feb. 2026) and this one from California's Department of Public Health (Feb. 2026) – to highlight opportunities for high-impact rural public health intervention amid the ongoing healthcare crisis. 

Public Health: Rurality in Focus

In general, the healthcare industry aims to treat people who are sick or injured, whereas public health seeks to keep people from getting sick or injured in the first place. According to the American Public Health Association, healthcare focuses on individualized care; public health focuses on entire populations. Because a key responsibility of public health is to collect, analyze, and interpret health data to inform timely public health interventions, policies, and resource planning, it is more likely to analyze and include the axes of identity and experience that inform vulnerability. In fact, rurality has been an axis of analysis in public health research for decades. "Place," meaning where people live, work, and play, is widely understood by experts in the field as a fundamental social determinant of health.

In February 2026, the Aspen Institute and the California Department of Public Health each published reports that examine, in significant detail, the state of rural public health. The Aspen Institute Report is titled "Meeting the Health Needs of Rural America," and represents the tenth installment in the Aspen Health Strategy Group's mission to tackle a single health issue annually through year-long, in-depth study. The California Department of Public Health Report, the State's second-ever "California State of Public Health Report," ("Cal. DPH Report") carves out tens of pages devoted to risks, trends, and interventions specific to rural children, adolescents, and adults.

All-Cause Mortality Rate by Race and Ethnicity in Urban/Rural
Areas, California 2022-2024 (Cal. DPH Rep., p. 32)

This post focuses on one paper from the Aspen Institute Report titled Population Health in Rural America: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities, authored by rural demographer Shannon M. Monnat and sociologist Tim Slack. Their paper tees up several useful policy proposals, which provide a path to remedying the so-called "rural mortality penalty" – the name for a widening disparity where rural U.S. residents experience higher age-adjusted mortality rates than urban counterparts. The authors suggest that the relative recency of the rural mortality penalty, which emerged in the data only four decades ago, "provides reason to believe it can be reversed." (Aspen Inst. Rep., p. 5). 

Systemic Risks and Opportunities 

Each report does a thorough inventory of factors driving mortality rates across the lifespan, from infants to working-age adults to the elderly. Unsurprisingly, barriers like lack of access to healthcare, transportation, healthy food, broadband internet, and other social services are central to their findings. But each goes a step further to do some accounting of recent social and economic trends driving the numbers: substance abuse and misuse; growing gaps in educational attainment; and persistent economic disinvestment that has hollowed out local institutions and workforce pipelines. Environmental risks (including climate change) and exposures also explain recent losses in resilience and increases in mortality rates. These overlapping stressors compound, reinforcing cycles of poor health outcomes that are difficult to interrupt through healthcare access alone. 

Adult Mortality Rates in Nonmetropolitan (Rural) Counties,
2000-2022 (Aspen Inst. Rep.)

Writing for the Aspen Institute, Monnat & Slack characterize "rural economic and human health" as "intertwined." The data in both studies bears this out. Lower income, wealth, and levels of educational attainment correlate strongly with shorter lifespans and fewer years lived in good health. Importantly, both reports frame these outcomes not as inevitable features of rural life, but as the product of policy choices and disinvestment patterns that can be changed. The California report, in particular, emphasizes that upstream interventions–those that target education, early childhood development, and economic stability–offer some of the highest returns for improving long-term health outcomes (Cal. DPH Report). 

The reports identify education policy reform as a major inroad for uplifting rural communities struggling with economic disinvestment and population decline. 

Education, particularly possessing a bachelor’s degree, has become an increasingly important determinant of health and longevity in the United States. Higher education confers economic, social, and lifestyle advantages that manifest as a “personal firewall” that protects health, even in the face of external and unpredictable threats, such as pandemics, recessions, and natural disasters.

(Aspen Inst. Rep., p. 76). Investments in vocational programs, community colleges, and early childhood education programs like Head Start not only improve education and employment outcomes, they also provide measurable health benefits over time. Many health outcomes and disparities in adulthood are rooted in childhood conditions such as family and community health, neighborhood safety, policies, and systems" (Cal. DPH Report, p. 58). By strengthening local economies and expanding opportunities, these interventions address root causes of poor health, rather than treating symptoms as they occur. In this way, rural public health policy begins to function as a cross-sector strategy for community resilience. 

Conclusion 

The current crisis in rural healthcare access underscores the need for action, but it also highlights the limits of a healthcare-only response. As the reports analyzed in this post make clear, improving rural public health outcomes requires sustained investment in the social and economic conditions that shape health, long before a person ever becomes a patient. Public health offers a framework for identifying upstream opportunities and making interventions where they can have the greatest impact. In the face of hospital closures and shrinking coverage, this broader approach might provide a path forward: one that treats rural health not only as a medical issue but as a function of place, policy, and long-term community investment.

Rastafari roots of plant-based eating

An Ital meal of rice, ackee, callaloo, and veggie chunks.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2009)

In considering a vegan diet, I imagine a young, progressive urban consumer motivated by environmental or animal welfare concerns. In other words, someone who likely shops at a Whole Foods. In the West, veganism is packaged as something performed through individual consumer choices. That framing obscures the structural conditions shaping diets, and reinforces the mistaken belief that veganism is a modern invention. The “Ital” tradition complicates the popular narrative of modern veganism. Long before plant-based eating carried a price premium in Los Angeles, it was ordinary in the hills of rural Jamaica. 

The Rastafari movement began in the 1930s in Jamaica among the working poor who had been devastated by the global financial crash of 1929 and prolonged colonial mismanagement. These forces created mass unemployment and rural-to-urban migration into the slums of west Kingston. Rastas fled to the rural mountains where they could access land and practice self-governance without persecution.  

Leonard P. Howell, an early Rastafari leader, drew on the practices of Hindu indentured laborers in Jamaica to promote what became known as Ital living. The word “Ital” comes from “vital,” dropping the first letter to emphasize the pronoun “I”. This linguistic practice signals unity with the speaker, the listener, and Jah (God). Ital eating is an expression of “livity,” a Rastafari concept that the individual can embody and express spirituality through the practices of daily life.  For Rastafarians, Jah exists in all of creation, including plants, animals, and people. As such there is a divine force or energy in everything. 

What one puts in one’s body either enhances or degrades this life force. Food that has been processed or chemically altered is considered corrupted and further from Jah’s creation. Life force does not begin at the moment of consumption. Powell’s research participants described farming, cultivation, and conservation as the literal pouring of one’s energy and emotion into the earth. The sincerity of this effort determines how the earth responds and reciprocates that energy. 

Rural Rastafari food is shaped by what the land yields. Coconuts are naturally abundant across Jamaica. They are cracked, drained, grated, and squeezed into milk that forms the base of most dishes. Vegetables and aromatics are sautéed in coconut oil. The food typically contains beans, spices, chili peppers, and the coconut milk, stewed for hours over low heat and eaten communally. A strict Ital diet rejects salt as “a needless adulteration” of what Jah placed on the earth, so herbs and dry seasonings are key. Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, lemongrass, allspice, and nutmeg build complex flavor without salt. 

The one-pot stew is a practical response to the rural conditions of Rastafari life. Land access is limited, so the range of available produce is narrow. A single pot stretches what is on hand to feed the community. Cooking takes place outside in clay pots often balanced over a wood fire by three stones. Metal cookware is avoided on the belief that it harms the body. 

In Saint Lucia, a young Rasta farmer described conversing with plants throughout their life cycle to transfer positive energy to them. He explained that during planting one must ensure a positive heart is present because this very energy will be transmitted to the earth. The same is true of cooking. Ital food involves preparing food with a clean heart to transfer life force into the food. Food must be cooked slowly, with intention and gratitude. This preserves and transmits the life energy that began in the soil. Food is not just physically nourishing; it is also spiritually nourishing.

Food that is rushed or processed severs the energy force and transmits a lower form. It follows too that food grown under corporate conditions is spiritually degraded. Jahson Peat, who runs a vegan restaurant in London called Zionly Manna, presents Ital as a process of relearning that strips away the method of eating brought about by colonialism. This is inseparable from a rejection of capitalism itself. Commitment to Ital eating is tightly linked to a broader turn away from the imported industrial and materialist ways of life, which are all combined under the Rastafari concept of “Babylon.” 

By contrast, mainstream veganism operates according to market logic. It converts diet choices into an ethical identity. For some, it is an exercise in personal branding, where what you eat signals who you are. This channels genuine ethical concerns for animals and the environment into demand for plant-based products. In this sense, the market-based vegan movement can be seen not as a challenge to the current food system, but a force that risks expanding it further, as seen through the IPO of Beyond Meat. The growth of this plant-based segment does not depend on replacing meat consumption, only on expanding overall consumer demand. The Ital diet is not a consumer identity. It seeks to reject the economic system and the very notion of consumerism upon which it relies. 

However, Ital does not operate entirely independent of market forces. Jaffe’s concept of “Ital chic” describes the convergence of middle-class consumerism and the Ital diet. In Kingston, Rasta symbols have been used to market artisanal soap lines and premium vegetable products. When a brand sells coconut-milk products with Rasta packaging, it co-opts a tradition built on self-sufficiency and places it inside the very market that tradition was designed to reject. This dynamic is similar to that explored in a blog post from this semester about rural tourism. It noted that rural culture is often packaged to meet consumer expectations, with authenticity operating as a selling point. 

Plant-based eating did not begin with a farmer’s market or with a marketing campaign. It owes some of its roots to rural Jamaica, where people grew what the earth offered based on a theological conviction. That story deserves to be remembered before it is repackaged.

The Grange: Community building in rural America

                      

Credit: Anderson Valley Grange

Some of my earliest memories are attending the yearly variety show at the Anderson Valley Grange in Mendocino County, California. During these performances the bustling Grange hall felt like the busiest gathering of the year, besides the county fair. The Grange gives fair warning that “this is a variety show NOT a talent show.” In catching up with my grandma about the Grange, which she was a member of for many years, she remembered most performances as “really bad,” noting affectionately that the emcee was “extremely corny.” She and her hippie friends were often among the acts of the night and may have been at least in the neighborhood of “really bad” also.

Regardless of the varying quality of the performances, the Grange provided a sense of community in a place where many people lived too deep in the woods to see their neighbors regularly. There was always some friend of my parents or grandparents who had apparently known me since I was a baby, and I likely would not see them again until the next variety show. Unbeknownst to me as a child at the variety show, the Grange had been playing a similar role in rural communities across America for almost 150 years.

The origins of the Grange

The Grange, formally known as National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, began as an organization dedicated to agriculture when it was founded in 1867 by Oliver Kelley, a Minnesotan with an interest in reorganizing and educating agricultural workers. Kelley had been sent to the South after the Civil War by President Andrew Johnson to assess the agricultural conditions of the region and formed the Grange partially in reaction to this tour.

I Feed You All! Image Credit: Library of Congress 

The Civil War had marked the culmination of a rapid series of changes to farming communities. The draw of urban economies and the increasing efficiency of agricultural technology had steadily reduced the share of the US population engaged in farming, declining from 90% in 1790 to 42% in 1880. This demographic shift brought changes to the social fabric of rural communities.

Once, farmers had engaged in subsistence agriculture and frequently labored together if one member of the community needed help planting or with harvest. Now, innovations like the cast iron plow greatly reduced the need for farmers to work together in the fields. Additionally, most farmers had shifted from subsistence farming to commercial farming, rendering them competing market actors rather than a community with shared goals.

Kelley began the Grange with the increasing obsolescence of traditional farm life in mind, and his vision for a new farming community was a rather radical one. The National Grange claims that “[s]ince our founding in 1867, we have lived by our motto, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.,” and that “[w]e have always welcomed and invited people of all races, creeds, religions and nationalities into our membership.”

The Grange did in fact embody principles of equality in many ways. The institution not only welcomed women, it required that at least four members elected to the board be women in order for a Grange to be chartered. Recognition of the labor that women provided in agricultural life was central to the Grange from its inception.

In addition to the social principles espoused by the Grange, the group was strongly motivated by Kelley’s longstanding interest in developing and proliferating farm technologies in an equitable manner. Kelley saw people engaged in agriculture being left behind. In his words, "Everything is progressing. Why not the farmers? The inventive genius of the country is continually at work improving tools, and farmers remain passive."

A particularly interesting feature of the Grange is their Masonic-inspired secrecy and ritual. Kelley had found that his membership in the Masons was a helpful foot in the door during his time in the South. He believed, quite correctly it would seem, that “[t]he secrecy would lend an interest and peculiar fascination.” Grangers ascended through a variety of ranks, known as “degrees”; wore sashes, badges, and regalia corresponding to their rank; and had secret handshakes and passwords. These features faded in modern Granges, but my grandmother still recalls a secret handshake and being given a “goddess name” when she joined in the 80s.

Expansion, goals, and advocacy

The Grange was a near-immediate and explosive success, with over 24,000 chartered local Granges and almost one million members within eight years of its founding. While Kelley had founded the Grange with central planning in mind, hoping to eventually incorporate the Grange into the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Grange chapters quickly became extremely independent, with the National Grange exerting little control over their operations. The Grange was focused on farmers, but were very lenient regarding who could become a member. Even from shortly after its founding, Granges members often included lawyers, judges, and educators.

The early National Grange strongly advocated for cooperative farming. While we commonly think of cooperative farming as groupings of producers, the Grange additionally endeavored to unify production and sale of agricultural products to extract greater profits, a practice known in economics and antitrust law as vertical integration. At the peak of the Grange collectivization attempts in 1877, about 30,000 co-ops existed. The Grange also operated the infrastructure necessary for these co-ops, facilities like mills, grain elevators, and warehouses.

Though the Grange is ostensibly non-political and discourages discussion of politics at their meetings, their concern for the agricultural class manifested in advocacy for a variety of political causes, especially in their early history. Perhaps most prominent was the effort of the Grange to combat the high rates charged by railroads, an effort that resulted in the Granger Laws and inspired modern antitrust law. A contribution that perhaps has the most lasting impact on rural communities is their campaign for rural free delivery of mail.

A critical view of the early Grange

While many accounts of the Grange dote over its inclusivity, Prof. Charles Postel provides a rather scathing perspective on the Grange in his book Equality: An American Dilemma. He notes that gender equality was a relatively palatable position in Washington D.C following the Civil War, where seven of the eight founding members of the Grange were working as members of the federal government at the time of the founding. While women did occupy prominent leadership positions in some Granges, many female members were relegated to secretarial roles.

Additionally, the Grange was somewhat wavering in its support for suffrage. The National Grange came out in support of suffrage in 1885, but the next year reverted to support for state rights to set suffrage policy. Granges did provide an audience for suffragettes, and the National Grange finally backed the suffrage amendment in 1915.

The Grange did not explicitly discriminate against African-Americans; it was nevertheless clear to many that they were not welcome. Kelley was a lifelong Democrat, and many Granges made quite obvious overtures to white Southern farmers. Prof. Jenny Bourne of Carleton College notes in her book In Essentials, Unity: An Economic History of the Grange Movement that the National Master of the Grange in 1873 said that admitting “colored” members was a question best left to local interests. Unsurprisingly, many communities in the South answered this question with exclusion. Black farmers responded by creating the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance near the end of the 1880s.

Many positive accounts of the Grange’s early history acknowledge and discuss the exclusion of African Americans, but the relationship of the Grange to Native Americans is often left unexplored. Prof. Postel notes that Kelley was largely disinterested in the Civil War because his “deep antipathy towards the Indians of Minnesota” motivated him to cooperate with Republicans, despite being a lifelong Democrat. While the Grange performed a variety of charitable work for Native Americans from the 1940s onwards, it must be acknowledged that the interests of white farmers were often in direct opposition to those of Native Americans during the early history of the Grange.

As aptly put by Prof. Bourne, “the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and for dictating how the spoils are split.”

The fall, rise, and second fall of the Grange

While declining profits from farming rendered cooperative efforts very attractive, Grange efforts to collectively sell and purchase agricultural products suffered from defection by individual farmers. A lack of effective cooperation between the National Grange and local and state Granges was an additional challenge. Additionally, the cooperative methods employed by the Grange often required an upfront investment that many farmers were unable to afford as the economy became increasingly strained in the late 1800s.

Grange membership had fallen precipitously in the 1880s and 1890s, as many members found that the costs of their membership outweighed the perceived benefits. It did not help that some members apparently found the agricultural programming “dull as well as not worth the money.”

In terms of rural political advocacy, the space once occupied by the Grange had been effectively co-opted by new organizations like the Farmers Alliance, the Farm Bureau, and the Greenback Party by the late 1800s. While the Grange thus receded from national politics, it was a significant influence on these successor organizations and on modern farm interest advocacy groups, like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and state dairy marketing boards.

   Combined Grange and Farm Bureau Facility in Del Norte County, California

 (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

While the Grange had largely withdrawn from the political stage by the early 1900s, membership had begun to rebound as Grange organizations started to offer important services to rural communities. In particular, the Grange began offering insurance and created power cooperatives in the 1930s.

While nonprofit utilities and insurance providers initiated by the Grange still serve rural communities, these enterprises are now mostly under non-Grange management and no longer exclusively serve Grange members. The fact that these services gradually stopped being linked to Grange membership and decreasing rural populations has caused a steady decline in Grange membership. Since the 1955 Grange membership has fallen from 850,000 members to 140,000.

The National Grange currently advocates on the level for relatively modest and non-partisan goals, like increased spending on agricultural research. They maintain their longstanding anti-tariff views and have generally favored immigration, but the organization seem to be tempering their language to assuage Trump voters in recent years.

The Anderson Valley Grange and the new role of Granges

The Anderson Valley Grange has a particularly Northern California themed history. This wonderful article by Lisa Morehouse, published recently by KWED, the San Francisso details the initial frictions at the Anderson Valley Grange in the 70s and 80s as the longtime residents of the area, largely loggers, apple farmers, and sheep herders, were suddenly overwhelmed by hippies hoping to use the Grange, home of the best dance floor in town.

The Anderson Valley Grange, Mendocino County, California

 (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2022

The current head of the Anderson Valley Grange is a man known around town as Captain Rainbow who “wore a loincloth [and] lived up in the woods” when he first moved to Anderson Valley. He tells the story of how a crisis led to a reconciliation of this "old-timer" vs hippie conflict. 

In his early days in Anderson Valley, “if you were a hippie, you weren’t particularly welcome here.” He didn’t go to the local bar, nicknamed “the Bucket of Blood” for about 10 years “because it was chainsaw haircut time if you did." 

Things changed in 1985 when the old Grange hall, built in 1939, burned down. When the Grangers came together to build a new building, the hippies begged the Grangers to include a dance floor and offered to help rebuild the hall if the insurance money ran out.

Captain Rainbow recounts that even if you had a bad encounter with an old timer, “The next day, hungover, both of you would be hanging sheetrock together, and you’d find out that, hey, you’re all right.” After the hall was built, Captain Rainbow was delighted to receive an invite to join the Grange, along with the many other hippies who had been involved in the effort to rebuild the hall.

A post buried about half way down this archive of the Anderson Valley Advertiser shares a similar sentiment, noting that running out of insurance money, “was a blessing in disguise, forcing us to rely on each other, it forged new friendships and respect.”

My grandmother recalls joining after this cultural divide had somewhat mended. She joined because she wanted to find a venue for her Congolese dance teacher to offer lessons, and both were welcomed with open arms.

Today, the Anderson Valley Grange still acts as a center of community for the region. They host their annual variety show, monthly pancake breakfasts, dances, and quinceaneras. The Grange maintains ties to its agricultural roots, collaborating with Anderson Valley Brewery, using the hall for agricultural education, and hosting seed exchanges. Mendocino County Grangers also started a retirement facility that houses 170 people.

Food Bank Sign at the Anderson Valley Grange (c) Lisa Pruitt (2022)

While still lively, the Anderson Valley Grange faces the same issues as Granges nationwide. In Captain Rainbow’s words, “We need some fresh blood.” The Grange is active, but the membership is aging. “When my generation came in and became part of the Grange, the old-timers, they needed us. And [], I’m a geezer now!”

While Grange membership has been on a long downward trend, there has been some incremental growth in the last few years. The Anderson Valley Grange, like many in California, has an increasingly Latino membership. It is also making overtures to Native Americans in the area.

Conclusions

The Grange is an institution with an extremely rich and complicated history that this post has barely scratched the surface of. While its political relevance has faded, local granges still remain as a hub of community in many rural areas. Living in the city, it is easy to forget how crucial simple infrastructure like a large hall with a stage is to cultivating community. As rural communities struggle and decline, we should be mindful of the role that organizations like the Grange play in supporting them.

Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

Internationalism, the idea that people and states should organize across borders, is a popular organizing principle on the political left. It takes two related forms. Liberal internationalism promotes rule of law, open markets, and free trade as a path to peace through multilateral governance. Socialist internationalism emphasizes solidarity among workers across nations, rather than competition between them. Both tend to replace an emphasis on local community with an abstract political identity that isn’t rooted in any particular place. 

International governance creates a layer of authority that communities cannot meaningfully influence. The resulting cosmopolitan governing class (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “globalists”) are socially and geographically distant from communities affected by their policy. Meanwhile, international economic integration guts local economic prospects so that multinational firms can thrive. After China's accession to the World Trade Organization, imports of Chinese furniture surged, leading firms that once anchored the manufacturing economy of High Point to shut local factories and source production abroad

This process spreads similar models of education and culture, eroding distinct regional identities and traditions. In the name of internationalism, many have advocated for cultivating cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Within this frame, local or regional culture is something to be overcome, not preserved. Is rural culture something that needs to be overcome in pursuit of a more equal society? 

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michèa offers a critique of liberalism that bears directly on this question. Until recently his work was unavailable in English. Michael Behrent, a History Professor at Appalachian State University, published a collection of his works titled Toward a Conservative Left. Don’t let the title put you off. What the title evokes is the way in which Michèa combines a critique of capitalism with a suspicion of "progress". Michèa says little about American politics in his work, but his analysis maps uncomfortably well onto the contemporary Democratic Party, which has become a party of urban educated professionals. 

Michèa’s personal background is relevant too. Born in Paris in 1950, he was raised in public housing by parents who were both members of the French Communist Party. The Party was central to his childhood. It employed his parents, with his dad working as sports reporter for the Party newspaper. It was a community of working-class people who looked out for one another. Today, Michea lives on a farm in southwest France. 

At the center of Michèa’s work is Orwell’s concept of “common decency,” developed in the 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier.  For Orwell, common decency is the moral intuition observable in tight-knit communities built around face-to-face interaction. In his 1939 essay on Dickens, Orwell argues that Dickens owed his popularity to a rare ability to give comic, memorable expression to the native decency of the common man. It is the instinct “that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” 

Michèa takes this concept further,  giving it anthropological character. Working people, because of their way of earning a living and social status, tend to exhibit a form of solidarity and spontaneous ethics. Working people rely on one another out of necessity. It is a set of habits that arise through family life, neighborhood association, and shared work. Common decency requires social relations through which people experience themselves as dependent on and responsible for one another. Capitalism, Michèa argues, is breaking down this social fabric. As the market relentlessly expands into every area of life, relationships once governed by reciprocity become self-interested transactions. 

This maps directly with the concept of high density of acquaintanceship associated with rural communities. In a small agricultural community, a neighbor’s failed harvest is visible. Decency is not an abstract value, but a material reality that rural people navigate on a daily basis.  Michèa argues that modern society has removed people from the social relations that foster this common decency. 

Here is where Michèa’s argument becomes uncomfortable. He contends that economic liberalism, meaning the spreading of free markets, free trade, and global integration of markets-- are not in tension with cultural liberalism . He believes these two liberalisms actually operate in concert. He writes, “a right-wing economy cannot function in a lasting way without a left-wing culture.” It is well documented that economic liberalism has devastated rural communities by financializing land, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating agricultural markets. 

Cultural liberalism, for Michèa, works in parallel. It elevates individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s lifestyle over inherited social norms or traditions. Institutions that once anchored rural life: stable family, religious practice, the local community, have all been delegitimized over time in the name of individual emancipation. Rural communities are left with a social and moral vacuum at a time when economic liberalism has taken away their material foundations. For Michèa this is not a coincidence, capitalism prefers autonomous individuals without a sense of rootedness to a place and an inherited way of life. The tech worker who relocates for opportunity is a more compatible economic subject than the farmer who will not leave because his family has worked the same land for three generations. 

While Michèa’s argument is not without its blind spots, he invites the left to take working class culture seriously. To be clear, I don’t believe the left should abandon a commitment to individual freedom. However, a politics aimed toward a more just society cannot organize against rural morality. To me, this is what is intended by the provocative title. The social fabric that allows for the cultivation of common decency is worth conserving.

Rural news, late notice: the mail lag that quietly taxes rural life

American Samoa Post Office (2021) - Pago Pago, AS; Credit: Talanei News 

Without a post office in one’s community, one must resort to traveling farther and farther away in order to have access to this necessary element.

That quote was from a 2011 blog post about post offices as community lifelines. It, along with many other posts on threatened post office closures in 2011 and 2012, highlights a rural baseline: when infrastructure is limited, distance becomes a cost paid in time, fuel, and coordination. In 2026, however, the issue seems less about whether a post office exists and more about the timeliness of mail delivery. The issue of slow mail delivery in rural America is partly caused by public policy.

In 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission (“Commission”) outlined nationwide changes by the United States Postal Service (“U.S.P.S.”) under its “Delivering for America” plan. The plan was introduced shortly after the Trump Administration called for privatizing the U.S.P.S. While it claims the plan is essential for financial stability, critics argue that the Delivering for America plan more resembles a "march to privatize the U.S. mail." Particularly relevant to rural America under this plan is a concept called Regional Transportation Optimization (“RTO”). The Commission explained:

Under RTO, mail dropped off at Post Offices and collection boxes more than 50 miles from a regional hub is collected the next day instead of the same day.

The Commission warned that rural communities would face disproportionate negative impacts. That is, some mail originating in rural areas enters the U.S.P.S. system later than mail from locations closer to processing centers. Hence, rural areas are more likely to experience the additional day and any subsequent delays. Reports from journalists like Sophie Culpepper help illustrate what that extra day looks like in practice for rural communities.

In her 2026 Neiman Lab Report, Culpepper described community newspapers facing mail delays that arrive late, go missing, or show up in batches. She interviewed publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia, all of whom reported a significant increase in complaints about U.S.P.S. delays last summer. 

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager – which serves Knox and Waldo counties – is the primary or only local news source for roughly 80,000 residents. Publishers told Culpepper that they have little visibility into, or control over, U.S.P.S.’s delivery timelines:

When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating…because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber, let alone many.

Rural Post Office (2024) - Salvo, NC
Credit: Wikimedia Commons Contributors

For a weekly newspaper, punctuality is essential. Culpepper directly linked mail delays to rural livelihoods because local advertising relies on timely delivery. From community announcements like auctions and open houses to business inquiries like invitations to local project bids, if the newspaper is late, rural residents not only miss the news; they lose the opportunity to act while it still matters. 

Newspaper delivery is just one issue where mail speed influences rural life. A similar issue arises in the business context. In a 2026 interview with the Federal News Network, Elena Patel described the U.S.P.S. more as a rural economic platform than as a news pipeline. 

Patel, a Brookings senior fellow and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, argued that judging the U.S.P.S. mainly by profitability misses the role the postal service plays in rural economies. Patel pointed out that private carriers can impose geography-based surcharges of up to $20 per package, costs that can wipe out small margins for rural businesses trying to reach distant customers. 

Patel also highlighted the practical functions of post offices in rural areas: shipping goods for e-commerce, maintaining a reliable business address (including P.O. boxes), and accessing counter services such as certified mail. She concluded:

We need to rethink the Postal Service as a public good and fund it appropriately so that it can support rural economies.

Taken together, these stories reveal why the mail delivery system is a rural livelihood issue. Rural areas suffer twice when mail slows down: once in time and once in opportunity. Time is spent on extra trips to town, more phone calls, and contingency plans just to complete basic tasks. Opportunities are missed: auctions and bids close, notices arrive too late, payments are delayed, and small businesses lose customers as shipping slows or becomes more expensive.

This is the quiet tax of a lagging mailbox: not a sudden shutdown, but a consistent decline in timely mail delivery in rural communities. When a national service like the U.S.P.S. is treated as a profit-and-loss problem, delay becomes an acceptable efficiency trade-off.

The importance of pharmacies in rural areas

Pictured is Newfane Pharmacy, a rural pharmacy in Newfane, New York my family owns

Newfane has a population of roughly 3,400

When discussing access to healthcare in rural communities, the focus often centers on hospitals and physicians’ offices but rarely on pharmacies. Yet pharmacies are critical healthcare access points: they provide not only prescription and over-the-counter medications, but also direct access to highly trained healthcare professionals. Pharmacists counsel patients on medications, diagnoses, and general health concerns while serving as trusted, familiar faces in their communities. They answer questions about immunizations, referrals to medical services, common colds, heart attack symptoms, and even pet medications. Pharmacists have a uniquely valuable position in their community-- they possess specialized medical and pharmacological knowledge while maintaining close personal relationships with their patients. 

At the same time, rural hospitals are increasingly at risk of closure due to systemic challenges such as funding reductions, high operational costs, and insurance provider reimbursement inadequacies. An article written in November, 2025 from Boston University School of Public Health stated that over 100 rural hospitals have closed in the United States over the past decade. The article also reported that 700 rural hospitals are currently at risk of closing, with 300 of them being at immediate risk of closing. Rural healthcare systems are already strained, and hospital closures further restrict access to care and shift additional pressure onto remaining providers, including pharmacies, critical access hospitals and small clinics, all of which are already few and far between. 

As hospitals close and medical services shrink, rural pharmacies absorb much of the strain. They face growing patient volumes, inadequate reimbursement from insurers—sometimes resulting in financial losses on certain prescriptions—and increasing pressure to expand services such as compounding and immunizations. An analysis by the Rural Policy Research Institute found that 80% of rural independent pharmacies recieved reimbursement less than the cost of acquiring and dispensing medications. Some states, like New York, provide additional reimbursement rates for state medical programs in rural areas to bolster healthcare assess. Additionally, unlike chain pharmacies, independent pharmacies often have the flexibility to adapt. Many provide delivery services for patients without reliable transportation and they expand clinical offerings to fill gaps left by other providers.

Despite funding challenges and cuts, there are signs of support for rural healthcare infrastructure. On December 30, 2025, the New York State Department of Health announced that the state will receive $212 million in 2026 under the federal Rural Health Transformation Program to improve health care access and delivery in New York communities. While the announcement states that "to ensure the funding directly benefits rural residents across the state... [p]rogram implementation will be supported by ongoing stakeholder engagement, including feedback from providers, tribal and faith-based organizations, local leaders and community members to target resources where they will have the greatest impact," it remains unclear if the funds will truly reach rural areas in need. Nevertheless, programs like this are essential to sustaining healthcare infrastructure and providers in rural areas.

(An model antique pharmacy in upstate New York)

Some may argue that funding rural pharmacies is secondary to hospitals due to mail-order prescriptions or outsourcing of prescription services. Access to prescriptions has increasingly shifted to mail-order pharmacy services. While mail delivery can be convenient, particularly for maintenance medications, it presents its own set of challenges. Delays, incorrect dosages, stolen packages, or temperature-sensitive drugs compromised during transit can place patients at serious risk. Additionally, mail-order services do not offer the same in-person consultation and real-time problem-solving that community pharmacists provide. Although mail services play a role in rural healthcare delivery, policy efforts should prioritize sustaining brick-and mortar pharmacies that provide direct support. 

Recent retail pharmacy closures have further intensified the strain. The closure of all Rite Aid stores and numerous CVS locations has increased patient volume at independent pharmacies. With a large proportion of rural patients relying on government-funded insurance programs, reimbursement pressures can make profitability difficult. Independent pharmacists must balance delivering high-quality healthcare with managing the financial realities of running a small business. The dual responsibility of being a pharmacist and a business owner adds stress but many remain committed because of the meaningful and tangible impact they make in their communities.

With healthcare in rural areas experiencing increased strain, policymakers should consider how to strengthen pharmacies’ roles. Perhaps independent pharmacies should have the ability to prescribe some drugs in rural areas. Perhaps federal and state governments should allocate greater support to rural healthcare infrastructure compared to urban ones? Rural pharmacies are pillars of community healthcare—the question is whether policy will evolve to recognize, and adequately support, that reality.

Who’s fighting whom? Rural-urban resource competition as misdirection

When I first read Professor Pruitt's 2014 book chapter on the rural lawscape, my gut reaction was defensive. I learned that rural areas have fewer courts, longer police response times, and less access to legal services than urban areas. The obvious solution would be to invest more money in these areas so that they have real access to justice. But then came my instinctive urban response: who is going to fund this? The taxes from urban spaces? Why should cities subsidize rural services?

I sat with that reaction for a while. It felt spiteful, and after some time, I realized I'd asked the wrong question.

The zero-sum framing

Pruitt's chapter, “The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space,” talks about the “mutual constitutivity” of law and rural space. Rural areas have less law because their material characteristics (low population density, distance, sparse built environment) make legal infrastructure expensive to maintain. That sparse legal presence then shapes rural culture, fostering self-reliance and skepticism toward the state.

Photo Credit: Jay Walljasper (2019)

The policy implication seems obvious: if rural residents want more legal infrastructure, they need more funding. And state funding is finite, and largely comes from the taxes of wage-earners in the city. So rural gains mean urban losses, right?

This framing positions rural and urban communities as competitors. It shows up in fights over federal appropriations, in resentment about which communities receive disaster relief, and in arguments about whether “real America” deserves more than coastal cities.

Prior posts on this blog have explored related dynamics. One post on California redistricting quoted a rural rice and walnut farmer: “People in the cities don’t have a clue what it takes to survive out here. I don’t think people that were born and raised in the cities can represent us to the same extent.” This frames the issue as the big-city bureaucrats thinking they know better than the rural folk with their actual lived experiences.

Another post on the Secure Rural Schools Act documented how a rural school superintendent made fourteen trips to Washington over three years to secure funding that Congress acknowledged had bipartisan support but still allowed to lapse. The funding was described as “budget dust” relative to federal spending. If rural needs are so uncontroversial and so cheap, why did it take three years and fourteen flights to get the money allocated?

The actual budget

To help me put all this in perspective, I considered the scale of American federal spending. The FY2025 defense budget request was $849.8 billion. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had access to $28.7 billion in 2025. Customs and Border Protection’s budget was more than $19 billion for that year.

Meanwhile, the Legal Services Corporation asked for only $1.797 billion in 2025, while facing the threat of a proposed 46% budget cut. The LSC distributes funding for civil legal aid to low-income Americans in both rural and urban areas.

Photo Credit: Mina Corpuz (2026)

The access-to-justice gap that the rural lawscape chapter documents is not expensive to address relative to other federal priorities. The entire LSC budget is less than 0.2% of defense spending. Meaningful investment in rural legal infrastructure would cost a rounding error on military appropriations.

This pattern holds across federal spending. In FY2023, 62% of the federal discretionary budget went to militarized programs: war, weapons, law enforcement, incarceration, detention, and deportation. Less than $2 out of every $5 in federal discretionary spending went to education, housing, childcare, disaster relief, environmental protection, or scientific research. Since 2001, the federal government has added $2 to the discretionary budget for militarism for every $1 invested in communities.

Meanwhile, wealth inequality has reached historic levels. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth. The incomes of rural men have stagnated for 50 years, while the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 229% between 1979 and 2019. Rural and urban working people have both lost ground to the same forces.

The federal government has the money to invest in rural communities. It simply chooses to fund violence. The scarcity that pits rural against urban is not a fact of nature. It is a policy choice.

The shared problem

Both rural and urban poor face access-to-justice gaps. Rural residents drive hours to reach a courthouse. Urban residents wait months for overburdened public defenders. The material conditions differ, but the underlying problem is the same: inadequate funding for legal infrastructure serving ordinary people.

There is some federal recognition of the specific problems that rural Americans face. The Violence Against Women Act identifies domestic violence in rural areas as a focus for discretionary spending. The Crime Control Act sets aside funds specifically for rural drug enforcement.

But legislative recognition of rural disadvantage does not guarantee meaningful investment. A post on the rural health fund noted that the $50 billion rural health fund in the recent reconciliation bill came alongside $137 billion in projected Medicaid cuts to rural areas over ten years. This is a gesture toward rural needs accompanied by a policy that actively undermines them.

The political function of the divide

When rural and urban residents see each other as competitors for limited resources, they do not build coalitions around shared interests in healthcare, legal access, housing, or economic security. The “why should my taxes go there” instinct, which I initially felt, plays into a framework where ordinary people fight over crumbs, instead of coming together to improve their material conditions.

Photo Credit: Jacob Migdall (2015)

A post challenging the Ezra Klein Show’s framing of rural-urban tension pointed out that rural voters alone lack the numbers to determine national elections. Blaming a “rural coalition” for federal policy obscures the urban voters who supported the same candidates and the structural factors that shape resource allocation. The framing is, as the post puts it, “inflammatory and therefore unhelpful. Of course, it is also inaccurate.”

Rural-urban resentment prevents coalition-building. When a rancher in Modoc County and an unhoused person in Sacramento see each other as competitors, rather than people with shared interests in functional public services, neither builds power.

What is the baseline?

I believe everyone in the United States should have access to a viable, just legal system regardless of where they live. That belief does not require me to think rural and urban interests are identical. It requires me to think they are not fundamentally opposed.

The money exists. The obstacle is political priority. Rural-urban competition is a distraction from the actual allocation choices being made.