Senators call for investigation into the state of rural child care—and how Trump administration policies are undermining it

Head Start offices in Toledo, WA.
Photo by Joe Mabel, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

On January 26, six senators led by Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock announced an investigation into how the Trump administration's childcare policies affect rural families. The letter, addressed to Todd Lindsey, Acting Under Secretary for Rural Development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Alex Adams, Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, requests "information regarding ACF and USDA's current capacity to support child care, particularly in rural communities." The senators highlight the national childcare crisis, emphasizing the high costs and lack of access many families face. 

Child Care Funding in Rural Areas

This letter follows a January 6, 2026, Trump administration attempt to freeze federal funding for child care and family assistance in five states. The administration said it was taking this action due to allegations of fraud in the use of federal funding. Courts restored the funding within three days, allowing child care centers to continue receiving federal funds. The freeze temporarily affected the Child Care Development Fund Block Grant (CCDFBG), a federal funding stream that helps make child care more affordable. It also affected Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which provides block grants to states. It has been historically known as cash assistance to families, but it also provides direct childcare assistance, as well as state-wide funding. States can choose to transfer up to 30% of their TANF funds to their CCDFBG funds and funnel them towards childcare subsidies and Head Start programs.

The Senators' statement also follows H.R. 1 (the "One Big Beautiful Bill"), which you can read more about here. The bill expanded the Child Tax Credit and increased the amount that employees can set aside pre-tax for childcare. These changes mostly benefit middle- and upper-income families. On February 3, 2026, the House passed a new spending package, and President Trump signed it. That bill increased the Child Care Development Block Grant and Head Start by $85 million each. 

Head Start provides critical resources to children up to age 5. Its programs include providing breakfast and lunch, mental health care, and school readiness. Almost half of all Head Start slots are in rural districts. In a survey of 10 states, Head Start programs comprised about one-third of childcare centers in rural communities. This program supports children and families. Expanding Head Start has drawn bipartisan support, and  78% of rural Americans support it. 

The Rural Childcare Gap 

The senators cited a September 2025 poll by the First Five Years Fund, which found that rural families experience child care challenges across the board. 

Overall, 4 out of 5 [r]ural Americans say the ability of working parents to find and afford quality child care is either in a “state of crisis” or “a major problem,” including 81% of Rural Parents and 80% of Rural Nonparents.

Further, one in five rural parents report having trouble finding or keeping a job because of the cost or access to child care.  

Data collected by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska further illustrates the gap. 31.5 percent of rural children who may need childcare do not have access to a childcare facility within 10 miles of their home. This data assumes that parents drive, but aproximately six percent of rural households do not have a car. Lack of access to transportation can make finding childcare even more difficult in rural areas, especially when transporting multiple children. 

Kickapoo Community Childcare Center in Lincoln County, OK. Photo by Rebecca South, distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license. 

Effect on Families

The lack of access and high costs of childcare drive parents out of the workforce. A 2021 Bipartisan Policy Center survey found that 86 percent of parents in rural areas who do not work cited child care responsibilities as a reason they stay home. Child care centers face significant economic difficulties, driven by high turnover rates and low wages. Closures have led to parents, often mothers, leaving the workforce at higher rates than ever over the last two years. 

These funds also provide child care to parents pursuing higher education. Congress did not reauthorize the Child Care Access Means Parents in Schools, pausing the program. Programs at rural colleges make child care affordable for student parents and provide other support to help them pursue higher education. 

One administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater said she expects that this will make it more difficult for student-parents to graduate. Cutting this program means student-parents will either need to work while pursuing their degree or leave their program to stay home with their child. 

The Future of Rural Child Care

Recent federal legislation surrounding rural children and families has proven to be a mixed bag. While bolstering Head Start programs might expand child care resources in rural areas, other funding cuts could undermine those gains. This administration has shown its willingness to use child care funding as a political football. ACF and the USDA, which work together on child care in rural communities, have had their funding withheld, field offices closed, and major workforce reductions. 

The senators concluded their letter with six questions about the future of rural child care, with a response requested by February 16, 2026. As of today, neither ACF nor USDA has responded. Their response—if and when it comes—will inform the debate around the future of childcare funding in rural communities through the remainder of the Trump Administration. 

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part IV): documents, documents, and more documents

This is Part IV in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here. You may read Part III here. 

"A resident or inhabitant or both of this state and of any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state shall be a person who is domiciled or has a place of abode or both in this state and in any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state, and who has, through all of his or her actions, demonstrated a current intent to designate that place of abode as his or her principal place of physical presence [for the indefinite future] to the exclusion of all others."

                                                                                                - New Hampshire House Bill 1264

In July 2018, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu signed a bill into law that amended the state's definition of "resident" for the purposes of voting. Despite a federal court clarifying that students could vote in the state and compromises being reached to make that happen, there were still some who felt that students were simply not welcome at the ballot box. On this day, those interests won. 

Prior to this change, an intent to remain in the state "indefinitely" was sufficient to be considered a resident for voting purposes. In practice, this shift in definition would effectively force out of state college students to get New Hampshire driver's licenses and register their vehicles in the state. Since these things cost money, these new requirements essentially amounted to a poll tax. Just as they had in 1971 and 1972, the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union came out against the legislation and filed a lawsuit to stop it from going into effect. 

Widespread Opposition 

The bill had passed despite widespread opposition and warnings that it would disenfranchise college students. In fact, the original venue for the bill's July hearing before the Senate Election Law and Internal Affairs Committee was insufficient to hold the people who had turned up to oppose the bill. College students, facing disenfranchisement, showed up to show their opposition.

Many opponents zoomed in on the removal of intent to remain "indefinitely" from the state's election laws. While a federal court later ruled it was unnecessary, even the most ardent opponents of student voting in 1972 agreed that a statement of intent to remain indefinitely was sufficient. This legislation upended a status quo that had essentially persisted for the last 45 years.

SB 3 and the Turn Toward Enforcement

As a voter suppression effort, HB 1264 did not stand alone. It built directly on Senate Bill 3 signed into law the previous year. SB 3 altered the mechanics of voter registration by requiring voters who registered without documentation to complete detailed affidavits and submit proof of residency either at the polls or through post-election follow-up. Those who failed to provide documentation in a timely manner faced civil penalties and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

SB 3 did not explicitly target college students, but its effects fell most heavily on them. Students, who are more likely to register close to Election Day and less likely to have New Hampshire-specific documentation on hand were transformed from presumed eligible voters into legal risks. Civil rights groups warned that SB 3 converted routine voter registration into an act that could trigger investigation by the Secretary of State or referral to the Attorney General.

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, along with other voting-rights advocates, sued to block SB 3’s enforcement. In October 2018, just weeks before the midterm election, a state court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law’s new registration forms and enforcement provisions from being used. The court concluded that SB 3 imposed unreasonable burdens on the right to vote and risked confusion and disenfranchisement at polling places.

That injunction foreshadowed SB 3’s eventual demise. In 2021, the New Hampshire Supreme Court struck the law down in its entirety, holding that it violated the state constitution by placing disproportionate burdens on eligible voters without evidence of a meaningful fraud problem.

HB 1264, by contrast, survived judicial scrutiny. Because it altered definitions rather than election-day procedures, it was treated by courts as a permissible legislative clarification rather than an immediate burden on voting. The result was an uneven legal landscape: SB 3, which enforced residency claims at the polls, was enjoined and invalidated; HB 1264, which raised the cost and risk of making those claims in the first place, endured. 

After the New Hampshire Supreme Court issued a favorable advisory opinion regarding HB 1264, the lawsuits that sought to overturn it were withdrawn. It still stands to this day. The residency requirements imposed by HB 1264 survived, but the documentation requirements imposed by SB 3 did not. A college student registering to vote today may prove their identity and residency using documents provided by their college, satisfying the requirements of HB 1264.

Both laws were passed under the familiar banner of “preventing fraud.” In reality, they reflected a sustained effort to narrow the electorate by making student participation more expensive, more confusing, and more legally fraught.

The Broader Effort

Taken together, these measures represented the culmination of a long-running partisan effort to suppress the political power of those who live in New Hampshire but are not considered permanent enough to be trusted with a ballot. College students are undeniably present in the state for most of the year, and many will never return to their so-called “home” communities after graduation. Forcing them to vote in those communities compels them to participate in elections where the consequences of public policy may never touch them, while silencing them where those consequences most certainly will.

Part V, which will come next year, will examine the most recent updates.

Chronicle of Higher Education features LSU-Alexandria as an institution successfully serving rural students

Dan Berrett reports on Louisiana State University-Alexandria's success in surviving the rural area amidst which it sits.  The headline is Rural America, Growth Area? and the sub-head is "There’s a growing population of high-school seniors waiting to be reached — if colleges can figure out how to better serve them."  Here are some key excerpts:  

On the surface, Louisiana State University at Alexandria might seem like an institution in trouble. It’s a public regional campus in a rural swath of the state, located in a city of under 50,000 that hugs the Red River and is “surrounded by forest and farmland,” says Adam Lord, a spokesperson for the university. Central Louisiana, according to Lord, is “defined by work-force shortages, growing health-care deserts, and limited access to degree programs.” Less than one-third of the city’s adults have at least an associate degree, below both the state and national average.

But the institution saw its enrollment more than double between 2013 and 2023, largely by focusing on the regional and state population. The heavily rural, 11-parish area in which the campus sits accounts for 94 percent of its student body, and the state’s residents make up 70 percent of its online learners. LSU-Alexandria has grown largely by expanding its online enrollment and touting its low cost and high value. The undergraduate-only institution has developed pipelines to the state’s graduate professional programs. It’s created programs for the rural work force — including aviation, disaster preparedness, and cybersecurity — and programs that feed into local companies, like RoyOMartin, a plywood manufacturer, and utilities and hospitals.

Where its graduates once left for Texas, the institution is now trying to keep them at home.

* * * 

The notion that rural areas are growing runs counter to a decades-long narrative of decline.

* * *

The largest increase in undergraduate enrollment — more than 9 percent — over the past two years has been among institutions in rural areas, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“There is a slight gain in the number of rural students. That’s the news,” says Patrick Lane, vice president for policy analysis and research at WICHE.

* * * 

Several scholars of rural higher education who spoke with The Chronicle come from such areas themselves, and they consistently recall feeling alienated when they arrived on campus — not unlike what first-generation students and students of color describe, says Tony Pipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, who has written about rural America and produces a podcast on the subject. “They feel like a fish out of water,” he says of rural students. “Rural is an identity.”

That sense of identity can leave a lasting impact, says Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education and student affairs at Appalachian State University.

* * *

When rural scholars meet each other, they might find common ground discussing how many 
stoplights or how few people were in the communities in which they grew up, Koricich says. The sense of identity expresses itself in deeper ways, too. “I think there’s a piece of it that is very much around self-sufficiency,” he says. “You meet other rural scholars and we have similar stories about how we had to figure out everything ourselves.”

I really appreciate the attention here to rurality as identity, which is consistent with a recent finding by political scientists regarding rural voters.  

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part III): The "problem" of student voting

This is Part III in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here.

"Student Voting Rights Present Challenge for College Communities" 

This headline from the February 23, 2001, edition of The Valley News might appear preposterous at first glance. Imagine if this headline were written about any other community. Most people would be up in arms or at the very least confused. After all, the ability to influence the politics of your local community is a bedrock element of American democracy. Why are students any different? That question has driven years of policymaking and dialogue in New Hampshire. 

If there is one meta narrative of conservative New Hampshire politics over the last half-century, it's the feverish pursuit to figure out how students are different. The courts settling the question of student eligibility to vote did not stop people from trying to impede access to the ballot and it did not stop some people from perceiving students as "outsiders" who are trying to change the culture of their college towns. As an April 17, 2002, article in The Valley News noted, Republicans said that students should not be allowed to vote because their "votes can affect local elections."  Again, is that not the point of democracy? 

The narrative was clear, despite students spending money in local communities, they were not a part of that community. Again, a preposterous claim. How can you live somewhere for four years and not be a member of that community? 

The $10 Residency Tax: A Financial Barrier to the Ballot

In the early 1990s, several towns, including Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, had a $10 “residency tax.” In my research, I couldn't find it when it actually began. Though technically framed as a general municipal tax, it functioned as a de facto poll tax, falling heavily on college students who attempted to vote in local elections.

The issue came to a head during the 1992 election, when Dartmouth students were among those threatened with being denied the right to vote unless they paid the $10 fee.

Legal advocates, students, and civil liberties groups pointed out the obvious: this was a modern poll tax, applied in a way that discouraged transient, often younger voters who might lean progressive.

Public pressure mounted and by 1993, the Hanover Selectboard voted to abolish the $10 tax. But the damage had been done. The episode reinforced the idea that students, even when legally eligible to vote, were second-class citizens in the eyes of some local officials.

Students as “Outsiders”

The cultural narrative didn’t end with the repeal. It evolved. As an April 17, 2002 article in The Valley News recounted, some Republican leaders continued to argue that college students shouldn’t be allowed to vote because their “votes can affect local elections.”

Again, isn’t that the point?

This recurring claim that students shouldn’t vote because they might change outcomes underscores the deeper issue: students were (and often still are) seen as outsiders, regardless of how long they live, work, or participate in local life. Even students who spend four years in a community, longer than many military deployments or job assignments, are treated as though their presence is fleeting and their political preferences invalid.

It’s a paradox that continues to shape policy: students contribute economically, socially, and even civically, but they are often excluded from the political sphere because of who they are, not where they live.

From Cultural Resistance to Policy Pushback

The battles of the early 2000s reflected this tension. In towns like Durham and Keene, officials raised concerns about “student blocs” skewing town meetings or dominating turnout in close elections. In Hanover, Dartmouth students increasingly participated in local races, even running for office, prompting new calls to review voter rolls or tighten eligibility standards.

These efforts rarely resulted in legislation at the time, but they shaped the political discourse. They planted seeds for later laws that would impose document-heavy voter ID requirements, burdensome domicile definitions, and financial consequences for registering to vote in one’s college town. 

The rhetorical groundwork was already laid, if students are different, and if their votes “threaten” the balance of local politics, then the state has a vested interest in managing their access to the ballot.

The Voter ID Fight: 2011 and the “Feelings” Comment

By the early 2010s, efforts to discourage student voting had become more formalized. In 2012, the Republican-led legislature passed a voter ID law, overcoming Governor John Lynch's veto, requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls. Though framed as a measure to prevent fraud, the real intent behind the law became clear when House Speaker William O’Brien infamously said in a public forum that college students “just vote their feelings,” and that they "don't have life experience and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the townspeople’s vote.” That statement, widely reported at the time, was more than a gaffe, it revealed the underlying sentiment that student voters were not just inconvenient, but illegitimate.

I was a college student in New Hampshire when this debate was on-going. It started after the New Hampshire Republicans took control of the state legislature in the 2010 elections. Governor Lynch was the lone Democrat with any kind of real power in New Hampshire, and he was left to fight a tidal wave of bad Republican ideas.

For me, this was personal. 

I was interning for Governor Lynch on the day of the 2010 midterm elections. It was a somber feeling in the office, and we knew that change was on the horizon. I did not however expect to be told by New Hampshire Republican state leaders, many of whom I had met throughout the course of my internship, that people like me were not welcome to participate in New Hampshire's political discourse.

Despite interning in state government and participating in multiple political campaigns, my level of civic participation was not deemed, by some, to be enough to be allowed to participate in New Hampshire's state governance. 

Overcoming Governor Lynch's veto did require a student-friendly compromise: College IDs issued by college and universities in New Hampshire would be accepted. This concession kept the bill alive, but it didn’t undo the chilling effect the law had already created. These efforts sent a clear message: you are not welcome at the ballot box.

The Slow Burn of Suppression

Even without new laws on the books, the cultural resistance to student voting has a chilling effect. When voters are repeatedly told they don’t belong when they face extra questions at the polls, or hear that their ballots might be challenged, or are warned that they could owe fees or taxes — some will walk away.

That’s the real power of these policies. They do not need to block all student voters to be effective. They just need to discourage enough of them.

Look Ahead! 

• In Part IV, we’ll see how these cultural attitudes were codified into law during the Sununu administration.

• In Part V, we’ll examine how these policies continue to evolve, including 2025 legislation targeting student ID usage, and how young people are organizing to protect and expand their rights. 

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part II): Voting rights prevail...for now

This is Part II in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here.

1972 was a pivotal year in American history:  Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden sought political office for the first time, the Watergate break-ins began the unraveling of a presidency, and George McGovern's landslide defeat arguably nudged the Democratic Party to the right for decades. It was also a year of landmark legislation, including the Clean Water Act and Title IX, setting in motion changes that still shape American life today.

But even as the country grappled with sweeping national changes, some of the most immediate battles over democracy and civil rights were playing out at the local level, including in New Hampshire, where a fundamental question about who could vote loomed over the state's critical First in the Nation primary.

On January 26th, New Hampshire Attorney General Warren Rudman and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union announced an imperfect compromise that did not fully address the residency problem but also did not actively disenfranchise college students. In essence, the state would allow college students to vote, as long as they claim to intend to remain in New Hampshire indefinitely. No further inquiry would be made, and it would be assumed that the student was answering the question in good faith. If a student said that they were planning to move away at any time, they would be denied the right to vote. Judge Hugh Bownes of the United States District Court for New Hampshire signed the compromise.  

That day's edition of the Valley News asked a very obvious question, does this apply to non-college student New Hampshire residents who declare an intent to leave at a certain time? If a person moves to New Hampshire to work for a limited duration, which could be years, and plans to return to the place from which they moved, they (in theory) would be unable to vote in any location. This question would remain unanswered.

Not surprisingly, this did not end the saga, and another lawsuit was filed just a month later by a Dartmouth College student who was denied the right to vote because of his stated intent to move back to Hawaii after graduation. Within a week of the lawsuit being filed, Bownes issued a temporary injunction that would allow the student to register to vote in the New Hampshire Presidential primary. 

The final resolution in this case would come in June when the District Court decided Newburgh v. Peterson where the judges found that the indefinite residency question was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

In their opinion, the judges reckoned with the question that the Valley News had asked which dealt with this compromise's application to non-college students. 

On the one hand, New Hampshire excludes from the franchise a student candid enough to say that he intends to move on after graduation, a newly-arrived executive with a firm intention to retire to his Florida cottage at age 65, a hospital intern or resident with a career plan that gives him two or three years in New Hampshire, a construction worker on a long but time-limited job, an industrial or government trainee working up a precise career ladder, a research contractor on a project with a deadline, a city manager hired for a term, a military person on a term of duty, a hospital patient with a hoped-for goal of discharge. On the other hand, those persons who are less precise in their planning or less confident that their plans will be realized at a time certain are allowed to vote.

* * *  

In this day of widespread planning for change of scene and occupation we cannot see that a requirement of permanent or indefinite intention to stay in one place is relevant to responsible citizenship. Or, to state it legally, the state has not shown that the indefinite intention requirement is necessary to serve a compelling interest.

The judges believed that the compromise had disenfranchised a wider swath of the population than just college students and that it represented an outdated way of thinking about residency. The Fourteenth Amendment prevailed, and this compromise (and the 19th century New Hampshire residency law) fell.

The immediate fire was out, and students could now vote in New Hampshire.

However, as we would learn in the coming decades, while the fire was out, its embers remained. Join me for Part III, in which we look at the contemporary struggles and the re-emergence of this issue in the 21st century. 

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Look Ahead!

Part III will cover more contemporary battles, including the rise of voter ID and its usage as a vehicle to suppress the student vote.

Part IV will cover the Chris Sununu era and the battle over college student voting in the late 2010s.

Part V will wrap it all up and talk about the current struggle.  

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part I): The 26th Amendment and its immediate aftermath

Let me start this piece off with a very basic question:

If you live somewhere for four years, should you be able to vote and have a say in the affairs of the state and local government?

Most people would say yes. If you live in a community, if you study there, work there, rent an apartment, buy groceries, use public services, you have a stake in what happens there. The laws passed by state and local governments directly affect your daily life. In any functioning democracy, you should have the right to elect the people who make those laws.

What am I asking this question? Because New Hampshire politicians are once again proposing a law that would disenfranchise college students and exclude them from having a say in their local government. In January, Republican State Senator Victoria Sullivan introduced Senate Bill 223, which would amend New Hampshire's existing voter ID law to remove the ability to use college IDs to satisfy the requirement. This is particularly egregious for New Hampshire, which prides itself on having a citizen legislature (with 424 members, its legislature is the third largest in the English-speaking world). 

This bill is disguised as a proverbial trojan horse. After all, State Sen. Sullivan and her co-sponsors are simply asking that students gets a New Hampshire ID in order to vote in New Hampshire elections. However, this ignores the context in which this law exists and the decades long battle against student voting that has been waged by Republicans in the state. It also ignores the fundamental problem of every voter ID law, they exist to disenfranchise voters who cannot (for various reasons) get an ID. It's an additional barrier to exercising a fundamental right. 

But this is not an isolated occurrence, it's the latest in a decades long battle to curtail student voting rights in New Hampshire. Over the next few weeks, we'll explore this history and how it impacts the current battle.  

Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the Student Vote

The fight against student voting in New Hampshire dates back to 1971, when then-Attorney General (and future U.S. Senator) Warren Rudman took a hardline stance against allowing college students to register to vote in the state. The issue came to a head following that year's ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. In July of that year, Rudman issued a directive requiring college students to register in their hometowns rather than where they attended school. The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union swiftly pledged to fight Rudman's directive, though they did not file their lawsuit immediately. 

Rudman reasoned that a college student's domicile remained in their parent's households, a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult that moves out on their own at the age of 18. He also claimed that college students pay no taxes (presumably property tax since NH doesn't have an income or sales tax), a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire renter. Rudman also said that he opposed letting people who are not in a community "permanently" to vote there, again a standard that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult. 

There were other bizarre standards at play - opponents of student voting reasoned that college students were more informed about the issues where their parents are living than their college town. Even if this were true, knowledge of local affairs does not determine an individual's right to vote. In fact, I have met many adults who could not even name their state legislator. There were also tall tales (debunked by local officials) of Dartmouth College students flooding Hanover, NH town meetings and voting for absurd items like a subway system. Opponents seized on the idea of "temporary residents" radically changing the political affairs of small college towns. 

In the context of the time, it must have scared New Hampshire Republicans to have thousands of liberal college students added to the voter rolls. The country was in the midst of the Vietnam War and college students were both politically engaged and incredibly motivated to exercise their newly acquired right to vote. These political calculations undoubtedly led Rudman to advocate for disenfranching entire swaths of his state's population. 

Rudman's commitment to disenfranching college students even led him to threaten to criminally prosecute town officials who registered college students to vote and take the issue to the United States Supreme Court. He also accused the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union of having political motives for advocating for student voters. He was seemingly oblivious to the irony in his statement. 

Rudman even opposed compromise measures, such as HB 1029, which would have excluded college students from voting in local and municipal elections. 

By October 1971, Rudman was increasingly finding himself as a man on an island. Courts around the country (including in California, whose Attorney General took a similar stance to Rudman) had rejected the kinds of arguments that Rudman had advanced. According to the October 25th edition of the Concord Monitor, in New England, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut explicitly allowed college students to register to vote while a federal court case was pending and would soon be decided in Maine on the matter. Vermont had no explicit policy, but the state had given tacit approval to move forward with registering students to vote. Despite these setbacks, Rudman said that he did not plan to change his guidance. 

In December, the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union finally filed their lawsuit. 

--

Here's what to expect in future parts:

Part II of this series will cover the outcomes of the legal actions against Rudman and the State of New Hampshire and their impacts on voting rights in New Hampshire. 

Part III will cover more contemporary battles, including the rise of voter ID and its usage as a vehicle to suppress the student vote. 

Part IV will cover the Chris Sununu era and the battle over college student voting in the late 2010s.  

Part V will wrap it all up and talk about the current struggle

Hillbilly cosplay and the privilege coverup

With nearly 120,000 reviews and a 4.4-star rating among Amazon purchasers, Hillbilly Elegy seems to strike a fond chord with readers. The book, a memoir of J.D. Vance's life, tells the story of a young boy with Appalachian roots navigating a new world from Ohio to Yale Law School. Vance tells the story of how he, a self-labeled hillbilly, rose from the dregs of poverty to wealth through his hard work and grit. 

In 2020, Netflix released the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. Not having copious amounts of time as a third-year law student yet wanting to know about the new U.S. Vice President, the movie would be the perfect chance for me to verify the acclaim. Unfortunately, after watching, I am left feeling unmoved, uninspired, and frankly, disappointed in the narrative promoted by Vance. 

Shortly after beginning, Hillbilly Elegy tracks Vance while in law school. The scene occurs at a recruiting event for law students attempting to network with fancy, private firm attorneys, hoping to secure a summer internship at a big firm. Initially, I felt empathy for Vance as he attempted to fit in by ordering a glass of wine. However, Vance was immediately confounded when a server presented him with several wine varietals unfamiliar to Vance, eventually being rescued by a teacher who ordered him a Chardonnay. My empathy extended as Vance became immediately uncomfortable upon sitting for dinner because of the numerous forks at his place setting, not knowing the purpose of each.

Vance's story is similar to mine. Raised by a single mom and surviving thanks to government assistance, I was utterly unprepared for law school. It seemed like all my classmates had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or white-collar professionals. For them, it seemed like law school was second nature. However, law school was a new world for someone like me—raised by a minimum-wage-earning office secretary. Like Vance, I was ultimately and utterly "a fish out of water."

While most viewers might continue watching this networking scene in Hillbilly Elegy, feeling sorry for Vance, I had a different reaction. I felt pity for Vance, but not because of his awkward situation; instead, I felt pity for Vance because I knew how the story ended. I knew who Vance would become. 

For all intents and purposes, Vance defied the odds and became successful through hard work. His rise is objectively admirable. However, I believe Vance is a cosplayer at best and a traitor to his people at worst. Vance grew up in suburban Ohio, two generations removed from living in the Appalachian hills. Although he self-designates himself a hillbilly, that designation is suspect and laughable to some critics.

Even worse than Vance's cosplay as a hillbilly when it benefits him, Vance actively engages in harmful rhetoric against his so-called people. He describes the impoverished as lazy burdens on the system. If Vance were a hillbilly, perhaps he might understand that laziness has nothing to do with the poverty experienced by poor white folk in rural America.

In my opinion, Vance is not a hillbilly. He does not deserve that title. I believe Vance only calls himself a hillbilly for one reason—to preclude accusations of privilege, as if privilege diminishes his accomplishments. 

Vance is privileged. Returning to the movie's dinner scene, Vance, upon seeing the multiple forks, retires to the hallway to ask Usha (his then-girlfriend and now wife) how to approach the dilemma. Returning to a table of classmates and prominent attorneys, Vance tells the table a little about himself. Vance goes on to talk about military service and attending The Ohio State University for his undergraduate degree, leading to one of the attorneys asking Vance if he was a "redneck."

To me, this dinner scene is perfectly illustrative of the privilege Vance has as a white man. When Vance returns to the table, he is seen and treated by the others as one of them, starting on a level playing field. Nevertheless, while Vance's sex and skin color entitle him to a favorable baseline opinion from the others, those belonging to minority groups often start far below in the esteem of the group, only to be deemed an equal by them proving themselves worthy. As Vance's statements and reactions to the group's questions grow more abrasive and subjectively rude, it is by sheer grace, and ultimately privilege, that he is offered an interview from someone at the table.

Hillbilly Elegy tells more than a story about an individual achieving the American Dream. The memoir tells the story of privilege, that despite considerable adversity, sometimes being white does mean that "you'll be all right."

Rural-ish outreach by California Governor?

Mark Barabak in the Los Angeles Times today writes under the headline, "Newsom is acting more like a governor should. Will that boost his White House prospects?"  Here are the introductory blurbs, which both highlight "rural"of a sort:  

• Ever since the election, Gov. Gavin Newsom has made a concentrated effort to show up and deliver policies for red California.
• The move, as Democrats seek to rebuild their depleted rural support, can’t hurt if the governor decides to run for president in 2028.

And here's more, which reflects what I've been thinking about Newsom's latest moves:

Things changed after Nov. 5, following Donald Trump’s triumph and California’s notable shift toward the center-right on election day. Suddenly, Newsom started appearing in places such as Bakersfield, Redding and Colusa, among the ruddiest parts of red California.

It’s something the governor should have done a long time ago, rather than strutting and preening on the national stage. There are millions of Californians — politically outnumbered, geographically far-flung — who have long felt derided or ignored by Sacramento.

* * * 

And if he’s interested in really, truly running for president in 2028 — when the Democratic contest looks to be a wide-open affair — it’s not a bad place to start.

Barabak continues: 

In promotional materials, the governor’s office describes the program as a “bottom-up strategy for creating good-paying jobs and regional economic development.” The plan follows lengthy consultation with locals in 13 parts of the state and aims to streamline programs and spur economic growth through a series of tailor-made initiatives.

The unveiling in the red reaches of California was no accident.

With Trump’s victory, Democrats have begun to reckon ever more seriously with their diminished standing among union members and working-class voters and the party’s catastrophic collapse — decades in the making — across rural America. There’s a new urgency “to solve problems and meet people where they are,” as David McCuan, a Sonoma State political science professor and longtime student of state politics, put it.

In other words, if building bridges is in order, why not start with a bridge across the rural-urban divide.  Indeed, when this Barabak column came across my news feed this morning, it dovetailed with this blog post I'd already begun to write with a similar theme:  Newsom going rural--or at last, ruralish. Below is part of that draft:  

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently traveled to Redding, California to announce a new "career passport" initiative.  Here's coverage from the Los Angeles Times.

Initiatives to expand college and career education have drawn bipartisan support. State Assemblywoman Heather Hadwick (R-Grass Valley) appeared with Newsom on Monday, expressing excitement for more opportunities for youth in her rural community — some areas so remote that the nearest Costco is a three-hour drive away, she said.

Here's a compelling--but not surprising--data point from the new plan: 

California has one of the largest economic divides in the nation...with the top 10% of California earners making an average of $300,000 annually compared with the bottom 10% at $29,000 annually.

And here's a further quote from the plan: 

The economic divide underscores the imperative for a more coherent career education infrastructure. Degree attainment cannot be the only pathway to stable, well-paid work. Even though individuals with bachelor’s degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes than those without, degrees are not a panacea, particularly in the absence of practical experience and social capital.

Prior to his visit to Redding, Newsom visited Fresno.  Admittedly, it's one of the state's largest cities, but it's also associated with conservative politics and rural California, to the extent that rural is equated with agricultural in the Golden State.  

Rural colleges cutting corners--and cutting majors

The Washington Post reports today from Cleveland, Mississippi, population 11,199, under the headline, "

Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors

Many of the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and resulting financial crises. Nationwide, college enrollment has declined by 2 million students , or 10 percent, in the 10 years ending in 2022, hitting rural schools particularly hard. An increasing number of rural private, nonprofit colleges are not only cutting majors, but closing altogether.

“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, ‘Well, this is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”

For many rural students, there are already few places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges that were in rural areas or served large proportions of rural students have closed since 2020, data show.

On Gluesenkamp Perez's re-election: Times calls her a "red-district conquerer"

Annie Karni writes under the headline "A Red-District Conqueror Wants Fellow Democrats to Look in the Mirror."  An excerpt follows:  

For two years, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from a rural, red district in Washington State, has been criticizing her party for being too dismissive of working-class voters.

That message appears to have helped Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, long considered perhaps the most vulnerable Democrat in the House, defy the odds in this week’s election. Even with President-elect Donald J. Trump at the top of the ticket and winning her district for the third cycle in a row, she appears on track to beat the same candidate she faced two years ago, the far-right Republican and former Green Beret Joe Kent, by a larger margin.

* * * 

Preliminary results showed her outrunning Vice President Kamala Harris by seven percentage points in two of the reddest counties in her district, including the rural timber county of Wahkiakum.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, 36, who owns an auto shop now run by her husband, has angered progressives for sometimes crossing party lines, like when she voted with Republicans to repealPresident Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative. She argued that it didn’t do much for her district, where most people don’t have college degrees.

What follows are some quotes form Guesenkamp Perez: 

The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people.

* * * 

People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.

Pennsylvania as battleground state, geographically and otherwise

 Here's a quote from the New York Times story (by Shane Goldmacher) in today's paper, "Inside the Battle for America's Most Consequential Battleground State."

What makes Pennsylvania so compelling — and confounding — for both parties is the state’s unusual mix of demographic and geographic forces.

It is home to urban centers such as Philadelphia with a large population of Black voters whom Democrats must mobilize. It has fast-growing, highly educated and mostly white suburbs where Republicans have been bleeding support in the Trump years. There are struggling industrial towns where Mr. Trump needs to maximize his vote, and smaller cities booming with Latino immigrants where Ms. Harris aims to make gains. And there is a significant, albeit shrinking, rural population. White voters without college degrees, who make up Mr. Trump’s base, still account for roughly half the vote.

The Philadelphia Inquirer also has a feature today on the state's rural voters. 

"Stop with the rural-bashing on campuses"

Here's the lede from the essay (op-ed) I published today, co-authored with Emelie Peine, in Inside Higher Ed: 

“My parents actively taught me to hate rural people because they all vote for Trump—so why should we care about them?”

This comment came from a San Francisco Bay Area student in a fall 2022 class one of us, Emelie, taught on rural communities at the University of Puget Sound.

In a course on law and rural livelihoods the other of us, Lisa, taught at the University of California, Davis, the few students who hail from rural areas have noted their peers’ lack of empathy for rural folks—for folks like them.

Kami Steffenauer, then a sophomore at Georgetown University, wrote poignantly in The Georgetown Voice last fall about the shame she felt when a professor called her a “country bumpkin” during a class discussion.

Many rural students can relate to Steffenauer’s experience; we often hear this kind of casual bashing of rural areas and people from our students and colleagues. So it’s no surprise that some conservatives are railing against university elites who fail to appreciate rural folks or, worse still, lump them all into one big, toxic basket of deplorables. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance—who often represents himself as standing up for rural folks—has gone so far as to describe universities as “hostile institutions.”

Sadly, conservatives are not entirely wrong. As we embark on another fall semester that coincides with a contentious presidential election in which rural-urban dynamics—and tensions—are attracting attention, we have a responsibility as educators to challenge antirural bias. It is incumbent upon us to ensure that our institutions are places where rural students and faculty know that they, too, belong.

And the media can't get enough of Walz' links to rurality

Here are excerpts from a few recent stories about Walz' rural roots.  These excerpts are from from Matt Flegenheimer's story in the New York Times, "The Small-Town Nebraska Tim Walz Put Behind Him, but Never Fully Left":  

Within a few years, Mr. Walz’s father, a well-liked school administrator, got sick, then sicker. When he was gone, Mr. Walz’s mother found work where she could, and the family subsisted on Social Security survivor benefits.  

By then, Mr. Walz had joined the National Guard, two days after his 17th birthday. He has said he took his oath of enlistment from a lieutenant with a farm nearby, standing in the middle of a cornfield.

As Mr. Walz, the 60-year-old Minnesota governor, prepares this week to introduce himself to the nation from the party convention in Chicago, he and those close to him have positioned his rural Nebraska upbringing as essential to his self-conception, a skeleton key to understanding the man he became and the values he came to embrace.

His experiences in this period formed the core of his future political identity — unpretentious, neighborly, a little mischievous — even as he seemed determined, ultimately, to see what life might look like somewhere else.

Though Mr. Walz still speaks nostalgically of his time back home, he has remained tethered to the place mostly through those who stayed.

His mother still lives in Butte, Neb., a village of fewer than 300 people, where the lettering above the old high school reads simply, “High School,” and Mr. Walz’s cousins recounted his exploits from their regular perch at the corner bar, Corner Bar.

And here's a more recent Washington Post story by Abbie Cheeseman about how how Walz' old congressional district is divided across the rural-urban axis. I like the nuance in this story, which doesn't treat the whole congressional district as rural--like most stories have. Here are some key excerpts, beginning with the lede:

The political divide in the congressional district Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz once represented is now so stark that it’s hard to imagine one person representing the whole area. In this expanse of southern Minnesota, a few small, sleepy cities stand their ground in a sea of rural red that stretches from the South Dakota border to the bluffs above the Mississippi River. 

Democrats have expressed hope that putting Walz, a Midwesterner who grew up working summers on a Nebraska farm, on their ticket will help them win over rural voters. But a close look at Walz’s former district — a prime example of how America’s huge urban-rural cultural divide shapes the nation’s politics — shows just how difficult that task will be.

In the 18 years since Walz made the life-changing career change from high school teacher to politician, Minnesota has grown more liberal as a state, but the district that gave him his start has lost almost all of the blue precincts that once dotted its farmlands. The cities in the 1st Congressional District have grown, but in the expansive rural heartland (pigs outnumber residents of the district seven times over, according to 2022 census data), populations have decreased and the people remaining have grown more conservative.

Tales of Walz’s days as a teacher and high school football coach trip off the tongues of almost everyone in Mankato, the college town where he and his family lived, but mentions of Walz were widely met with a roll of the eyes this month at the Nicollet County Fair. Mankatoans feel energy and pride for their governor, but at the fair just 20 minutes outside town, some people were more excited by the prospect that if Walz becomes vice president, he might finally leave the state.

Mankato, with a population of 45,000 spread among three adjacent counties, is micropolitan--the upper end of metropolitan counties.  So, the story suggests that places the size of Mankato--typically thought of as rural--are more like larger cities in their political leanings.  It is probably significant, too, that Mankato is a college town, home of Minnesota State University.  

Marilynne Robinson ponders the role of U.S. war losses in relation to resentful voters and the rise of Trump

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson published this piece in the New York Review of Books earlier this summer (publication date shows July 18, 2024, but it appeared online weeks before that--certainly well before Biden decided not to seek a second term).  I'm revisiting the piece now because I think it's really important--really insightful-- in relation to this election season.  The headline is an opaque "Agreeing to Our Harm."  The subhead is a telling "We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters and threatens Biden’s chances this fall."  In it, Robinson links working-class discontent to the fact that what we might think of as left-behind communities (and she does use that term) are the ones that have supplied most of the soldiers who've been killed in the Iraq and Afghan engagements in the past few decades. And, of course, those left-behind communities providing many soldiers are often rural.  Here are some salient excerpts from the essay: 

[T]here is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands.

A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America. In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism.

* * * 

More than 4,400 American military personnel died in the Iraq War. Say their average age was twenty-five and their life expectancy was seventy-five years. Then our civilization was deprived of some 220,000 years of productive life—soldiers are healthy and competent people in the vast majority of cases. I am not speaking here of economic loss—our tendency to bring this measure to bear on virtually everything is a disheartening and destructive habit. I am speaking of everything they might have done to enjoy and enhance life, charming us, dazzling us, simply sustaining us in the course of finding occupations and rearing families. The death toll among Iraqis was vastly higher, and a calculation of the cost to civilization of the kind I have made here would be proportionately more unfathomable.

But my subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.

It is taken to be true that the Trump phenomenon reflects the feeling in a large part of the population that they are “left behind.” This view is obviously too smug to deserve the acceptance it enjoys. Why does this movement have no vision of a future, beyond the incarceration of whomever Trump chooses to vilify? Why have its members proposed no reforms to narrow the economic divide? Why is there no response to the ambitious investments President Biden has made, designed to stimulate the economies of struggling areas? A “populism” whose lieutenants have an impressive number of Yale Law degrees and whose idol is a Manhattan moneyman is not to be understood as a flaring up of aggrieved self-interest. 

* * * 

I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great manyAmericans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use.

When I calculated the loss of lives America suffered in the Iraq War, I might have implied that this immense loss was suffered by us all, and in a sense it was. But in a deeper sense it fell disproportionately on a part of the population described in other contexts as men without college degrees, men without higher education or training. And their families, and their communities. They accepted the inducements the military offers and were caught up in a war of frivolous choice. Many of them killed and died. Like the rest of us, on religious and other grounds they can be assumed to be deeply reluctant to take human lives. Their own deaths, without need or purpose, would be profoundly bitter for everyone who loved them.  These fine young people entrusted their lives to authority they assumed would not make casual use of them, and when all was said and done, no one was prosecuted.

It is true that these men without college degrees often vote for Republicans. The Presidents Bush are seen in retrospect as exemplars of political civility, and perhaps they would be a little embarrassed by the crude thing their party has become. It is hard to imagine a purer example of privilege than father-son presidencies. Still, the Tea Party found a home for its “populism” there and opened the way for the kind of postpolitical disruptiveness now so strongly associated with the Republicans. Among their masses there is a disillusionment verging on nihilism that experiences itself as patriotic. 

* * * 

And now we all talk about an elite, elitism. It is a meaningful issue, despite and because of the general pointlessness of the rhetoric that surrounds it. Billionaires and their offspring can be excused from this disfavored category if they are conspicuously crass or ignorant. Insofar as the potent term is securely linked to any group, it is associated with the highly educated and their institutions and with people whose politics are liberal. There is nothing more American, historically, than education. 

* * * 

If elitism is a thing that is deplored in academe itself, this looks like a fig leaf on the foolish and discreditable rise in the cost of higher education. This hostility to the universities traces back to the social polarization that associated them with privilege and immunity rather than with the humane value of learning for its own sake. Because of the system of student deferments, universities became associated with draft dodging. To the degree that they had ever conferred social advantage, this was compounded by the immunity they offered from the stark claim the government was making on the lives of the population as a whole. They were largely and appropriately centers of resistance to the war, an opposition that could not entirely mitigate the appearance, or the reality, that some lives were being treated as having more value than others. The struggles for minority rights and women’s rights should have taught us that an inequity is also an insult, and that a sting can persist long after a law has been repealed.

* * *  

A population more likely to provide troops for the military would have a livelier awareness of the fact that they are deployed all over the world, in places that are or at any time might become very dangerous. This might yield a different definition of globalism. On the other side, that regrettable gift for forgetting is a factor, forgetfulness of the weight of this burden.  

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law. 

Connecting rural and small-town youth with higher education

Images are from STARS Network website

I recently learned of the STARS Network, that is the Small Town and Rural Students Network--when my own alma mater, the University of Arkansas, became one of its 32 members.  Here's how the organization describes itself: 

The STARS College Network, which partners with top colleges to ensure that students from rural and small-town America have the information and support they need to enroll and graduate from the college or university of their choice, is doubling its membership to include 32 of the nation’s most prominent institutions.

In its inaugural year, the STARS College Network opened doors to higher education for more than a quarter-million students. The expansion this summer will add flagship state schools, historically Black colleges, Ivy League universities, and other selective institutions, spreading STARS’ reach to more regions across the nation.

Support

In support of the STARS expansion, the Trott Family Philanthropies, which catalyzed the creation of STARS with an initial $20 million gift in 2023, will be investing more than $150 million over 10 years in programs that prepare, recruit and support rural students. Adding the financial aid provided directly by the STARS institutions to students, expanding support from philanthropies and non-profits and new funding from governmental agencies, an estimated $7.4 billion will be spent in support of STARS’ mission over the next decade. This extraordinary growth follows a year in which STARS outreach connected with 1.6 million people, including students, families, educators, administrators, foundations, legislators, companies and other organizations. STARS institutions directly engaged with more than 700,000 students, and more than 288,000 students joined the STARS network.

Partnerships

STARS schools directly engage with the rootEd Alliance, a public-private partnership that helps rural students define and plan their futures, whether that means a college degree, work-based learning, or military service, with the goal of putting them on a path to career success and economic stability. By placing dedicated college and career advisors in 195 schools across Missouri, Texas and Idaho, rootEd has served 42,000 students to date, and collaborates with STARS to provide specialized support and training for rootEd advisors throughout the year. rootEd Alliance, launched in 2018, is made possible by a group of philanthropists convened by Trott Family Philanthropies.

Meanwhile, this international publication on rural students' access to higher education came across my radar screen, "Access of rural youth to higher education: An international perspective," published in Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development 2024, 8(8), 5528.  The authors are Álvaro Andrés Rivera Sepúlveda, Omar Cabrales Salazar, and Lizeth Natalia Saboyá Acosta.  Here's the abstract: 

This is a review of empirical studies with the objective of analyzing the theoretical-practical discussions that have been raised internationally to deepen the understanding of the access of rural youth to higher education as an object of study. For this purpose, a narrative review was designed, considering scientific articles published in three different languages and concerning studies conducted in 21 different countries in all regions of the world. The results reveal three discussions: a) the strong interest that higher education has regained in the life expectations of rural young people and their families, especially as a means of social advancement; b) the inequalities that most affect the access of rural youth to higher education are the lack of academic offerings in rural areas and the discontinuities that occur around rural socio-cultural capital; c) since the inequalities experienced by rural youth are diverse, actions to promote greater democratization cannot be limited to implementing systems of grants and scholarships. It is concluded that the major project consists of creating a differentiated higher education model that, in terms of location, academic offerings, recognition of knowledge, and articulation with the environment, allows rural youth to experience their professional training not as an inevitable process of acculturation, but as a continuation of their socio-cultural capital and their territorial yearnings.

Literary Rualism (Part XLVIII): Barbara Kingsolver's introduction to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold Shack, near Baraboo, Sauk County, WI
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A few weeks ago, on a field trip from the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, I visited Aldo Leopold's shack in Sauk County, Wisconsin.  This is where Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac, is set. Leopold wanted land in one of the sand counties, so designated, because the soil had become so degraded by how it had been farmed.   What I want to do here is highlight some bits from the new introduction by Barbara Kingsolver:  

After a reverent passage on wild places, [Leopold] concludes: “It is here that we seek—and still find—our meat from God.” The use of “meat” and “God” in a metaphor for deep satisfaction might irk some modern environmentalists, but the words will find purchase in the hearts of rural readers who are weary of being maligned for their loyalties to meat and God. Weary, also, of urban land-saviors who look to nature for spiritual balm or recreation, and presume a moral high ground over the folks who literally owe their survival to the land. People who hunt and fish to help stock their freezers are astute naturalists, of necessity, and most farmers are well aware that the fields and forests they steward are home not just to crops but to bluebirds and foxes, spring wildflowers and winter wrens. It’s hard to endure ham-fisted judgments against livestock slaughter and crop-spraying from people who have no fields to shepherd or weeds to fight. 

We listen and take our truths—all of us—from people we trust, who know us and have our interests at heart. This is a built-in bias of the human psyche, and the crux of the fix we’re in as we stand in nations divided against themselves. As long as we live in entirely separate worlds, without comprehension of the others’ language or daily grinds, the door between us is sealed. Not a word will pass from one side to the other. 

I’m unusually preoccupied with this deadlock, as an environmentalist who is also a country girl, raised in rural Kentucky, living now on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains. I love this landscape and my neighbors, but I can tell you that it has never been harder to be a rural person in America. Employment is scarce, schools are under-resourced, doctors and other crucial services are overstretched or nonexistent. The main streets of our little towns are rows of shuttered local businesses, all bankrupted by internet sales and box stores. Farm incomes have bottomed out, and just about every economic mover, from industrial employers to airline hubs to professional baseball leagues, have pulled out of the nation’s less-populous regions to concentrate their benefits in cities. Out here in the heartlands we’re still raising kids and crops to feed a nation’s appetites for food and labor, but we’re feeling pretty lonely about it. And invisible. Some 40 percent of Americans live in places that aren’t cities, but we show up virtually nowhere in American TV shows, movies, or major journalism. These are made in cities, by city people. If rural folk appear in mainstream culture, it’s generally in a voyeuristic hit-and-run piece on addiction and poverty, or a degrading caricature intended as entertainment. 

Imagine, then, the novelty of reading A Sand County Almanac, a rural man’s earnest, exultant accounting of his life in the country. He’s not singing his praises to some untouched parcel of pricey wilderness real estate; it’s just a worn-out little farm. Most of its native glory was driven out by previous owners who overcropped its topsoil down to naked sand, then abandoned it with debts to the bank. (xv-xvii)

And I love this next excerpt for its explicit reference to socioeconomic class: 

A written voice is an artifice, of course, even in nonfiction. It occurred to me to wonder whether this book’s class-crossing accessibility was a conscious, crafted choice. A look into his archives reveals a more complicated Aldo Leopold than the cheerful fellow who greets us from his “sand farm.” As an outdoorsy Iowa boy, he shipped off to the newly created forestry school at Yale, then wrote wistful letters home describing the nearby woods where he sought refuge from the classroom. And as early as that, he sounded less like a duck hunter than a sophisticated naturalist. From there, a forestry career took him to a wild and woolly West (in 1909, Arizona was not yet a state) where he climbed mountains on foot and horseback, carrying a sidearm as protection against bears and wolves. He assessed oaks and pines for the board-feet of lumber they contained, and he gradually came to see the forest behind the trees, with unprecedented clarity. Rising through the ranks of the U.S. Forest Service, he developed a comprehensive land-management program for the Grand Canyon and other important wilderness areas, and he applied his remarkable insights on predator-prey interactions to new theories of game and fish management. Eventually he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin as its first professor of wildlife management, to spend the rest of his life as a conservationist, educator, and founding father of modern environmental ethics and the science of ecology. It is remarkably to his credit that Leopold compressed this master class for all time into readable prose that glows with ease and optimism. He knew that compromises between humans and our habitat would never be simple. (pp. xviii-xix). 

The outhouse, so well designed that Leopold 
called it the Parthenon.

Then there's this about the character of rural folks and their relationship to urban folks: 

His gift was to wear his rural roots and humility on his sleeve, and respect the full range of his audience, wherever they lived—a knack that we modern environmentalists have largely lost. He knew how to talk to the good ol’ boys. 

In the heat of modern culture wars, a voice like this could risk getting canceled. Readers quick to judge might just see guns and camo. Some of his language might mark him as old-school, a product of the same era as the cabal of elderly men who now impose mine-and-drill politics on many nations—that is, the time when the earth’s resources seemed in endless supply. Like those men, Leopold was well-churched in the notion of earth-as-property. But unlike them, he found his way to a nuanced idea of the planet as an autonomous collection of lives. He managed to be more inclusive than the best of us.  (p. xix).  

 * * * 

For the urban reader, I hope you will let down your guard with this man as he sits on his rock in the stream, waiting for his trout to rise. If you take him for a redneck, listen anyway, because he’s wiser than most any two of us put together. He may help you see past the frustrating divides that plague the awfullest failure of our day, as we try to reconcile human subsistence with the needs of our damaged biological home. If you’ve lost all hope of finding a common language for that conversation, you might well find it here. (p xx) 

It's a fitting introduction for a classic and a staple of the conservation movement.  The book was first published in 1949, a year after Leopold died helping fight a wildfire near his shack--a shack which, by the way, had been the chicken coop for he farm's prior owner.  That owner had gotten so frustrated with trying to cultivate the land, that he burned his house down before selling the property.