Waterlogged boundaries, the case for bioregionalism, and its unfortunate demise

Fording a river, Grouse mountain, British Columbia, Summer 2021

If you’ve ever been in the Pacific Northwest, you've seen the local “uniform.” Amongst the water-resistant (nothing is waterproof!) Carhartt pants, flat-billed trucker hats, and colourful spectrum of flannels, there is a waterproof jacket in the armoury. This jacket must have a hood so that you do not need an umbrella, a sin that only a tourist would make.

A bad idea, Squamish mountain, British Columbia, Spring 2022

The jacket is necessary because in the wet winter months, any person caught on the scenic trails of Squamish (known for the Chief, one of the largest granite domes in the world) would think that Noah’s flood was upon him, that the sun would never reappear, and that rain has so consumed reality that any imagination of the world can only find a cloudy mist covering a canopy of pine trees. In short, the water cycle of the PNW calls for the jacket.

In contrast, in a place like the Central Valley, deciding how to dress requires taking into account the overhead sun and the dust. Therein lies the non-ironic donning of cowboy hats and boots respectively (A recent blog post about western apparel is here). Continue further east on the Interstate 70 past the plains and the Mississippi river and you will find the habit of tucking long sleeve shirts into pants, which are then tucked into socks, a necessity in the tick laden bushes of Appalachia. (A study from Nebraska Medicine about the migration of tick populations west).

Each of these clothing outfits make sense in the place where they are adopted. Sartorial culture reflects the ecosystem hydrological and biological of the region where people live. This understanding is one key tenet of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism (defined by one non-profit here) is a philosophy which holds that political systems should reflect naturally definable, local regions rather than artificial political boundaries. (Read more about this philosophy as taught by a Bay Area theatre here). Bioregions are drawn by the natural lines drawn by watershed boundaries, topography, as well as the socio-cultural human histories of the area.

10% water capacity, Lake Hensley, California, 2025

Bioregionalists seek several core goals: including matching political boundaries with the aforementioned bioregions; prioritizing the usage of local resources and materials; and building regional sustainability and supply chains rather than global ones. This local focus benefits the making of policy that is suited to local ecological needs, rather than the difficulty of federal or state systems that cannot possibly take account of all local conditions and ecosystems. (Read more about federal funding to rural water systems here)

Current political divisions force rural and urban communities into statewide policy frameworks that, through competing interests and compromise, can poorly fit all. Agricultural water use in arid basins is legislated alongside, and often in, coastal zones where the flow of rivers can power 98% of electrical grids (read more about BC Hydro here). Or consider the current issue of the banning of or restriction of gasoline vehicles being impractical in rural regions that remain dependent on generators and gasoline vehicles (read more here).

Currently, the rural-urban divide is often framed within a structural power antagonism, where cosmopolitan elites- with vastly greater urban resources- intrude on traditional rural communities. The physical distance between these two groups sharpens these perceived differences. These urban elites live far from rural denizens, often in ecosystems that are vastly different. Consider the common epithet, “coastal elite.” (Read more about water disagreements between the rural and the urban here and here).

As the reasoning goes, how could someone in the Bay understand the water struggles of the Central Valley? A bioregionalist approach would instead link governance between metropolitan and rural communities wherever and whenever they are linked by watersheds and water cycles requiring literal downstream cooperation.

Of course, bioregionalism is not without flaws. Even from this brief inventory of bioregions, readers will see issues with assuming histories and shared interests in fluid boundaries that are anachronistic, ambiguous, and would be contentious and complex to draw. Land-based identity idealizes lives that are pre-urbanization, occasionally even pre-industrialization, and is often isolationist and exclusionary of any political change as a result.

In a globalized economy, high technology requires supply chains that cannot be localized efficiently, or at all. Anything that would require national coordination (national defense, macroeconomic policy, large scale infrastructure projects) would be difficult if not impossible under bioregional governance. Of course, there is also the potential of extreme inequality between natural resource-rich and natural resource-poor regions. Without national redistribution and the needs of national and global economy, spatial inequality would be all but guaranteed.

I finish with a point about Cascadia, the former bioregionalist movement stronghold within the PNW that spanned from Juneau, Alaska to San Francisco. Prior to the 47th American president, most money spent within Cascadia, (defined here, as in my heart, as Oregon, Washington, British Columbia), remained within Cascadia. Now with rising tensions between the United States and Canada, this seemingly unbreakable cross-border relationship is strained by the Canadians' general boycott of American goods (read more). Alas, the Cascadian identity, nascent if it ever truly existed, has yielded to national lines for now.

Superbloom, California, 2017

New angles on rural library closure, with a story out of central Washington

Library in Kingtson, Arkansas 2013

Major media outlets have published several rural library stories --most of them about the closure of rural libraries--in the past few years.  (Read some of them here). This latest, from the New York Times, is a bit more complex than most.  Anna Griffin reports form Tieton, Washington, population 1389, in Yakima County.  The headline is "Federal Cuts, Immigration Raids, and a Slowing Economy Hit Rural Libraries."  Here's the lede: 

Cole Leinbach, a librarian in Tieton, Wash., population 1,610, watched intently as a 7-year-old girl hunkered down with a book in a corner of the town’s one-room library. Her brother, 4, had opened a board game searching for potential toys. Their mother talked quietly on her phone in Spanish.

“This is what libraries are supposed to be,” he said, “just a place a mom can go with her kids for an hour to hang out and get some kind of enriching entertainment.”

But the Tieton library, which occupies a few hundred square feet in a side room at the city hall, is closing next month, a casualty of rising costs in Yakima County, Wash., shrinking help from Washington, D.C., financing decisions made decades ago and significant demographic change.

“I’ve had people come express dismay,” said Mr. Leinbach, who at 26 has been a librarian for about a year and a half. “A library is in a lot of ways a kind of civic symbol, a demonstration of a community’s commitment to itself. So what does it mean if that goes away?”

* * * 

That is a question a growing number of communities, many of them in Republican states, will be facing soon. In March, President Trump issued an executive order dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has provided around $270 million a year to public and academic libraries to help pay for services such as summer reading programs, broadband internet access, lending between libraries, staff training and access to national databases.

Don't miss the rest of the Tieton, Washington story here.  

On America's deadliest occupation: logging

The New York Times reported a few days ago from southwestern Oregon, with a fair bit of attention to the fact that places where timber jobs are most important are also typically rural.  Here are some excerpts from the story by Kurtis Lee:

About 100 of every 100,000 logging workers die from work injuries, compared with four per 100,000 for all workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“There is a mix of physical factors — heavy equipment and, of course, the massive trees,” said Marissa Baker, a professor of occupational health at the University of Washington who has researched the logging industry. “Couple that with steep terrain and unforgiving weather and the rural aspect of the work, and it leads to great danger.”

I wonder if Baker is suggesting that the "rural aspect" of the work contributes to its deadliness because of the distance from health care.  

Here's another quote that notes the rural context: 

In the most rural stretches of Oregon, where swaths have been scarred by the clear-cutting of trees, many workers decide the risk is worth it. Most loggers here earn around $29 an hour. And average timber industry wages are 17 percent higher than local private-sector wages, according to a recent report from the Oregon Department of Administrative Services.

In 1990, 11,000 Oregonians worked in the logging industry, including those who take down trees and drive trucks--a figure that had dropped to 4,400 by 2024, according to federal data.  

Now, the local economy of Coos Bay, for example, relies mainly on tourism.

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.

Jennifer Rubin on how Democratic legislative wins play in an increasingly rural and exurban congressional district

Rubin's column in the Washington Post is titled, "Democrats are on a legislative roll. That’s great news for this congresswoman."  Here's an excerpt:  

That’s great news for Rep. Kim Schrier, the Democrat representing Washington’s 8th Congressional District. Her district, which is rated as a toss-up, was redrawn to include more rural and exurban areas and leave out more urban parts of the district.

One might think that would pose new challenges for a Democrat, but during a phone interview, Schrier told me that many of the concerns of her voters haven’t changed. “They worried about inflation, gas prices, health care and the cost of prescription drugs,” she said. They’re also worried about climate change, especially the firefighters in her state battling catastrophic wildfires and farmers affected by extreme weather. “These are people on the ground,” Schrier said.

This quote suggests that folks in rural and exurban places aren't so different from their urban counterparts--especially when it comes to kitchen table issues.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXXII): On the shortage of public defenders in Oregon's rural reaches as court systems play catchup after pandemic

This story is by Garrett Andrews for The Bulletin (Bend, Oregon):  "Another tough year ahead expected for Oregon public defenders."  Here's an excerpt that focuses on the shortage of public defenders in rural Oregon:  

Rural public defense offices, down bodies when COVID-19 hit, got by during the court slowdown from 2020-2022. They’ve found their current staffing levels are inadequate to meet demand created by the justice system. This has led to where the state is now: 39 inmates statewide without representation and 65 out-of-custody defendants, as of last week.

When COVID-19 hit, to limit jail population for social distancing, Deschutes County judges set aside signed arrest warrants in less-serious cases. But police have now started arresting people based on those warrants and hundreds of new cases are expected to hit the docket.

* * * 

Though not limited to Oregon by a long stretch, the state is among the hardest hit by the problem. Earlier this month, a majority of Oregon’s public defense providers refused to sign their latest contract with the state, citing workloads so extreme they risked violating their professional ethics by taking new cases. Concessions were made to win over holdouts, and officials are meeting regularly to address the issue of unrepresented inmates. The lack of public defenders has exposed larger issues in the justice system, which looks ripe for another tough fiscal year ahead.

In his pitch to prospective hires, Erik Swallow leans into the idea his office is essentially a training ground for larger and better-paying firms. The director of Umpqua Valley Public Defenders in Roseburg [population 24,000] stresses the area’s natural amenities: small-town friendliness and the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond.

This "training ground" pitch reminds me of a commonly used label on this blog "urban use of the rural." 

The office has been rocked by vacancies since the Oregon justice system erased its pandemic-related backlog earlier this year, the result of retirements and younger lawyers leaving to work at state agencies and firms in more urban areas.

To help explain why 10 people now sit unrepresented in the local jail, Swallow provided a rundown of his recent staff departures to the board that oversees public defense contracting in Oregon, the Public Defense Services Commission, at a recent board meeting.

Despite spending $3,000 a month on recruiting in national publications, the Umpqua Valley office has received just one application for one of three open positions over the past six months. Now, the office no longer takes new minor felony cases.

I couldn't help think of this Oregon story in relation to this national piece that ran last week in Pro Publica.  Alec MacGillis reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico and Wichita, Kansas, contrasting how courts in the two different cities managed court proceedings during the pandemic. Wichita tried to maintain case processing, while Albuquerque's court system essentially shut down.  In both the Pro Publica story and the Oregon story in The Bulletin, we see court systems responding to conditions dramatically changed by the pandemic and the public health dictates that flowed from it.  

Always going to bat for rural America--and making sure his rural constituents know it

This was going to be a post about Senator Jon Tester's (D-Montana) advocacy on behalf of a rural post office in northwestern Montana, so I had written this:  

Don't know the story behind the Corum, Montana Post Office--why it, specifically, was threatened with closure--but U.S. Senator Jon Tester was tweeting about it a few days ago, so I figure it really matters to folks in Flathead County.   Corum is a Census Designated Place with a population of 539.  

Tweet sent June 27, 2022

As he often does when talking about how important the U.S. Post Office is to rural folks, Tester mentions how it facilitates rural residents' access to prescription drugs and Social Security benefits. 

Threatened closure to U.S. Post Office locations has been a preoccupation of rural communities for a decade.  You'll find many posts here.  

I always appreciate the details in how Senator Tester communicates with his constituents--naming specifics, here tiny Corum, elsewhere the roads, bridges, water projects and so forth that are getting the benefits of Build Back Better.  

* * * 

Then, before I got that posted, Tester sent two other tweets, in quick succession, about how he is helping rural folks.  One is about keeping Veterans Administration (VA) clinics open in Montana, and the other is about policies that will keep skilled nursing facilities open.  

Tweets sent June 28, 2022 mid afternoon EST

I wish other senators paid as much attention to their rural constituents--and communicated with them as effectively.  I don't know of any other senator who uses the word "rural" as frequently in tweets as Tester does.  

Rural residents struggling with pharmacy closures

National Public Radio reported on this phenomenon this week, with a focus on Oregon.  

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Americans have been going to their local pharmacy for more than just prescriptions during the pandemic. They've been going there for masks, COVID-19 tests and vaccines. But even with that increased business, retail pharmacies, big and small, are closing their doors. Oregon Public Broadcasting's April Ehrlich reports that these closures are straining small towns where options were already limited.

APRIL EHRLICH, BYLINE: Lisa Raffety has rheumatoid arthritis and needs to take an anti-inflammatory medicine every day. If she can't get it on time, the consequences are severe.

LISA RAFFETY: I'll go two to three days at the most, and then I'm pretty much - I can't walk.

EHRLICH: She lives in Baker City, a small town in eastern Oregon that had one of its four pharmacies closed last year. Fifty-five-year-old Raffety says, since then, lines at the remaining pharmacies started going out the door.

RAFFETY: And it hurts to stand for any length of time, to be on my feet. It's a hard, cement floor.

EHRLICH: Raffety says some people bring their dinners and eat them in line. Store clerks have to bring out wheelchairs for people who can't stand that long. Last year, the Pacific Northwest retailer Bi-Mart announced it was getting out of the pharmacy business, closing nearly 60 pharmacy counters in three states. Many of them were in rural areas.

* * * 

Bi-Mart's spokesman Don Leber says there are several factors that went into the decision to close its pharmacies.

DON LEBER: We were really forced to make a decision we never wanted to make.

EHRLICH: He says one big issue is affecting pharmacies across the country - increasing fees, specifically from the middlemen that bridge pharmacies and insurance companies, called pharmaceutical benefit managers, or PBMs. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has had his eye on these companies recently, which he says are charging excessive fees that are pushing smaller pharmacies out of business.

RON WYDEN: For rural communities in Oregon, this is a five-alarm emergency.

EHRLICH: Basically, when someone gets a prescription through an insurance or Medicare plan, the PBM is supposed to reimburse the pharmacy for the drug cost and some overhead. But in recent years, PBMs started decreasing the amount they reimburse when pharmacies don't meet certain sales markers. Wyden has called on Congress to increase its oversight of pharmaceutical benefit managers. And some states like New York have started regulating PBMs at the state level.

Climate change is deterring farmworkers from following the harvest to the Pacific Northwest

Priscella Vega reports for the Los Angeles Times on the movement of farm workers between California and the Pacific Northwest--in particular how migration north is being diminished because heat in Washington and Oregon are making those less desirable places for workers to be.  An excerpt quoting a few experts follows: 

Edward Taylor, distinguished professor at UC Davis’ Agriculture and Resource Economics department, said to his knowledge there isn’t a study that statistically links harvest migration to extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest. But he found it interesting and worth studying because whatever makes migration less attractive makes people migrate less.

Taylor conducted research in Mexico that showed extreme heat “significantly” drove migration out of rural communities and into other parts of Mexico and the United States.

“I can imagine in this context that anything would make farm work less pleasant than it already is,” said Taylor, who also serves as director of the Center on Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim at UC Davis. “It would simply compound this big picture we see happening out there. Fewer farmworkers. Less and less are willing to migrate to follow the crop.”

“We can ban pesticides, but we can’t ban hot weather,” said Dr. Marc Schenker, distinguished professor emeritus of public health sciences and medicine at UC Davis and founding director of the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety. “We can’t regulate Mother Nature.”

But the heart of Vega's piece is the story of Enedina Ventura, a farmworker, and her family. She is based in Fresno, but made the seasonal journey to Oregon for years.  

Here's an NPR report from September, 2021, about the impact of heat on farmworkers in California.  Here's a story about the impact of climate change in Oregon. 

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CVI): Out of central Washington from NPR this morning

Anna King reports from Okanogan County, Washington, population 41,120, under the headline, "Rural Health Systems Challenged By COVID-19 Surge."  The story leads with the death of a 66-year-old man suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease, at a long-term care facility in Tonasket, population 1,032.  

The town's health care system is in crisis, a striking example of the perilous state of rural health care.

Rural America has been the site of COVID-19 hotspots this year: prisons, nursing homes and meat packers. But there are few doctors, ICU beds and little backup when health care workers also get sick.

The deceased man's step sister explains, ""When we want to get a COVID test we have to go 30 miles away to Omak (Washington).  So we can't just go to our local hospital. They don't have enough."

Like some other stories I've heard or read, this one refers to the transfers coronavirus is necessitating between rural and urban hospitals.  

Confluence Health is a health system that covers north-central Washington, including Tonasket. It has a dozen clinics across a wide swath of the region. Incoming CEO Dr. Douglas Wilson says as his hospitals fill with COVID-19 patients, they're crowding out victims of car accidents, heart attacks and head injuries.

King quotes Wilson, 

You hate to put someone on a helicopter or in an ambulance and fly them over the mountains in the winter, when they would've done better had they been able to receive care here locally without traveling. That's a difference between life and death sometimes.

Another story about such transfers, this one out of Alaska, is here. 

I've also heard NPR reports (picked up from local affiliates) the past few days out of Boerne, Texas, Lubbock, Texas, and Durango, Colorado.  The Lubbock story is by Kaysie Ellingson.  The Durango story, featuring an interview with the mayor, is here. 

Rural proofing in California? Not when it comes to transportation

This story from today's Sacramento Bee highlights the burden on rural folks imposed by California Governor Gavin Newsom's aspiration to move the state to all electric vehicles by 2035.  The principle of rural proofing, followed in Australia, New Zealand and some European countries, suggests that laws and regulations should be vetted for their impact on rural communities.  It's sort of like an environmental impact statement, but with the focus on rural people and places rather than on the environment.  The practice of rural proofing is a way of ensuring that laws are not disproportionately burdensome on rural people and places, a common phenomenon as our world becomes increasingly urban-centric.  Urban-centricity is certainly a concern in the Golden State, where just about 2% of the population live in rural areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.  

Ryan Sabalow and Philip Reese report for the Bee from Modoc County, a sparsely populated county known for ranching and recreation, in the far northeast corner of the state:

It’s a long drive to just about anywhere Gary Wright needs to go. A rancher in the far northeastern corner of California, he sometimes has to drive nearly 100 miles, one-way, to get to where his cattle graze. It’s 36 miles to Klamath Falls, Ore., for a significant errand run.

There are only a few gas stations along the routes through the forests and high deserts in Modoc County — let alone electric vehicle charging stations. There are none near the rangeland where Wright’s cattle graze.

So he was baffled when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that California would require all new passenger cars and trucks to be electric or “zero-emission” by 2035 to combat climate change.

Prior posts featuring Modoc County are here and here.  And two prior posts about California that also implicate rural proofing or suggest the need for it are here and here. 

Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXXX): "Why we're not surprised by what's happening in Yakima County, Washington"

This is the second in a two-part series on rural jail responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Both this post and the prior one (out of Georgia) are by scholars associated with the Vera Institute's rural jails project. This post is by Marisa V. Cervantes and Sandra Yokley of Washington State University, Pullman:

Compared to large cities, rates of COVID-19 are increasing faster in rural counties, agricultural communities, and smaller cities. The less urbanized areas have limited access to resources, leaving these communities in a heightened vulnerability. This lack of safety can have devastating impacts on their ability to recover. As we continue to think about how to maintain safety in the face of restructuring communities, it is vital that these areas be included in the conversation.

Yakima County, Washington, has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases in the state. There have been upwards of 7,300 cases as of June 30, 2020. Of those, 49.8% of the cases have been tied to Hispanic/Latinx people, compared to 18.5% of whites (even though whites make up 42.7% of the population while Hispanic/Latinx make up 49%). Amidst the high rates of coronavirus, the county has had several recent events including a jailbreak and various protests, both in response to the pandemic.

In the face of the power differential split that exists in areas like Yakima, whose economy is highly dependent on food processing industries, we see a divided community. The agricultural economy employs about a third of the workforce, most of whom are Hispanic/Latinx and/or undocumented. These agricultural workers’ protests are centered on the need for stricter safety measures and protection, while another group of non-agricultural workers is opposing the state mandates to practice social distancing and wear protective gear out in public. Despite the division, both groups share a concern of public safety within the community.

The devastating effect of COVID-19 and the subsequent events happening in the area do not come as a surprise because Yakima is a socially vulnerable county. The CDC measures social vulnerability using factors including but not limited to socioeconomic status, minority status, crowded housing, and lack of access to adequate transportation. Socially vulnerable counties like Yakima, which ranks in the top 10% of socially vulnerable counties across the nation, are less likely to prevent suffering and recover from disasters such as COVID-19. This is why a rethinking of safety and the ways in which these counties operate is imperative.

These conversations and calls to action center on what can and should be done when what communities desire and require in terms of safety diverge from what the police can provide. Governments and policymakers thus far have viewed public safety as something to be handled by the police. This paradigm is reflected through local, state, and national budgets, wherein law enforcement agencies often secure a high proportion of the financial resources. These efforts demonstrate the county, state, or country’s commitment to safety and affirm that the police are responsible for guaranteeing the safety of the communities they work for, no matter the cost. Whether governments, policymakers, and police prioritize safety is not what is being called into question in the recent—but not new—discourses taking place across the nation. The voices speaking out against the escalation of COVID-19 and its disproportionate impacts on minorities and communities of color, like those in Yakima County, need to be heard. These calls for justice, paired with those protesting the wrongful death of Black bodies by police officers across the nation, highlight that law enforcement as the primary avenue for public safety is insufficient and deadly in the wake of these pandemics.

While the protests happening in Yakima County by minority agricultural workers may appear, on the surface, to be about hazard pay and protective gear, the root of their actions is fear — the fear that comes with not feeling safe, not feeling protected. The police are not able to bring the safety these vulnerable people seek, but there are organizations that can. Many community service organizations, while better equipped to handle community needs, have been forgotten by county, state, and national governments because of the prevailing notion that police are best suited to handle issues of safety. Yakima County, like many other socially vulnerable counties, has social service organizations that are in high demand and have the ability to best serve the community and advocate for their rights. What they don’t have are the resources to operate successfully.

Organizations that address issues tied to the vulnerability of residents such as crisis services (Lower Valley Crisis & Support), medical assistance (Yakima County Department of Emergency Medical Services), housing assistance (OIC of Washington), and more, can be better utilized and supported by those who are trained to deal with community wellbeing. This can happen through diverting funding from law enforcement agencies to local social service organizations. Calls to defund the police have surged across the nation as protestors, activists, and organizations express their discontent for the way safety in their communities has been handled.

In protest, people are putting themselves in harm's way to demonstrate their longing for and commitment to community-driven safety. While ideally, the partnerships between law enforcement and community service organizations should have already existed, it is not too late. Governments, police, and community service organizations can work together to adjust responses to safety and to work on funding the organizations that can create a safer community.

* * * 

Another recent post out of Yakima County is here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXXIII): Recent reports from Minnesota to Arizona to Oregon

The first story is reported by the New York Times out of Umatilla County, Oregon, population 75,889, in the northeastern part of the state.  The headline for Kate Conger's story is "‘We’re Not an Island’: Rural Outbreaks Challenge Oregon’s Virus Success." The subhead says as much or more, "Oregon was sandwiched between two states that had big coronavirus outbreaks but managed to keep its numbers low. Until it couldn’t."  Here's an excerpt that focuses on rural Oregon:

The increase has been most drastic in rural parts of the state where outbreaks have been spurred on by large gatherings at churches, food-processing facilities, funerals and graduation parties. 

Ms. Brown has ordered Oregonians to wear masks in public buildings, starting July 1. She has also introduced a spending package to fund protective equipment and quarantine pay for farm workers.

I last wrote about what was happening in this part of Oregon in the relatively early days of the pandemic and sheltering-in-place.

The second rural-focused story is by Bloomberg news, out of Austin, Minnesota, population 24,718, a meat-packing center in the southern part of the state, right near the Iowa state line.  (It also happens to be the hometown of Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl).  Here's an excerpt from Adam Minter's story:

The course of the Covid-19 pandemic in rural Mower County, Minnesota, is hand-written across six easel-sized sheets of paper affixed to the wall of the local Emergency Operations Center. Six cases and no deaths were recorded on March 22, the first entry. Pam Kellogg, Mower County's community health division manager, points to the fourth sheet, covering much of May. “It was the third week when things really hit us.” On May 31, Mower reported 64 new cases, for a total of 318 out of a population of about 40,000. By mid-June, it had the second-highest case incidence in Minnesota, and by the end of the month it had nearly 1,000 infections. 

Mower’s experience is increasingly common. Of the 10 U.S. counties with the highest number of recent Covid-19 cases per resident, nine are nonmetropolitan areas with populations under 50,000. There are several factors behind that surge, including the prevalence of older populations, meat-processing plants and communal living among immigrant labor forces. But what it adds up to is a quietly growing crisis. For many of these rural communities, confronting the coronavirus pandemic will require a lot more than issuing stay-at-home orders — and there won’t be much help from Washington or anywhere else.

Other coronavirus reporting with a rural angle is here, out of Bisbee, Arizona (population 5,575), from Kurtis Lee of the Los Angeles Times.  The headline is "The 1918 flu hammered this Arizona mining town. Now a new scourge looms."  Here's an excerpt:

As the death toll climbs for the novel coronavirus — Arizona is a hot spot in the U.S. with intensive care unit beds almost at capacity — many people in this small, reinvented town have started to look back 102 years, searching for warning signs and lessons of hope. 

The magnitude of infections in this state is alarming, with cases growing over the last three weeks by 150% and eclipsing more than 2,200 deaths. And, like the century-old flu that preceded it, the virus has upended lives even in far-flung outposts like Bisbee (population 5,000), which sits defiantly tucked in a canyon 12 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

* * *  

At the Copper Queen Library — one of the oldest in the state, which remained open during floods, fires and Wild West shootouts — a sign near the entrance explaining the current closure reminds people that during the 1918 flu the library shuttered its doors for 76 days. 

The library — which has 32,000 books, including ones on the town’s history — has now been closed 99 days and counting. 

While Cochise County, where Bisbee is located, has recorded only 22 deaths from COVID-19, the local economy has begun to crater.

Another story out of rural southeastern Arizona is here, from NPR, about the death of a teacher in the Hayden-Winkelman school District, which straddles Pinal and Gila counties.  Wikipedia says Hayden, population 662, is "in the process of becoming a Ghost town."

Here is a story about food insecurity and how one community in California's northern Sierra is responding, from Capital Public Radio's Rural Reporting Project.  Nina Sparling reports. 

And here is the latest from The Daily Yonder on what's happening in rural places.   The headline for Tim Marema's story is "Rural America’s Daily Rate of New Infections Climbs 150% in Last Month."  the subhead is, "A list of the rural counties with the highest rates of new cases includes many with prisons and meatpacking plants. Many other counties are those with a high proportion of non-whites."

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XII): Rural economies

This post will highlight two recent stories about the impact coronavirus is having on rural economies.  I'll lead with this by April Simpson for Stateline, which was co-published by Daily Yonder.  Simpson observes that the impact of the pandemic is going to vary from rural place to rural place, largely depending on the basis and diversity of a given rural economy.  I'm reminded of the old adage popular among rural sociologists: If you've seen one rural place, you've seen one rural place. 

The states least affected by the huge spike in unemployment claims are largely rural. They include West Virginia, Arkansas and Georgia. In part, that’s because those states have taken less dramatic steps to slow the spread of the virus. Among them, only West Virginia issued a stay-at-home order before the end of March. 

Nevertheless, “the industries that have been hard hit are just not as prevalent in rural areas,” said Ernie Goss, an economics professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He cited the relative lack of retail and hospitality businesses in Corn Belt states. 

Economists rank regions as economically vulnerable to coronavirus fallout based on demographic and economic factors, including their number of COVID-19 cases, connection to international travelers, reliance on tourism, population density and reliance on global trade, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis.

Simpson focuses on Utah as a sort of case study for variations within a state with many sparsely populated counties:

Utah, for example, is a net exporter of energy, so low oil prices have delivered an extra hit to workers in those industries. 

In addition, 10% of Utah’s jobs are in leisure and hospitality. And in the rural areas outside of a narrow string of cities and towns along a mountain range toward the north central part of the state, the reliance on those jobs is even greater. 

“Those rural economies aren’t as diverse as some of the more urbanized places, so the impact we’re expecting might actually be even more concentrated,” said Juliette Tennert, director of economic and public policy research at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. 

But the economy in Utah doesn’t revolve around tourism like it does in Nevada and Hawaii. Tourism also isn’t an outsized employer in rural counties such as Cache and Box Elder to the northwest and Juab in central Utah, which are among the places Moody’s Analytics considers less vulnerable. 

Manufacturing is among the largest industries in Cache and Box Elder, although each has other anchors, such as Utah State University in Cache County. Juab has agriculture that feeds local demand.

The New York Times on Sunday ran a big business section feature about the impact of the coronavirus on rural economies.  The focus of Patricia Cohen's story is eastern Oregon, from the southern part bordering Nevada, up to Wallowa County, bordering Washington.  Several of folks Cohen interviews  are farmers and ranchers, but she also talks to a musician, a leather craftsman, and a man who owns a hotel and restaurant in Joseph, Oregon, population 1,081, where the summer tourist season--quickly approaching--is a short one.  All of these folks are accustomed to remote living and a great deal of time alone or with just their families.

Some are thinking about future economic survival strategies.  For example, one couple, the Casads, grow organic potatoes:

Their biggest customer, Deschutes Brewery in Bend, closed two weeks ago and laid off more than 300 workers. The Casads, fortunately, have so far been shielded from the worst economic effects. They produced about 50 tons of Kennebec potatoes last year — perfect for french fries — and sold out of them in February, before the epidemic hit. 

“We’re doubling down this year” on the amount they’re planting, Ms. Havstad Casad said. They’ve just begun to seed and plant squash, and won’t be harvesting Kennebecs until the fall.

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And they are thinking about redirecting some of their sales to local grocery stores and organic distributors in case restaurants are slow to recover.

Some of the places featured in the story are Steens Mountain Wilderness, Eagle Cap Wilderness, and Hells Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America.  Other population clusters mentioned--in addition to Joseph--are Enterprise, population 1,940, Madras, population 6,000, and Canyon City, population 703.