John Ikerd on "Economic Colonialism" in rural America

John Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri, delivered a stirring key note address at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Columbus Ohio on July 29.  That lecture has now been reprinted in Rural America In These Times.  Here's an excerpt:

I think “a growing sense of impotence and dread” accurately describes the prevailing mood of people in rural America. Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished scholar at the Leopold Center at Iowa State University, has observed that the “predominant attitude toward rural communities is that they have no future. In fact, this attitude seems to prevail even within rural communities.”

He quoted from a 1991 survey conducted in several Midwestern rural communities indicating that people in most rural towns harbored one of two visions for their communities. “One vision sees their town’s death as inevitable due to economic decline.” The other vision is also of “a dying town” with only a fading hope that “they can keep the town alive by attracting industry.” The widening rural-urban divide since the early 1990s seems to confirm a transition in rural attitudes from impotence and dread to desperation and anger.

That was Ikerd's first point in agreement with Margaret Wheatley.  Read the whole piece to learn more about the other two points with which he agrees with her:

1) “A growing sense of impotence and dread about the state of the nation,”
2) “The realization that information doesn’t change minds anymore.”
3) “The clarity that the world changes through local communities taking action—that there is no power for change greater than a community taking its future into its own hands.”

Number three, as you might imagine, is the most hopeful.