A Sustainable Transition (Part 1: Sustainable Development and the Green Transition)

Up until mid-twentieth century, miners would carry bright yellow canaries down into coal-blackened tunnels to carve out a meager living from the walls. Canaries are particularly sensitive to carbon monoxide, an odorless gas which can cause drowsiness, weakness, loss of consciousness, and death. Mining is hard, physical work, and miners would often fail to recognize the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. The common canary exhibits distress in the presence of carbon monoxide poisoning and will die well before a human would begin to feel the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. Thus, miners began to bring canaries down to warn them of the presence of the gas to escape its effects.

Although canaries helped save the lives of miners, the miners’ livelihoods are still at risk. On one hand, a mine exists to extract a metal or mineral, and when the mine exhausts the supply, it is worthless.  On the other hand, global politics and shifting market demand can shut down otherwise stable mines, with the workers the first to feel the impact of these shifts.  While whole swaths of miners lose their jobs, the owners of the mines feel relatively little impact. Ironically, coal workers can function as the “canary in the coal mine” for the coal industry itself. This is true for many extractive industries such as timber, oil, and natural gas. 

Furthermore, there are entire communities that depend on fossil fuel production to sustain their existence. But the world is facing a climate crisis that will require an energy transition on an unprecedented scale. We are left with a predicament: while we need to transition away from the fossil fuel industry, doing so requires the communities of workers that rely on that industry to sacrifice their way of life and their economies. Corporations have also perpetuated these extractive industries and have a strong interest in delaying this transition. 

So, here’s the trillion dollar question: how do we transition a national urban-centric economy away from fossil fuels without destroying the rural communities that produce them? 

There has been substantial literature on two aspects of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies, widely known as the “green transition.” First, the idea of “environmental justice,” which asks that the environmental costs associated with renewable energies be borne fairly, instead of concentrated within low-income or majority-minority areas. Environmental justice is not a concept limited to the green transition but has become increasingly relevant in discussions about where to site renewable energy industry and infrastructure. 

Environmental Justice 

I first came across the concept while working for the Department of Toxic Substances Control in Sacramento. Consider the car battery recycling process, which can infinitely recycle the lead component of the battery, melt and reform a substantial amount of the plastic casing, and neutralize the sulfuric acid or convert it to sodium sulfate, a product used in laundry detergent. Ninety-nine percent of car batteries are recycled. However, the recycling plant produces air emissions and a risk of lead contamination in air, soil, and groundwater. Battery recycling is an industry that benefits the community as a whole, but the smaller community near the plant suffers. For example, Exide Technologies shut its plant in May 2015, after years of fines and citations by the Department of Toxic Substances Control, leaving a five-square-mile brownfield site with elevated lead levels, near predominantly working-class and Latino neighborhoods. The cleanup is ongoing. 

While the energy created by renewable energies is “clean,” the production of solar panels requires silicon, which must be mined, refined, and disposed of if the panel fails or is irreparably damaged. This both threatens health and safety due to emissions and environmental contamination and impacts the quality of life in an area through habitat destruction and a loss of natural beauty. 

Just Transitions 

A “just transition,” as articulated by Ann Eisenberg in a phenomenal law review article, is a labor-driven principle of easing the burden that decarbonization poses to those who depend on high-carbon industries. It emphasizes a fair distribution of the risks and rewards of the green transition. Privately and publicly driven transition attempts have met varying degrees of success. 

In 2017, a nonprofit called Mined Minds came to West Virginia with promises to teach West Virginians how to write computer code, and then get them well-paying jobs. Many West Virginians quit their jobs or dropped out of school to participate, but almost none who signed up for the program are working in programming now. 

Alternatively, there are retraining programs that exist to train wind and solar installation technicians, and zero-emission vehicle construction. However, these programs are not widespread and presently are neither widely targeted nor made free to fossil fuel workers. This may hamper their use as a transitional tool. 

In the past, the United States has provided some form of financial benefit to workers displaced by federal policy, such as compensating workers displaced by the Trade Act, the President’s Northwest Forest Plan, the Tobacco Transition Payment Program, and the POWER program. These payment programs have their own problems, which are discussed later in the series. 

Even successful non-fossil fuel climate transition projects, such as the USDA’s Rural Energy for America Program (which uses grants and loans to pay for clean energy projects for farmers and small business owners) and Climate Smart Commodities Program (which helps participating farmers implement production practices that help build soil health, sequester carbon, and enhance productivity) have been shut down or delayed by Trump’s USDA, casting some doubt on the integrity of long-term federal transition programs. 

California is “committed to achieving a just and equitable transition to carbon neutrality by 2045.” Although this will create a significant amount of jobs, only 56% of current fossil fuel workers will have “promising employment opportunities outside fossil fuel industries.” This number is likely to rise as renewable energy industry increases but is still likely to leave many in the lurch. 

So, What’s Missing?. . . 

Nestled within these concepts is the sustainable development triangle, a nexus between competing issues and interests like environmental stewardship, economic growth, and human well-being, to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The triangle is comprised of Equity, Economy, and Environment. 

Eisenberg nestles the existing policies of “environmental justice” and “just transitions” as lying on the triangle between ‘Equity and Environment’ and ‘Equity and Economy,’ respectively. 

But what lies between ‘Economy and Environment’? 

Extractive economies are unique in the fact that their economy is inextricable from their environment—these communities are ‘stapled’ to the resources they extract. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mill towns sprouted as forests were clearcut for the burgeoning timber industry. Mining towns cut into the rock to extract coal. Oil towns drilled down to start drawing up crude oil. However, the fate of many extractive economies is the same—once the resource has been fully extracted, the town fades away.

. . . And What Comes Next? 

While environmental justice asks to distribute the costs of industry equitably, it may also take away the benefits from communities that find the costs acceptable. While just transitions aims to compensate individuals who will lose their employment in the green transition, that same person may be forced to relocate to find employment. 

This series of blog posts aims to discuss complex issues such as place, pride, and progress, and home in on a crucial aspect of the transition—how do we keep these communities intact? 

Here is a quick view of what’s to come: 

Part II of this series will cover the rural concept of “place” and how it factors into the identity of fossil fuel towns, even when there has been a past exploitative relationship with fossil fuel corporations, as well as how past transitions away from rural mono-economies have failed to adequately acknowledge this concept. 

Part III will examine Ann Eisenberg’s concept of rural America as a “commons,” and how this can help drive governmental investment in local communities instead of corporate investment in utility-scale renewable energy projects. 

Part IV will expose how the current renewable energy industry echoes past extractive economies like fossil fuels, and how localized renewable energy production could help decentralize the United States energy grid. 

Part V will examine several ways in which localized renewable energy siting could provide long-term stability for fossil fuel towns.

On the rural lawyer shortage, from the Illinois Supreme Court

Mark Palmer, Chief Counsel to the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, posted this a few days ago about the enduring rural lawyer shortage.  The item is headlined, "The Disappearing Rural Lawyer, Part IV: The Persistent Legal Desert Crisis."

I'll just include a short excerpt here: 

In previous installments of my “Disappearing Rural Lawyer” series (Part I, Part II, Part III), I have examined the alarming shortage of attorneys in rural Illinois and explored initiatives across the state and country to address this problem to better serve rural communities, from financial incentives for relocating lawyers to technology tools to easier cross geographical divides.

Legal deserts — vast geographical areas with minimal or no access to legal services — remain a reality for many rural Illinois residents. For them, finding legal representation might require traveling significant distances, taking time off work, and incurring additional expenses that make justice effectively inaccessible.

In installment IV of this series, I present the latest data on Illinois’ rural attorney shortage and consider what it means for access to justice in 2025 and beyond.
The numbers: A continuing downward trend

Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) data from November 2024 reveals that the rural lawyer shortage in Illinois has shown little improvement.

Of the 8,327 Illinois resident attorneys admitted to practice in the last four years, a staggering 7,625 (91.6%) are practicing in Cook County or its collar counties (Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage, Kendall, Grundy, Will, Kankakee). This leaves only 702 of those newly admitted attorneys to cover the remaining 93 counties in Illinois.

Furthermore, of these 702, only a portion serve in private practice. Many of these lawyers are drawn to essential, non-private roles, such as prosecutors, public defenders, and other government positions.

However, this means the pool of attorneys available for family law, estate planning, business matters, and other civil needs is even smaller than the already stark numbers suggest.

In comparison to previous years, the trend of the disappearing rural lawyer in Illinois is concerning: 

• 75 Illinois counties have five or fewer new attorneys (compared to 72 counties in 2021)
• 32 counties have no new attorneys whatsoever (compared to 33 counties in 2021)

While there’s been a slight improvement in counties with zero new attorneys, the overall concentration of legal talent in and around Chicago continues to intensify.

Readers can, of course, find many resources related to the rural lawyer shortage on this blog. 

As traditional media collapse, "The Epoch Times" gains a following in rural America

The newspaper racks at the Newton County (Arkansas) Library
are full of issues of The Epoch Times, along with News China 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025.

The New York Times journalist Eli Tan reported last week from Oakdale, California (population 23,181), on the evolution of that community's media ecosystem.  The headline for Tan's story focuses on events from 2020, "It was Just a Rumor on Facebook.  Then a Militia Showed Up" but the story is about the longer-term disintegration of local media, both before and after that 2020 event.  It's a story of how the local media dried up, leaving residents reliant on local Facebook groups, eventually supplemented by The Epoch Times, a publication of Falun Gong, a group associated with right-wing views and its opposition to the Chinese government. I want to focus on that part of the story because it relates to something I observed first-hand in my home county this year.  First, I'll share a bit more background on Oakdale, which is in Stanislaus County, in California's Central Valley:   

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale — it was the media itself.

Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

Many issues of News China magazine
were also on display in the 
Newton County Library

Of the 80 Oakdale residents The New York Times spoke to for this article, not a single one subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country. 

Here is more coverage of the rural news desert phenomenon. 

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. 

* * *  

The town is still able to support a weekly newspaper called The Oakdale Leader, which shares a handful of reporters with nine other local newspapers in the Central Valley, all owned by Hank Vander Veen, its publisher and a former circulation director at the Modesto Bee.

* * *

It isn’t just local news habits that are changing in Oakdale. Since the pandemic, a wider skepticism for everything including vaccines and the price of eggs has changed the way people approach information in general: The thinking is, do your own research, and trust neither side.

Newton County Library, Feb. 2025
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

Here is another post about misinformation influencing politics in rural communities.  Tan's story in the NYT continues:

Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. In barber shops, clock repair stores and diners across town, copies of a peculiar newspaper appear on tables and bookshelves: The Epoch Times.

The media outlet is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, and it is known to include right-wing misinformation with an anti-China slant. (The outlet did not respond to a request for comment.) A weekly print subscription costs less than $15 a year, but most store owners in Oakdale said they didn’t initially pay for a subscription — the editions just started showing up in the mail during the pandemic.

This brought to mind what I saw in the Newton County (Arkansas) Library (in my hometown) when I visited in February, 2025:  the newspaper rack was dominated by just two publications, The Epoch Times and the local(ish) Harrison Daily Times, from neighboring Boone County.  Oddly, there was no copy of the local weekly, The Newton County Times, on display.  (It is owned by the same company that owns the Harrison Daily Times and currently operates out of the same office in Boone County--that is, The Newton County Times has no physical presence in Newton County except when the reporter comes over from Harrison, Boone County's seat, to cover events like local government meetings).  

I was back in Newton County in early April and again popped into the library.  Nothing had changed in terms of what was on display--well, the issues of The Epoch Times and The Harrison Daily Times were more recent because it was April and no longer February.  On this latter visit, the librarian was present, and so I asked her about the prominence of The Epoch Times--and why she carried it at all.  She said that a patron had requested it.  My facial response was skeptical, perhaps even as strong as an eye roll.  Though what I was really judging was her decision to display this propaganda so prominently, especially when there was so little counter-balance of real news.  Not a copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, let alone any national newspaper, in sight.    

Now, however, that I've read this New York Times story, I'm skeptical in a different way about what the librarian told me.  I suggest The Epoch Times is being sent to lots of local libraries, and those without much else--and those who don't see how biased it is--simply display it.  After all, they have plenty of room, and it's no tax at all on their budgets.   

It seems this is an important bit of information toward understanding the media ecosystem that has led to a right-ward shift in the rural vote. 

It also reminds me of some billboards for The Epoch Times I saw on California's I-80 in the last year.  Those billboards proclaimed The Epoch Times the most trusted news source in America, a claim that made me very skeptical.   Here's a story about those billboards and how they showed up in Tampa, Florida. from Axios. 

Housing Assistance Council launches Rural Data Central

You can access this important new resource here.  It has sections on 

• Rural people and places
• Society
• Economy
• Housing
• Mortgage and Housing Finance
• Federally Assisted Housing

The Housing Assistance Council reports that the website 

is designed as a resource to help rural communities, organizations, and decisionmakers with data to inform strategies and solutions. Rural Data Central compiles over 275 million data points into one accessible and easy-to-use tool. Sign up for Rural Data Central today to get the data you need for your community.

With so little data available that teases out rural difference in various sectors, I'm excited about this new rural-focused source of quantitative data.  

Will Trump’s push for increasing timber production help rural communities?

Many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest grew up around a once-thriving timber industry. Almost all timber harvesting operations are located in rural areas. Logging has, and continues to be, a source of pride in these communities. The timber industry allowed rural communities to thrive economically. However, the timber industry has slowly shrunk over the years. President Trump wants to revive the timber industry by opening more national forests to logging.

On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to expand American timber production. The Executive Order calls for the reversal of restrictive policies and the implementation of federal policies that promote timber harvesting throughout the United States.

This executive order is meant to assist rural communities that depend on the timber industry and help gain support for the Trump Administration. Will the change in policy work, and will it help the economies of rural communities? The answer is likely no.

The timber industry has been slowly shrinking across the United States, particularly in Western states. Many sawmills near national forests have closed in recent years. With the closure of mills, jobs in the rural communities that surround local mills have disappeared. For many rural communities, the local mill was the largest employer in the area.

One example of this is the closure of the Malheur Lumber Company in John Day, Oregon. John Day has a population of 1,543 people, and the Malheur Lumber Company employed 76 people. Following the closing of the Malheur Lumber Company, two other mills in Oregon closed in 2024. This means that in Oregon alone, seven individual mills have closed in 2024.

The closure of so many mills demonstrates that the timber industry in rural areas has vanished. This means that increasing timber harvesting in national forests will be of little help to rural communities. There is nowhere to go with the logs that are harvested. This is because “logs would have to be transported longer distances, at increased costs.” Struggling mills cannot afford to pay extra transportation costs.

It is also unlikely that any of these closed mills will reopen their doors. Susan Jane Brown, an environmental lawyer and principal at Silvix Resources in Oregon, said that “‘no businessman is going to invest millions of dollars in a new mill or in retrofitting an old mill.’”

Further complicating the implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order is the recent Forest Service budget cuts and employee layoffs. I have previously discussed how the layoffs of Forest Service employees disproportionately affect rural communities, but these layoffs also hamper the Trump Administration’s goal of increasing timber production.

The Federal Government has laid off approximately 3,400 Forest Service workers. Forest Service staff are responsible for organizing and implementing timber sales. Without adequate staffing, the Forest Service will struggle to market timber sales to private companies.

The Trump Administration's ongoing tariff war will negatively affect the wood products industry as well. If the United States’ economy falls into a recession, the timber industry and rural communities will be hit extraordinarily hard. If a recession were to occur, the housing market would suffer. Since the wood products industry is intertwined with the housing market, the effects on rural communities that depend on local mills would be devastating.

President Trump’s Executive Order is unlikely to assist rural communities that depend on the timber industry. Local mills and rural mill communities have already disappeared. The industry that needed to produce wood products no longer exists. Harvesting more trees will be of little use, as there is nowhere to go with the logs.

The Executive Order appears to be an attempt by the Trump Administration to appease rural communities who overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in 2024. However, this push to open more national forests will do very little to help rural communities that depend on the remnants of the timber industry. 

For further reading on the hardships that logging-dependent communities face, please see Jennifer Sherman’s book, Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, and Michelle Wilde Anderson’s book, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America. 

Helicopters over Humboldt: a retrospective interview

Growing up in suburban Southern California, Humboldt County seemed like a completely different world. In some ways, I think it probably is. But stories about Humboldt—stories about environmental activists, cannabis cultivation, and, of course, Bigfoot—have always fascinated me. From bitter campus protests to its history as a major logging hub, Humboldt has been a major talking point on this blog for years. I wanted to contribute something to the already robust list of stories, but there was a problem: I have never been to Humboldt, and I don't have any stories about it!

My solution was to interview a friend, "M." He grew up at the end of a dirt road, on 44 acres of land ~15 minutes from the town of Redway. Initially, our conversation was general—we discussed his upbringing in the '80s and '90s and rural life in Southern Humboldt. But the piece of the story we kept coming back to (perhaps unsurprisingly) was marijuana. What M ultimately chose to share was, essentially, a brief oral history of cannabis cultivation in Southern Humboldt.

It started, of course, with the hippies. According to M, they were "mostly college-educated idealists, looking to live off the land." Most were looking for tranquility, self-sufficiency, an escape from city living. In rural Southern Humboldt, "they found it for cheap." These initial community members were "rich in natural resources, but not in money." There was an issue, though—In Southern Humboldt, you can't grow much. "It's an interesting landscape for agriculture. Most of it is... these vast conifer forests. It's not really agricultural land."

 Enter the Marijuana plant. 

"Cannabis, during those early years, was something that [people] perhaps stumbled upon as a means of generating income for their community." By the time M was born, it had blossomed into a "spectrum of growers." On the one hand, there were "those that were fully in it, willing to grow more, risk jailtime, and supply cities that were farther away." For them, cannabis was a livelihood. 

On the other hand, "you had the mom-and-pop operations that were just a small greenhouse, or a few plants hidden in the woods." For them, cannabis was just "used to supplement income from whatever job they had in the local community." By the '80s and '90s, both groups were facing serious challenges from local, state, and federal law enforcement.

At the heart of our conversation was a story about Vietnam-era helicopters flying low across the treetops around his home. 

You could hear them coming from miles away—and we'd all run out into the yard... to have that experience; ok, we're on a homestead, living in nature, on a homestead off the grid; to have that seclusion, that self sufficiency, and then to hear an army helicopter disrupt the tranquility was pretty strange...

This profound juxtaposition was the result of CAMP: the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Managed by the California Department of Justice, CAMP united local, state, and federal agencies in a concerted effort to eradicate illegal marijuana grow operations all over the State of California. Launched in 1983, CAMP activity escalated throughout the 90s. 

In Northern California, CAMP culminated in Summer 1990 with operation Green Sweep. During that operation, the federal government deployed active-duty troops to Southern Humboldt in a drastic escalation of previous drug-policing methods. The operation was met with large-scale protests, some of which became violent. According to M, the "community felt it was being targeted and really terrorized by this government-funded operation." 

Despite its attempts at deterrence, M felt CAMP only increased profits for determined growers: 

when you have these aggressive tactics, the beneficiaries are the ones that are able to continue [growing]. If you increase the focus and the efforts to disrupt the exchange of product... you increase the price. That's what happened: you had cannabis that wasn't initially of significant value, [skyrocketing] to four or five thousand dollars a pound. There were many in the community that felt the reward was worth the risk: friends and neighbors that either faced jailtime or were impacted by friends and family getting locked up for cultivation...

M recalled one community member, busted with what was later described as "a handful of sprouts. They slapped a 5-year sentence on him. He had a young daughter. But he knew the risks..." 

Sometimes, the dangers went beyond jail time. 

As far as the actual exchange of the product for cash, I've heard there were buyers that would come up from the city; they would go up to someone's house, and you would hope to establish some kind of rapport and trust. 

But finding a buyer, at least at first, entailed "meeting at the bottom of a dirt road, and hoping for the best." For one of M's high school classmates, this dynamic proved deadly. "[He] became affiliated with some buyers from the Bay Area... perhaps he didn't put a lot of trust in them. They came up and robbed him, he resisted, and they shot him. He was 17 or 18." 

"It's interesting," M remarked towards the end of our conversation, "to return to that time period and compare it to the traditional American high school experience." 

I am inclined to agree. 

M now works in Portland, Oregon as a registered nurse. When asked if he ever saw himself settling down back in Humboldt, he responded with a simple "no," adding briefly that "too much has changed."

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. 

---

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.  

Japan erects--overnight--a 3-D printed train station for a rural community

Kiuko Notoya recently reported in the New York Times about the overnight construction of a train station in rural western Japan.  The components were 3-D printed elsewhere.  According to the West Japan Railway Company that serves this place, Hatsushima (near Arida, in Wakayama prefecture) building a station the old-fashioned way would have cost twice as much and taken more than two months.  The station is served by one train line, which runs between one and three times per hour; it serves about 530 riders each day. The new train station, which looks more like a shed or a shelter, was erected between the time the last train ran at 11:57 pm one evening and the first train train the next morning at 5:45 am.  The 100 square foot building is described as "a minimalistic, white building, featuring designs that include a mandarin orange and a scabbardfish, specialties of Arida."

Notoya writes:  

In the six hours between the departure of the night’s last train and the arrival of the morning’s first one, workers in rural Japan built an entirely new train station. It will replace a significantly bigger wooden structure that has served commuters in this remote community for over 75 years.

* * * 

As Japan’s population ages and its work force shrinks, the maintenance of railway infrastructure, including outdated station buildings, is a growing issue for railway operators. Rural stations with dwindling numbers of users have posed a particular challenge. 

The NYT story, which includes several short videos of the production process for the train station parts and the building's erection, is worth a read in its entirety.   

Rural schools in Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere threatened by vouchers that divert tax dollars to private schools

Jasper School District Truck, Jasper, Arkansas, February 2025
The Jasper District includes schools in Kingston (neighboring Madison County)
and Oark (neighboring Johnson County).  
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

The Texas House of Representatives voted this week to create "one of the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher programs," which the New York Times characterized as "a hard-fought victory for private school choice activists as they turn their attention to a nationwide voucher push."

I and students in the Law and Rural Livelihoods course have previously written a number of blog posts here about this issue in the context of Texas and other states, with particular concern for the consequences for rural schools. Those concerns were also called out this week by Dallas-area Democratic Representative Chris Turner, who commented that the measure “will harm students with disabilities. It will harm rural students.”  He also expressed concern that it will effectively "resegregate education."  

The New York Times provides this further context on this week's vote, including attention to the rural angle: 

[S]ome Democrats argued that what they called a “voucher scam” was a giveaway to parents who have already opted out of public education.

* * * 

Vouchers have been a priority for [Governor Greg] Abbott for several years. But strong resistance from Democrats and some rural Republicans in the Texas House — who feared the program would undercut their local schools — prevented it from becoming law.

* * * 

There has often been resistance to private school vouchers in conservative rural regions, where few private schools exist and public school districts are sometimes a county’s largest employer.

That dynamic was further documented in the Texas Monthly story that is the focus of this mid-2023 post.  The NY Times coverage of events in Texas this week continues:   

But the growth of alternative models for education has convinced some policymakers that rural students will have more options than they would have in the past. Those models include for-profit virtual schools and microschools, which are often run by a single educator working out of a home or a rented space.

Meanwhile, in Texas' neighbor to the northeast, Arkansas-Democrat Gazette columnist Rex Nelson has written a few pieces on that state's voucher scheme, part of the LEARNS Act that Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law in 2023.  In a March 23, 2025 column titled "An Education Debacle," Nelson begins by couching what is at stake for rural schools in terms of rural population loss and the collapse of communities associated with the loss of a local school.  He leads with the illustration of Lake View, in Phillips County, in the Mississippi Delta region.  Nelson observes that the town's population dropped from 609 in the 1980 census to 327 in 2020, a rate of loss faster than most places in the nation.  He also points out that Lake View is one of just a few incorporated cities in Arkansas where the population is more than 90% Black.   

But Nelson leads with Lake View for a reason in addition to its population loss.  He writes: 

Lake View became a household term in Arkansas as a case named Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee wound its way through the courts. When the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in November 2002 that the state's system of funding public education was unconstitutional, it in essence said this: The child who lives at Lake View deserves the same educational opportunities as a child living in Bentonville.

Nelson names Bentonville, in particular, because it is one of the wealthiest communities in the state.  It has become affluent not least because it is the home of Walmart and one of the richest families in the nation, the Waltons. 

Eventually, Nelson uses his column to dig into Governor Sanders.  This is an especially interesting turn since Nelson previously worked for her father, Mike Huckabee, when Hucakbee was the state's governor.  This column is such a straight-talking doozie that I'm going to indulge myself a long quote from it.  

In 2022, Arkansas voters elected a young political operative named Sarah Sanders governor. Sanders had achieved minor fame in the MAGA movement for serving as Donald Trump's press secretary and lying to the media on Trump's behalf. She raised money from MAGA cultists across the country... 

Though she remained far more interested in Washington politics than Arkansas public policy, Sanders took office in January 2023. Indebted to her out-of-state funders, she needed to produce what they would consider "wins." One such win would be a statewide school voucher program under which taxpayers would foot part of the bill for children attending private schools.

The bill was based on a template from out-of-state organizations. There was little input from teachers and administrators in Arkansas.

Until this year, bills promoting vouchers in Texas consistently were defeated by a coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. Rural Republicans realized such a scheme would be devastating for their public school districts.

Sanders faced no such problem in a state where GOP legislators are scared of their own shadows. They fear those out-of-state MAGA adherents will fund primary opponents. They asked no questions and went along with the voucher plan, often against the advice of superintendents and teachers back home.

I waited two years before writing about the voucher scheme. I don't like knee-jerk reactions to calls for school reform. I've been a strong supporter of public charter schools. But after two years, the picture is becoming clear. A statewide voucher system doesn't improve outcomes in a poor rural state such as Arkansas. In fact, it's nothing short of a debacle.  (emphasis added)

It's also unconstitutional under the reasoning of the Lake View ruling. The state must give the same support to that child in Lake View as a child in Bentonville. In much of Arkansas, there are no close private schools that offer a good education.

A few days after this column appeared, the Democrat-Gazette published a story headlined, "Arkansas sees more than 33,000 students applying for next school year’s vouchers."  The lengthy story by Lena Miano leads with this further background and data breakdown: 

Created through the LEARNS Act of 2023, the Education Freedom Account program provides state funding for private and home school costs and was gradually rolled out over three years, with next fall marking the first time vouchers are available to all school-age children in the state.

The window, which opened on March 3 and closed Sunday, saw 23,357 students selecting private schools while the remaining 10,393 applicants indicated homeschooling as their choice for next school year,

The story uses the word "rural" only once, in this quote from Representative Jim Wooten of Beebe, who has proposed a bill requiring that private schools participating in the voucher program must comply with the same state laws and Arkansas Department of Education reporting requirements as public schools.  He states that he does not oppose private schools, but that "the voucher program is 'damaging, hurtful and harmful to public education,' particularly in smaller, rural parts of the state."

Then, on March 30, 2025, Nelson published, "Welfare for the rich," from which I drew this excerpt.  As you'll see Nelson ultimately returns to the matter with which he led in the prior week's column--the matter of rural decline: 

As one longtime educator told me: "You can pretty well paint the word 'Christian' on the side of a barn, call it a school and start collecting state money. It's troubling."

An Arkansas historian I know was even more frank, calling the voucher program "the greatest grift in the history of Arkansas, and that's saying something given the history of this state."

Rural Arkansans don't have the opportunity that my wife and I had because we happened to live in Arkansas' largest city. Either there are no private schools close, or the ones that are close don't shine academically.

That reminds me of this bit from the Miano story above, out of Ash Flat, Arkansas, population 1,109.  There, the voucher program has allowed The Underwood Branch Homeschool Cooperative "to provide personalized, special education services to dozens of homeschooled students this year."  I guess this is what the New York Times calls a "microschool" in its coverage, quoted above.  The Miano story in the Democrat-Gazette continues:  

The state's program has "really impacted us, just being able to let families afford to be able to do what we're doing -- and then also on the business end, we are able to provide it because without it, there's just no way that we could do it," [the founder] said, adding that the voucher program has gone toward building costs, tuition, therapy services and more her team offers.

The Ash Flat cooperative, which welcomed its first students this fall, now serves 45 students--35 of which are voucher program participants -- and has 90 K-12 grade students on a waitlist.

Tuition is $10,000 per year, with the vouchers covering just over $6,800 of that and financial aid options provided by the cooperative offered for families who can't afford to pay the remaining costs, Horton said.

The cooperative team expects to move from its current, temporary church building to its own permanent facility this May. The new building, made possible by a loan and increased enrollment, will house three classrooms, a main area, full kitchen and storage spaces along with a porch, playground, mud kitchen, nature trails and a myriad of animals -- horses, goats, sheep, chickens and pigs -- to meet students' outdoor needs.

Whether this Ash Flat institution is tantamount to a barn with "Christian" painted on the side, I cannot say, but it is interesting to have some details about how the voucher funds are being used in one rural community.  

Nelson's column continues: 

Funding the voucher scheme will cost the state more and more in the years ahead. That will come at the expense of public school funding. As one who travels through and writes about rural Arkansas, I worry. Rural schools won't have the funds they need to operate. Parents will move elsewhere. Enrollment numbers will fall to the point that those schools cease to exist. Once schools die, the communities around them will die.

Nelson notes that these concerns to preserve rural schools and communities are what have led Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska to reject similar schemes.   

With rural Texas lawmakers failing to hold the line against vouchers after a years-long struggle, this is an issue rural education advocates will surely continue to watch closely.  With Arkansas a few years ahead of its behemoth sister state to the southwest on the voucher path, the consequences of these programs on rural schools may be revealed in Arkansas before they are known in the Lone Star State. 

Postscript:  On April 24, 2025, the Arkansas Times published this commentary on the Arkansas voucher scheme.  Benjamin Hardy writes under the headline, "Texas joins Arkansas in the great Republican school voucher experiment."  He leads with news that the Texas Senate has now joined that state's lower chamber in support of the program: 

After years of resisting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to create a universal school voucher program like those in Arkansas and other red states, rural Republican legislators in the Lone Star State finally caved.

On Thursday, the Texas Senate gave final passage to a bill that will devote $1 billion over the next two years to set up “education savings accounts” to pay for private school tuition and other expenses beginning in the 2026-27 school year.

Hardy also provides additional information about the implementation and cost of the program, in both Arkansas and Texas:  

Arkansas gradually phased its program in, perhaps so as to soften the gigantic blow to the state budget. LEARNS vouchers were available only to certain groups of students in the first two years.

In Year 3, the upcoming 2025-26 school year, the vouchers will be available to all students in Arkansas — and will cost the state a whopping $277 million. On a per capita basis, that’s way more than the $1 billion the Texas program is supposed to cost over the first biennium. But the price tag in Texas will certainly balloon: A fiscal statement estimated vouchers will cost the state $3.8 billion on net by 2030.

It's going to be interesting to see how these states' budgets will absorb these costs in coming years.  It will also be interesting to see the impact the schemes will have on rural schools' budgets--especially in an era when many expect Title I funding to dwindle under the Trump administration.   

The USDA pulls back from rural communities

The Trump administration's efforts to reduce the size of government now include reducing investment in rural America. The administration recently fired hundreds of staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development program, part of a broader firing of 6,000 staff at USDA. Many staff are now being reinstated following court challenges to the layoffs, but their futures remain uncertain.

Alongside the layoffs and uncertainty, the Trump administration ordered staff not to perform community outreach, which Carrie Decker, a West Virginia employee of USDA Rural Development, said was "90% of what we do." 

All of this looks like it will have a profound effect on rural communities across the U.S. Frank Morris at KCUR reports, 

[t]he U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development is Washington’s chief tool to promote economic growth in rural counties — providing funding for everything from renovating old hospitals to providing faster internet service.

Previous bloggers have highlighted some of the many benefits provided by Rural Development. The agency 

does things that local governments can't afford - building water supply systems for small, shrinking towns, for instance, shoring up hospitals, buying police cars. It's an economic lifeline to places without a lot of options. 

Rural Development has a long history of bringing needed investment to rural areas. 

USDA Rural Development is rooted in the Great Depression, when the Rural Electrification Administration brought power lines to hundreds of remote communities. The agency has sustained thousands of towns over the decades, often by supporting the businesses and farms that bring money into the local economy. 

Now, government upheaval under the new administration is draining the resources that could go to rural people and towns. Former Missouri head of USDA Rural Development Kyle Wilkens noted that the current process of firing and rehiring is highly inefficient:

Think of the time that you're taken away from these folks doing their actual job and that is money. It's all it is. It's money.

Many of the grants already cut are relatively small, but provide important support for small-scale programs in rural communities.

One of the most notable examples is the Mancos Conservation District in Colorado, which had its $630,000 grant for the Equity in Conservation Outreach Program canceled. This grant was intended to support small farmers, tribal communities, and local outreach efforts in the region.

The Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council in Kansas City also faced a setback when its $165,000 Farmers Market Promotion Program grant was canceled. Director Alana Henry explained that, despite the cancellation, the community is working hard to keep their farmers market going and continue supporting local growers.

While much of the Trump administration's efforts at "government efficiency" seem to be aimed at reducing red tape and allowing greater private investment, there does not appear to be private capital ready to fill the void caused by cuts to Rural Development programs. Owen Hart, from the National Association of Counties, pointed out that

[i]n a lot of these communities, USDA Rural Development is the most important partner. You can’t rely on private investment coming in. The market’s just not there for it. You can't rely on philanthropy, like you can in a lot of urban areas to meet some of these needs. It is a really, really crucial partner to a lot of these folks.

Without any clear benefits from slashing this vital economic lifeline besides nominal budgetary relief, the administration appears to be primarily sending a political message. USDA recently announced that it was allowing applicants for Rural Development's energy programs to update their applications by removing DEIA and climate-related content, which it framed as an 

opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals.

Ignoring the inefficiency of resubmitting already-submitted applications, this announcement shows that the political messaging of these changes is the point. USDA's emphasis on "energy independence" also indicates that the administration is ignoring or downplaying the many beneficial programs overseen by Rural Development that do not involve energy, such as grants and business support for small farmers. 

Punching down at rural areas by the Trump administration is not limited to USDA. The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households, many in more rural areas of the country, offset the cost of high energy bills. Much like the Rural Development cuts, the obvious impact of cutting the 25 staff at LIHEAP is that 6.2 million Americans who relied on those funds will struggle to make ends meet.

The frustratingly narrow focus on "energy independence" at USDA under the Trump administration seems particularly backwards when considering the strong support Trump received from many rural parts of this country - and his efforts to cast his campaign as advocating for rural people. One can more easily imagine a Republican administration wanting to promote its investments in rural farms and communities than risking the backlash associated with cutting those programs. 

One reason for these cuts is to reduce citizens' faith in, and reliance on, the federal government to provide benefits to the public. The administration's directive to reduce community outreach at Rural Development, even while outreach staff remain employed, reduces visibility for agency programming without saving any money. Instead, making communities less aware of the possible benefits of working with federal agencies is the point. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis recounts an illustrative scene in which a local official requested that USDA staff not show up to the ribbon-cutting for a new grocery store in his town that was built with Rural Development funds, because he said that people in town did not think highly of the federal government. 

(I highly recommend The Fifth Risk for further reading on USDA Rural Development, as well as other vital and under-appreciated areas of the federal government.)

Even if this administration succeeds in further reducing communities' faith in government, that success will not create more jobs or bring better internet access or hospitals to rural communities. Hopefully, in the same way that farmers are lobbying for relief from Trump's tariffs, there can be some political will to push back against these cuts. But unlike Big Ag, the people served by Rural Development are not already wealthy and politically influential. They need government support just to get by, or in the hopes of improving areas that have historically suffered from under-investment. Are these cuts truly worth the pain?