Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An update on alleged insurrection plans in far northern California

Jessica Garrison reports under the headline, "A far-right insurrection aims to take over this Northern California county, at the ballot box," for the Los Angeles Times.  This story follows up on a number of reports from January and February this year, when a local militia supported the successful recall of a Republican member of the County Board of Supervisors.  (You can find those and earlier stories about the county's and region's politics here, here, here and here, among others).

Here's the gist of the new story, which features something of a focus on gender and a faction's desire to keep women out of positions of authority in the county:

Far-right activists, including members of a local militia, led a successful recall campaign in February against a Republican supervisor. Now the newly formed "Liberty Committee" is backing a June 7 election slate of Crye and five other candidates to further consolidate power. The group’s website declares that “our country is under assault. It’s time to take it back, one state, county and city at a time.”

In recent months, county government has been in near chaos. Board meetings have been raucous, with anti-establishment activists screaming and threatening violence. Some county workers say they fear for their safety. Amid it all, an astronomical amount of money has flooded into local politics. Reverge Anselmo, a former Hollywood filmmaker turned vintner who abandoned the county after a bitter land-use dispute, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the recall and has given hundreds of thousands more this spring, including to the Liberty Committee, according to records.

In May, the new conservative majority on the Board of Supervisors fired the county’s health officer, Dr. Karen Ramstrom. Shortly after that, the county’s chief administrator, Matt Pontes, announced that he was leaving — but not before he told the local paper that one of the pro-recall supervisors, gun-store manager Patrick Jones, had been "blackmailing" him." Pontes could not be reached for comment. Jones said the allegation was a "total" lie, adding: "I asked him to take a polygraph, and he won’t do it."

The county’s voters now face a stark choice between the Liberty Committee's slate and the traditional Republican establishment. Though Shasta County is home to just 180,000 people, the election is being watched as a harbinger of rising radicalism in local government, particularly because the recall contingent has touted their playbook as a national model.

* * *  

Last month, Anselmo told a reporter from the Redding Record Searchlight that it was no accident that the committee is only backing men. Women tend to be too emotional and “squishy,” the paper reported Anselmo as saying. He did not respond to an email asking him to elaborate.

Shasta County is the second most populous county between Sacramento and the Oregon state line.  Though it's a metropolitan county, Shasta County covers a lot of territory and is sparsely populated; it's surrounded by nonmetro counties.  The region has long been referred to as the "State of Jefferson" based on its desire to secede from California and Oregon, an impulse that dates back to the days before WWII.  

If you thought private fire-fighting was a rich So Cal thing, you need to know what's happening in rural Nor Cal

Theo Whitcomb reports for the High Country News out of Siskiyou County, California, where Hmong pot farmers have established their own firefighting branch in the wake of this year's wildfires.  Here's an excerpt: 

In late June, lightning struck the western slope of Mount Shasta, a volcano in Northern California, igniting the Lava Fire. Four days later, gusting winds sent flames billowing towards the unincorporated community of Shasta Vista, where over 3,000 residents, predominantly Hmong Americans, live.

One resident, Neng Thong, who bought property there a year earlier, joined with 30 others to form a firefighting force. The community saw no choice; people no longer trusted the county or state to protect them. A seven-year crackdown on cannabis farming had eroded what little trust existed between the Hmong American community and county leaders. Thong believed the county would simply use the fire as an opportunity to clear the area. Others thought the county would implicitly approve the destruction of their property. Recently, vigilantes who’d fulminated against the subdivision on the sheriff’s Facebook page openly mentioned arson, with one user wondering whether it would be legal to start a fire. Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue, in a recent interview, brushed off the exchange, saying that the vitriol is “just kind of the way Facebook is.”

“They announced that they’re going to burn our town down,” Thong told me a month later, showing me a screenshot of the comment. “We wanted to save our property. If we hadn’t stayed, the entire area would’ve burned.”

An earlier post about these events is here, with a focus on the Hmong man who was shot by law enforcement.  

Another interesting angle on this is that wealthy communities have set up private fire fighting services in recent years in southern California, and wineries and tourist destinations are doing it in Sonoma and Napa counties.  But I wouldn't have expected it to happen in relatively poor Siskiyou County, where racial difference and attendant distrust seem to be the driving force.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXXXIII): "The Fine Line: Rural Justice, Public Health and Safety, and the Coronavirus Pandemic"

Professors Jennifer Sherman and Jennifer Schwartz of Washington State University recently published this article in American Behavioral Scientist.  The abstract follows: 

In this article, we provide an early glimpse into how the issues of public health and safety played out in the rural United States during the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on Washington State. We utilize a combination of news articles and press releases, sheriff’s department Facebook posts, publicly available jail data, courtroom observations, in-depth interviews with those who have been held in rural jails, and interviews with rural law enforcement staff to explore this theme. As elected officials, rural sheriffs are beholden to populations that include many who are suspicious of science, liberal agendas, and anything that might threaten what they see as individual freedom. At the same time, they expect local law enforcement to employ punitive measures to control perceived criminal activity in their communities. These communities are often tightly knit, cohesive, and isolated, with high levels of social support both for community members and local leaders, including sheriffs and law enforcement. This complex social context often puts rural sheriffs and law enforcement officers in difficult positions. Given the multiple cross-pressures that rural justice systems faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore the circumstances in which they attempted to protect and advocate for the health and safety of both their incarcerated and their nonincarcerated populations. We find that certain characteristics of rural communities both help and hinder local law enforcement in efforts to combat the virus, but these characteristics typically favor informal norms of social control to govern community health. Thus, rural sheriff’s departments repeatedly chose strategies that limited their abilities to protect populations from the disease, in favor of appearing tough on crime and supportive of personal liberty.

McClatchy feature on policing in rural California echoes my theorizing of law's relation to rurality

Most Wanted Poster
Trinity County, California, Courthouse, July 2018
Photos by Lisa R. Pruitt 

The headline is "Calling 911 in rural California?  Danger might be close, but the law can be hours away," and four Sacramento Bee journalists contributed to this major feature, which has been in the works since December, 2017.

I was gratified to see the story--which documents the reality (and consequences) of lack of effective law enforcement and high per capita violent crime rates in California's nonmetro counties.  To be clear, the news is bad, but I was gratified in that the story confirms work I have been doing for more than a decade now (some of it documented in this blog since September, 2007, 11 years ago this month).  That work has been theorizing the difference that rurality makes to law's operation and people's attitudes about law.  In other words, what is the legal relevance of rurality and, thus, why should legal scholars attend to rural difference?  why should "rural" be a category of analysis in the implicitly urbanormative field of law?

Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office, Yreka, California, July 2018
photos by Lisa R. Pruitt (c) 2018

Just a few years ago, I published a chapter on this issue in a volume of legal geography essays.  Mine was titled, "The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space."  My argument was that rural spatiality is in tension with law.  That is, the distance between homes and the distances that legal actors must traverse in order to exert law's authority--to make law meaningful--practically disables law.  Technology can help (that is, time can trump space), but it's costly and cannot always be a substitute for the presence of human law enforcement.  Further, rural residents' sense that they must be self sufficient is reinforced by this lived reality.  As academics express it, society, spatiality and law and all mutually constituting or co-constitutive.  If people know that legal actors such as law enforcement are effectively not present, then they know they must take care of themselves.  In a sense, the lack of efficacy of law promotes a sort of frontier justice or informal order.   

Now, the empirical work of these Bee journalists confirms my theorizing with hard data about the number of sheriffs deputies per 100 square miles in California counties--including those all across the state, not just in the northern third on which Sac Bee usually focuses.  These journalists also look at  violent crime rates, confirming that  many of the highest crime counties are "rural" according to the metric used by the reporters:  Alpine (with a population of just 1,175, the state's least populous county, in the eastern Sierra) and Lassen (in the northern Sierra) lead the pack.  Third is metropolitan San Joaquin County, home to Stockton.

Seal of Plumas County, Quincy, California

Plumas (again, northern Sierra) is next, followed by the state's most urban county, San Francisco, then nonmetro Inyo, Shasta, Lake and Modoc.  Of course with populations as low as those of many of these nonmetro counties, the violent crime count doesn't have to be very high to rise to the top of the per capita heap.  Indeed, it would be interesting to see data on deputy sheriff per 1000 residents vs deputy sheriff per 100 square miles.  How different would the map and rankings look then?  And which is the more salient metric?

The Bee story begins with information about a 2011 double murder in the Trinity County community of Kettenpom, nearer to Mendocino County than to Weaverville, the Trinity County seat.  In that case, Trinity County law enforcement asked the neighbors of a couple who called 911 to check in on that couple because sheriffs deputies coming from Weaverville were several hours away.  The incident ended badly, with the responding neighbors severely wounded and the assailant, who had killed the couple who initially called 911 by the time the responding neighbors arrived, also dead after a car chase.  The responding neighbors, Norma and Jim Gund, are suing the Trinity County Sheriff (in a case now going to the Supreme Court of California) and in the related story by journalist Ryan Sabalow observe, "Over here, we have to take care of ourselves."  Any trust they had in the sheriff's office has disappeared, the story reports.  (The separate story about this law suit is well worth a read, especially for legal eagles who will be interested in the arguments of the respective parties, including the assertion that the Gunds were effectively Posse Comitatus).

Another quote from this McClatchy feature similarly speaks powerfully to informal order.  The man quoted is one whom Modoc County Sheriff's deputies knew was growing marijuana illegally.  Yet when they stopped him in a remote locale, they made an effort to calm his anger rather than confront him with the marijuana infraction.  The story reports that the deputies planned to return later with reinforcements rather than risk the consequences of his ire when they stopped him in a vulnerable location.  The man who was stopped, identified as Roberts, told the reporter who was on a "ride along" with the deputies:

We have freedom with responsibility out here.  We can do a lot of stuff. These guys [sheriffs deputies] referee.

near North San Juan, Nevada County, July 2017 

Wow, law enforcement as referees for what residents want to do?  This is sounding like the wild west, indeed.  (As it happens, I am in the midst of reading about the wild west in Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, which features vignettes where vigilante justice takes over, much to the dismay of eastern transplants to places like Leadville, Colorado in the 19th century).

Bieber, California (Lassen County), July, 2018

These somewhat harrowing vignettes from Trinity and Modoc County aside, what I consider to be the story's lede contrasts rural with urban:

As urban areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno grapple with discussions about use of force and the over-policing of minority communities, the state’s rural counties face a growing and no-less-serious law enforcement crisis: a severe shortage of staff that puts the public — and deputies — in danger. 

A McClatchy investigation found that large stretches of rural California — where county sheriffs are the predominant law enforcement agencies and towns often run only a few blocks — do not have enough sworn deputies to provide adequate public safety for the communities they serve.

Elsewhere the story provides this illustration, again contrasting rural and urban:

Del Norte Courthouse, Crescent City, July 2018  

While the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department employs nearly 160 deputies for every 100 square miles it covers, the tiny sheriff’s departments in Madera, Mariposa and Mendocino counties employ about four deputies for the same amount of turf. In Del Norte and Alpine, the counties make do with two deputies per 100 square miles.

Those figures include non-patrol personnel and those who work in county jails. 

Also, consider the role that the phenomena of distance and personnel shortage played in this tragic story out of Tehama County last fall.  Perhaps these Rancho Tehama events gave the Bee journalists the idea for this story.

Tehama County Sheriff's Office, Red Bluff, California, July 2018

The McClatchy story features a color-coded map that shows the number of law enforcement officers per 100 square miles (again, what would it look like if deputies per 1000 residents?).  It reminds me of maps I have helped to produce here showing lawyers per capita in California counties.  Guess what? As with law enforcement officials, nonmetro counties have shortages of lawyers.

Another interesting theme/revelation in the story is that no deputy actively patrols in some counties, e.g., Mendocino, for some parts of the night, though deputies are on call from their homes.  When I wrote something similar on Legal Ruralism about my home town in Arkansas a few years ago (see here, here and here), students in my Law and Rural Livelihoods class were shocked to imagine a place with no law enforcement on duty 24-7, yet it is happening here in California, too.

A third interesting theme:  population churn in rural areas, partly driven by low cost of living, has had an impact on how rural communities are policed:

Tex Dowdy, the sheriff-elect of Modoc County, said an influx of transient residents drawn to the low cost of living has made identifying suspects harder for Modoc’s deputies. 

The story quotes Dowdy: 

It isn’t the same place where we used to live.  You used to recognize the bad guy walking around the street because he was in the paper every week.

Alturas, California (Modoc County) July 2018

Note the lack of anonymity theme, about which I have written a great deal in the last decade, including here and here.  The sheriff basically confirmed what I have argued:  in rural counties, the "usual suspects" is as powerful a type of profiling as racial profiling, if not more so (and, of course, the two can overlap).

A fourth interesting theme--one also  articulated in my academic writing--is that some people seek our rurality for the privacy and effective seclusion from law that it provides.  (Think Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in rural Montana).  These folks are unlikely to call on law enforcement even when they need it.  Regarding this proposition, the story quotes Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal in relation to this phenomenon:

Things go on in the hills all around us that go unreported.  We know that. Daily. It happens. It’s something that we’ve just gotten used to. There are shootings that occur in the middle of the night. ... We know that there’s kidnappings, we know there are people getting brutalized out in the hills, we know there are people getting robbed.

Honsal's quote reminded me of this feature by Reveal last fall, which I blogged about here, regarding wage theft and sexual abuse of "trimmigrants" in places like Humboldt and Trinity County.  Of course, immigration status can also make people reluctant to report a crime, a particular concern in places like the San Joaquin Valley.  The Chief Justice of California has, for that reason, criticized ICE for any presence in California courthouses.

A fifth theme relates to budgets, cuts to which have undermined a prior practice of deputizing people who lived in the remote reaches of a given county:

Until recent years, many rural departments had regional substations and hired “resident deputies” who lived in the remote areas they served. Those resident deputies knew their territories and most of the locals by name, making it harder for crime to go unnoticed, said multiple sheriffs. Resident deputies also allowed for quicker response times. 

Those in need “just come and knock on your door,” said Modoc’s Poindexter. “You just grab your gun belt and go out the door and try to fix it.”

July 2018, Bieber, California (far northern Lassen County),
a sheriff station at the local school, which is closer to Alturas, in Modoc 
County,  than to Susanville, the Lassen County seat.

Indeed, in my recent drive up California 299 from Burney (Shasta County) to Alturas (Modoc County), I saw a sign indicating such a remote outpost of the Lassen County Sheriff's office in Bieber, which is near the Modoc County line and also not far from Shasta County.   Yet it is technically in Lassen County, and how interesting that the Lassen Sheriff's substation should be at the school, of all places. (More photos from that journey are here and here with more to come in future posts on access to justice in rural California).  A few years ago, I also photographed a Siskiyou County Sheriff's substation in Dunsmuir.  Though it is at the southern edge of the county, it is hardly remote given its locale on I-5.

Siskiyou County Sheriff's
Substation, Dunsmuir July 2016

Another aspect of the economic situation is the inability of counties to tax public lands, both federal and state.  The story explains:

The state compensates counties for protected lands, too, but that funding has been controversial and even less predictable. Since the 2015-2016 budget cycle, the state has given rural counties $644,000 for payments in total each year to be divided among them, said state Sen. Mike McGuire, whose coastal district spans seven counties from Marin to the Oregon border.

 * * *  

“You can’t sustain an operating budget not knowing what is coming,” said Justin Caporusso, vice president of external affairs at the Rural County Representatives of California, an advocacy group. 

I have written previously here and here of the constraints that lack of tax revenue on federal lands place on local governments in rural areas, especially in the West, which has a much greater percentage of public lands than the rest of the country.  The impact of shrinking federal dollars on law enforcement in Southern Oregon has attracted media attention in recent years.  As for that state contribution, less than $700K/year spread among seven counties is pretty pitiful,  even in the context of a paltry rural budget. 

Sign on Sierra County Courthouse,
Downieville, California, July 2017

A sixth theme is that the state practice of re-alignment (re: prisons and local jails) has not served nonmetro counties well.  The Bee story includes a few interesting quotes to illustrate the conundrum re-alignment has created for county law enforcement.

Sierra County Courthouse and Jail, Downieveille, July 2017

A seventh theme is the lack of mental health support.

Rural counties have 0.9 psychiatrists for every 10,000 residents, about half the statewide average, according to California Medical Board data. Mariposa has been experimenting with “tele-doc” video technology to connect jail inmates with mental-health professionals in other counties.

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article215453050.html#storylink=cpy

Of course, telemedicine is being used to provide mental health and other services in rural counties generally, and not only to incarcerated populations.

Weaverville, California (Trinity County) CHP headquarters
is adjacent to the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.  Perhaps this sign
responds to the reality that rural residents are known to
report crime at lower rates than urban residents,
even when the perpetrator is a stranger.

An eighth theme regards reliance on other law enforcement agencies, including not just California Highway Patrol, but also both federal and state game and fish officers.

USDA Forest Service vehicle, Weaverville, California, July 2018 

Back to the budget/economics note, I'll close with this stunning data point:  rookie deputies in Modoc County earn $13/hour!  I assume baristas in Los Angeles are paid better than that, especially if you take into account tips.

Cross-posted to UC Davis Faculty Blog.

Crime and law enforcement in rural Alaska's native communities

After watching "Incident at Oglala" -- the documentary showcasing the tensions and events surrounding the 1975 shootout between a group of Native Americans and two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation -- I became interested in the unique challenges faced by Native American rural communities with regard to law enforcement. I stumbled upon several articles discussing the lack of a strong law enforcement presence in rural areas of Alaska. Rural Alaska has the worst crime statistics in the United States. Native American communities in rural Alaska experience the highest rates of domestic violence. Moreover, Alaska is the rape capital of the country, with rape occurring at three times the national average.

Alaska's high crime statistics are exacerbated by spatiality. 229 of the country's 566 recognized tribes are located in Alaska, most of them in Alaska's "Bush" regions -- the areas of Alaska not connected to the road or ferry systems. Most of the areas in the Bush that are not accessible by roads can be reached only by a small airplane, while locals typically travel by snowmobile, dogsled, and boat.

Associate Attorney General Tony West recently stated that "there are places in rural Alaska that if a woman is raped or a child is beaten, that victim might not get any help whatsoever...it can take a day and a half before responders show up to the scene of a crime or to a call for help." Because they have no police and few courts of their own, Alaskan natives in the Bush regions largely rely on state troopers, who are few and far between. Moreover, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers stated that the terrain and distance between troopers and rural areas delay responses to crime reports. As a result, locals are often forced to take matters into their own hands before law enforcement officials arrive to a crime scene. For example, when a 13-year-old native Tlingit girl named Mackenzie Howard was beaten to death in rural Kake last February, a villager gathered other locals to guard Howard's body and the crime scene before troopers from arrived from Juneau, 114 miles away. In other towns, locals have been forced to lock suspects in closets or handcuff them until law enforcement officials arrive.

Moreover, the lack of a strong law enforcement presence in rural areas of Alaska perpetuates crime. Perpetrators are less likely to fear the consequences of their crimes and are more likely to get away with them. As Mackenzie Howard's mother stated, "[p]eople don't really fear the law here." Some native Alaskans believe that the remoteness of law enforcement from rural areas also attracts criminals.  

Something that stood out to me while reading the articles on crime in rural Alaska was what appears to be a strong feeling of resentment on the part of native Alaskans to the delayed response of law enforcement officials (or, in some cases, their lack of response). Multiple native Alaskans have expressed a common sentiment among communities in the Bush regions -- that they only feel the full force of law enforcement when somebody commits a hunting or fishing violation. As one villager stated, "[t]he fastest way to get law enforcement here is to shoot a moose." 

This resentment toward and distrust of law enforcement in native Alaskan communities reminds me of the tensions surrounding the incident on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Here, as there, the native communities have been forced rely on themselves for maintaining some sense of order, as seen with the creation of ad hoc law enforcement teams to guard crime scenes and evidence. Moreover, as on the Pine Ridge Reservation, many residents of rural Alaskan communities feel the need for self-protection with the lack of nearby police and troopers. For example, in the wake of the Howard murder, several residents of Kake began carrying guns with them. Furthermore, as with the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s, the violence and crime in rural Alaska is not eliciting a sufficient response from law enforcement or the government at large. After all, what brought Pine Ridge Reservation to the attention of many Americans was the fact that two outsiders, FBI agents, were killed in the midst of a shootout -- not the fact that Pine Ridge had the highest rates of violent crime in the United States at the time. Will the violent crime in rural Alaska similarly go largely unnoticed and unaddressed? Are conditions in the Bush regions ripe for another Pine Ridge incident?

For more information on challenges faced by rural Alaskans with regard to spatial isolation and self-reliance, click here (discussing the difficulty of delivering medical services to rural Alaskans).

What do MF Global and ranchers in Kansas have to do with one another?

Well, according to this NPR story, many farmers and ranchers "were major clients of MF Global, buying futures contracts to hedge against swings in the value of their crops and livestock." More than a billion dollars of the cash of MF Global's clients was declared missing when the giant trading company went belly up a few weeks ago. Journalist Lynn Neary interviewed rancher Tim Rietzke, who has spent some time trying to reach MF Global by phone to determine the status of his funds that were held in a brokerage account there.

Rietzke is a well-spoken rancher from nonmetropolitan Comanche County, Kansas, population 1,891. In particular, Neary introduced him as from the county seat, Coldwater, population 828. Rietzke explained the consequences of his missing $30,000 that was being held by MF Global:

Well, much like a household budget, if you had $30,000 in the bank and all of a sudden that money disappeared, it would change your personal life. And it changes your business life much the same. Let's say in the ranching business you wanted to buy some replacement females or breeding stock or a pickup, now you're not sure what should I do. I don't want to put myself in a bind and have to borrow more money.

Also striking to me was Rietzke's response to Neary's question about the size of his operation. He answered instead with this description of where he lives:

Of course, we're prejudiced, but we think we have a beautiful ranch. The cattle are handled just like they were a lot of years ago, all by horseback. Really, I guess if you came out here, you would think that you had gone back in time, but in our county, there are only 1,900 people. There is no stoplight. It's an hour to fast food any direction. It's an hour to Wal-Mart in any direction, but we like that.

That strikes me as quite an expression of rural attachment to place.

The next long quote from Rietzke's suggests something akin to the informal order and general absence of law typically associated with rural places, with the final bit suggesting discomfort with the web of fiscal globalization that links his life to Wall Street and European debt.

[A]lot of people out here still do business with a handshake. So in other words, I'm going to buy hay from somebody and he said, okay, I'll see you hay for $100 a ton and you shake hands, they deliver the hay and you write them a check.

And I don't need to give him down money. I don't need to write a contract. And there's still an enormous amount of business done in our area just like that. So this is really a different part of the world.  When I had a hedge account to protect my prices, I didn't want to invest in European sovereign debt.  I didn't want to invest in MF Global.  I had nothing to do with their business.

Mind your manners, please

I'll be the first to admit, whether it's the classic "Gone with the Wind" or the romantic comedy "Sweet Home Alabama," I can see the charm of a chivalrous Southern beau pursuing his beloved Southern belle. Part of the charm, I imagine, largely involves the "chivalry" aspect. Southern hospitality has been a concept that describes the politeness, deference, and civility characteristic of rural regions. But is this traditional Southern civility disappearing? As this New York Times article suggests, it's quite possible Southern manners are declining. Historically, Southerners enforced strict rules regarding "courtesy and deference" as a means of enforcing "social order in which women and blacks were considered less than full citizens." Against the backdrop of the Jim Crow era, the "code" of "hyper-politeness" smoothed "the edges of a harsh racial system" between black and whites. As the racial tensions slowly faded, the courtesy and manners remained. Southerners have worked to maintain that cultural marker of civility. But as Charles Reagan Wilson, professor of history and Southern culture at the University of Mississippi notes, proper manners are declining in the South:

Manners are one of many things that are central to a Southerner’s identity, but they are not primary anymore. Things have eroded.

And many Southerners blame the erosion of civility on newcomers. Between 2000 and 2010, the population in the South increased 14.3 percent. This unprecedented immigration influx from other states and countries makes the South the fastest growing region in the country. Many of these "newcomers" are largely "outsiders trying to escape the pressures of life in bigger cities," according to media specialist Saahara Glaude.

The "outsiders" from the big cities, however, don't necessarily take on "Southern identities" too quickly, if at all. As second grade teacher Dana Mason of Birmingham observes, part of it might have to do with the overall faster-paced lifestyle and the "demise of the home-cooked family meal." But in her 36 years of teaching, she observes manners are at their lowest level yet in her classroom. Parents who move to the South tell her outright they don't want their children saying "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'am" because it's "too demeaning."

In addition to the burgeoning ranks of newcomers to the South, scholars attribute the social shift to technology and globalization. As digital communication accelerates the access to information, the South has become less insular. Whereas in the past taking the time to add the proper "thank you" and "please" seemed appropriate, modern communication streamlines the process and eliminates the need for formal etiquette. Formal salutation in a text message, for example, would seem out of place.

The declining civility in the South might not altogether be so bad, however. When it comes to politics, Southerners such as Nathalie Dupree actually appreciate that "we are now more willing to say what we think" rather than beat around the bush for the sake of politeness.

Perhaps the decline of manners in the South is inevitable, but some Southerners hold on to the belief that civility and politeness will remain a unique characteristic of the region. Dorothy McLeod is one of them. She has taught thousands of children in her program, Social Inc., ballroom dancing and proper etiquette to combat the modern family of two working parents with no time to teach it themselves. For the rest of us, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to say "thank you" and "please" more often.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part LXXXV): If a tree falls in the forest ...

An old saying queries, "if a tree falls in the forest and no on hears it, does it make a noise?" A law and order analogy to this adage might be, "If a law is on the books, but no one enforces it, is it a law?" I was reminded of this reality recently by an editorial in my hometown newspaper, the Newton County Times (August 17, 2011). The editorial was cleverly titled, "It's time to bite the dogs." It's a play on the old newspaper phrase, "Man bites dog," which is often used as a metaphor for an "unusual, infrequent event that is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary occurrence (such as dog bites man)."

The editorial tells of a recent dog-bite incident in Jasper--a dog of unknown origin bit a girl in the face, requiring stitches in her lip and nose. The girl's parents, the editorial reports, intend to attend the next City Council meeting to draw attention to the incident, ask the community for support, and explore what can be done to prevent similar incidents in the future. According to a letter to the editor by the girl's parents, the city of Jasper has a 20-year-old leash law, but it has never been enforced. According to Police Chief Pete DeChant the city has only a "policy" of requiring dogs to be leashed in Bradley Park, though no provision is made for its enforcement. Whatever the state of written law, the editorial notes that neither Jasper nor Newton County has an animal control division in its law enforcement--which isn't terribly surprising given that the city doesn't even have an officer on duty round the clock, and the sheriff's office is stretched to cover the entire county.

The editorial nevertheless calls for more attention--and resources--to animal control. Acknowledging the cost of training and paying people to enforce animal control laws--assuming an enforceable ordinance were passed--the editor nevertheless calls for a change in "attitude ...for the health and safety of our community." I was heartened to read in his column of the prior efforts to address these issues. Among these is the work of a non-profit group, Newton County Animal Services, which seeks animal control solutions. Among other things, it has advocated spaying and neutering. The group has sought the assistance of the Quorum Court in the past--seeking a donation of land where a clinic could be built to accommodate visiting veterinarians to provide these services. To date, the Quorum Court has only permitted the group to use fairgrounds facilities for these low cost clinics, which are held a couple of times a year and also provide rabies vaccination services. Residents concerned about roaming dogs attacking their pets have met with the prosecuting attorney and sheriff, going so far as to present laws other communities have adopted to deal with such animal control issues. Still, public officials have failed to take the proverbial bull by the horns--presumably because these issues are seen as a low priority.

Consideration of these events and challenges in the context of impoverished, sparsely populated Newton County, population 8,311, makes me wonder if local officials essentially cede animal control to the "informal order" often associated with rural communities. Of course, to some extent, law enforcement must also cede many other issues that implicate human welfare (like drug manufacture and myriad other crimes) to informal order because money and space so limit what they can do. It is also a reminder of a service that city dwellers may take for granted, but about which rural residents can only dream.

The wild west in our backyard.

The sinister murder of City Councilman Jere Melo in Fort Bragg several weeks ago highlights what has become a serious public safety issue, which also has environmental health implications. Melo was murdered in a remote area of Mendocino County by a marijuana grower squatting on forest land. Melo’s job was to manage thousands of acres of forest, and he was on location investigating reports of illegal pot growing on that land when he was killed.

The rural economy in Northern California is inextricably tied to the marijuana industry. Marijuana has become a major cash crop in areas where a once hearty forestry and fishing industry was the backbone of a robust rural economy. For example, some news sources report that marijuana accounts for two-thirds of the Mendocino County economy.

While much of the marijuana growing in California is tied to the legal medical industry, certain types of illicit grows create monumental environmental and public safety problems. One of the greatest concerns surrounding the industry regards the illegal large-scale growth of marijuana in California’s national parks. These grows pose major environmental hazards, as they often correlated with toxic dumping, illegal water diversions, and hazardous pesticides.

As a recent article on this subject in Legal Planet points out, marijuana industry is a hot button issue among California’s residents. This is true among California's rural populations too. Many locals whose families have been in the area logging or fishing for generations are outraged as outsiders move into rural areas to claim a stake in the burgeoning industry. These outsiders are often from out of state altogether. Many such locals are vehemently opposed to the marijuana industry. Other rural residents have begun growing marijuana as traditional forms of income have become harder to survive on.

For the last several decades, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) has carried out raids, flying helicopters over sites in Northern California in search of illegal grows. Until recently, CAMP was known as a force that would terrorize small “mom and pop” farms. Many rural residents grew to dread the sound of CAMP helicopters in the summer sky.

However, recently the campaign has shifted focus to an issue which rural residents unanimously support. That focus, the New York Times reports, is the eradication of illegal grows in “state, county and federal parks, which Mexican drug cartels and other large-scale growers have found to be excellent locations for illicit farms, the authorities say.” These are the type of grows that Melo was investigating when he was murdered.

However, drastic budget cuts this last year threaten to undermine the state’s major mechanism for eradicating these dangerous grows.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has vowed to keep financing its part of the program, but since CAMP is operated by the state, the state’s money appears crucial for it to continue. CAMP’s 2010 operations cost taxpayers more than $3 million. . . .The state budget for 2012 cuts $71 million from the Division of Law Enforcement, including the narcotics bureau.

While the issue of illicit marijuana grows in national parks has not received much attention in major media news until recently, law and order types and rural residents, have been aware of the problem for quite some time.

At the 2009 California Bar Association’s Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite, an entire panel and afternoon hike was focused on educating the public about the extent of, and hazards associated with, the problem. Led by a park warden and an officer from the California Department of Fish and Game, the panel highlighted both the environmental degradation and the safety issues posed by these grows. Squatters in Yosemite have been caught poaching animals, damming creeks to create reservoirs filled with pesticides long-banned in the United States, and with illicit firearms.

While Californians, rural and urban alike, agree that large scale marijuana grows on forest lands pose a serious problem that needs to be addressed, they do not agree on the best methods for doing so. Some argue that the only solution for stopping illegal grows is to legalize marijuana. Others are vehemently opposed to this option and believe that illicit grows will continue and, even increase, if marijuana is legalized. Regardless of how the problem is tackled, the tragic death of Jere Melo highlights the urgent need to address the issue.

More on meth in Missouri

I've blogged a lot about meth in rural places, including in Missouri, this past year. The Missouri focus was driven largely by the attention I have given to the film "Winter's Bone," including here, here, here and here. Now, the New York Times reports today from Ellsinore, Missouri, population 373. The headline for A. J. Sulzberger's story is "Drugs in Ozarks Town Infects Even Sheriff's Department." Sulzberger tells the story of Tommy Adams, the man who was county sheriff for two years until his recent arrest for dealing in methamphetamine. Though the story details events leading up to Adams' arrest, the focus of the story is less the lawman-turned-bad theme than on the community's response. Sulzberger writes:

But in this long-struggling community in southeastern Missouri where distrust of law enforcement has always run deep, the story of a sheriff enabling the scourge he was supposed to fight has not provoked outrage. Rather, many local residents are accepting it, even sympathetically, as another disappointing chapter in what they see as a hopeless fight.

* * *

People recognize the symptoms of use in neighbors but, reflecting a culture of fierce independence, say nothing.

“We all know who does what, how they do it and when they do it,” said David Bowman, a school maintenance worker who is the mayor of Ellsinore. “You just turn your head and go on.”

Sulzberger notes that Missouri leads the nation in the number of meth labs discovered. "[T]hroughout the Ozarks," he writes, "the drug has metastasized."

Ellsinore is in Carter County, population 5,894, a persistent poverty county in southeast Missouri. Just two-thirds of residents have a high school diploma, and only 11% have a college degree. The poverty rate exceeds 25%. See more demographic information about the county here, all of which arguably helps explain why meth has such a strong hold there.

Rural neighbors and property disputes

Read this interesting post called "Lawyers Cringe when Neighbors Fight." The true story is out of Texas County, Missouri, population 24,568. Don't miss the "What was accomplished" part near the end of the post. So much for the idea that informal order--not law--is the arbiter of choice in rural places.

This post is the work of Southwest Missouri lawyer, Harry Styron, who reveals here that the has roots in Newton County, Arkansas, my home. His post about Donald Harington's death, which I blogged about here, is also worth a read.

Styron's blog is called "Ozarks Law & Economy," and the subtitle is especially interesting to me because it echoes so many themes from our law and rural livelihoods course: "How people, businesses and nature compete."

A town finally starts to question "who(really)dunnit"?

Shaila Dewan's story in yesterday's New York Times was particularly interesting to me for two reasons. One was that it depicted an interesting example--and perhaps a typical one--of what might be viewed as an essentially nonmetropolitan response to a sensational crime. The other is that I was living in Arkansas when the crime occurred, and I followed the day-to-day coverage from a somewhat local perspective.

The crime in question was the murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in May, 1993. The boys were found "hog-tied" and naked. One reportedly died from loss of blood, the other two from drowning. Three teenagers were subsequently convicted of the murders. Known as the West Memphis Three, they have increasingly become a cause celebre, as evidence of their innocence has accumulated.

The current population of West Memphis is 28,092, and that for Crittenden County is about 50,000. But West Memphis is part of the Memphis, TN-AR-MS metropolitan area, which doesn't sound very rural. Nevertheless, Dewan calls it a "town small enough for only a degree or two of separation." More interesting from a law and order perspective--as well as a jurisprudential one--Dewan observes: "Questioning the results of the trial, some residents said, is tantamount to questioning the local police, prosecutors and judges, and can feel like disloyalty to the victims." Now those are some serious consequences to the lack of anonymity and informal order that tend to characterize nonmetropolitan places.

Dewan observes a "strong urge to move on" among locals, offering this quote from city councilwoman Ramona Taylor in support of that observation:

People felt comfortable that the problem was resolved, and this was an anomaly. It was not representative of our community or of our youth.

But Dewan also quotes another resident who says "she becomes angry every time she reads about the West Memphis Three — who, she points out, were not even from West Memphis, but the next town." Yet another resident says she "believes that the convictions were wrong" but is "wary of speaking her mind" given the “polarizing” nature of the issue.

Dewan also puts all of this in socio-economic and racial context: "residents have other preoccupations, including poverty and tensions between black residents and the West Memphis Police Department." Indeed, Crittenden County is a rare entity in two senses. One is that it is almost exactly half Black and half White. It is also rare in that it is a persistent poverty county that is metropolitan. All three victims and all three teens convicted were white.

The final paragraph of Dewan's story quotes a local resident as saying, "I bet if you polled three-fourths of West Memphis ... they would say those boys [the West Memphis Three] had nothing to do with it.”

So is there something rural or quasi-rural in how West Memphis responded--and continues to respond--to the murders of these children? Or would we expect the same response from any other American locale to such a horrific crime?

When it comes to clotheslines debate, old timers and environmentalists make strange bedfellows

Read Ian Urbina's story in today's New York Times, "Debate Follows Bill to Remove Clothesline Ban." The dateline is Canton, Ohio, which at population 76,738, is not a rural or nonmetropolitan place, though this story may nevertheless have a rural angle. The quote that follows is from Canton resident Jill Saylor:

I figured trailer parks were the one place left where hanging your laundry was actually still allowed,” she said, standing in front of her tidy yellow mobile home on an impeccably manicured lawn.

But she was wrong. Like the majority of the 60 million people who now live in the country’s roughly 300,000 private communities, Ms. Saylor was forbidden to dry her laundry outside because many people viewed it as an eyesore, not unlike storing junk cars in driveways, and a marker of poverty that lowers property values.

So, I hadn't thought much about trailer parks being "private communities," but indeed they are. What I have thought (and written) some about is clotheslines in relation to rurality. Read my earlier post here. Urbina's story even hints at the link with this comment: "Driven in part by the same nostalgia that has restored the popularity of canning and private vegetable gardens, the right-to-dry movement has spawned an eclectic coalition." That coalition includes younger, pro-environment folks and "older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer.”

In any event, this story reminds me of the lesser degree of regulation (public or private) associated with rural places. That lack of regulation--often reflecting an enhanced respect for private property--can result in junk cars and such not only in driveways, but in yards. Such attitudes would seem to make clotheslines less a bone of contention in rural places, but maybe not. Urbina mentions that, in Verona, Mississippi, population 3,334, one neighbor shot and killed another last year in a dispute over none other than a clothesline!

A dearth of lawyers in rural Japan

A story in today's NYT comments on the concentration of Japanese lawyers (50%) in Tokyo -- and their accompanying shortage in rural Japan. The dateline is Yakumo, a small city of almost 20,000 within a legal district of about 50,000. Journalist Norimitsu Onishi reports that it is not unusual for cities five times that size to have not a single lawyer.

When a lawyer arrived in Yakumo pursuant to a national campaign to increase the number of lawyers in the hinterland, residents were slow to notice him. Here's an excerpt about the town's new lawyer, Katsumune Hirai:

He was perplexed that, so far, few had come to him for advice on handling debts, the biggest source of work for lawyers right now. “Tokyo’s economy is doing well these days,” said Mr. Hirai, a baby-faced 33-year-old who has been practicing law for four years. "* * * The economy’s very weak in the countryside, so we see a great number of consultations nationwide about debts, especially from people with highly urgent matters.”

So far, Mr. Hirai mostly deals with land disputes, and he speculates that before he set up his office here, these clients would have sought counsel in a larger city or "resigned themselves to their fate." The story echoes questions I have earlier raised here: what happens in rural places where lawyers are unavailable? Do people resolve disputes on their own? take matters into their own hands, as through self help?

The story also reports on Japan's goal, as reflected in the new lawyer's presence in Yakumo. The report indicates that increasing the number of lawyers is part of wider judicial reforms. Other measures have included the founding of 74 law schools in the past four years. The current system, purusant to which only 3 % of those who take the national bar exam pass it, will be abolished in 2011.

The Japanese government had expected the country to have 3,000 new lawyers by 2010, but the bar pass rate has not been as high as it anticipated so that goal will likely be unmet.

Another (related) question that occurs to me is what, exactly, Japan is trying to accomplish by making lawyers more accessible throughout the nation. More litigation or less? Presumably it does not wish to foment conflict. The story reports that the clients who came to see the new lawyer on a recent day were embarrassed at doing so. Mr Hirai indicates that his goal of dispelling such shame is why he established his office in such a prominent place in the town:

After all, this is a small town * * * Because I’m right in front of the train station, everybody will know if a person came to this office. If I’d settled instead in a more secluded part of town, people might think that this is a shady business after all, and that I’m a bad guy.

But is this embarrassment about consulting a lawyer a Japanese thing? or is it about being rural and priding themselves on being able to sort out such conflicts on their own, as research indicates is the case in the U.S.? Does informal order exist in these rural places--an informal order the Japanese government hopes to replace by making legal advice more accessible? Or is providing the lawyers about assisting residents in relatively remote areas to navigate their conflicts with larger institutions, such as creditors, with whom informal resolution is not viable?

Fighting Fires in Rural California

The tragic fires in California have been burning for a coupla' weeks now, and many of us in The Golden State have experienced at least minor consequences, e.g., bad air, from them. While wildfires in the West are often associated with rural places and exurbia, we do occasionally hear of evacuations from cities, such as that from the Goleta/Santa Barbara area a few days ago.

This morning 's New York Times gives us a different angle on fires in the rural West. It is the tale of the volunteer fire departments in tiny Elk and Comptche struggling to stave off fires in hard-hit Mendocino County, California with very little government assistance. (Both Elk and Comptche are wide spots in the road that don't even merit entries on U.S. Census Bureau website, but are noted on wikipedia, which lists Elk's population as 208).

Here's an excerpt from Carol Pogash's story:

When he spotted a small fire two weeks ago atop a steep hill outside this blocklong town, Charlie Acker, 57, the president of the local school board and a volunteer firefighter, jumped inside his stubby red 1965 fire truck and, with a skid and a prayer, drove up the nearly vertical incline to check out the situation.

Knowing that every other volunteer firefighter in this community of 100 residents was battling a larger blaze nearby, he used his cellphone to call his wife. She roused a crew of young kayakers who cater to tourists in this picturesque old logging town at the edge of the Pacific, some 140 miles north of San Francisco, and joined Mr. Acker on the line.

CalFire, the state fire agency, had promised to send a helicopter, but it ultimately was sent instead "to a higher rent district." When Acker sought more firefighters, he got 13 state prison inmates.

Pogash's story plays up not only the resourcefulness of these volunteers, but also the sense of community -- or gemeinschaft --associated with rural places. Pogash notes the contributions of local stations that let fire engines run tabs for gasoline; restaurants, caterers, and a market that provided free meals for firefighters; a hardware store that donated supplies; and landscapers that carried away brush at no charge. Locals donated more than $4,000 in cash to the effort, and many also participated in the effort in a hands-on way, with rakes and shovels.

Pogash writes:

Residents expressed both pride and shock that they mostly had to fend for themselves. “This community of rugged individualists pulling together is part of the reason we love where we live,” said Deborah Cahn, who with her family owns Navarro Vineyards. “But isn’t this what government is supposed to do?”

Now there's a rarity--at least in rural mythology: a rural resident invoking the need and desire for government assistance. Perhaps as owner of an upmarket winery, Cahn is not what I call a "traditional" rural resident. She may be a relative newcomer who does not share the anti-government attitudes typically associated with rurality. Indeed, it is possible that there are so few traditional rural folks in pockets of California, particularly these so close to the coast, that self-reliance is not so great a value there. Nevertheless, residents of Elk and Comptche certainly showed they could be self-reliant in a way that served not only their individual interests, but those of the entire community.