Perry County, Alabama declares "Barack Obama Day"

NPR reported this evening that the commissioners of Perry County (AL), population 11,861, have voted to institute Barack Obama Day as a county holiday. It will be celebrated each second Monday of November.

Brett Tannehill of Alabama Pubic Radio explains that the community, which lies in the so-called Black Belt, was central to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Further, 72.3% of the county's voters supported Obama in the race for President. Nevertheless, one county commissioner voted against the holiday. He explained that he opposed it because of the expense to the county.

According to the 2000 Census, 68% of Perry County's residents are black. The county seat is Marion, population 3,511.

Given the lack of a personal link to Obama--that is, he was not born or raised in Perry County-- it's interesting that the county would take this step. It strikes me as the sort of the strictly local action most likely to happen in a relatively homogeneous rural place, although it also seems possible that there might some day be a national Barack Obama Day.

A green revolution in the heartland

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I recently wrote a short paper about Greensburg, Kansas, a small town that was almost entirely destroyed by a tornado in May of 2007. It is hard to overstate the destruction this town faced. The real story, though, is how the town decided to rebuild: by becoming the greenest town in America. Like many small towns, Greensburg was losing population, especially young people, before the tornado. After its renewal effort, though, the town has a new sense of purpose and hopes to keep and attract residents. The following is some excerpts from my paper illustrating the destruction and the rebuilding:

"The tornado that destroyed Greensburg was part of a massive system of tornados that hit the plains Midwest. Recent research found that 22 storms in total struck roughly within the same time period. The death toll reached eleven, mercifully small considering the incredible destruction. A warning had sounded throughout the town twenty minutes before the tornado hit. One resident described how the local convenience store owner pulled her and several others into the store’s cooler after the alarm sounded. When they emerged, the building around them had collapsed.

In the days and first few weeks after the tornado, it was not clear the town would survive. It was an open question whether older residents and those with young children had the time or resources to rebuild after this level of devastation. As one survivor noted, a town without schools or medical facilities would be a hard place to raise a child. In the end, 95% of the buildings in town, including over 900 homes, were destroyed. The history of whole-town reconstruction is complicated, and not universally happy.
…………..

Three months after the tornado hit, Greensburg published its “Long-Term Community Recovery Plan”. Created in conjunction with the office of Governor Kathleen Sebelius and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the 86 page plan describes no less than 21 discrete goals, most with sub-goals. They reflect both the basic needs of the town (“rebuild medical and emergency service facilities”) as well as its ambitious vision (“prepare a sustainable comprehensive plan”). The citizens of Greensburg took an active role in developing the plan. The town held four meetings to solicit input and feedback, with attendance averaging 400 (more than a quarter of the total population).

A little after the one-year anniversary of the tornado, the Greensburg city council adopted the Sustainable Comprehensive Master Plan. The Master Plan describes in detail the new ethos the town is committed to. All new city building will be built following the LEED Standards for sustainable building. The residents themselves are being helped to rebuild their homes and businesses according to similar sustainable criteria. Development is planned in a way to cut down on driving and encourage a walk-able community. The city is even setting the groundwork for generating its own renewable energy, with the goal to power the entire city with this new energy."

Greensburg’s efforts raise a lot of interesting questions about local government, rural culture, and environmentalism. I’ll save those for other posts. For now, check out their website. What this town is doing is really impressive. I, for one, think it is amazing that a small town on the plains of Kansas is the cutting edge of sustainability. I hope you find their story as inspiring as I do. Here's a link.

A cabinet post for culture, but would it include the rural variety?

William R. Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, makes an interesting proposal in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times. It begins:

IN 1935, as part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration, which reached out to rural families as they struggled during the Depression. Roy Stryker, who oversaw the agency’s photo documentary program, captured the strength of American culture in the depths of the country’s despair. The photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks showed us both the pain of America and the resilience of its people.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson drew on his Texas roots when he created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, organizations that share America’s arts and humanities with the American people.

In part because of Ferris's role in studying Southern culture and in part because of these opening paragraphs mentiong rurality, I thought his proposal might be particularly attuned to rural and/or Southern culture. I guess I am looking pretty hard for signs that someone is thinking about rural America as we prepare for the inauguration of a very cosmopolitan President and his incredibly urbane cabinet.

But Ferris's proposal is not attuned to rural culture -- at least not explicitly so. It calls for a new cabinet-level post, a "Secretary of Culture," to oversee and coordinate the various federal agencies that have evolved over the years, some from FDR and LBJ initiatives: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, NPR, PBS and the Smithsonian Institution. None of these institutions is particularly oriented to rural matters, although I do find NPR's coverage of rural issues to be quite good.

In any event, Ferris's piece got me to thinking about the New Deal-era W.P.A. Writers' Project, which employed writers to produce a set of travel guides called the American Guide Series. That's a project about which I knew nothing until the New York Times series this year, "Going Down the Road." You can read some of the installments in that series here, here, here, here and here.

What has struck me about these guides--or at least the New York Times coverage of them -- is that they documented rural places. I don't know if this was purposeful or not. Perhaps in the 1930s, rural places were viewed as those most needing documentation because little had then been written about them, whereas cities already attracted a lot of attention as bastions of culture, as inherently interesting places. If that was the case then, it is surely even more so now, when fewer and fewer Americans have meaningful and sustained contact with rural people and places and when rural folks seem to be popularly depicted as more marginal, culturally and otherwise, than ever before.

William Yardley wrote in the first of the NYT Going Down the Road series that the American Guides became "literary windows into an era and its aspirations." Of course, those were also the aspirations for particular places in that era. As Yardley expresses it, in places like the Cascades, progress no longer means "more commerce, more logging, more farming. . . . Now, it’s all about enjoying the scenery." The same can be said, of course, about much of the West. But even there it is only part of the picture, as oldtimers often oppose such development. (See related posts here and here). Further, what do we really know as a society about the aspirations of other types of rural places, those suffering population loss and struggling to survive in the face of agri-business growth and other forms of restructuring? How can/do we value their culture(s) -- and how can we document it so that in another half century it won't be lost for good?

A (rural) Mexican Christmas

Don't miss Sam Dillon's story in the NYT about how the holiday is celebrated in Chinantla, Mexico, which he characterizes as rural.

The Christmas season joins people with their loved ones wherever it is celebrated, but in few places, perhaps, does it unite whole villages so thoroughly in communal rituals of music and merrymaking as in rural Mexico.

For nine consecutive nights, starting Dec. 16, villages all across Mexico have been re-enacting Joseph and Mary’s biblical search for lodging. Each night’s procession, called a posada, has led townspeople, marching to the strains of a brass band, to a different home, where humble heads of household . . . . have fed and entertained the revelers.

Read the entire delightful (and sentimental) story here and note the strong rural theme of community throughout.

A new food policy from the Obama administration?

Read Kim Severson's speculation about this in the New York Times here. She recites a great deal of evidence that Obama is the "first foodie President since Thomas Jefferson." One of my favorite parts of the piece is her humorous play a holiday theme.

FROM the moment it was clear that Barack Obama was going to be president, people who have dedicated their lives to changing how America eats thought they had found their St. Nicholas.

* * *

For many food activists, a shiny new secretary of agriculture was high on the Christmas wish list.

About 50,000 people--high-profile foodies and advocates of sustainability among them -- signed a petition asking Obama to consider the six candidates they believed would best promote and protect "farm-based rural America and sustainable agriculture." But, as Severson writes," Santa had other plans."

Those other plans, of course, involved selecting to be Secretary of Agriculture former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, known for his alignment with agri-business interests.

Rural Women Making Change

That's the name of a community-university research alliance at the University of Guelph, Ontario. I learned about it this summer from Belinda Leach, a University of Guelph faculty member who leads several of its initiatives. Here's the organization's website.

You'll see that RWMC is involved in a number of research initiatives, including:

• Rural Women's Organizations Survey

• Gural, which expands knowledge and livelihood opportunities for rural girls

• Good Rural Jobs

• Migrant Workers and trans-local livelihoods

• Rural Transportation
  

• Gendering Rural Policy and and Policy Development
  

• Understanding Trans-local Economic Development and Rural Municipal Decision-making
  

• Gendering Census and Survey Data

And here is a summary of what RWMC has delivered on just one of those topics: transportation. Lead on this project is Professor Tony Fuller of the School of Environmental Design & Rural Development at University of Guelph, tfuller@uoguelph.ca.

Without access to public transportation in many rural Ontario communities, getting to work or completing household tasks often requires the use of a private vehicle. In this project we are investigating how transportation affects various aspects of women’s lives, how they manage transportation and what options to improve transportation could be considered for rural communities in Ontario.

We started by collecting data and stories from women living in southern Ontario. We found a significant number of women in all types of locations and stages of life adjust their activities and livelihoods around the availability of transportation. The quality of women’s lives in rural areas was tied to transportation in one way or another.

We refined our research tool, and with support from the Sustainable Rural Communities Program, expanded our investigation to the impact transportation has women’s access to employment and job related training in rural communities in northern Ontario. We found that access to a car is important for women to find and maintain employment in these communities. Without access to a vehicle, women are confined to jobs that were accessible by walking, which are often part time and with low rates of pay.

For this project we have delivered:

• a summary document of our research findings
• an Op Ed essay in the Wellington Advertiser
• presentations of results to rural community organizations, women and policy makers across Ontario
• a Master’s thesis
  
• a workshop for participants at the Northern Ontario Women’s Economic Development Conference in Thunder Bay .

In the coming year we are planning to:

• produce a fact sheet on rural transportation for policy makers and community organizations
• compile current examples of rural transportation systems
• write an academic article for publication
• present our findings at labour conferences.

Resources from this Project Team:

• The Impact of Access to Transportation on the Lives of Rural Women (Dr. Tony Fuller and Siobhan O'Leary, 2008)
• The Economic Disadvantage of Transportation for Women in Northern Ontario (Siobhan O'Leary, 2008)

Clearly, University of Guelph has developed an impressive model of academic-community cooperation, and RWMC is making heard the voices and needs of rural women in Ontario.

My Rural Travelogue (Part IX): Aspen, Colorado

I’m spending a few days in Aspen, population 5,914. It is the county seat of Pitkin county, population 14,872, and is on Colorado’s western slope. (Photo top Pitkin County Courthouse). While it is nonmetro by OMB standards, the place strikes me as rural by that measure only. Certainly, I have seen nothing here that is culturally rural –though that doesn’t mean that remnants of the rural West aren’t present.

Aspen is, of course, a playground for the super rich. The wikipedia entry for the city boasts that the “downtown has been largely transformed into an upscale shopping district that includes high-end restaurants, salons, and boutiques. Aspen boasts a Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Fendi, Tod's and recently a Burberry boutique, 3 of which are the only locations in Colorado.” Wikipedia further describes the yawning chasm between rich and not-so-rich: “The city today remains a mix of high-end luxury homes and condos intermixed with legacy residences and mobile home parks populated by an old guard of Aspen residents struggling to maintain the unique character of the city.”

High land values in Aspen also make it prohibitively expensive for many who work in Aspen to live there. Many therefore commute to bedroom communities such as Basalt, population 2,681,.and Carbondale, population 5,196. The Roaring Fork Regional Transit system of buses serves all of these communities and, indeed, reaches as far as Glenwood Springs, population 7,736, 40 miles away in Garfield County. It’s a good thing, too, because even with the frequent bus service, morning rush hour into Aspen and evening rush hour out seriously slow things down. The RFTA also provides free bus service linking Aspen to the other nearby ski areas, including Snowmass and Buttermilk. Snowmass, whose commercial district and housing options have been expanding in recent years, is the largest of the areas in acreage.

Aspen as a resort apparently dates to the late 1940s, when the Aspen Skiing Corporation was founded. Long before that, it was Ute City and came to be called Aspen only in 1880. It was founded as a silver mining community and had its peak years as such in the early 1890s. Now the economy is fueled by tourism and the second-home phenomenon.

Interestingly, Aspen has two newspapers, The Aspen Times and Aspen Daily News. The first dates back to 1881, and the second bills itself as “the Roaring Fork Valley’s only independent and locally owned newspaper.” Both papers have online versions, and both are free in print – presumably supported by the pages and pages of ads they feature. There’s not a lot of national news in these papers, and what there is tends to be a bit sensational – such as an AP story about a boy named Adolph Hitler Campbell, in Easton Pennsylvania, whose parents couldn’t get a local bakery to put his entire name on his birthday cake. In fact, there’s not a great deal of news of any sort in the paper, but what news there is tends to be local, and it’s the stuff you might expect from a town this size: deaths of residents, including a former ski patrolman killed a few days ago in an avalanche while he was skiing just out of bounds; crime; and local politics.

Two stories covered by the papers in the past few days suggest the sorts of local government issues you would expect from a rural resort community like Aspen. One is about a conflict between Pitkin County commissioners and the Aspen School Board over the desire of the latter to build teacher housing in an area not currently zoned for it. The school board hopes to seek only state approval, while Pitkin County believes it must be involved. There’s lots of talk in the story about Aspen’s UGB –that’s Urban Growth Boundary. What is at stake for the school board is affordable rental housing for teachers.

Another local government story is coverage of the meeting of Pitkin County commissioners on Wednesday, 17 December. They voted to “require carbon monoxide detectors in all county residences . . . and voted to outlaw drinking alcohol in public—except in licensed facilities—for eight days in January during the ESPN Winter X Games.” Such actions aren’t exactly consistent with rural stereotypes of independence, small government, and lack of regulation. But, as I said earlier, Aspen isn’t very rural by cultural measures.

I overheard the innkeeper at the mid-market inn where we are staying say that bookings are down over the holiday season, compared to past years. He said they “expected Aspen to be immune from the downturn, but it’s not.” This is also echoed in a story on the front page of the Aspen Daily News yesterday. The headline is, “Dearth of jobs awaits influx of workers,” and it tells of the hundreds of seasonal workers who have

descended on Aspen, many from abroad, who are encountering record numbers of “Sorry, we are not hiring” signs. (photo right, Aspen's Workforce center).

Meanwhile, I also see coverage that the town council of Snowmass Village, population 1,822, has cut its 2009 budget by 10%, “citing the uncertain economy and weak winter bookings.” Other headlines today: “Expert: Aspen-Snowmass currently a buyer’s market” and “

Toys for Tots sends an SOS.” Clearly, if Aspen and Snowmass are hurting like this, things truly are tough all over.

Salazar's "characteristic ten-gallon hat and bolo tie"

Obama's naming of U.S. Senator Ken Salazar to be Secretary of Interior and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture is old news by now, and I have little to add to the mainstream coverage of these picks, such as the New York Times reporting here. I will comment, however, that I really like the fact that Salazar appeared at the newsconference with Obama in his cowboy hat and bolo tie, which the Times story called "characteristic."

As I have suggested previously, I think Obama's cabinet needs a little cultural and geographical diversity -- in addition to the ethnic diversity that Salazar represents as a Hispanic. Whatever his other strengths and weakenesses in the eyes of environmentalists and conservationists, Salazar is a fifth generation Coloradoan who has worn many metaphorical hats in the public and private sectors during his career. He grew up near La Jara, Colorado, population 877, where he also attended school. His higher education credentials are more elite -- a B.A. from Colorado College and a J.D. from the Univeristy of Michigan. But with his rural and agricultural upbringing in the southwestern part of a southwestern state, Salazar represents diversity on several fronts.

Did the world become more urban than rural yesterday?

Prof. Ronald C. Wimberley, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, posted this to the Rural Studies listserv of the Rural Sociological Society yesterday:

In case you missed it previously, today is one of those days.

Today is the day that the world's population becomes more urban than rural. That's according to what we calculate from the 2008 United Nations' data on rural and urban populations.

It's a symbolic date, of course, due to inherent difficulties in predicting such things. There are the unreliabilities of population counts from the world's countries and varying dates of those counts or estimates to say nothing of inconsistent definitions of what's rural and urban across the array of nations involved.

Then there're the problem of new and updated world and urban-rural population estimates that the UN produces each year. They change. Consequently, our estimated date of the rural-to-urban transition changes as well.

At the beginning of the decade, the UN data only showed that the transition would occur sometime during this decade; later the UN said it would happen in 2007. The UN does not offer a specific day, but recently the UN's revised year for the rural-urban balance to change is this year, 2008.

So, today is one of those days that we have predicted this new demographic transition. With earlier years of the data, we had predicted earlier dates for the global shift (e.g., Wimberley, Fulkerson, and Morris, 2007, "Predicting a Moving Target..." The Rural Sociologist, 28:18-22). Our first prediction of a symbolic date--based on the current data at the time--was May 23, 2007. Later data suggested that the date would be July 13, 2008. But the rural population of the world has held its own much better than expected at the beginning of the millennium.

Our latest estimate of December 16, 2008 rural-to-urban transition date is based on a linear projection of the average estimated rural and urban growth rates from 2005 to 2010 based on current UN data. We think this is as good an estimate as any. Alternately, our exponential projection falls on January 7, 2009.

No doubt, such projections will also change as the UN releases ever newer waves of world population data. By and by, when the population numbers stabilize into history, we may be able to look back and see more precisely when the rural-urban transition actually occurred.

As demographer Nathan Keyfitz (1971, "Models," Demography 8:571-580) once said, demographic predictions are interesting but are an "all-but-impossible prediction of the future." Given our experience at predicting the rural-urban transition date, we agree. But as Keyfitz adds, "the most interesting facts are those relating to the future." So, we keep on trying to predict the future rather than the past.

Regardless of whether the date that has passed, lies in the near future, or is upon us today, the significance of this event is that the world's urban population becomes more and more dependent on rural people and resources as the historic balance toward the weight of the urban population shifts further and further away from the rural.

But this does not mean that rural people and places have become less important. Rather, the smaller proportion of world and its space that is rural has become even more important in supporting both the urban and rural peoples' needs for rural resources.

Tell your students. Tell our politicians and governments. Tell everyone. More of us are depending upon a smaller share of the rural world than ever before. Since we are all vitally dependent upon the rural people, resources, and environment, we should pay greater attention to their needs. The time is now.

I like Prof. Wimberley's optimism. I tend to think that as rural populations diminish, so will their political influence, which is already so low. Prof. Wimberley, however, sees this demographic shift as an opportunity to enhance rural influence -- as the growing number of urban dwellers become increasingly reliant on the shrinking rural population for food and other resources, and to be good stewards of the natural environment.

Caroline goes upstate, but apparently not to cultivate rural support

Today I read with interest the news reports of Caroline Kennedy's visit to "upstate and western New York." Here's the link to the story in the New York Times by Jeremy W. Peters and Nicholas Confessore. Kennedy visited with the mayors of Syracuse and Rochester, cities with populations of 147,306 and 219,773, respectively. In other words, these are neither rural nor nonmetropolitan places. Her visits to them may signal that Kennedy is seeking to build a bridge between NYC and upstate cities, but they do not indicate a sensitivity or awareness to the issues facing rural New Yorkers. Maybe that will come.

Indeed, Gail Collins implicitly touches on rural NY in her December 18 column about "Ms. Kennedy" in which she speculates about her willingness to "do Utica." That city's population is 60,651, so it's closer than Rochester or Syracuse to being nonmetropolitan, and it apparently suffers from some of the consequences of restructuring associated with micropolitan places. Collins continues:

And it’s easy to imagine Kennedy doing a Hillary-like “listening tour,” having round-table discussions about the dairy compact or broadband access while the press corps gently naps in the rear row.

Collins also writes about how well Hillary Rodham Clinton fared in New York's rural/ag milieu:

I remember watching Hillary tour the fair in Syracuse with her family in tow, stopping at a booth that featured a teeny table with teeny teacups and a sign: “Reserved for the Clintons.” Bill and Hillary, instantly perceiving their duty, pulled up two teeny chairs and plopped right down.

I guess Hillary was well served by her time as first lady of Arkansas. Caroline Kennedy may not have anything similar in her background, but as Collins suggests, she could adapt.

Inspector General finds political appointees meddled with scientific reports at Interior

In the New York Times coverage, Charles Savage reports that inspector general Earl E. Devaney delivered his report to Congress on December 12. The report found "serious flaws" in the processes leading to more than a dozen decisions regarding the designation (or lack thereof) of endangered species. Savage's story quotes Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, who is chair of the Natural Resources Committee:

“The results of this investigation paint a picture of something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that was colluding to undermine the protection of endangered wildlife and covering for one another’s misdeeds.”

The inspector general's report was particularly critical of the conduct of Julie MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, although it did not accuse her of any illegality.

Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, portrayed Ms. MacDonald’s case as a symbol of a broader pattern of manipulation of science under the Bush administration.

“Over and over again, in agency after agency,” Ms. Grifo said, “we’ve seen where special interests bump up against scientific determinations, the science is set aside.”