Farm workers accuse employers of bias, favoring immigrant workers

Ethan Bronner reports in today's New York Times from Vidalia, Georgia, with this lede:

For years, labor unions and immigrant rights activists have accused large-scale farmers, like those harvesting sweet Vidalia onions here this month, of exploiting Mexican guest workers. Working for hours on end under a punishing sun, the pickers are said to be crowded into squalid camps, driven without a break and even cheated of wages. 

But as Congress weighs immigration legislation expected to expand the guest worker program, another group is increasingly crying foul — Americans, mostly black, who live near the farms and say they want the field work but cannot get it because it is going to Mexicans.

Those American workers have filed several suits against Georgia growers like Stanley Farms.  Sherry Tomason is among the plaintiffs in that case. She argues that the employer for whom she worked for seven years , against an employer for whom she worked for seven years.  Tomason is quoted:

They like the Mexicans because they are scared and will do anything they tell them to.

An owner of Stanley Farms, Brian Stanley, tells another story: 

We have tried to fill our labor locally.  But we couldn’t get enough workers, and that was hindering our growth. So we turned to the guest worker program.

Stanley and other farmers assert that "Americans who say they want the work end up quitting because it is hard, leaving the crops to rot in the fields."  The comments of Jon Schwalls, director of operations at Southern Valley, had racist overtones:

When Jose gets on the bus to come here from Mexico he is committed to the work.  It’s like going into the military. He leaves his family at home. The work is hard, but he’s ready. A domestic wants to know: What’s the pay? What are the conditions? In these communities, I am sorry to say, there are no fathers at home, no role models for hard work. They want rewards without input.

And some local workers do acknowledge that, unlike the immigrant workers who are bused in for short periods of time, they are not willing to work around the clock for several consecutive days to increase their pay.  

Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has lobbied against the guest worker program, amplifies the domestic worker's point:

There used to be lots of American pickers who moved around the country.  But wages have stagnated and conditions have deteriorated, and agriculture is unwilling to make these jobs attractive. Think of trash collection. That’s not very appealing, either. But if you offer a decent wage and conditions, people do it.

In fact, according to Cindy Hahamovitch, a professor at the College of William and Mary who studies guest worker programs, domestic workers comprised two-thirds of farm laborers in the 1970s, immigrant workers the remaining third.  Within a decade, those proportions flipped, and now the vast majority of agricultural workers are immigrants, though most are not in the guest worker program.   

Bronner's is a very thoughtful story, giving due to both sides of a difficult issue.  I believe that an exceptionally strong work ethic was historically a feature of the U.S. work force (of all colors), but employers take advantage of such a strong work ethic--just as they currently take advantage of immigrant labor in part because of that exceptional work ethic.  I appreciate that immigrant laborers are now willing to work harder than many Americans, but a considerable downside to that right now is that employers are not forced to treat any workers well because they have the option of desperate immigrant labor.  The quote above from Jon Schwalls speaks volumes about the attitudes of some employers.  Since when it is not OK to ask about the pay rate?  about working conditions?  Since when is it not OK to expect fair pay and breaks for one's labor?

Other recent reports on the role of immigrant labor in agriculture are here and here.  These focus on the dairy industry, which like a handful of other agricultural sectors, requires year-round labor.  

Kentucky town hunkers down in the face of outside criticism over child's gun death

I wrote a few days ago about the shooting death this past week of a 2-year-old in Burkesville, Kentucky.  The girl was shot by her 5-year-old brother with his .22 gun when the children's mother stepped outside the home to take care of a household cleaning task.  In that story, I observed that the media seemed to be ridiculing the family by printing a photo of their trailer home and by describing the particular task the mother was doing:  pouring out grease for the dogs.

Now, today's New York Times picks up on that latter theme--or at least a related one.  The somewhat opaque and inartful headline is "Girl's Death by Gunshot is Rejected as Symbol."  In it, journalist Trip Gabriel explains that Burkesville wants "no part of being a symbol" in the national debate over gun control.  He writes:

The death has convulsed this rural community of 1,800 in south-central Kentucky, where everyone seems to know the extended Sparks family, which is now riven by grief. But as mourners gathered for Caroline’s funeral on Saturday, there were equally strong emotions directed at the outside world, which has been quick to pass judgment on the parents and a way of life in which many see nothing unusual about introducing children to firearms while they are still in kindergarten.

Gabriel quotes several local residents, including one who said, "I think it's nobody's business but our own town's."  Another also referenced the town's solidarity: "This town, there's nothing like it.  They pull together." One teenager "said strangers from around the country had written scathing comments online blaming the parents, deepening the town’s pain and anger."  Indeed, Gabriel reports that a couple of Burkesville locals punched the cameraman from a German television crew who were in town to cover the girl's funeral.  Those men told a newspaper reporter, "If you had any sense, you'd get out of here.  You're next, buddy."

Nevertheless, Gabriel found a few locals who "expressed skepticism of the parents for having a loaded, unlocked gun in the house."  I don't know if expressing skepticism is quite the same as blaming the parents--like many outsiders have done--but it sounds like there's some room for debate, even down in Burkesville.  (I note that one Burkesville parent Gabriel interviewed had taken the step of better securing the family's guns, "[s]ince that little girl died").

Some states have laws that make criminal the negligent storage of a gun, but Kentucky is not among them.

As for the media's behavior in all this, I go back to my original criticism that running a photo of the trailer home and using the detail about pouring out grease for the dogs serves only to fuel stereotypes of ignorant, unworthy "others," those I sometimes label retrograde rednecks to connote how the outside world--especially the world of liberal elite NYT readers and NPR listeners--see them.  I note that the New York Times also ran the photo of the family home--the same one from the earlier AP story, the same one NPR picked up--and they described the work of the children's father: shoeing horses and working at a sawmill.  I guess that completes the picture for us.  

California's Great Central Valley: "the largest human alteration of the Earth's surface"

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Rural Life, writes in today's New York Times of his trip this past week down California's San Joaquin Valley, along I-5.  The headline is "Lost in the Geometry of California's Farms," and in this essay he compares this recent journey to one he took with his family in 1966, as they contemplated a move from Iowa to California.

Klinkenborg borrows Joan Didion's phrase to describe the Great Central Valley: "the trail of an intention gone haywire." He calls California's history "a story of feverish intention, a tale of almost manic possibility and reinvention."  And he describes some consequences of that intention and reinvention.  Klinkenborg's tale is essentially that of a land abused, and paying the consequences. For example, he says orchards planted high above the irrigation line have "become firewood," and--perhaps more shocking: "The entire valley has sunk in on itself over the years as the aquifer beneath it has been siphoned off."  He notes that the U.S. Geological Survey has labeled the Valley "the largest human alteration of the Earth's surface."

He calls the Valley a "biological desert," where only a few species are allowed to thrive, a place "utterly alien" to all except a few machine operators "wearing hazmat-like suits."  Like Wendell Berry, Klinkenborg laments the separation of people from food systems.

The picture Klinkenborg paints is of agriculture on a massive, almost unimaginable scale, a scale the author implies is inappropriate and certainly unnatural.  

There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word “farming” has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate, than the platted but unbuilt streets out where easy credit dried up during the housing crisis. This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure, like the vast concrete sluice of the California Aqueduct, like the convoluted arrays of piping that spring up everywhere at the corners of fields.

Klinkenborg acknowledges his nostalgia (with specific reference to his high school days in Sacramento), and he contrasts that nostalgia with the apparent lack thereof by most Californians, who simply "marvel at the rate of change."  Klinkenborg suggests that "the logic and illusion in so much of California, urban and rural" is to see agriculture on this scale as inevitable and necessary, whether or not that is objectively so.  

As always, Klinkenborg's prose is beautiful, and the entire essay is thought-provoking, if a somewhat depressing, read.  

Hatfields & McCoys become tourist draw

Chase Purdy reports for the New York Times today from Sarah Ann, West Virginia, home of the Hatfield Family Cemetery.  His story is about the tourism boom linked to the long-standing Hatfield-McCoy feud in this part of Appalachia, a resurgence in interest that most attribute to the History Channel's 2012 mini series, Hatfields & McCoys.  Here's an excerpt from Purdy's story:  

Local tourism departments, along with members of the Hatfield and McCoy families, are working to transform feud folklore into a dependable source of jobs and revenue for Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, a region grappling with the decline of coal. In the past year, communities along the Tug Fork, the stream that is the state boundary in the area, have witnessed a surge in out-of-town foot traffic, tourists by the thousands drawn to the region in search of history.

The Hatfield Family Cemetery is one focus of the tourists' interest, but the cemetery has fallen into disrepair, even though it is on the National Register of Historic Places.  A descendent of the Hatfield clan, Reo Hatfield, approached West Virginia officials with a plan to clean up the cemetery, but a determination has yet to be made regarding whose land the cemetery is on.  

The Dils Cemetery, where patriarch Randolph McCoy is buried, is across the state line, in Pikeville, Kentucky.  That cemetery is much better kept and touted as a must-see spot.  Indeed, beginning about a year go, Pike County, Kentucky's tourism office has spent $40,000 of state funds on billboards and a national advertising campaign to draw people to the land of the Hatfields & McCoys.  Some of that money was spent on signs to direct tourists to landmarks like the Dils Cemetery.  The executive director of the Pike County tourism office noted the need for jobs in the region, where coal--once the economic king--is now on the decline:

The mines are shutting down every day.  We have to put our people back to work.  

Of particular interest to me is the intrigue that this legendary feud still conjures up, the attraction it represents.  I would like to know from whence most of the visitors come.  Purdy's story suggests that some of them are relatively local, as from Ashland, Kentucky, but surely some come from farther away, too.  I note that Pike County's tourism office spent some of its ad dollars in Oprah's Magazine, O, which suggests a certain demographic.  

Just as our nation has a love-hate relationship with rural America, we also have one with the Scots-Irish associated with Appalachia and phenomena like the Hatfield-McCoy dynamic.  I'm glad to see this economically depressed region capitalizing on some of that.  

Gun culture extends to children, with fatal consequences

Like many, I was shocked by the news this week that a 5-year-old boy had shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a rifle--indeed, with the child's own rifle, which the boy had received for his 5th birthday.  Read more here and here.  This happened in Burkesville, Kentucky, population 1,756, which wikipedia describes as "[n]estled among the rolling foothills of Appalachia and bordered by the Cumberland River to the south and east."

The .22 rifle the boy used was called a Crickett and was marketed to children as "my first rifle."  The product comes with different design options on the shoulder stock, including pink to appeal to girls.  The gun was apparently stored in a corner of the family's mobile home, next to the child's BB gun, and the parents did not know it had a shell in it.  The incident has sparked debate over whether the children's parents should be prosecuted, and there is some talk of letting a grand jury decide.

One thing I find interesting in the media's coverage of this story are featured quotes from Kentucky locals that normalize gun ownership and use by children.  Here are some of those quotes, as reported in the Louisville Courier-Journal on May 2:

[C]ommunity and business leaders in Burkes­ville said they strongly support the couple and saw nothing unusual about giving a rifle to such a young child. 

“Learning how to use a gun at a young age has been common for generations in rural Kentucky,” said County Judge-Executive John A. Phelps Jr. 

He said it was a “mistake” to let the boy have access to the rifle, “but it was an accident.”
“These are good people, a normal, average Kentucky family who loved their children very much,” Phelps said.

Kathy Mosby, who runs Shapes Fitness Center in Burkesville, said the “whole community is behind the family,” while Terry Riley, general manager of Don Franklin Auto, a car dealer, said, what happened “can happen to any of us.”

County Coroner Gary White is quoted in the AP report that NPR picked up:

Down in Kentucky where we're from, you know, guns are passed down from generation to generation. ... You start at a young age with guns for hunting and everything. ... What is more unusual than a child having a gun is that a kid would get shot with it.  

I am not saying that it is inappropriate to include the quotes; the quotes do, after all, give one perspective on the events, and the media also note the contrary position, as in a quote from a pediatrician who co-wrote the American Academy of Pediatricians policy on children and guns.    

I was also struck by the detail included in this AP report (quoted by NPR) of what the mother was doing outside when the boy shot his sibling:

As Stephanie Sparks cleaned the kitchen, her 5-year-old son, Kristian, began playing with a rifle he was given last year. She stepped out onto the front porch, poured grease out of a frying pan for the dogs and 'heard the gun go off.'

This detail--"pour[ing] grease out of a frying pan for the dogs"--is so vivid.  It conjures up images from "Winter's Bone" and from my own upbringing in the rural Arkansas Ozarks.  But it's also arguably a rather inflammatory detail--suggesting "white trash." (The same could be said of the AP photo of the family's home, a run-down trailer, which accompanied the NPR report).  For folks like me, no household errand would justify a mother leaving her young children in the house with a loaded gun, but that is now how folks in rural Kentucky see it--especially for a parent who though the gun was no loaded.    

As it happens, the Courier-Journal reports a slightly different version of what the mother (here referred to by her last name rather than that of the children's father) was doing:   

Robinson was home, cleaning, at the time of the shooting, and said she had stepped out to empty a mop bucket when she heard a pop.

Maybe the children's mother was, in fact, taking care of both tasks, which I suppose increased the amount of time she was out of the home. The total time she was outside, which would be influenced by the number of tasks she was doing, would be legally relevant to establishing her possible negligence. 

Here is an NPR feature on when children are old enough to have guns.  The Kentucky shooting came on the heels of two other recent gun deaths at the hands of children.  One was in neighboring Tennessee, and the other was in New Jersey.  

Here is an op-ed in the New York Times by columnist Joe Nocera, which mentions the Kentucky death.   Here is a Courier-Journal editorial about marketing guns to kids; it compares the gun industry's efforts to previous efforts by the tobacco industry to entice children to use their products.    

A cluster of rural vignettes in the New York Times

The national page of yesterday's the New York Times featured three stories that present vignettes of rural America.  The stories are from different regions and about very different issues and events, but all rural.

One is a follow up on the recent explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas.  (See an earlier post with references to the disaster here).  The headline is "In Texas Blast, Horseman Died Trying to Save Animals He Loved." The story, by Manny Fernandez who reports from Texas for the Times, focuses on Buck Uptmor, 45, one of the 12 men who died "serving officially or unofficially as volunteer firefighters" and first responders.  Uptmor died trying to save his horses, which were in a pasture near the fertilizer facility.  Fernandez provides a vivid vignette of a "a youth baseball coach, a racehorse jockey, a bull-riding and bareback-bronco-riding rodeo cowboy, and the former drummer of the family country band Billy Uptmor and the Makers."

But the story is more about the town of West than it is about a single victim of the April 17 disaster. Fernandez writes of those who died:

They were an unpretentious lot, not unlike the town they died saving. They were deer hunters and Nascar fans, practical jokers and backyard BB gun marksmen. They tinkered with their cars — Kevin W. Sanders, 33, had a Superman logo painted on his — and they went by their nicknames so often for so many years that their real names faded, as happened to Mr. Uptmor. 

They were goateed, mustachioed McLennan County country boys, with wives and ex-wives, children and stepchildren, grown sons and newborn babies.

Call me nostalgic, but I loved--even treasured--this depiction of ordinary, working men in middle America--small-town America.  

The next story definitely does not make me nostaligic.  It is headlined"A Racial Divide Closes as Students Step Up."  The dateline is Abbeville, Georgia, where two Black students and two white students planned the first integrated prom at Wilcox County High School.  Robbie Brown writes:

The rural county in central Georgia is one of the last pockets in the country with racially segregated proms.

That is the story's only reference to rurality, but Brown implies that the persistence of segregated proms has been a phenomenon associated not just with the South--but with the rural South:

Across the South, segregated proms have gradually faded away. In 2008, Charleston, Miss., held its first mixed-race prom after the actor Morgan Freeman, who grew up there, offered to pay for the event. In 2010, Montgomery County, Ga., stopped its segregated proms after they were featured in an article in The New York Times Magazine. 

Paul Saltzman, who directed a film about Charleston’s desegregation, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” said he did not know of any other proms that were still segregated. 

The population of Charleston is 2,198.  It is in nonmetropolitan Tallahatchie County, population 15,111.  Montgomery County, Georgia is also nonmetropolitan, with a population of 8,963.  

I suppose that one would expect rural places to be more resistant to integration because they tend to be more static and traditional in most regards.  They also tend to fly under the radar of national news scrutiny.  That is obviously less so in relation to high-profile issues like racial segregation, as suggested by what happened in Charleston, Mississippi and Montgomery County, Georgia.   

The third story is really just a photo and its caption.  It shows high school students in Fargo, North Dakota, stacking sandbags in preparation for the crest the Red River.  The caption notes that students have done this each of the last four springs.  I know that Fargo, a city of more than 100,000, is technically not rural, but the NYT so often refers to states like North Dakota as rural in their entirety, so I am taking a similar liberty.  Certainly, what the students are doing reflects what is popularly seen as the spirit of rural community.  

Rural exceptionalism in gun control legislation

I have been writing about the renewed debate on gun control, in relation to rurality, since the Newtown, Connecticut massacre last December.  Read those posts here and here.  Accommodating rural residents' need and or desire to buy guns is an issue that has cropped up in the last month in particular in relation to the federal debate over new gun control legislation.  A recent effort to close the loop-hole that permits those purchasing guns at gun shows and in private transactions to avoid background checks failed last week with 55 votes in support before Harry Reid changed his vote to "no" in a procedural measure to preserve the parliamentary right to bring it up again. That bill was a bi-partisan effort co-sponsored by Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania.  Among the Democratic Senators who crossed party lines to vote against that bill were Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.  A few Republicans, along with Toomey, went the other way, supporting the measure:  John McCain of Arizona; Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois; and Susan Collins of Maine.

Back before the Senate vote that defeated the Manchin-Toomey bill, Jennifer Steinhauer had described in a Times story a possible 11th hour change to the bill:

One approach designed to entice lawmakers representing large rural areas, particularly in Alaska, would exempt residents who live hundreds of miles from a gun dealer. Lawmakers are hoping that they can attract support from both Republicans and Democrats who are weighing the political costs and benefits of a bill against the perception that they are chipping away at gun rights.

Nothing else in Steinhauer's story illuminated what Manchin and Toomey had in mind, but yesterday's New York Times, reporting on renewed efforts to pass a federal law that would strengthen gun control by focusing on anti-trafficking measures, mentioned the rural exception to expanded background checks.  Journalist Jeremy Peters notes that Manchin is considering reviving his bill.  He would

tweak[   ] the language of his bill in a way that he believed would satisfy senators who, for example, felt that background checks on person-to-person gun sales would be too onerous for people who live in rural areas far from a sporting goods store. 

Those concerns were an issue for Alaska’s senators, Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, and Mark Begich, a Democrat.

Recent Times coverage further highlights regionalism in gun control (or lack thereof) politics by noting that Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, was the "only one out of 22 senators on the East Coast north of Virginia who voted against strengthening background checks."

In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Robert A. Levy of the Cato Institute endorses some revived version of the Manchin-Toomey plan, including its rural exception.  Levy writes that any new proposal "should also exempt certain rural residents who live too far from a licensed gun dealer for a background check to be practicable."

All of this talk about a rural exception to background checks has me more than a little annoyed because of law's failure in other contexts to acknowledge or respond in a helpful way to the spatial isolation and attendant lack of rural services and amenities.  These include the right to vote and the right to terminate a pregnancy.  I have written about the jurisprudence of the latter here.

Above is a photo I took last week-end along Pleasant Valley Road, near Placerville, California, in El Dorado County.  El Dorado County is metropolitan by virtue of its population (180,561) and the fact it is contiguous with Sacramento County.  Yet the county has significant rural pockets, a relatively low population density and, many would say, a rural culture.   

Water wars divide a Montana community

Jack Healy reports in the today's New York Times about a proposed water compact in Montana, a 1400-page agreement that is a decade in the making.  It allocates water on the Flathead Reservation in northwest Montana among the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Nation on the one hand and local farmers and ranchers on the other.  In fact, the compact would also settle Indian claims to fishing rights across western Montana--rights promised to the Indians as long ago as 1855.  Plus, the compact provides $55 million in state funding to upgrade the Reservation's water system.

Part of what makes the compact so controversial--and tensions so great--is that these groups have lived amidst one another, intermarrying and attending the same schools, for decades.  Indeed, white settlers permeated the reservation so completely that only 7000 Indians are among the 28,000 reservation residents.

The story's lede highlights the history and the current tensions:  

In a place where the lives and histories of Indian tribes and white settlers intertwine like mingling mountain streams, a bitter battle has erupted on this land over the rivers running through it. 

A water war is roiling the Flathead Indian Reservation here in western Montana, and it stretches from farms, ranches and mountains to the highest levels of state government, cracking open old divisions between the tribes and descendants of homesteaders who were part of a government-led land rush into Indian country a century ago.

The Montana state government considered the compact this spring, with Democratic governor Steve Bullock and some Republican lawmakers supporting it.  But others in the Republican dominated legislature ultimately killed the compact after farmers turned out to oppose it.  

Pursuant to the compact, farmers and ranchers would get 456,400 gallons/year for every acre they irrigate. Potato farmers fear this will be insufficient to support their crops, and ranchers say it won't be enough for their cattle and the crops grown to feed them.  

Gender Disparities in Farm Transmission

The North Dakota Law Review has jut published an article called "Rural Inheritance:  Gender Disparities in Farm Transmission."  This is a thoughtful gendered critique of why sons rather than daughters tend to inherit family farms.  It concludes that families and rural society groom boys to farm, but do not cultivate this interest in nor pass the know-how on to girls in the same way.  Gender stereotyping and its consequences remain the culprit, even in the face of changes to the Uniform Probate Code that made it gender-neutral.

The author of "Rural Inheritance" is Hannah Alsgaard, a 2012 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall), who is currently clerking for Judge Roberto Lange of the District of South Dakota, in Pierre.  Ms. Alsgaard grew up in Yankton, South Dakota, so she knows well the milieu of which she writes.  The abstract for the article follows, and you can download the full text here:

Farmers are farmers’ sons. Notable in our modern day, heralded by many as a gender-neutral society, it is farmers’ sons, not farmers’ daughters, who become farmers and take over ownership and management of the family farm. It has long been true that agricultural knowledge and land have passed through generations of men. In contrast, daughters, even today, are neither considered to be farmers nor likely to inherit family farmland. This Article begins by chronicling how farmland is inherited (by sons) then discusses why the pattern of excluding women continues. There have been substantial legal changes in the United States impacting land inheritance and ownership, culminating with the Equal Protection Clause’s extension to gender discrimination and the gender-neutral Uniform Probate Code. Social changes have also been tremendous, but even legal and social developments have been unable to correct gender disparity in farm inheritance. After exploring many legal and social factors, I conclude it is grooming – at the familial, governmental, and social levels – that plays the most vital role in training future farmers and mainly accounts for the gender difference in farm inheritance and the farming profession. This Article ultimately proposes girls must be groomed to farm in order to rectify the vast gender disparity in the ownership and management of family farms. A three pronged approach will be needed to remedy the situation, specifically: changing the role of lawyers, educating girls and women, and educating testators. What remains most important is that daughters are given the same opportunity as sons to farm based on merit, rather than being excluded from farm inheritance merely because of their gender.

Cross-posted to the Ag Law Blog.

Protest, Nebraska style

This week, Nebraskans had what may be their last formal chance to comment on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.  Many attended public hearings that the U.S. State Department hosted at an events hall in the state fairgrounds at Grand Island, in central Nebraska.  Dan Frosch reported for the New York Times, describing the scene:

Hundreds of people braved heavy snow and wind on Thursday, streaming into this central Nebraska town to speak out on the Keystone XL pipeline at what may be the final public hearing on the project. 

The hearing, conducted by the State Department, drew hours of emotional testimony, mostly from opponents of Keystone XL, who whooped and applauded when anyone from their ranks spoke, and solemnly hoisted black scarves that read “Pipeline Fighter” during comments by the project’s supporters.

Nebraska rancher Ben Gotschall was among those who spoke in opposition to the pipeline at the hearing:

The Keystone ‘Export’ pipeline is not in the national interest, and it is most certainly not in Nebraska’s interest.  ... Our landowners have been left to fend for themselves against an onslaught of dishonest land agents and corporate bullies.

While opponents of the pipeline seemed to considerably outnumber supporters at the Grand Island meeting, an Omaha World-Herald poll last year indicated that Nebraskans support the pipeline by a ratio of 2 to 1.  But another poll, this one by the University of Nebraska’s Center for Applied Rural Innovation, found that 65% of respondents believed the pipeline should avoid the Sand Hills and the Ogallala Aquifer.  Whether the path currently proposed for the pipeline would avoid the Sand Hills and the Aquifer is debatable.  

The day before the Grand Island forum, Mary Pipher of Lincoln published this op-ed in the Times, titled "Lighting a Spark on the High Plains."  In it, Pipher describes the strategies Nebraskans have used to oppose the pipeline, and I found her characterizations reminiscent of at least one strand of rural culture. Here's an excerpt:

Newly minted activists organized potlucks, educational forums, music benefits, tractor pulls, poetry readings, flashlight rallies, wildflower drops in Capitol offices and pumpkin-carving protests. Grandmothers created the Apple Pie Brigade and arrived every Monday at the governor’s mansion with small gifts and letters opposing the project.

* * *  

Our activism was polite and respectful. Our common language was our love of our state and our hopes for our children.

* * *  

In part, our unity came from our shared history and geography. Many of us are the relatives of homesteaders and modern farmers and ranchers. Whatever our politics, we all believe in the sanctity of home.  (emphasis added)

Mary Pipher quotes Nebraska activist Randy Thompson to illustrate how "[f]armers, ranchers, urbanites, Republicans and Democrats, students and senior citizens as well as native peoples" have come together to to oppose the pipeline:

There is no red water or blue water, there is clean water or dirty water.

Pipher closes by highlighting the unexpected in all of this, as well as Nebraska's place in a larger environmental movement:

Our remote, conservative, flyover state seems like an odd place to make a stand for clean water and fertile land, but we will be at the heart of those battles. We are fighting not only for ourselves but for people all over the world.

As for what comes next, President Obama will make a decision about the pipeline later this year.  Or, as Randy Thompson expressed it, "We're about at the final bell" in this "heavyweight bout between the ordinary citizens of this country and a foreign corporation."

A tribute to volunteer (rural) fire fighters

Volunteer Fire Dept. Station in Mt. Judea, Arkansas, April, 2013.  Mt. Judea is a tiny community in a persistent poverty county in the Arkansas Ozarks, Newton County.   

It took me a while, along my journey as a ruralist, to realize that volunteer fire fighting is a rural issue.  That is, places that rely on volunteer fire fighters tend to be rural places.  More populous and wealthier places, places incorporated as cities, tend to establish and invest in professional, well-compensated fire departments.  After I came to that epiphany, I started taking photos of volunteer fire departments wherever I went, and I feature just a few in this blog post.

Rico Volunteer Fire Dept., in
Dolores County, southwest part of Colorado
July, 2012 

In California, rural folks are especially aware that volunteer fire departments are a rural phenomenon because they have been paying a fire fee (or tax, depending on who you ask) for several years now.  It's been controversial, in part because the money goes to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection rather than to any of the numerous volunteer fire departments that actually defend the homes of California's rural residents.  Read news coverage of the fee here, here, and here.  

Volunteer Fire Dept. in Blairsden- Graeagle, California, in Plumas County,
in the northern Sierra-Nevada Mountains, March 2013.

I am writing this post now because two recent events have highlighted the sacrificial courage of volunteer fire fighters. The most recent was the explosion in West, Texas, last night, in which the town's volunteer fire fighters valiantly fought the blaze at the fertilizer facility until they realized it was getting out of control and moving toward the highly volatile storage tanks.  That is when at least some of them began evacuating the nearby nursing home and apartment complex.  In doing so, they saved many, many lives.  Yet news reports tell us that 3 to 5 of those firefighters are now missing, and they may be dead.  See coverage of these events here and here.  The Dallas Morning News currently features this headline: "Dallas Fire-Rescue captain, West City secretary among those missing after devastating explosion." The current New York Times headline also (awkwardly, language-wise) focuses on the local first responders as likely victims of the blast, "Ruins Searched for Firefighters after Blast at Factory Kills Five."  

Volunteer Fire Dept., Jasper, Arkansas, Newton County
November 2011 

The other event was the December, 2012, murder of two volunteer fire fighters responding to a fire in rural Webster, New York, on Lake Ontario.  The New York Times reported these events here and here.  An excerpt from one of the stories follows:

As Christmas Eve dawned in this suburb of Rochester, local authorities say, [William Spengler, Jr.] set fire to a car, as a trap. When an engine company came roaring down the street, he started shooting at the first responders, most likely from his Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle.

* * * 

The authorities say Mr. Spengler fired shots that killed two volunteer firefighters from long range and seriously wounded two others, and set a “raging inferno.” The police found him dead on a berm about five hours after the siege started, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Jondaryan Rural Fire Dept.,
Southern Queensland, Australia, August 2012

So, here's to volunteer (rural) fire fighters, who face a range of perils.  They not only train and courageously respond, they and their communities often have to raise their own funds, as the bottom photo illustrates.

Advertising a fire department fundraiser, Bodega, California
Sonoma County, March 2012 

N.B.  Moments after publishing this post, I came across this on the Dallas Morning News regarding 2011 cuts to volunteer fire departments in Texas.  Here is an excerpt from Christy Hoppe's story:

State lawmakers, struggling to erase a $27 billion budget shortfall two years ago without raising new revenue, slashed money throughout governmnet — including to volunteer fire departments. 

The Legislature cut its annual grants to such fire departments from $25 million to $7 million, leaving many of the 1,400 small communities scrambling. 

Asked if those cuts should be restored, following the fertilizer plant explosion in West that was fought by a volunteer fire department, Gov. Rick Perry said budget decisions are made by the Legislature. 

He also faced similar questions in November 2011 when volunteer firefighters were overwhelmed by wildfires in Bastrop County.

And here is a post script from the NYT, in its coverage of the West explosion.  The story by Manny Fernandez and John Schwartz focuses on one volunteer fire fighter:

Perry Calvin, 37, a married father of two with a third on the way, was one of the missing volunteer firefighters. He had been attending an emergency medical technician class in West on Wednesday evening when a firefighter in the class got a page about the fire at the fertilizer company, said his father, Phil Calvin. 

Perry Calvin and another man drove to the scene together and got there before the explosion. The other man was found dead Wednesday night. 

“It doesn’t look good, but we don’t have anything confirmed yet,” Phil Calvin, the fire chief in the town of Navarro Mills, said Thursday afternoon. About an hour after he spoke those words, he got the news, sitting by the phone at his home in nearby Frost: his son was indeed among the dead. 

Perry Calvin was not even a firefighter with the West department. He volunteered with another department in a nearby town, but had rushed to the scene to help, because he happened to be close. He is the kind of person who would be right at the head of the line, his father said. “He would do what he could to put the fire out or help find people.”