The Death of Rurality
I love the land as if it were a member of my family. It’s not my father or brother or family pet; it’s an entity of its own. For generations, the land has fed my family, provided our living, and given us a beautiful place to make a life. It’s no wonder that I feel towards it the same connection I do towards my family — it nurtures me as they do. As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun to notice widening fractures in my utopian view of Texas’s landscape. New small businesses are having grand openings that no one attends. Vibrant downtowns are falling into delapidation. A solitary pumpjack on one hill gave way to loud, polluting hydraulic fracking pads desicrating the once pristine horizon. The pumping of fracking water, aided by droughts, rendered the free-flowing creeks and rivers merely cracked and dried mud shadows of their former glory. Children of ranchers are ending generations-long dynasties because it just wasn’t making enough to survive. One or two employees spend hours serving empty space at the Post Office, the Dollar Store, or the pharmacy until the lone customer of the day arrives. After a few years, it’s become hard to ignore that these symptoms are part of a more serious condition: rural America is dying.
The purpose of the following research is to investigate and articulate the decline of rural America, specifically focusing on the socioeconomic and environmental changes affecting these communities. This study aims to explore the multifaceted issues contributing to rural depopulation, the degradation of local economies, and the deterioration of the natural environment in case areas like the panhandle and south Texas.
By examining factors such as the outmigration of young people, the decline of traditional industries like agriculture and manufacturing, and the challenges posed by inadequate infrastructure and services, this research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the crisis facing rural America. Ultimately, the goal is to contribute to a body of knowledge that can inform policies and initiatives aimed at revitalizing these communities and preserving their unique cultural and environmental heritage.
All data confirms rural America’s prognosis. According to data collected by FWD.us, “Between 2000 and 2020, departures from rural counties outweighed new arrivals by 700,000 people. FWD.us projections conservatively show that this trend will continue over the next two decades, resulting in a net loss of an additional 600,000 people by 2040. Those leaving are often in their prime working years, leaving behind a population that is rapidly aging; during the past two decades, the average ratio of individuals 65 or older for every 100 working-age people across rural counties rose to 40 from 26, far outpacing the U.S. overall (25 in 2020 from 19 in 2010)” (FWD.us 2023).
Many pathogens are to blame for the illness, but they’re all part of one disease: the world advancing in all the wrong places.
When you live in a small town, it’s no hard decision to take the easy way out and move to the city. Life is so much more convenient in an urban area than a small town.
In rural areas, you have to travel to see doctors or dentists. If you get hurt or sick, the closest hospital to treat you is in the nearest major city, often an hour or more drive away.
People farm for a living, yet small towns are the worst food deserts. Rural communities, constituting 63% of U.S. counties, face the highest food insecurity rates, with 87% of the most affected counties. While major delivery services cover 93% of the population, only 37% of rural limited-access food deserts have such access due to connectivity challenges (CoBank, 2023). Small businesses cannot survive; only chains, so convenience and dollar store chains become many small towns’ grocery stores. Moldy or expired food stays on store shelves because food supply gets restocked less.
There isn’t reliable internet access or cell phone access and what you can get is very expensive, so accessing job applications, government assistance, teledoc or schooling online is nearly impossible.
Electricity infrastructure is just as weak. In the city different providers exist, but in a small community it’s usually only rural electric cooperatives and their prices per kilowatt hour are double or more than in the big cities.
It is also easier to work in an office for a corporation or large company than on a farm or ranch or family-owned small town business, because there aren’t opportunities for advancement in a small town. While higher education can contribute to individual mobility and economic advancement, it has inadvertently fueled a phenomenon known as "brain drain" in rural communities. Many young people from these areas pursue higher education in urban centers, and a significant proportion tends to settle in these more economically vibrant regions after graduation, seeking better job opportunities and amenities. This demographic shift exacerbates the population decline in rural areas, leading to a dwindling workforce, reduced economic activity, and a lack of skilled professionals in key sectors. Additionally, the limited availability of higher education institutions in rural settings often hinders local residents' access to advanced learning opportunities, perpetuating a cycle of economic stagnation and depopulation in these communities.
We’ve also seen the shutting down of two of rural America’s most vital organs — agriculture and manufacturing industries. Children of farmers and ranchers have had to let go of dreams to continue the rural way of life the generations before them were able to sustain and pass down to them. The rural way of life simply isn’t earning them enough to survive. The shift towards automation and consolidation in these sectors has led to job losses and economic instability.
Once-bountiful harvests have thinned due to environmental factors. Farmers are forced to turn to non-remedial medication — more efficient (and expensive) machinery, more disease resistant (and expensive) genetically modified seed and more potent (and expensive) chemicals that promise larger yields (Jordan 2002). Over time, farmers have become as exhausted as the soil — farmers’ suicides in the United States has become a named phenomena. Farmers have among the highest suicide rates of any occupational group in the U.S. A 2016 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among agricultural workers in 17 states was five times higher than in the general population (SPRC, 2018).
Farming and ranching are no longer profitable enough to provide a living for even a small family. What’s more, when the farmers’ and ranchers’ livelihoods diminish, so do the towns they surround. Towns that used to be able to support and sustain a hardware store, a parts store, a feed store, a clothing store, a pharmacy, a small clinic, a couple of restaurants, a bank, a few churches and a small grocery store, are being replaced by convenience stores, dollar stores, liquor stores, payday loan businesses and a handful of fastfood establishments. Gone are the small businesses built by men and women who also gave back to their communities and schools with time and funds. Gone are the clinics and pharmacies and grocery stores. All replaced with corporate owned outlets that pay only minimum wage jobs, don’t maintain their businesses and offer only low-quality and cheap products.
In my grandparent’s heyday, it would’ve been hard to believe these areas would ever become the sad, empty communities they are today. Their generation was filled with people who were proud to build and help their communities and churches and schools. Some were high school and college graduates, most were not. But they were all dedicated, hard-working, and smart people. They all worked full time jobs, most at the businesses they or their families personally owned, and still made time to give back to their communities, churches, and schools with their time and money. They served on community committees, school boards, and church leadership. They volunteered to help build the generations growing up as 4-H leaders, sports boosters, religious education/Sunday school teachers, volunteer fire fighters, beautifying their communities.
What is most shocking is that rural America was already sick then; it was just early enough that no one could tell. Migration out of rural areas across America has been occurring fairly steadily since the 19th century (Smith, Winkler, et. al 2016).
With this comes an interesting realization — in many metaphorical diseases, progress is a carcinogen. One cannot simply blame progress for modern-day problems because medical, technological, scientific and environmental discoveries continue to pave the way to a better humanity. They have also emerged as a result of non-progress phenomena like global overpopulation. But those same discoveries have plenty of negative drawbacks, which adversely affect some areas more than others. Rural America has been plagued by the adverse effects of societal evolution.
“When we think about rural decline and sacrifice zones one of the biggest problems is the way multiple forces have drained wealth out of communities. The institutions that once facilitated wealth circulation within and around communities — producers’, consumers’ and service providers’ cooperatives, credit unions, mutual savings banks, locally owned businesses — have weakened over the years. People can organize to take back value-added that now gets taken away by far-off investors, though this requires a kind of local-level solidarity that isn’t always easy to muster. It’s the ongoing struggle of society against the market and it’s happening in a lot of places. Scaling up successful efforts and resisting pushback by self-interested powerful actors are among the most formidable challenges.” (Weeks, 2022)
Works Cited
Carl F. Jordan, Genetic Engineering, the Farm Crisis, and World Hunger, BioScience, Volume 52, Issue 6, June 2002, Pages 523–529, https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0523:GETFCA]2.0.CO;2
“Food Deserts in Rural America Expose Need for Broader Distribution Strategies.” GlobeNewswire News Room, CoBank, 5 Oct. 2023, www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/10/05/2755691/0/en/Food-Deserts-in-Rural-America-Expose-Need-for-Broader-Distribution-Strategies.html.
Henderson, Tim. “Shrinking Rural America Faces State Power Struggle.” Stateline, 16 May 2023, stateline.org/2021/08/10/shrinking-rural-america-faces-state-power-struggle/.
“Immigration Can Reverse Rural Population Decline.” FWD.Us, www.fwd.us/news/rural-decline/#:~:text=Between%202000%20and%202020%2C%20departures,additional%20600%2C000%20people%20by%202040. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.
“Immigration Can Reverse Rural Population Decline.” FWD.Us, www.fwd.us/news/rural-decline/#:~:text=Between%202000%20and%202020%2C%20departures,additional%20600%2C000%20people%20by%202040. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.
“Rural Population Loss and Strategies for Recovery.” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2020/q1/district_digest#:~:text=Since%20the%2019th%20century%2C%20various,communities%20for%20cities%20and%20suburbs. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.
“Rural Population Loss and Strategies for Recovery.” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2020/q1/district_digest#:~:text=Since%20the%2019th%20century%2C%20various,communities%20for%20cities%20and%20suburbs. Accessed 5 Feb. 2024.
Smith, Miranda, et al. “How Migration Impacts Rural America.” Population Trends in Post-Recession Rural America, W3001 Research Project, 2016, w3001.apl.wisc.edu/b03_16.
Smith, Miranda, et al. “How Migration Impacts Rural America.” Population Trends in Post-Recession Rural America, W3001 Research Project, 2016, w3001.apl.wisc.edu/b03_16.
