Going Over Home: Excerpt

By Charles D. Thompson, Resilience.org

Are there rural Americans who will embrace neighbors who do not look like them, go beyond tribalism and fear, and welcome diverse allies in the struggle for common goals? Will rural whites come to see that their future is tied to racial, environmental, and economic justice for all? I believe the answers to these questions will determine whether our national drive to form a “more perfect union” can survive. Everything America stands for is riding on this.

An Everyday Tale of the Rural Economy

By Catherine Broomfield, Sustainable Food Trust

What we must not forget amid the reams of policy briefings and papers, is that rural economies are not an abstract concept, but a mosaic of real people, places and passions that drive creativity and entrepreneurship. Here are two such stories of the many remarkable everyday tales of rural economy folk.

A different kind of childhood

By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry

If you ever wanted to see what the world might look like after the Tribulation, you could do worse than visit the Burren land on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. ... the Burren has only rock, with thin soil in the cracks –a rippling moonscape of pale hills that stretches to the sea, with few trees to slow the screaming Atlantic winds. It’s lovely to visit, but living here would seem to us like being marooned on an alien planet, and raising children unthinkable.

Trump and Mother Nature Threaten to Sink Rural America. What Does It Mean for Democrats in 2020?

By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion

Trump’s crowing about his having launched an unprecedented economic miracle rarely seen before belies the harms his economic and environmental policies are causing farmers, ranchers, and agro-businesses in America’s heartlands. 

The Future is Rural: The Unexpected Consequence of Energy Descent

By Jason Bradford, Resilience.org

Something new will arise, and in the evolution of what comes next, many may find what is often lacking in life today—the excitement of a profound challenge, meaning beyond the self, a deep sense of purpose, and commitment to place.

A Rebellious Hope

By Neal Gorenflo, Shareable

While this new rural economy is coming to life, its success is uncertain. It will likely be an uneven, difficult, and slow transition if there's a transition at all. It will take people of uncommon vision, commitment and patience to make it happen.

Thoughtstoppers and Thoughtstarters

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

I don’t think I’m being too Spenglerian to express the fear that in present troubled times, when the modernist state-industry-warfare nexus is manifestly unraveling, something similar could easily take hold again and do the same. And that, I submit, is a thoughtstarter, not a thoughtstopper.

What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”

By Russell Arben Fox, In media res

The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of his powerful vision of what constitutes a good life or a good community.

Learning from The Left Behind

By Russell Arben Fox, In media res

Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in the United States in years. It may, in fact, be the best book I've ever read on the topic, and I've read a lot of them.

Confronting Authoritarian Populism: The Rural Dimension

By Ian Scoones, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Lyda Fernanda Forero, Marc Edelman, Wendy Wolford, Ben White, Open Democracy

Authoritarian populism is on the rise. Whether in Brazil, Hungary, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, France, the US and many other countries. Regressive, nationalist, sometimes with religious inflections, it is a diverse, global phenomenon.