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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
Speaking for myself (not Cindy), my urge and motivation for moving to the farm 17 years back, and the desire to document it, had more to do with wishing to relearn what it was like to be a resident. Or, as Wes Jackson would phrase it, to be native to this place.