Challenges for Social‐Change Organizing in Rural Areas

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12154
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016

Challenges for Social-Change Organizing in

Rural Areas

By MAURA STEPHENS*

ABSTRACT. Corporate criminality and corporatewelfare proliferate, and

their victims mount. Rural inhabitants, human and nonhuman, are

among those most affected. Rural areas are particularly affected by

chemical contamination, fossil fuel exploitation, the absence of

coverage of relevant local issues by the media, marginalization by

governments, and the loss of cherished places and ways of life. There

has never been a greater need for collective opposition to the forces

undermining rural life. But conditions make it especially difficult, with

growing poverty, dwindling and aging populations, lack of transit,

unreliable, spotty telecommunications, and other obstacles. These

factors and others are used to illustrate why ramped-up activism is

essential to protect the rights of rural residents, the natural

environment, and the farmlands that feed the majority of the U.S.

population.

Introduction

“To the suggestion I set myself on fire,” said Diane McEachern of Bethel,

Alaska, in response to one of the hate comments she received after post-

ing a photo of herself standing with her three dogs on the tundra during

the high days of the Occupy movement: “I AM on fire!” (Murphy 2011).

The photo went viral as soon as McEachern, a social worker andUni-

versity of Alaska assistant professor of humanities/rural humanservices,

posted it on Facebook in the fall of 2011. In it she held a hand-painted

sign reading “Occupy the Tundra.”

*Maura Stephens is a systems-thinking independent journalist and scholar, and asso-

ciate director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in Ithaca,

New York. A longtime human rights, justice, and environmental activist and commu-

nity organizer, she has founded or co-founded several nonprofit and grassroots

organizations.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3 (May, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12154

V

C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

McEachern stood alone making that bold statement, despite the fact

that her western Alaska town is home to more than 6,000 people, and

the greater region to some 25,000 people. But most of them are mem-

bers of one of the last indigenous cultures and societies resident in their

homeland, still speaking a Native language, Central Yup’ik/Cup’ik

Eskimo. Not surprisingly, this area includes districts with the highest rates

of poverty and youth, and lowest rates of full-time permanent employ-

ment in the state and nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Poor areas, where peopleexpend so much of their energy just to sur-

vive, tend not to be conducive to fostering activism. One need not live

in Alaska to be aware that rural dwellers, including many Native Ameri-

cans who live on reservations, have suffered the crippling effects of the

ongoing economic crisis and other assaults on rural life. The need for

strong collective opposition to the forces undermining the lives of rural

residents has never beengreater.

The resurgence of the ideology of neoliberalism in recent decades

has promoted “the market” as the solution to every problem. But the

market leaves out, among many others, elders, young people, the sick,

and those with limited formal education—all of whom are dispropor-

tionately represented among rural dwellers. Rural areas have been left

behind in terms of government services and investment, particularly in

education, healthcare, and access to public media, telecommunications,

and transit options. Furthermore, rural areas nationwide are on the

front lines of new environmental assaults.

1

Thus activism is essential to

protect the rights of rural residents, the carbon-sink natural environ-

ment, and the farmlands that feed the majority of the U.S. population.

But conditions in ruralareas make that difficult.

Some of the obstacles to rural organizing clearly overlap each other,

and others clearly overlap the factors affecting urban and suburban

organizers. Thisarticle will address several of the following challenges:

1. Entrenched and growing poverty and the accompanying need

to work longer hours or jump through more bureaucratic

hoops (or both) to keep a roof over one’s family;

2. Dwindling and aging populations;

3. Long travel distances, lack of affordable and efficient transpor-

tation, and isolation;

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology722

4. Shrinking national, sta te, and local government funding of

human services and libraries;

5. Spotty, unreliable telecommunications, combined with news

media “desertification” and susceptibility to disinformation;

6. Environmental degradation from fossil fuel exploitation, other

types of mining, and related infrastructure and heavy indus-

tries, from which corporations have been indemnified or

exempted and protected from prosecution;

7. Illnesses and depression that accompany environmental

contamination;

8. Climate change and other large-scale environmental disasters;

9. Antagonism, intimidation, and “divide-and-conquer” tactics by

industry forces, local and state officials who partner with

them, fellow residents who believe they will benefit from a

polluting industry or other harm, local chambers of commerce,

and unions that have been captured by industry;

10. Lax regulations and the failure of government agencies to

enforce existing laws, leaving oversight in the hands of ordi-

nary people who are powerless to stop industrial harm to their

health, safety, and property;

11. Public passivity due to inadequate education, lack of civic

engagement, unfamiliarity with constitutional rights, a tend-

ency toward “niceness” and unwillingness to “rock the boat,”

and general disenfranchisement;

12. The trend of some state governmen ts to pit regions against

one another to vie for economic development funding;

13. The segmenting of heavy infrastructure and industrialization

projects, such as pipelines, so that each requires an individual

permit, diluting activists’ energy in a typical divide-and-

conquer strategy, where each community has only enough

resources to wage its own “NIMBY” fight;

14. Co-option of grassroots and community groups by larger

NGOs that often subvert the real messages in service to their

own fundraising and self-perpetuating goals; and

15. The use of fear to control the population, often made more pro-

nounced by the decline in the number of supportive community

groups—which goes hand-in-hand with points 5, 9, and 10.

Challenges for Social-Change Organizing 723