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US suffers its own dislocations on road to growth
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Wan Lixin’s column of February 5 (“Rural Chinese society fractured by loss of traditional ways of life”) brought back some memories of my life as an Iowan, as well as of my work with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. It was also a reminder of how many transformative changes (not always positive developments) China has had to wrestle with in such a short time.
What has been occurring massively in China for only the last 30 or 40 years — mass migration from rural areas to the cities — took well over a century in the United States. Just one hundred years ago, America was overwhelmingly a rural society. Even when I was a boy, smaller family farms were still the norm in Iowa and throughout the agricultural Midwest. Smaller rural communities were still vibrant and many rural young people still opted to return to the farm as their chosen way of living.
As in China, though, the lure of a more “exciting” life with better options for “advancement” accelerated the flight from farm to city after World War II. Today, as farming in America is increasingly dominated by much larger, agri-business operations, it has become more difficult for the “family farmer” of old to survive. The average age of farmers has steadily risen, too, and now it is in the 50s.
Many of America’s water problems are, as in China, a consequence of the increased industrialization of everything, including farming.
I remember as a teenager hearing over and over again an advertising jingle that sang, “Everything is better through chemistry.”
Chemicals were increasingly present, in the fertilizers used on eroding soil that ended up leaching into water reservoirs and rivers, in the antibiotics routinely fed to cattle and hogs in order to prevent diseases (and that remained in their flesh for humans to consume), and sprayed abundantly on plants, including their leaves and their fruit, to combat hungry pests (and that also were subsequently consumed by animals and humans).
As the people have left the land to be managed by ever-fewer owners (many of them absentee), so also have the rural communities steadily dried up.
As their populations dwindled, and as their young left for the cities, first high schools were closed or merged, and then elementary schools as well.
Many small communities in rural America today lack the financial base to modernize infrastructure or attract new business investment.
When I was executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, I traveled up to 30,000 miles per year around the US visiting rural communities and meeting with local families and environmental activists. Time after time, I faced the heart-breaking experience of standing before them unable to offer any real solution to the interlinked forces forever altering their way of life.
I do nostalgically recall the many pleasures and virtues of small-town life, but it is also true that such communities tend to be much more homogeneous than non-rural America. Such sameness, while certainly affording great comfort and familiarity, can also fuel suspicion of “outsiders,” “strangers,” or just those “who are different.” It can be a lovely way of life, but it can also divide persons from those who live differently (or elsewhere).
Further, in the US at least, there is a tendency in many such communities to breed an “us versus them” mentality that is itself a consequence of relative isolation. Here in the West, there is particularly true where vast areas of land are held by the federal government and not either by the various states or individual citizens. This exists as a direct legacy of the developmental history of the United States — the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the war with Texas in the mid-1840s, the eventual resolution of the ownership of the Oregon-Washington territories with Great Britain and, of course, of the steady seizure of what were once Native American lands.
Just who has a “right” to this land depends, apparently, largely upon where you are sitting. If you are a rural citizen in an economically starved zone, then it might appear that this land could be “better put to use” by you and your neighbors than left in the questionable stewardship of a distant federal government.
On the other hand, if you are an urban resident — whether in the West or not — you might well applaud the foresight of the federal government for preserving so much of this land for park, wilderness, and ecological stewardship purposes.
The author is a retired statesman from Iowa, United States.
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