Change Organizing in Rural Areas

Challenges for Social-Change Organizing in Rural Areas By MAURA STEPHENS* ABSTRACT. Corporate criminality and corporate welfare 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 posting 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 and University of Alaska assistant professor of humanities/rural human services, 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 associate director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. A longtime human rights, justice, and environmental activist and community 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 C 2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. V

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The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

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 members 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 employment in the state and nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Poor areas, where people expend so much of their energy just to survive, tend not to be conducive to fostering activism. One need not live in Alaska to be aware that rural dwellers, including many Native Americans 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 been greater. 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 disproportionately 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 environment, and the farmlands that feed the majority of the U.S. population. But conditions in rural areas 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. This article 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 transportation, and isolation;

Challenges for Social-Change Organizing

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4. Shrinking national, state, 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 industries, 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 ordinary 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 tendency toward “niceness” and unwillingness to “rock the boat,” and general disenfranchisement; 12. The trend of some state governments 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-andconquer 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 pronounced by the decline in the number of supportive community groups—which goes hand-in-hand with points 5, 9, and 10.

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Currently about 20 to 30 percent of U.S. people live in rural areas, depending on which definition of “rural” is used. They represent many distinct regions, economies, geographies, and cultural and social communities, and thus are not easily quantifiable. Still, there are some clear demographics that can help to paint a picture. While rural areas as a whole gained population over the past decade, many communities, especially in the rural Midwest, Central Appalachia, the South, and the Midwestern and Northeastern “rust belt,” continued losing population. Population loss has significant effects on these communities’ housing stock as well as their overall economic viability. Rural and small town areas are not as racially or ethnically diverse as the nation overall: approximately 78 percent of the rural population is white and non-Hispanic, compared to 64 percent of the population in the country as a whole. In many individual rural communities, however, minorities do make up a majority of the population. Hispanics have now surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in rural and small town America, and more than half of the growth in rural and small town populations in the last decade is attributable to Hispanics. (George et al. 2014: 2–3)

Deepening Poverty

People under tremendous economic stress rarely have the wherewithal or energy to engage in civic activities, let alone actual activism, and are thus easily exploited and further victimized. “There are a lot of working poor in rural areas, as there are in cities,” said Toshia Hance (2015), a community organizer from rural northcentral New York State, near the Canadian border. “When I was a single parent I couldn’t go out to everything, but I did make sure I signed petitions and stayed up-to-date with as many things as I could. People don’t seem to be doing that now, especially parents of young children, who are so vulnerable.” Over the past decade, millions of people across the United States lost their homes to foreclosures, thanks to unscrupulous banking. Although there are no specific data about how many of them were rural homeowners, it seems safe to assume that there were a million or more. The statistics are less readily available about how many of those former


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homeowners have been able to “recover” from this devastating loss, but it is reasonable to expect that a significant number of them are still living on or near the edges of poverty. Attorney Kassandra McQuillen (2011) writes about clients who lost their homes to foreclosure, homes that they had bought under the USDA Rural Home Loan Program. They learned two years after being made homeless that they were still liable for the entire amount of the mortgage, despite thinking they’d been covered under a government guarantee. They had not been told, McQuillen related, that “when the government pays the lender for a loss, the loss becomes the responsibility of the borrower.” Her paper was published too late for it to have helped tens of thousands, if not more, former homeowners. “The lesson here: No matter how upside down your home is, if you have a USDA Rural Home Loan, do not allow it to go into default because you will not be able to walk away without filing bankruptcy.” Besides homelessness, another serious indicator of poverty is “food insecurity”—a euphemism for hunger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food-insecure households as those that regularly lack access to enough to eat for an active, healthy life. As the nonprofit Feeding America (2014) pointed out in the introductory fact sheet accompanying its most recent quadrennial report, “Hunger in America 2014,” the problem is more extensive in rural areas than in suburban areas. “The irony,” the study noted, “is that many of these food-insecure households are in the very rural and farm communities whose productivity feeds the world and provides low-cost wholesome food for American consumers.” A total of “17 percent of rural households are food insecure, or an estimated 3.3 million households.” Hunger and general poverty—among the unemployed, the working poor, the elderly, and others living on limited, fixed incomes—lead to demoralization at the least, and depression and anxiety at worst. Neither situation lends itself to civic engagement at all, let alone activism. Dwindling and Aging Populations

Rural populations are aging. Seniors make up a larger percentage of rural dwellers than the national percentage. The median age of rural dwellers is three years higher than for the country as a whole.

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According to George et al. (2014: 17), 19.3 percent of rural and smalltown residents, versus 16.2 percent of the national population, are age 62 or older. The age structure of rural populations exacerbates the problem of unemployment. With so few family farms remaining, and fewer agricultural jobs in general because of consolidation and mechanization, working-age adults have fled to the cities, carrying on a long-term trend. Job “growth” in rural areas tends to happen only sporadically, and only in construction or in dangerous jobs such as mining, fuel industries extraction, and other destructive jobs. Since most senior citizens are not physically suited for those sorts of jobs, there is a mismatch between available employment and rural residents (discussed below in the section on “Antagonism, Intimidation, and Demoralization”). The lack of employment opportunities for older workers might seem a likely boon for rural activism, with a larger number of retirees able to devote time to organizing; writing letters to the editor, op-eds, and letters to legislators; planning public education events and forums; tabling and distributing materials; protesting; lobbying policymakers; and even running for office themselves. But other factors—poverty, lack of transportation, inability to drive at night or at all, isolation, poor telephone and Internet service, lack of local news media—conspire to make it harder for those who might become involved, if they knew how. Travel Distance, Lack of Transportation Options, and Isolation

Country dwellers often choose to live where they live to enjoy some distance from other people. Many a former urbanite has opted to move to a rural setting for various quality-of-life reasons including the solitude and relative freedom from problems that can occur when living in close proximity to neighbors. But living in neighborhoods and communities makes it more important to learn to get along with others, and generally urbanites and suburbanites have many more opportunities to organize to solve shared problems—and build related skill sets. They also more typically have community spaces in their own buildings or neighborhoods or public transportation available via which to get to a variety of meeting places such as schools, local nonprofit agencies’ offices,


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and houses of worship. City, town, and suburban people are also more likely than country people to habitually frequent caf!es, diners, and bars that encourage or at least tolerate their patrons holding meetings. Rural people generally live far from fellow activists and have to drive long distances to meet, even sometimes when they all live in the same township or county. In rural central New York State, several of the busiest intrastate activist groups cover a lot of territory—and this area is much more densely populated than its counterparts in western states. The farthest-scattered members of one group, the Coalition to Protect New York, most of whom live in the central and western parts of the state (thus excluding the northeastern Adirondacks areas and the downstate New York City and suburbs), live a five-and-a-half-hour drive from each other in areas where there is no public transit available. Although they try to meet in the approximate middle whenever possible for monthly weeknight meetings, that means that some people are driving two-and-a-half or three hours each way at night, after work, winter, spring, summer, and fall. That’s a lot of driving, especially for environmentalists who would prefer to be using mass transportation, were it available, and not burning fossil fuels. (They would also prefer not to endanger themselves by driving in sometimes treacherous conditions, over many miles of country roads where deer and other wildlife are denizens of those same roads.) For people of color, LGBTQ activists, and members of other minority groups in rural areas, the isolation can be overwhelming. Rural dwellers are less exposed, as a rule, to people from widely divergent backgrounds, making acceptance less natural than it is in cities, where many LGBTQ people and other minorities live openly and are more regularly embraced by the wider community. Jack Harrison-Quintana, director of Grindr for Equality (G4E), a policy and disease prevention arm of the gay social network, Grindr, interviewed Jamee Greer about his many years working with the Montana Human Rights Network. Harrison-Quintana (2015) reports the following comments by Greer as the latter related his thoughts on the difference between rural organizing in Montana and the work he currently does from Portland, Oregon.

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The first couple years I was a paid organizer working on LGBTQ equality, I was literally the only paid organizer dedicated full-time to doing this work in the entire state. I mean, the state is more than 600 miles wide and 250 miles tall! It’s huge. It would often feel isolating, even though I was engaging queer folks from all over because I couldn’t find folks to relate to professionally in just the right way. Also being a queer lobbyist in the Montana State Capitol Building took a toll. They just didn’t know what to do with me and no matter what they said to keep me away, I just kept coming back! Remember that . . . there are queer and transgender rural folks, . . . LGBTQ people of color, . . . queer folks with access to money and some without. Perhaps it’s because the stories of rural queers are so rarely shared in the media consumed by people in larger cities, but it often feels like rural queers are either totally ignored, turned into punchlines, or become tales of tragedy. For a bunch of reasons, including the different identities we hold . . . the lives of LGBTQ rural folks are experienced in dynamic ways. . . . [D]on’t assume that all LGBTQ folks living in rural spaces are miserable or in a constant struggle with oppression. But the truth is that rural queer folks have fewer community resources and connections, just fewer queer people, to connect with in places like Montana. The general culture feels like it’s changing fast, but it’s still got a way to go and setbacks like the failure of a pro-LGBTQ policy, a report of discrimination without any legal recourse for a person to take, or an act of anti-LGBTQ violence against one of us is a reminder of the work that we have left to do.2

Thus, adding to the general discrimination experienced by LGBTQ people, those who live in exurban areas face additional difficulties because of the long driving distances that separate them from each other and close allies. The downsides of living far from neighbors also tend to be exacerbated as people age and become less mobile. Many of the most experienced and/or dedicated activists are older and retired, and some are not able to drive at night, when most meetings and many public events are held. They either have to miss meetings and events—which means they fall behind on the networking, information sharing, and strategic planning, and are unable to participate or contribute their accumulated experience and wisdom—or find others to go out of their way to chauffeur them. Rural organizers need to be cognizant of their fellows’ situations and plan accordingly, often taking many different needs into account.


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When it’s not possible to use videoconferencing software because a group member has erratic or nonexistent Internet service, a phone call into the meeting or to a specific discussion and voting portion of the meeting might keep the isolated group member engaged. At the least, a follow-up phone call or in-person visit from a fellow activist within a few days should be part of the group plan. Rural dwellers who live far afield from each other risk missing not only gatherings and events, but also just general interpersonal contact. Grassroots group organizers should set up a system so that any individuals who live alone are regularly checked on via phone or other means, even if those individuals have family members who check on them. This is simply part of building community and showing concern, appreciation, and mutual support. Shrinking Funding for Nonprofits and Human Services

The need for human services is not much different among rural and urban populations, but it does play a factor in organizing, just as poverty and isolation do; in fact, the drying up of available human services exacerbates those difficulties as well as stresses every sector. According to the National Council of Nonprofits (2013: 1), cutbacks in government spending on services are placing an ever-greater strain on the nonprofits that often provide those services: Government budget cuts impact charitable nonprofits in many ways, affecting nonprofits with government contracts and those without: • For instance, when the federal government recently cut the SNAP (food stamp) program, 47 million Americans suddenly needed more assistance for their families, leading some state officials to begin “encouraging people to seek help from local charities and churches.” • Many people are surprised to learn that sector-wide approximately 1/3 of all funding each year comes from nonprofits performing contracted services for local, state, and federal governments. So government budget cuts force them to raise funds elsewhere to meet their missions, thereby increasing competition for scarce resources from private donors. • As state and local governments struggle for money, a growing trend is that they increase their attempts to divert resources away from nonprofit missions through the imposition of new taxes, fees, and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs).

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• Nonprofits with government contracts are often not paid fairly for services they provide with governments. . . . • Governments are cutting spending on services, but they aren’t cutting the related human needs. Those needing help turn to nonprofits, thus further increasing demands for services.

When nonprofit human services agencies lose public funding, they are forced to cut back services and programs and/or seek funding from private sources. In rural areas, of course, there are fewer such sources, so the impact of lessening public funding can have an amplified effect. Poor Telecommunications and Little Reliable News Media

One of the biggest challenges for rural North American organizers is a serious lack of decent telecommunications in huge swaths of the country. A look at national coverage maps of both Internet service and mobile phone networks gives a rather startling picture of just how large an area of the United States and Canada receives little or no telecommunications services—and this is not just in the “Wild West,” but across the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast as well as along all the coastal regions. There is a shocking limit to mobile phone coverage across a broad swath of the United States, and tens of thousands of square miles of the country still receive no broadband services (National Broadband Coverage 2016; OpenSignal.com 2016).3 There is a notable lack of research on rural communities and news media. The Pew Research Center, in its March 2015 report, “Local News in a Digital Age,” investigated the differences between telecommunications access in three urban communities: • Denver, Colorado—“a highly educated urban area of more than 2 million with internet adoption above the national average and a large Hispanic population (19%)”; • Macon, Georgia—“a metro area of 175,000 with a substantial share of black residents (41%), an unemployment rate above the national average, and a local university working to serve as a hub for journalism innovation”; and • Sioux City, Iowa—“a city that spans three states and has a predominantly white population of just 125,000.” (Mitchell et al. 2015a: 5)


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Community organizing in Denver, a large, ethnically diverse, digitallywell-networked city with convenient, navigable, and inexpensive public transit, can bear little resemblance to organizing in southeastern Oregon’s ranch country or Butler County, Alabama, one of the persistently poorest non-metro counties in the country (USDA-ERS 2015). Without Internet access at home, most people are unable to use social media—and they certainly do not use it with the regularity and comfort that urban activists do. Even accessing email is difficult for many. Hance (2015), the political and environmental activist in north-central New York State, explains the problem based on personal experience: For many of my neighbors, and for me sometimes as well, it means going to the library. In my town, the library is open only Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 to 5:30 p.m., and on Tuesdays for a few different hours. My town’s library has essentially been turned into a community day care center, so it is not a comfortable place to sit and do research, create materials, and communicate with other activists. There’s a college town I could drive to, where the library is open daily and has night hours once a week. Because resources are so stretched, libraries are consolidating.

Hance and other activists have to drive not only to distant meetings, but even to engage in telecommunications, which are supposed to make organizing easier. With cutbacks in government services, the lack of availability of Internet services is another obstacle to activism. Thus we loop back to the rural problems of distance and isolation. Furthermore, coalition building between rural grassroots groups and their urban counterparts, which systems-thinking organizers recognize as critical, is stymied by the very different communications needs and habits of the two constituencies. Urban activists, especially those under 40, are much more likely to “live on their cell phones,” according to Kim Fraczek (2015), co-director of the New York City–based Sane Energy Project, which also engages in coalition work with rural and suburban allies throughout New York and other northeastern states. They regularly text (send and receive text messages via smart phones and other mobile devices). They rely on such online applications as Google Hangout, GoogleDocs, and MeetUp, as well as Facebook Events and other tools in an ever-

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expanding array of social media and networking apps, to hold virtual strategic meetings, co-write and co-edit documents, and plan and promote in-person meetings, events, and actions. They hop on trains and buses to get together in person. They “sometimes obsessively” follow Twitter and Instagram and other social media for news related to their activism interests, Fraczek observed. The urban organizers in Sane Energy Project also do their best to adapt when their projects involve collaboration with counterparts in rural areas, understanding that in those cases they must add a few layers of communication such as email, phone calls, postal mail, flyers, and posters, to be sure everyone is reached. Similarly, we find that the more media-savvy rural organizers maintain websites and active social media accounts, sometimes more for the benefit of those outside their own membership. This adds to the workload of all these (paid and volunteer) organizers, but they agree that it is an important task. The collapse of the newspaper industry as a primary source of news for people in exurban areas, along with the consolidation of news media in general, has left rural dwellers particularly bereft. Those in regions with decent Internet service can find independent news sources, but many communities are left with nothing outside a “shopper” or similar small-town weekly or monthly paper, with advertising as its primary sustenance and including just a bit of local news, often provided by untrained journalists without the ability to offer important context and analysis of the stories that are important to residents. Lack of local news media affects organizers not only in communicating among themselves, but critically in that they have lost a vehicle for getting their own messages out. If there are no local news outlets to alert, holding press conferences, or even rallies and protests, is almost futile. If nobody hears, views, or reads about a protest at a legislator’s office or a town meeting, there is no pressure brought to bear on the policymakers. In a midsized city of 200,000—about the size of Rochester, New York; Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Huntington Beach, California—a protest involving just .5 percent of the population would bring out 1,000 people, enough of a crowd likely to draw some media


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attention. But in a small township of 800 people, such a percentage adds up to 40 people, barely enough to fill a full row in some church pews, and certainly not sufficient to garner attention from media outlets, especially those that may be based many miles, and many counties, away. Between 2008 and 2013, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 33,000 journalists, in every state of the USA, lost their jobs as scores of newspapers closed down. Thus many issues that were once covered in newspapers that people read regularly are now covered, if at all, in fragmented ways across various other media and delivery models. There is a wide disparity in people’s ability to be informed and engaged with their community organizations, schools, and local, state, and federal governments (Mitchell et al. 2015b). The Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2015” included this comment about how news is now disseminated: [O]ur 2014 research revealed that nearly half of Web-using adults report getting news about politics and government in the past week on Facebook, a platform where influence is driven to a strong degree by friends and algorithms. Americans’ changing news habits have a tremendous impact on how and to what extent our country functions within an informed society. So too does the state of the organizations producing the news and making it available to citizens day in and day out. Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media report focuses primarily on the latter, tracking the expanding and diversifying news industry over time and across a variety of indicators. Understanding the industry in turn allows researchers to ask and answer important questions about the relationship between information and democracy—whether this means exploring the degree to which like-minded consumers gravitate to the same sources, the opportunities consumers have or don’t have to stay on top of the activities of their elected officials, or how connected residents feel to their local communities. (Mitchell, et al. 2015b: 5)

Lacking in Pew’s otherwise comprehensive news media study, and all of the prior years’ studies by Pew, is any focus on rural communities and their media or absence thereof. As mentioned above, the three

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locations studied in depth—Denver, Macon, and Sioux City—are urban, and they also have relatively extensive Internet network services. Thus, although this study and others prove useful to gain an overall national view of news media availability, there have not been in-depth studies of the rural news landscape. This author’s investigation, interviews, and experience in mainstream, independent, national, international, and local journalism as well as in urban and rural organizing point to the importance of organizers using a variety of media in their own messaging. Direct mail and advertising are expensive propositions and outside the reach of self-funded grassroots community groups. Anything involving printing, such as flyers and brochures, requires money as well. Holding public educational meetings and forums is critical but also expensive and time-consuming. Even in communities fortunate enough to have a noncommercial, locally run radio station and/or a local public access cable station, the coverage provided for activists’ work depends on the mission, commitment, and capabilities of those running the station, be they paid staff members or volunteers. Cable access franchisees are no longer required by law to air video brought in by constituents; there is also wide disparity among them as to what issues and points of view to which they grant air time. But organizers who have access to either of these two types of media outlets can make use of them. The single most effective way of reaching potential allies, grassroots organizers report uniformly, is the tried-and-true method of holding one-on-one conversations. This generally means going from door to door. When people live far apart, it is time- and resource-intensive activity. Still, with enough committed and informed people taking a few hours a week to do this, organizers can “have the most meaningful conversations and inform the most people,” asserts Hance (2015) from rural north-central New York. Hance has done intensive and extensive door-to-door work, gathering thousands of signatures on various issues. Among her biggest successes was getting 22 out of 26 townships in her own and 10 other counties to pass fracking moratoria or bans. This would never have


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happened, she is certain, without the door-to-door effort, during which Hance (2015) handed out information and explained some of the harms of fracking. And then I asked people if they thought the risk was acceptable—if they got poisoned or killed because some shareholder is going to make money off it. Yes, I put it to them crudely, bluntly, because it’s a crude, blunt issue. Most of the time, they hadn’t heard anything like that before, because the primary media they get, commercial TV, is all about the industry’s side of things.

Susceptibility to Disinformation

Hance’s (2015) experience with popular misunderstanding of issues created by mass media is not unusual. Since the vast majority of newspapers, radio stations, and network and cable television stations (and many online news media outlets) in the United States are corporately owned, it should come as no surprise that they are often sources of disinformation—distortions that favor corporate, government, and military proclamations (Mitchell, 2015b; Free Press 2016). Hance points out that what passes for news media is often the enemy of activists working for peace, justice, human rights, and the environment because so much “news” is actually corporate and/or government propaganda, or mindless entertainment. As Hance (2015) explains, much of what the media provide is panem et circenses, as it is in Latin: bread and entertainment, appeasing people so the government can keep dissent down. People have been fed entertainment rather than news so much, they think that’s what they have a right to. They haven’t been taught that to make a democracy work, we all have to do it. They have gotten so far removed that they’ve given up their power and voice. There is no questioning of authority. The old adage is true, that feeding and entertaining people makes them give up their political power. Yet their lives, and their children’s lives, are at stake.

Nickie Sekera (2015), a water rights (among other issues) organizer from rural Maine fighting water privatization by Nestl"e, explained how

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the corporation markets its Poland Spring brand as a good Maine company with a longstanding tradition of offering pure spring water. Never mind that the original Poland Spring has “dried up” and that they changed the definition of spring water! There’s no mention of Nestl"e in their ads. Poland Spring has been in operation since 1845 in Maine, so there is still a popular belief in rural corners of the state that they are still locally owned. Nestl"e bought Poland Spring as part of their water portfolio brands in 1985. Perrier had bought Poland Spring, and then Nestl"e bought Perrier.

Environmental Degradation: Corporate and Related Scourges

Environmental degradation is a more direct and personal challenge for rural citizens than for people who live in cities. Many rural areas depend on wells for their water supply and on septic tanks for wastewater disposal, not on public systems as in cities. “Consolidated animal feeding operations”—CAFOs, or factory farms where animals are routinely abused—are located in rural areas, and animal wastes from feedlots are a tremendous source of water and food contamination. Pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers are used nearly indiscriminately in “conventional” agricultural areas nationwide, where they seep into water sources as well as contaminate crops and animals that people eat. Dangerous fossil fuel pipelines—leaky and explosive—are proliferating, yet they are mostly unmapped and unregulated (Phillips 2015). Power plants are also sited mostly in rural areas, even when they supply electricity to cities. Forest fires, and the accompanying air pollution and ash fallout, generally affect rural areas more than cities (Park 2015: wildfire map). Droughts affect rural dwellers more significantly and directly than urban dwellers; even as the U.S. western states are experiencing unprecedented drought conditions, cities are winning rights to water over even agricultural regions. According to Brown (2009: 42): In the U.S. southern Great Plains and the Southwest, where there is little unclaimed water, the growing water needs of cities and thousands of small towns can be satisfied only by taking water from agriculture. A monthly publication from California, The Water Strategist, devotes several


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pages each issue to a listing of water sales that took place in the western United States during the preceding month. Scarcely a working day goes by without another sale.

Across the U.S. west, notably in Colorado and California, cities have been buying water rights from farmers and smaller communities—making this necessity for human life into a commodity. Brown (2009: 43) continues: The farmers who are selling their water rights would like to continue farming, but city officials are offering far more for the water than the farmers could possibly earn by irrigating crops. Irrigated area in California shrank 10 percent between 1997 and 2007 as farmers sold their irrigation water to cities. Whether it is outright government expropriation, farmers being outbid by cities, or cities simply drilling deeper wells than farmers can afford, tillers of the land are losing the water war.

As a result of all these factors, rural areas are already generally more directly affected by pollution than urban areas, and they are becoming even more vulnerable as fracking and related infrastructures and industries proliferate, with virtually no regard for the consequences. There can be no discussion of organizing on any level without paying attention to these pervasive and seemingly insurmountable problems that plague communities everywhere, and will continue to proliferate as long as policymakers choose short-term gain over longterm sustainability, and choose profit for the few over the good of the many and the health of the planet. Fracking

Terry Greenwood (2014) was a farmer in Washington County in southwestern Pennsylvania. In 2007 his farm pond was first contaminated with gas drilling wastewater. He lost 11 cows; more than half his remaining cows gave birth to stillborn calves, a catastrophe unlike anything he had experienced in nearly two decades of farming. The mineral rights on the property Greenwood and his wife bought in 1988 were contracted in 1921 to an oil drilling company with a permanent or 99-year lease. (It may be hard to imagine anyone signing

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such a thing that would be legally binding on a subsequent owner, but it is common, especially in mining states like Pennsylvania, which was then and still is heavily exploited, especially for coal.) When the drilling company, Dominion Energy, came to drill the wells, the Greenwoods had no say in the matter, despite their lack of consent. In early 2008, after Greenwood reported to Pennsylvania officials that his water had turned brown and tasted salty, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) determined that Dominion had polluted the family farm’s water supply. Dominion supplied bottled water to the Greenwoods for a time afterward, under court order. Two years later, Greenwood reported that his remaining cows did not give birth to a single live calf—an unheard-of phenomenon in his experience. His property was completely worthless, as no one would buy land that had no potable water. Four years after that, Terry Greenwood himself was dead, victim of glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer (Kelly 2014). Of course, there is no way of proving a direct correlation between Terry Greenwood’s fatal illness and the contamination of his drinking water by drilling corporations, just as there is rarely a way of legally proving that an illness or death is a direct result of a corporate harm. The near impossibility of proving causation in an individual case such as this reveals the extent to which the law is rigged in favor of polluters and against ordinary citizens. Contrary to the impression one might get from watching movies such as Erin Brockovich, companies that create illness from major contaminators of groundwater are rarely brought to justice.4 Polluting corporations count on this, of course. It is part of their culture and their budgeting; they build in allowances for fines to be paid out when they are caught and found guilty of causing environmental and health harms to people, animals, and communities—even ecosystems. Fracking and its related industries and infrastructures are just one example of a corporate harm that is out of control and all but unregulated. The “precautionary principle” seems to have utterly disappeared from public discourse. That principle was codified in the 1970s, but it dates back to ancient times (think Hippocratic Oath and its maxim of “Do No Harm”). It was clarified at an academic conference in what became known as the Wingspread Statement. An excerpt from that definition:


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[T]he Precautionary Principle: Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public bears the burden of proof. . . . The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic, and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action. (Ashford et al. 1998)

Emerging science confirms that drilling and fracking inherently threaten groundwater and have contaminated drinking water sources (Bushkin-Bedient et al. 2015: 26–27). In Pennsylvania alone, at this writing, more than 240 private drinking water wells have been contaminated or have dried up as a result of drilling and fracking operations over a seven-year period. A range of studies from across the United States presents irrefutable evidence that groundwater contamination occurs and is more likely to occur near drilling sites. The nation’s 187,570 injection wells for disposal of fracking waste also pose demonstrable threats to drinking water aquifers. Municipal sewage treatment plants are not capable of treating fracking waste; disposal of fracking waste through them can foster the formation of carcinogenic byproducts during chlorination. The disposal of fracking waste remains a problem without a safe, viable solution. Overall, the number of well blowouts (unintentional releases of pressurized gases and fluids), spills, and cases of surface water contamination from waste pits and other sources has steadily grown. Meanwhile, the gas industry’s use of “gag orders,” non-disclosure agreements, and settlements impede scientific study and stifle public awareness of the extent of these problems. Pennsylvanians will be paying the price over many years to come because their state’s policymakers chose to let it become the fastestgrowing unconventional gas drilling (fracking) state in the country, all without funding research to examine potential health impacts, or creating a fund to help care for those made ill by the short-term shale gas drilling boom. The state is full of children and adults who experience often unexplained symptoms ranging from skin rashes to nausea to nosebleeds to ulcerous growths, and worse.

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According to Secretary John Quigley of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, there are also hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline being installed around the nation, including Pennsylvania, where 20,000 to 25,000 miles of new “gathering lines,” which take gas from the frack sites to larger transmission pipelines or to processing facilities, are planned for the next couple decades (Hurdle 2015). Most of these pipelines for volatile frack gas are “class one” lines, which no local, state, or federal agencies oversee. They are intended for rural areas. While the state agency in Pennsylvania that is supposed to be protecting the environment and public health instead openly serves the interests of industry, Jenny Lisak (2015) of the Pennsylvania Alliance for Clean Air and Water has painstakingly compiled the “List of the Harmed.” Using published reports, Lisak had highlighted 16,079 documented cases of individuals and families harmed by shale gas production in the United States, as of May 18, 2015. Stories about the true nature of fracking do not get much publicity, except via National Public Radio’s StateImpacts and independent media such as DeSmog Blog, ProPublica, TruthOut, and work by such independent writers as Dory Hippauf (Pennsylvania), Sharon Wilson (Texas Sharon).5 Tobacco corporations spent decades hoodwinking the U.S. public about the harms from their products. Few would argue that those activities—deliberately exposing people to substances they knew to cause deadly cancers, while actively telling them smoking was harmless— were anything less than criminal. Now fossil fuel corporations are selling an unsuspecting and strangely trusting public on the idea that fracking, pipelines, compressor stations, “bomb trains,” brine spreading, radioactive frack waste dumping, underground fossil fuel storage, and related infrastructures and heavy industries are “safe” and intended to create “jobs” and “energy independence.” Hard-strapped people want so desperately to believe this, especially the jobs part, that they turn away from the mountains of hard evidence presented to them in public forums, hoping that they will somehow escape the worst consequences. Terry Greenwood spoke out for several years before he died, as have countless others who have suffered health problems and property losses as a result of fracking and related industries. Those who raise questions include industry and “oversight” agency workers and retirees.


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Alas, often people do not pay attention until it is too late and they or their loved ones become collateral damage themselves. But every time someone new decides to speak up about her own suffering, more consciousness is raised and more allies come aboard—some becoming activists themselves. It may not be the ideal way of organizing, but it is a powerful way. Large-Scale Environmental Disasters

The 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was one of the biggest human-caused environmental catastrophes in history. It hit an area that had been devastated five years earlier by another of the most horrific human-activity-exacerbated environmental catastrophes in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina. BP’s activity (it was found “grossly negligent,” which many argue is a “grossly inadequate” description of the oil rig explosion and spill) killed 11 workers and countless wild creatures, permanently damaged entire ecosystems, contaminated more than 30,000 square miles of sea with more than 3 million barrels of tar and oily crude, and wiped out the livelihoods of thousands of coastal dwelling individuals and families in five states—Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Five years after the disaster, BP was ordered to pay $20.8 billion to federal, state, and local governments as “compensation.” But it is being permitted to take 18 years to do this—giving it free cash in the meantime, as those dollars will be worth less than they are today. Furthermore, it could recover a big chunk of that fine as a tax deduction because only $5.5 billion of it is specified as a penalty under the Clean Water Act. The other $15.3 billion is for other damages and payments that BP can claim as simply a cost of doing business, and therefore tax deductible. (IRS regulations allow corporations to deduct the cost of recovering claims for restoring damaged environment.) The Department of Justice could have written into the settlement a provision that none of the fine was tax deductible, but it chose not to do so. In mid-November 2015 some 54 Congress members asked U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to specify in the final settlement that BP cannot claim tax deductions for all or part of the payout as a business expense.

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The actual costs of the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe are more likely in the billions of dollars, and some of them are virtually impossible to assign a monetary value. How does one compensate families who lost their lifestyle, their heritage? How does one put a price tag on a coral reef that has died, or schools of blue fin tuna, or oyster beds that will never recover? On November 30, 2015, a federal judge ordered Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, which owned 25 percent of the well that blew in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to pay a $159.5 million civil fine for its part in the “polluting enterprise” responsible for the disaster, but cleared it of fault. (Earlier Anadarko had been ordered to pay BP $4 billion to help pay settlement claims against BP.) The judge could have charged the full $3.51 billion—$1,100 per barrel of oil spilled— allowed under the Clean Water Act, but instead chose to impose a mere $50 fine per barrel. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), the day after the civil fine ruling, Anadarka shares went up 29 cents, or onehalf of 1 percent. The BP crimes and punishments are important to note because they serve as graphic reminders of just how discouraging activism can be, and the small value placed on the lives of many humans (as well as of other species). This adds another layer of difficulty, especially when activists try to inspire others to get involved and fight back. What is the use, many think, when the corporations will just run roughshod over us all in the end? Yet the Gulf of Mexico’s pollution by such companies as Formosa Plastics sparked one of the great environmental activists of our time, the former commercial fisherwoman Diane Wilson—author of An Unreasonable Woman, Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, and other books—to radically change the course of her life after age 40 and inspire countless others. Climate Change: Effects on Rural Areas

Weather and climate-change-related catastrophes continue to hit rural areas as hard as they hit urban areas. Since rural residents live in relative isolation, they are more vulnerable than city dwellers to fires caused by drought in western states, flooding or landslides from heavy rains, and prolonged interruption of electric power from


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storms. Rural areas generally have less in their coffers, and fewer volunteers available, than do cities and suburban regions; thus damage mitigation, repair, and rebuilding are likely to take considerably longer. And as these climate change dangers proliferate, communities have not kept up; the very basic discussions are not happening, let alone mitigation planning. In a peer-reviewed study conducted with funding from the U.S. Forest Service, Lal et al. (2011: 838) discuss the lack of adequate information available by which rural areas can plan for the consequences of climate change: Vulnerability to climate change tends to be greater for rural communities who [sic] typically have fewer resources and fewer alternatives than urban areas. The impact of climate change on rural communities depends on complex interactions among different sectors, regions and population groups and the environment. However, there is a dearth of information and literature on how the myriad, socio-economic and demographic factors will react to the bio-physical changes accompanying climate change and virtually none on how the interconnected socio-economic/ecological systems will respond. Most of the current literature is based on such coarse temporal and spatial resolution as to offer only very general guidance for investment and policy-making. The potential impacts of climate change on rural communities include increased risks to human health, changes to the agricultural and forestry sectors, stress on water resources and fisheries, impacts on recreation and tourism, adverse effects on indigenous communities, and additional impacts related to an increase in adverse weather events. The climate risk mitigation and adaptive capacity of rural communities remains an important area for public-policy interventions and future research. However, public discussion about adaptation is at an early stage in the U.S.

In 2009, in his inaugural speech as president of the World Medicine Association in New Delhi, India, the Canadian physician Dana Hanson noted the lack of adequate planning for the global health consequences of climate change: We know that the climate affects local and national food supplies, air and water quality, weather, economics, and many other critical health determinants. Climate change represents an inevitable, massive threat to global health that will likely eclipse the major known pandemics as the

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leading cause of death and disease in the 21st century. Yet why do we hear so little or no discussion by our governments of the effects of climate change on population health and its huge impact on health services? (World Medicine Association 2009)

Good question. Not only do we hear so little discussion about climate and health, but we often hear from mainstream media that there is still scientific uncertainty about climate change. Many of the major candidates for the office of President of the United States in the 2016 elections actively deny the validity of climate science, and they still have millions of devotees. The confusion of the public about the science of climate change is no accident. It has resulted from a conscious disinformation campaign by powerful interests. Banerjee et al. (2015: pt. I: 7), writing in the independent investigative media outlet Inside Climate News, released a bombshell report in September 2015 showing how ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. fossil fuel corporation (and the world’s fourth largest), had known about and conducted innovative studies on the effects of climate change from 1977 to 1986, and then did an about-face. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

Like Big Tobacco before them, the big fossil fuel corporations have spent a fortune in obfuscating the truth about how their products and processes harm humans and the environment. Their money has been well spent. Antagonism, Intimidation, and Demoralization

The tactics that are used to prevent rural residents from understanding the threats they face to their health are legion. They range from simple denials by company spokespersons to psychological assault. Companies and government agencies restrict access to relevant information by


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means that include silencing of employees, court injunctions against activists, gag orders against homeowners who are forced to resort to selling their underwater homes to industry, training of corporate staff in public relations and counterinsurgency tactics, and physical intimidation and interference with activists’ rights of free speech and assembly. As an example of silencing of employees, two whistleblowing retirees from the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DoH) came forward in 2014 to say that they and other DoH employees were told they could not discuss gas drilling, even to the point of being instructed to not return phone calls from residents who were worried about the health effects of drilling. A community health nurse who had worked in Fayette County for 35 years, Tammi Stuck, explained how she and others were silenced: “We were absolutely not allowed to talk to them.” Marshall P. Deasy, another retiree, who had been a program specialist for more than 20 years with the state’s Bureau of Epidemiology, confirmed Stuck’s report and added that staff members were ordered to get permission before attending any community meetings, even those devoted to their direct purview, community health. Deasy added that he could not remember a precedent for this kind of interference: “Community health wasn’t told to be silent on any other topic that I can think of” (Colaneri 2014). Aimee Tysarczyk, speaking for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, denied the allegations, claiming that employees were never told not to return calls: “Tysarczyk said all complaints related to shale gas drilling are sent to the Bureau of Epidemiology. Since 2011, she said, the agency has logged 51 complaints, but has found no link between drilling and illness” (Colaneri 2014). One has to wonder how carefully the Department of Health is investigating. Numerous individuals in the state have carefully recorded their illnesses and their proximity to drilling and related activities. When companies cannot silence employees, they may use courtordered injunctions to harass activists. Vera Scroggins is a well-known documentary citizen journalist who has led numerous “frack tours” of her home county of Susquehanna, one of the most heavily fracked regions of Pennsylvania, helping to educate lawmakers, students, academics, journalists, and visitors from around the USA and the world about what is happening in her state. She has especially shone a light

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on Cabot Oil & Gas, a Texas drilling company that holds leases on more than 200,000 acres, nearly 40 percent of the land in the county, and was found responsible for polluting an aquifer that supplied dozens of homes in Dimock Township. Cabot has repeatedly harassed and sued Scroggins. A judge ordered an injunction against her, barring her from Cabot-leased land, which included property of friends and neighbors, as well as stores, public parks, schools, and medical facilities. A retiree with limited income, Scroggins was fortunate to win the services of pro bono attorneys, but there are only so many attorneys willing and able to take on such free speech cases for free. Scroggins has vowed to not be cowed, and says she will go to jail if necessary to protect free speech and freedom of the press (Cusick 2015). Some companies go on the offensive by trying to prevent criticism from arising though the use of psychological tactics. CNBC’s Eamon Javers (2011) broke a story unearthed by Sharon Wilson, a Texas blogger (TexasSharon.com) and director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project for the nonprofit environmental group Earthworks. Wilson attended a fall 2011 gas and oil industry conference devoted to “giving corporate communications professionals tools with which to fight back against communities trying to protect themselves from the industry’s activities” (a euphemism for psy-ops, or psychological operations). Referring to corporate public relations tactics as psychological operations, normally used against enemies in times of war, might seem to be hyperbole. But, as Steve Horn (2012) explains, corporate leaders are quite open that they view as enemies anyone who questions their industrial operations: Anadarko Petroleum Corporation’s Public Relations Chief Matthew Carmichael, a military veteran himself, recommended that all natural gas industry PR professionals read the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” formerly the official doctrine of the US military. “Download the US Army/ Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual,” [he remarked] “because we are dealing with an insurgency. There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”


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In other cases, companies demoralize activists by making resistance seem futile. Nickie Sekera, the water rights activist in rural Maine, has been fighting Nestl"e, which has been buying water from numerous communities around the nation including her community. In Fryeburg, this practice has the blessing of some local officials and Maine’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC). In 2013 Food and Water Watch released a list of contributions that showed Nestl"e Waters North America, its subsidiary Poland Springs Water Company, and their employees gave more than $640,000 to Maine elected officials (Food and Water Watch 2013). That same year Sekera and fellow water justice advocates collected 126,000 signatures in opposition to Nestl"e being granted a 25-year water withdrawal contact with the Fryeburg Water Co., which they delivered to Governor Paul LePage. But two temporary commissioners on the Maine Public Utilities Commission (the three permanent commissioners had all worked for Nestl"e and recused themselves, only after tremendous pressure) (Varela 2013) ignored the vehement public opposition, even overruling the recommendation by PUC staff that the contract be rejected. The corporation and those in its camp exercised pressure on activists and managed to demoralize and cripple the opposition, even as they won the battle, Sekera (2015) said: The last big round of fighting ended up with the resistance falling apart due to Nestl"e’s strong-arming. When Nestl"e sued our town for saying No to a second loading [water withdrawal] facility, it left the activists feeling so defeated that they spread poison through the community, [saying] that Nestl"e couldn’t be beat and that it is useless to fight them. There is a very heavy “negative peace” in our town, and the divisions are deep. We’ve had activists lose their jobs for being outspoken against Nestl"e. Some had put up second mortgages on their homes to pay for lawyers, and became fraught with stress and anger. So it’s been very hard to get people involved in this last go-round against this contract. People did come out to flood the public hearing and speak out against it, but to do the day-to-day stuff there’s been just a small handful of locals involved. I’ve had to focus on going all over the state in hopes of educating people to create a statewide movement. I wait for critical moments to help push the fight along.

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LuAnne Kozma (2013), who founded the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan, has the herculean task of securing more than 253,000 handwritten signatures from Michigan registered voters over a sixmonth period to support a legislative ballot initiative. The law would change state statute to ban horizontal fracking and the dumping of frack waste, and also remove the language in the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act that favors the special interests of the oil and gas industry over the protection of human health and water. During the signature-gathering campaign, which began in 2012 and is now focused on the 2016 election cycle, Kozma and her allies have met with tremendous antagonism and even ambushes by the industry and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. The chamber “has a ballot question committee funded by the oil and gas industry against us,” Kozma explained. Discussing these methods used by corporations and their allied government agencies to silence critics, Kozma (2013) continued: Another tactic was to try to put obstacles to prevent us from being at public venues. Twice our best circulator got kicked out of the state park where he was collecting all summer. I had to involve the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] to talk to the DNR [Michigan Department of Natural Resources] and straighten it out. After the first kicking out, the DNR created a “free speech zone,” which is very illegal. In fact, the ACLU had successfully sued a county park system over this very tactic just a few years ago. The DNR had to back down and comply with the law. A similar tactic was in the hostility of some of the farmers’ markets around the state, which are sometimes run by local chambers of commerce. The people running the farmers’ market, who generally worked for the chamber, would order our volunteers to leave or they’d call the police. Sometimes it worked. Other times we stuck it out and straightened it out, sometimes with the help of the ACLU.

Kozma and her fellow lead organizers have gotten tough over the years, as have their counterparts around the country, but not every organizer can withstand such intimidation over the long term. If nothing else works, some companies will resort to physical harassment and threats of violence, sometimes apparently using hired thugs. One New York State anti-fracktivist, who lives alone in a remote rural county, has reported numerous attempts at intimidation over several years, with “strange men” coming to her windows at night and shining


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flashlights in her bedroom, among other invasions of her homestead. An avowed pacifist, she has a big dog and has felt it necessary to keep a gun by her bed. Rural activists, generally more isolated and sometimes out of easy telecommunications range, are more susceptible to intimidation than their urban counterparts (unless, of course, those urban counterparts are black, which is a whole other terrifying situation). Regulatory System Failure

The efforts of companies to stifle dissent regarding the hazards they pose in rural areas do not stop with intimidation. Unfortunately, many groups initially formed to help rural communities with various issues have been co-opted or hoodwinked by industry into unhealthy alliances. For example, the National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association has a membership “that includes 900 not-for-profit rural electric cooperatives and public power districts providing retail electric service to more than 42 million consumers in 47 states. . . . NRECA’s members include consumer-owned local distribution systems . . . and 66 generation and transmission (G&T) cooperatives . . . [which] share an obligation to serve their members by providing safe, reliable and affordable electric service” [emphasis added] (NRECA 2015a) Yet, while the association does good work on several fronts, NRECA regularly fights all regulation on energy industries. It actively lobbies for laws that harm the environment and fights laws that benefit the environment. The organization filed suit in 2015 against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to block the implementation of its Clean Power Plan, which requires existing fossil-fuel-run power plants to achieve by 2030 an overall carbon dioxide reduction of 32 percent below 2005 levels (Cash 2015). A search of NRECA’s “Environmental Regulation” pages yields numerous examples of its opposition to regulations that protect environment and health (NRECA 2016). It subverts its mission to provide safe electric service in favor of its contradictory mission of providing affordable electric service. Similarly, the “environmental protection,” “environmental conservation,” “natural resources,” and similarly branded federal and state

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regulatory agencies, departments, divisions, and offices generally have conflicting dual missions—simply put, (1) to best exploit natural resources, extracting the most economic benefit from their exploitation, and (2) to “protect the environment.” Those goals are incompatible. Here are few examples of their stated missions and goals (author’s emphases italicized): Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Conservation (DOECC) We are dedicated to conserving, improving and protecting our natural resources and the environment—and increasing the availability of cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy. (Connecticut DOEEC 2015) Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) The department is focusing on six strategic goals to help achieve its vision: . . . (3) Partner with communities and businesses to protect natural resources and promote economic growth. (Florida DEP 2015) Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EOEEA) EOEEA is responsible for promoting efficient energy use throughout the Commonwealth while protecting and preserving Massachusetts’ natural environment. (Massachusetts EOEEA 2015) New Mexico Environment Department INFORM citizens and businesses on environmental . . . health and safety requirements. MONITOR air and water quality and assess land . . . ISSUE PERMITS to facilities and businesses to ensure operations meet established environmental and health standards. INSPECT work sites and industrial facilities . . . ASSIST facilities with compliance requirements of environmental laws and regulations through outreach and technical assistance. RESOLVE environmental issues that have or could have a direct impact on . . . health . . . (New Mexico Environment Department 2015) New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) To conserve, improve and protect New York’s natural resources and environment and to prevent, abate and control water, land and air pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well-being.


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DEC’s goal is to achieve this mission through the simultaneous pursuit of environmental quality, public health, economic prosperity and social well-being, including environmental justice and the empowerment of individuals to participate in environmental decisions that affect their lives. (New York State DEC 2015) Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) The vision of the DEQ is to eliminate the effects of unintended consequences of historic development, to prevent new adverse environmental impacts and to provide significant input into national decision making, all the while enhancing both the environment and the economy of Oklahoma. (Oklahoma DEQ 2015a) (The Oklahoma DEQ is even more blatantly industry-friendly than the average state agency. Its 13 governor-appointed members, who each serve fiveyear terms, are composed of three members of any statewide nonprofit environmental organizations and one each of the following: • manufacturing industry executive, • hazardous waste industry executive, • solid waste industry executive, • representative from petroleum industries regulated by DEQ, • representative from agricultural industry regulated by DEQ, • certified or registered environmental professional, • individual “well versed in recreational, irrigational, municipal or residential water usage,” • individual from conservation districts of the state, • member of a governing body of a city or town in Oklahoma, • individual from a rural water district. (Oklahoma DEQ 2015b) Texas Railroad Commission (2015) The Railroad Commission serves Texas through: • our stewardship of natural resources and the environment; • our concern for personal and community safety; and • our support of enhanced development and economic vitality for the benefit of Texans.

Steve Coffman (2009), a writer in Yates County, New York, offers a succinct explanation of the impossibly contradictory mission of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which is emblematic of the fossil fuel divide not only in his county and state, but throughout the nation. “Through no fault of its own, the agency has become seriously compromised, split between two antithetical missions in the service of two incompatible masters,” Coffman

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writes. He then compares the agency’s original mission statement, from 1972, with its redefined 1992 Generic Environmental Impact Statement [emphasis added]: 1972 version: “To conserve, improve, and protect New York’s natural resources and environment, and control water, air, and land pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well being.” 1992 explanation of changed mission: “In 1963 the State Legislature repealed all previous oil and gas legislation and amended the Conservation Law to give DEC greater authority over wells drilled in the fields developed after 1963. The purpose of this law was to foster, encourage, and promote the development, production, and utilization of the natural resources of oil and gas in a manner that would prevent waste, increase ultimate recovery, and protect correlative rights of all the interests involved.”

“The consequence,” Coffman (2009) points out, “is that NYDEC presently has a conflict of interest by statute, a split personality by definition. No wonder, when it comes to Marcellus Shale gas drilling, its science seems subordinate to an underlying agenda that often seems intent on justifying a foregone conclusion. DEC cannot be fairly blamed for duplicity when duplicity is endemic to its mission.” Further explaining the impossible predicament for the agency, Coffman (2009) writes [emphasis added]: “The fault here is with the state legislature that has hamstrung DEC with this double bind. The federal government does not task the Environmental Protection Agency to ‘foster, encourage and promote’ the energy, mining and lumber industries. If such activities are to be legitimately governmental, at least put them under the likes of the departments of Energy, Interior, and Commerce, and leave the DEC to its hard-enough job of defending the environment and public health, without also legislating a Trojan Horse into the center of its mission.” It is not just the biggest state and federal agencies that have conflicting charges. Farm bureaus, cooperative extensions, and other rural organizations have similarly divergent missions, making it difficult (if not impossible) for their honorable employees to effectively pursue large-scale environmental and health safety goals.


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Too Polite—and Civically Disempowered

Questioning the legitimacy of big agencies and conflicted officials wouldn’t even occur to rural dwellers in many parts of the country, as Jim Gurley (2015) notes. Gurley is a multi-issue activist from Winona, a rural county along the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. Because of his location across the river from Wisconsin and just up the road from Iowa, he works closely with people in all three states. “A big challenge in working with rural families here in the Upper Midwest,” he said “is the prevalence of ‘Minnesota Nice.’ Hard-working, honest, and polite, many people here are loath to speak out with an opinion lest they seem proud or ‘puffed-up.’” Despite this, many of Gurley’s neighbors participated at local meetings and spoke at hearings when a factory farm threatened their community in 2005. “It’s important not to be pushy and to speak to the concerns of the residents in their language, not in the language of ideological environmentalism,” he notes. Currently, the region is being transformed rapidly by the industrial mining of silica, or “frac[k] sand,” which is used in fracking for methane (“natural” gas) and oil in other parts of the country. Silica is a hard, glass-like grain that is the cause of silicosis, a deadly and incurable lung disease, and it is mined by blasting into bluffs in these three states and elsewhere. “The frack sand mining invasion takes advantage of people who have operated on the basis of trust and honesty for generations,” Gurley (2015) explains. “The sand sharks, as we call them, come in posing as ‘good neighbors’ who care about the area and want to bring jobs. Many residents and officials believe them. But in the rare instances industry does not get what they want, they turn and threaten massive lawsuits or other retaliation. Our rural populations are really vulnerable to these amoral, manipulative industrialists.” Thus intimidation tactics, as discussed above, seem to work effectively for the extractive corporations in this region. “Industry has used the element of surprise,” Gurley (2015) continues. “Land men offer farmers exorbitant sums for property but require nondisclosure agreements, so the groundwork is laid before the community at large knows it is happening. Those who refuse to sell out often find themselves surrounded by mining operations, but then can’t sell their

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property. Industry then offers them a ridiculously low price to buy their property, knowing they can’t sell it to anyone else. No one wants to live next to a mine.” Hance (2015), the environmental and democracy activist from northcentral New York, would say the problem in her area is more “disconnection from community and from civic responsibility,” rather than “niceness.” “People have forgotten their responsibility to be part of the democracy,” said Hance (2015), who was born in the 1960s: Civic duty is no longer taught in schools, or anywhere. An industrialized nation destroys communities and makes people think of themselves as an island. I live in an agricultural area, but it’s within an industrialized society. People are farther removed from their community. And the lines have been disastrously blurred between church and state, so that now, instead of religious groups discussing people’s responsibility to help make their communities work better, prayers are being pushed in schools and at our county legislature meetings. They used to teach civic participation in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and through community projects. My parents’ generation understood civic duty. But it wasn’t taught in my generation, or my son’s, and it’s not being taught now. They don’t even teach it in scouting. As a Boy Scout, my son had to do certain things in the community, but it was just to get the badge, not to instill a lifelong commitment to participation in public life. Now, groups of people declare themselves sovereign and defy democracy. But we can’t have groups of people saying they’re covered by laws when it’s for their own benefit but they don’t have to play within the laws when they don’t want to! We all have to work together to make democracy, but we’re all sliding down the wall. It doesn’t take much to fall. If there are seven steps to the end, we’re on our seventh step. I’m really concerned.”

Thus social-change organizers must add to their list of duties the task of educating the public about civic responsibility and standing up for their own civil rights, as well as their primary foci. It helps, many agree, to make this learning happen using techniques from what Hance calls panem et circenses. Food is an enticement. Entertainment is an enticement. Instead of simply screening documentaries and holding panel discussions, some groups offer movie-and-popcorn nights for the


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whole family, even offering childcare to entice the hardest-to-reach age groups (those in their late 20s, 30s, and 40s).6 “We try and make our meetings and public events less threatening and more fun by offering food, and sometimes music,” said Minnesotan Gurley. “But first and foremost, we listen to the needs and concerns of the people, and try to speak to those. Keeping things simple, avoiding ‘activist-speak’ or ideological arguments, usually works best.” Keeping the Fire

There are many other challenges faced by rural activists. Perhaps the biggest, which we have not yet mentioned, is the same crisis faced by all who are aware of the magnitude of the threat of climate change. Many rural activists, living as close as they do to the land, are haunted day and night by this specter. They see climate change’s catastrophic effects not only on the human-built environment, but also on vegetation and wildlife. They struggle to figure out what food and protective crop species to plant and when to plant and harvest them, what native species to reintroduce, what new plant species from different growing zones to try, how to collect and best use rainwater, how to build and retrofit resilient and efficient structures, how to protect imperiled wildlife species, how to best harvest energy from the sun, wind, and waters—and how to keep themselves engaged with the beautiful aspects of life on earth that they’re fighting so hard to protect. A Dallas, Texas organizer who works in rural as well as urban areas, Marc McCord (2015) is an avid canoeist. “These days I spend far too many hours at my computer and far too few days on rivers,” he said. “This drought has really cut into my paddling time, but frac’ing [sic] has also done a masterful job of distracting me. When I do get away into the wilds it makes it all that much more special and enjoyable. [I especially love to get out to] a very big place that makes [me] feel very small and helps ground us in how truly insignificant any of us really are in the overall scheme of things. We are barely more than a gnat on the ass of the universe—but we do a leviathan’s job of destroying everything around us!” Many, if not all, of the rural (and, indeed, urban) activists this author has spoken with over the last half-decade agree that they share the

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most frustrating challenge of all: figuring out how to engage enough fellow activists to build the critical mass needed to change disastrous policies, on both the local and national levels. “I absolutely love the flora and fauna of Florida, but I am watching them vanish before my eyes,” said Southwest Florida writer, photographer, and environmental educator Fran Palmeri (2015). Now in her 70s, the lifelong observer of nature said:

It is due to loss of habitat with over-development and overuse of pesticides and other chemicals, yes, but even more, it’s because of people’s inability to see that their own activities are causing this. Dozens of species are becoming rare, even in the parks that were set up to preserve them. It seems like everyone in Florida is content to continue paving over paradise, without regard even to their own future. People crave the beauty of nature but are unwilling to do much to support it. Our local governments honor just the bottom line. I’m weary, but I still have the fire to keep fighting. Otherwise I would just succumb to despair. Now I see my job as recording the existence of species and habitats before they are gone forever, and trying to wake people up a few at a time through publishing my pictures and essays and giving public talks. I don’t know what else to do.

Like Alaskan Diane McEachern, her one-woman counterpart at the farther end of the country occupying the tundra, Fran Palmeri is doing all that she can. But she and other rural activists know that it will take a concerted nationwide convergence of activists demanding public policy changes to save any semblance of their rural ways of life. To reach those potential allies, they must work at keeping their own spirits up in the face of overwhelming threats and the waves of rage, grief, and despair that pour over them. Self-education and just doing are perhaps the best antidotes to those potentially crippling emotions. “We keep learning, becoming ever more knowledgeable about both legislative initiatives and the many aspects of fracking,” said LuAnne Kozma (2013) of the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan. “We are persistent, optimistic, ‘hands on’ doers.” Focusing on one or two issues at a time, and on building alliances the old-fashioned way, by one-on-


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one conversations, is how Kozma and other organizers keep from becoming overwhelmed. “In our efforts to get a ban on fracking on the election ballot in Michigan, our most effective volunteers were superheroes,” Kozma said. “One person got more than 7,000 signatures, another got more than 5,000. I got over 2,200 over six months while running the campaign every day, too. Those who were going above 1,000 felt committed to the success of the overall campaign and felt like they were making a very significant contribution of their time. When you find that it takes only 10 to 20 hours to collect 200, then you realize that dedicating a few weekends of your time, over the course of six months, isn’t much at all. The other thing they shared was belief in the power of the people, and persistence, and the need to work together.” Notes 1. This in no way diminishes the terrifying fact of institutionalized environmental racism in primarily urban areas throughout the United States. As environmental justice scholars-activists such as Majora Carter, Drs. Robert Bullard, Beverly Wright, and David Naguib Pellow, and others have pointed out in numerous studies, articles, and books, African-American, Latin-American, and Asian-American communities have long been victimized by siting of hazardous, polluting facilities and dumps 2. Regarding discrimination, counterparts across the country in Maine would agree with Greer’s assessment. EqualityMaine was founded in 1984 to secure full equality for LGBT people. Its Rural Organizing Project reported in 2013: “In our strategic planning survey of LGBT Mainers and allies 40% of the respondents lived in rural areas—more than any other category. These respondents shared specific, common needs—a need for greater visibility of LGBT Mainers, increased acceptance within their communities, and stronger connections between LGBT people. These common concerns are borne out by individual reports—of business owners treating LGBT customers unfairly, unsupportive school principals, and property damage and epithets directed at LGBT people in rural areas” (EqualityMaine 2015). 3. To see precisely what this means, visit www.broadbandmap.gov/speedtest and use the mouse to zoom in on almost any region of the United States. You will quickly discover that most of the area outside cities and along major highways has no coloring, which means it has little or no broadband coverage. The same is true of cell phone coverage, as can be seen

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from the map at www.opensignal.com. The result is the people in rural areas have limited access to cell phone and Internet coverage. 4. FrackbustersNY, of which the author is a co-founder, has proposed a novel law regarding fracking and related industries and infrastructures, which would subject executives and directors of corporations found guilty of perpetrating harm to the environment and health to mandatory financial fines and jail time. 5. It should be noted that National Public Radio is also full of pro-fossil-fuel “reporting” and frequently acts as a scribe for industry; that is subject for other writings. Here are a very few examples of independent media of note: DeSmog Blog, www.desmogblog.com, CommonDreams, www.commondreams.org, ProPublica, www.propublica.org, TruthOut, www.truth-out.org, Yes! Magazine, www.yesmagazine.org, Dory Hippauf (Pennsylvania) and the Frackorporation blogsite: www.frackorporation.wordpress.com, and Sharon Wilson’s BlueDaze blog: www.texassharon.com. 6. Here are some sources of free and inexpensive documentaries available online: Brave New Films (free feature and short documentaries), www.brave newfilms.org; Media Education Foundation (huge inventory of documentaries on numerous subjects; free previews upon request, some streaming available from $50), www.mediaed.org; Peace Project (inexpensive political, environmental, and progressive social change docs), www.peaceproject.com/dvds; Story of Stuff (free, short animated films about variety of subjects including Nestl"e’s taking of water from communities around the USA and world), storyofstuff.org. References Ashford, Nicholas, et al. (1998). “Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle.” Wingspread Conference Center, Racine, WI, January 25. www.gdrc.org/u-gov/precaution-3.html Banerjee, Neela, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer. (2015). “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago.” Inside Climate News, September 16. (Part 1: http://insideclimate news.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuelsrole-in-global-warming; Part 2: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/ 16092015/exxon-believed-deep-dive-into-climate-research-would-protectits-business Brown, Lester R. (2009). Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Substantially Revised Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Bushkin-Bedient, S., L. Dyrszka, Y. Gorby, M. Menapace, K. Nolan, C. Orensteing, B. Schoenfeld, and S. Steingraber. (2015). Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and


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Harms of Fracking (Unconventional Gas and Oil Extraction), 3rd ed. New York: Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility. concernedhealthny.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2012/11/PSR-CHPNY-Compendium-3.0.pdf Cash, Cathy. (2015). “NRECA and Co-ops Fight EPA Carbon Rule in Court.” Electric Co-op Today, October 26. www.ect.coop/industry/ on-the-docket/nreca-and-member-co-ops-challenge-epa-carbon-rule/86230 Coffman, Steve (2009). “The Marcellus Shale and Us.” Unpublished article. Colaneri, Katie. (2014). “Former State Health Employees Say They Were Silenced on Drilling.” StateImpact Pennsylvania, June 19. Harrisburg and Philadelphia: StateImpact, National Public Radio. https://state impact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2014/06/19/former-state-health-employeessay-they-were-silenced-on-drilling/ Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Conservation. (2016). “Home Page.” www.ct.gov/deep/site/default.asp Cusick, M. (2015). Cabot Continues Legal Fight against Fracking Activist. State Impact Pennsylvania, February 18. stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/ 2015/02/18/cabot-continues-legal-fight-against-fracking-activist EqualityMaine. (2015). “Rural Organizing Project.” equalitymaine.org/ ruralorganizing-project Feeding America. (2014). Real Hunger Facts. Chicago, IL: Feeding America. www. feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hunger/rural-hunger/ruralhunger-fact-sheet.html Florida Department of Environmental Protection. (2015). “Home Page.” www.dep.state.fl.us/mainpage/default.htm Food and Water Watch (2013). Nestl" e Political Contribution Breakdown (Maine). Washington, DC: Food and Water Watch. www.scribd.com/ doc/171422070/Nestle-Political-Contribution-Breakdown Fraczek, Kim. (2015). Interview by author, November 7, Albany, NY. Free Press. (2016). “Who Owns the Media?” www.freepress.net/ownership/ chart George, L., E. Oberdorfer, T. Singleton, J. Wichmann, K. Wiley, et al. (2014). Taking Stock: Rural People, Poverty, and Housing in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Housing Assistance Council. Greenwood, Terry. (2014). “In Memory of Terry Greenwood” (from his own words). www.shalefieldstories.org/terry-greenwood.html Harrison-Quintana, Jack. (2015). Interview with Jamee Greer. Grindr, September 9. Gurley, Jim. (2015). Interview by author, November 21, Winona County, MN. Hance, Toshia. (2015). Interview by author, November 24, Oneida County, New York.

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Horn, Steve. (2012). “Fracking and Psychological Operations: Empire Comes Home.” TruthOut, March 8. www.truth-out.org/news/item/ 7153:fracking-and-psychological-operations-empire-comes-home Hurdle, John. (2015). “New Task Force Seeks to Manage ‘Massive’ Buildout of Pipelines.” StateImpact Pennsylvania, July 22. Harrisburg and Philadelphia: StateImpact, National Public Radio. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/ 2015/07/22/new-task-force-seeks-to-manage-massive-buildout-of-pipelines/ Javers, Eamon. (2011). “Oil Executive: Military-Style ‘Psy Ops’ Experience Applied.” CNBC, November 8. www.cnbc.com/id/45208498 Kelly, S. (2014). “After Rancher’s Death, Calls for Fracking Health Study Grow Stronger.” DeSmogBlog, July 24. www.desmogblog.com/2014/07/ 24/after-rancher-s-death-calls-fracking-health-study-grow-stronger Kozma, LuAnne. (2013). Interview with author. Lal, P., J. R. R. Alavalapati, and E. Mercer. (2011). “Socio-Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Rural United States.” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 16(7): 819–844. United States Forest Service Southern Research Station, USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station General Technical Report 837. Lisak, Jenny. (2015). “List of the Harmed.” pennsylvaniaallianceforclean waterandair.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/list-of-the-harmed62.pdf Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. (2015). “Home Page.” www.mass.gov/eea/ McCord, Marc. (2015). Interview by author, December 2, Dallas, TX. McQuillen, K. (2011). “Foreclosure Implications for the Borrower Under the USDA Rural Home Loan Program.” J. D. Supra Business Advisor. www. jdsupra.com/legalnews/foreclosure-consequences-for-the-borrowe-13118/ Mitchell, A., J. Holcomb et al. (2015a). Local News in a Digital Age. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. ———. (2015b). State of the News Media 2015. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. www.journalism.org/files/2015/04/FINAL-STATE-OFTHE-NEWS-MEDIA1.pdf Murphy, Kim. (2011). “Occupy the Tundra’: One Woman’s Lonely Vigil in Bush Alaska.” Los Angeles Times, October 15. http://latimesblogs. latimes.com/nationnow/2011/10/bethel-occupy-the-tundra-facebook. html National Broadband Map. (2016). “Broadband Test vs. Advertised.” www. broadbandmap.gov/speedtest National Council of Nonprofits. (2013). 2014 Nonprofit Trends to Watch. Washington, DC: National Council of Nonprofits. www.councilofnonprofits. org/sites/default/files/documents/2014-trends-to-watch_0.pdf National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association (NRECA). (2015). “About Us.” www.nreca.coop/what-we-do/about-us/


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———. (2016). “Environmental Regulation.” www.ect.coop/category/regulatorywatch/environmental-regulation New Mexico Environment Department. (2015). “About Us.” www.env.nm. gov/NMED/aboutus.htm New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. (2015). “About Us.” www.dec.ny.gov/24.html Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. (2015a). “DEQ Goals, Values and Behaviors.” www.deq.state.ok.us/pubs/ASD/DEQvalues2015.pdf ———. (2015b). “Board Members.” www.deq.state.ok.us/mainlinks/ EQBmmbrs.htm OpenSignal. (2016). “Open Signal.” opensignal.com Palmeri, Fran. (2016). Interview by author, January 8, in Nokomis, FL. Park, Haeyoun, Damien Cave, and Wilson Andrews. (2015). “After Years of Drought, Wildfires Rage in California.” New York Times, July 15. www. nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/15/us/california-fire-season-drought.html Phillips, Susan (2015). “Unmapped, Unregulated Maze of Rural Pipelines Poses Hidden Risks.” StateImpact Pennsylvania, August 4. Harrisburg and Philadelphia: StateImpact, National Public Radio. https://stateimpact.npr.org/ pennsylvania/2015/08/04/unmapped-unregulated-maze-of-rural-pipelinesposes-hidden-risks/ Sekera, Nickie. (2015). Interview by author, November 23, Fryeburg, ME. Texas Railroad Commission. (2015). “Home Page.” www.rrc.state.tx.us U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. (2014). “Rural Poverty and Well-Being.” www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economypopulation/rural-poverty-well-being/geography-of-poverty.aspx Varela, Julio Ricardo. (2013). “Conflict of Interest Claims Persist in Maine’s Nestl"e Water Case.” Al Jazeera America, September 27. http://america. aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-stream-officialblog/2013/9/27/ conflict-of-interestclaimspersistinmainesnestlewatercase.html World Medical Association. (2009). “Doctors’ Leader Criticises Governments for Paying Poor Attention to Heath in Climate Change Debate.” October 16. Ferney-Voltaire, France: World Medical Association. www.wma.net/ en/40news/20archives/2009/2009_11/

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