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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
New York City, it's it's such an interesting place to me in part because I just I love it. Right? I mean, it's New York. It's the Big Apple. I'm from Upstate.
Ann Eisenberg:It's where I go to have so much fun, eat incredible food. I love the theater. But just walking around the city, just touch something, anything, and ask where it came from. If you're eating a meal in a restaurant, where did this come from? Many of the imports that fuel what I think of as the mega cities are coming globally.
Ann Eisenberg:We're such an interconnected world. Right? A lot of them come from rural regions in The United States as well. And I really have nothing against New York. I absolutely understand why people wanna live there.
Ann Eisenberg:But what does it take to have sort of our modern society? And what it takes is a lot of resource extraction from distant invisible places.
Ellen Wolter:That's Anne Eisenberg, law professor at West Virginia University and author of the book Reviving Rural America. She's describing urban places' reliance on rural resources and the complex sustainability challenges that underlie that relationship. Anne joined me for a conversation about her book, which unpacks the many myths of rural America, including the myths of rural decline and obsolescence and unsustainability, and the ways in which these misconceptions can sometimes obscure urban America's reliance on rural America. Anne describes moving to West Virginia for a land use fellowship after law school and expecting it to be a departure from the civil rights work she wanted to do. But she ultimately found that land and energy use are very aligned with civil rights issues.
Ellen Wolter:Anne wonders if we should be valuing rural resources as a commons in ways that emphasize collective stewardship. And while she acknowledges she doesn't have all the answers, she offers this as a starting point to further a dialogue about how to better value rural people, places, resources. When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started, just to travel along, singing a song, Side by Side. This is Ellen Wolter from the University of Minnesota Extension, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Ellen Wolter:So, Anne, tell me first about your move to West Virginia and how you kind of fell into into that move.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. But, I mean, it's interesting how life takes us in different directions. Right? I was a couple years out of law school. I had been doing a short term clerkship in St.
Ann Eisenberg:Louis, and I really just needed a job. And so it just so happened that a job that got me geographically in striking distance of my home region of Upstate New York happened to be this sort of postdockey fellowship type thing at at West Virginia University focused on land use law. And and for me, that was actually this big compromise because I thought I was going to be a civil rights attorney. And so going into land use law and with this sort of energy focus as well, I was like, well, I'm sure that will be really boring. But I need a job.
Ann Eisenberg:And so I guess I'll do this for a couple of years and get to what I really want to do. And then of course, I ended up in West Virginia, learned so much about land use and energy are civil rights issues. And it was this really formative eye opening life changing experience for me.
Ellen Wolter:And one of the things you said in your book is you said, living in West Virginia turned out to be radicalizing. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you mean by that.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. And and I think that kind of gets to what you were saying earlier of once you start pulling this thread of trying to understand what's going on in rural communities, you can just keep pulling and and pulling and realize it sort of cuts to these really deep issues for how we've structured our society. I thought I was starting a boring fellowship in land use law. And I for a research project, I just said, well, I'm gonna learn about fracking. I haven't thought that much about energy.
Ann Eisenberg:Everybody's talking about this. So I'm going to, you know, study this. And and it sounds really technical to me. It was sort of my initial reaction. But the more I learned about, you know, if you study fracking in West Virginia or other Appalachian regions, that leads you to coal.
Ann Eisenberg:Once you're kind of looking at fossil fuel development and the relationship with Appalachian poverty and rural poverty more broadly, It's it starts to look like, wait, wow, this is this is actually really, really bad. The stories of injustice that sometimes get framed as these sort of historical stories, but really modern people today are living without adequate plumbing, with high rates of drug overdose deaths in their communities, with these sort of many challenging socioeconomic conditions that relate directly to energy economy. And so, yeah, you come out of it differently once you get sort of immersed in the realities of what I think of as the plight of Appalachia, which I think of as signifying or kind of mirroring the plight of other rural regions. Sometimes it's it's a different kind of economic activity. But that kind of extraction of someone somewhere else is taking the good stuff and leaving a lot of bad stuff, that's what really motivates me to understand kind of urban rural relationships.
Ellen Wolter:I'm gonna read something you wrote in because it it really struck me. But you said people's stories about coal and gas companies in West Virginia were often visceral and emotional, life or death. The most heartbreaking moment I remember was an otherwise stoic friend choking up as he told me about bodies of people he knew being laid out on a lawn next to his house after a mine explosion. Locals I met did not drink the Morgantown tap water because it seemed to make people sick and because investigations revealed that water quality reports throughout the state were regularly falsified.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. And I think that's why it really started to get to me having moved to West Virginia, seeing how devastating and personal people's experiences with those stories were. And then I might talk to someone from New York or DC who would make kind of an ugly joke about the region. And that too, that seemed like a piece of it too of like, oh, well, all these horrors. These are horrors.
Ann Eisenberg:But if we if we get the rest of the country to kind of laugh at this population, laugh at this region, who's that serving exactly? And it's serving the sort of industries and the companies that are able to sort of get away with creating those horrific conditions that are really affecting people profoundly.
Ellen Wolter:You also write about all of the wonderful things that you really appreciated about Morgantown. So I I wanna make sure you highlight those two because, yes, there are these challenges in rural America. And there are just as with any community that has struggles, there are amazing people and wonderful things.
Ann Eisenberg:Absolutely. I mean, I was just reading an interview I did with someone for another project where the question was, what can people what can researchers do for the region? What should people outside the region know? And a theme in in this interview and another interview was enough with the poverty porn. Right?
Ann Eisenberg:Like, they're they're those stories I feel like they often get told in kind of a skewed voyeuristic way sort of the side of everything. Right. So I think it is worth highlighting like, hey, these conditions really do need attention. But then they get kind of fallacious, cliched version. I mean, the the passion for me came not just from the injustice, but because I also fell in love with the region.
Ann Eisenberg:I mean, I'm sitting in a very cute 700 square foot cottage right now that has a view of the mountains and lovely neighbors. And I drive eight minutes to my law school on top of a mountain. And the sense of community we have in that law school is unlike any other. And there's just such good food, music, really, really lovely things about the region.
Ellen Wolter:How did you come to write Reviving Rural America?
Ann Eisenberg:Well, I got very lucky in that I was approached by the publisher, which I now know is probably not something that's ever going to happen again. If I wanna write another book, I'm gonna have to work a little bit harder. And they had seen something I had written about vacant abandoned and dilapidated properties in rural regions, but sort of tying that sort of physical deterioration to the sort of broader macroeconomic trend that a lot of commentators on this topic sort of throw up their hands and say, this is terrible, too bad. There's nothing we can do about it. And so that that was a great prompt for me to think about like, well, do I have something to say?
Ann Eisenberg:What's kind of my theory of the world? And I realized that there were sort of these, these two, two themes that I had been harping on for about a decade. Theme number one is I kind of conceive of rural America as one big sacrifice zone based on how our national policies have treated rural regions for the past half century. And that that version of this story just isn't being told that way. And there are a lot of economists kind of talking about decline and being left behind.
Ann Eisenberg:And I I have this kind of environmental justice angle on the rural economy. But then the other theme too was just, hey, I've been traveling around talking about rural communities for a while now, and there are just so many common misconceptions, especially from the majority of the population who because of urbanization is increasingly detached from these conditions. And people really and truly think there is one type of rural person. It is a 45 year old white guy in a pickup truck who is an avid republican. And that guy exists.
Ann Eisenberg:Right? But there are so many other rural people. And there are so many sort of structural condition in rural communities that kinda get lost if you're just focused on that stereotype.
Ellen Wolter:Well, I love how you structure the book. Each chapter is a myth that you unpack and explain the realities of what it's really like to be in rural America. So I'm just gonna go through some of those myths and the first one I'm gonna start with is you write about the myth of rural decline. You wrote, if someone poisoned your friend John, you wouldn't say John's health declined. The search for solutions requires a search for accountability, not merely the categorization of forces of nature.
Ellen Wolter:Collecting on the debts owed across the country necessitates asking who poisoned John, how, and why. You explain a little bit about the myth of rural decline and maybe that that quote in particular.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. That's where common narratives on this topic confuse or distress me a little bit where we sort of talk about societal things as as just happening. But, you know, if you dig a little bit, it's usually that somebody did them, some institution or some even sometimes some individual with a lot of power exercising agency. Right? And so that was big threat in some of my research projects is saying, what was the role for law here?
Ann Eisenberg:Law being rules that human beings created and implemented and structured life for people around them. And so that's one where, you know, someone from another discipline might might point to globalization like NAFTA and liberalized trade as a a blip in the historical well, it happened, and now it's a reality of life. Right? But I think it's really interesting to go back and be like, well, what were the justificate there were people who voted for those things. There were government actors that wanted to implement this new vision.
Ann Eisenberg:And when you go back and look at sort of the legislative history and and some of the public and scholarly discourse around the time, it's kind of shocking to me that we're sort of blase about globalization now. It's like, well, it happened. We live with it. You go back and look at it. It's happening in the eighties and nineties.
Ann Eisenberg:People were fighting it. People knew that a lot of really bad things were going to happen from this. And then the bad things happened. Right? And so that's part of what what I see my job as is just kind of being a reminder of there was an alternative path that could have been taken that probably should have been taken.
Ann Eisenberg:And if we treat all this stuff as forces of nature rather than the consequences of human action, of course, we feel hopeless now. Right? And so that's where I thought it would be helpful to the current conversation on rural policy to say, well, here were some of the mistakes. I call them mistakes now. Here are the mistakes that were made.
Ann Eisenberg:So what can we do differently all in the time that we're in? Do we need to correct for those mistakes? Do we need to come up with a different vision for the rural economy? But in either case, if we're glossing over denying that there was any agency in those decisions, how can we possibly learn from them?
Ellen Wolter:I think it's a really important reframe because I think folks do know this.
Ann Eisenberg:I so that's where I have to not sure. Because so you and I are immersed in and obsessed with this topic. Right? And so there's a world of rural sociologists who I think know this very well. And it's so refreshing to go talk to those audiences and everyone's just like, yes, of course, we know this.
Ann Eisenberg:I think your average person living in The United States, maybe all they learn on this topic is a headline they skimmed over in the New York Times op ed page. And that's where it's like these narratives are shaped by a very small handful of powerful platforms. It's easy for one particular generation. I mean, we're now a generation out from those decisions that I think kids really don't know. And so that's where I actually think sort of just even though it feels recent and easily researchable, I think it really is worth kind of pointing to that.
Ellen Wolter:Well, tell me a little bit about the myth of unsustainability.
Ann Eisenberg:So that's I think that fits really well with kind of what we're saying is that if the average person who doesn't look into this topic that much and doesn't think about it that much, let's say they read three headlines by a particular type of economist, let's say. And those headlines say, rural communities are expensive. What are we gonna do? How do we fix this unfixable problem of how expensive rural communities are? I mean, there's so much baked into that brief simplistic framing.
Ann Eisenberg:But if you talk to urban audiences, including like urban scholarly audiences, that is believed like lore. That urban communities are and this is the myth of rural and sustainability. Urban communities are organic, self sustaining, natural, desirable entities or modes of development. Cities are good. Cities are progress.
Ann Eisenberg:Cities are a more efficient use of public resources because of the bang for your buck you can get on things like public transportation. From a climate perspective, yes, there's great emission efficiency gains on concentrating these resources and investments and infrastructure here and then cramming all the people in here. There are some really desirable environmental and social and economic things you get out of that. And so I'm I'm describing the myth and agreeing that some of that is true. Right?
Ann Eisenberg:But so then the flip side of that is, well, rural regions by contrast, they have sparse or nondense development. They're spread out. Their economies are stagnant. And so for them to survive, we basically get entire welfare clean regions that we just have to dump endless amounts of public resources into endless subsidization. It's this losing cause to sustain a sort of taker region that is unsustainable.
Ann Eisenberg:We should stop. According to the myth of unsustainability, we should stop, quote unquote, subsidizing rural regions in favor of more desirable urban patterns of development. And that's largely justified based on this concept of the economy of scale that because rural regions by definition have fewer people and more sparse development, it's just highly inefficient. Right? So that's the the myth.
Ann Eisenberg:I and then there are many different ways to sort of poke holes in in the myth. Right? So one is the very premise of your podcast. It turns out urban and rural regions need each other. Rural regions in many ways, we could say I don't like the word subsidy or subsidized, but we're gonna use that term.
Ann Eisenberg:Rural regions subsidize cities. Cities are not self sustaining. Pretty much every resource that is in a city has to be extracted from and transported from another place. Workers and communities in those distant sort of supplier regions have to live and work in those regions. Right?
Ann Eisenberg:So you really you can't have cities without sort of rural supplier regions. And I know there are great sort of efforts in urban development to sort of have urban agriculture and urban energy, urban green space. I think those efforts are fabulous. But just in terms of scale, cities are not there yet. So there's urban rural dependence.
Ann Eisenberg:I haven't fully fact checked the the sort of lack of urban subsidization assumption that cannot be right. I'm sure cities are getting many, many public resources. And then there's the piece of, well, a lot of rural regions do receive sort of disproportionately high shares of public funds, but each one of those pieces needs investigation. So first off, people will often point to agricultural subsidies as being this massive rural subsidy that is just not the same as kind of broad based support for rural people. There are plenty of critiques out there sort of pointing out how agricultural subsidies largely support major industrial agribusiness operations, which I would say is just a different player in the rural regional landscape than to regular rural people.
Ann Eisenberg:And then people will point to disproportionately high rates of social safety net support. Well, kind of gets back to the accountability piece. Right? Where, yes, that's true in part because of the damage that's been done to the rural economy over the past half century that has made it so young people, healthy people, maybe more diverse people have felt compelled to depopulate rural regions due to economic changes, which has meant that on average, the rural population that remains is older, sicker, and more economically challenged. And I think that helps kind of shed light on or challenge the notion that rural regions are just taking and taking and taking for no good reason.
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious what you think some of the myths are that urban folks struggle with the most. And I didn't get to the myth of whiteness, which I'd love to hear about as well. If you wanna maybe share a little bit about the myth of whiteness and then what are some of the myths that you think urban folks just struggle knowing about? Because as you said, we're just more urbanized as a society.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. I I think it all comes back to that one image in people's minds of sort of who the rural representative is. And it is that 45 year old white guy in a MAGA cap and a pickup truck. And that then gets exacerbated because a lot of the time, I think for a lot of folks that the only time they ever think about this is during election season. And so then you get these map.
Ann Eisenberg:There's so many maps thrown around. Right? But you see if you're living in New York DC, San Francisco, all the places where much of our population is concentrated, and you just see the sea of red on the on the maps. Right? And there are real problems with our election structures.
Ann Eisenberg:That that's where one where I'm like, okay, I'm not an expert on that. I'm learning about it. I know it is a real problem. I don't think rural people hold all the power despite how our elections are structured. And then you add that on top of the headlines.
Ann Eisenberg:What are we going to do about white rural rage? Right. And so I think the urbanites sort of easily gets this impression of this 14% of the population outside of cities just being backwards, backwards, backwards. Right? It's this irrational not just irrational, but enraged right wing person, quote unquote, voting against their interests because that person, their community actually means the help of the government, but they hate the government.
Ann Eisenberg:And meanwhile, they're trying to hold all the rest of us hostage with their voting patterns. And so all of the myths sort of feed into each other. There's this type of person, and that person is bad. That person's politics are bad. That person's community is bad.
Ann Eisenberg:And so you can see how that pretty easily fuels these patterns of geographic, cultural, and political polarization. Right? And so there's so many problems with that. But but that's when I sort of come back with, I think of rural as a type of place, not a type of person, and there is immense diversity within the demographic of those types of places. And we are not doing rural populations of color, indigenous populations, immigrant population, women.
Ann Eisenberg:We're not doing any of those more marginalized populations any favors by completely erasing them and tailoring all our national conversations about this around that one stereotyped guy.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. I mean, I can say just for Minnesota. Right? We have 11 sovereign tribal nations In Greater Minnesota, we have communities, some of which the share of communities of color is larger than many places in the Twin Cities. And so rural communities are changing in many places quickly.
Ellen Wolter:And I I think to your point, the national narrative, it really misses understanding the needs of these communities. And you mentioned that you'd feel as if rural people don't have the kind of political power that urbanites maybe think that they do or scholars who study, you know, political systems. I'm curious your perspective on that.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. Yeah. And this is one sort of on my medium and long term to do list is truly understand election law, read all of the literature on sort of geographic polarization, etcetera, etcetera. But the way I kind of think through this is I am told that rural people have all the political power. And my response to that is, okay, maybe I I can see how there's something to that with the way the electoral college is set up, the way the senate is set up.
Ann Eisenberg:That I can see how that's a problem. But if rural people had all of the political power, then why are rural region still struggling so much with high rates of persistent poverty and other economic challenges and premature death, etcetera, etcetera. And so then the response I get to that is, well, that's their own fault because they wield their disproportionate political power irresponsibly. They don't vote correctly. They vote against their interest.
Ann Eisenberg:And my response to that is, I'm not I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure that's that's an explanation. Right? So one of my points that I make in the book is that Democrats policies have often been just as harmful for rural region as Republican policies. Right?
Ann Eisenberg:I I don't like even the concept of people voting against their interests. Like, I get I get the sort of rationale on how people get there. Well, you are poor, and therefore, you should be voting for democrats because they tend to expand the social safety net. I just think the the problems here are deeper than that. And then there's the issue of minority representation in rural election structures.
Ann Eisenberg:So even in the pretty deep red counties, you're gonna see 30% of people voting for Democrats. Right? That's not this narrative acts like there there is no political diversity, and that's not true. And then also the one in four possibly growing rural populations of color who do tend to skew more liberal, how are they ever to be represented in in the ballot box? Right?
Ann Eisenberg:And so I just come back to I have a lot less faith in our current system of representative democracy translating to material gains for people, then I think the assumptions behind that conversation tend to assume. Mhmm. And then there's the other piece of sort of, well, why did the rural vote end up getting sort of more disproportionate power? And why does it more recently feel like more of a problem? And that's where, okay, we know the formation of the constitution resulted in the senate.
Ann Eisenberg:These are old compromises going to the founding of the country. Right? The reason it's gotten to be more of a problem over the past fifty years is not that rural people are bad or that the election structures never worked in any way. It's also rural depopulation. The rural vote became even more disproportionately powerful because of damage to the rural economy that has driven sort of a higher rates of more extreme urbanization, which means the remaining people in rural regions get more bang for their buck in the ballot box.
Ann Eisenberg:So, again, it comes back to, well, we still need to to fix this. Right? I don't think narratives about cultural pathology get us anywhere.
Ellen Wolter:You spend much of your time writing this book in New York City. How did that vantage point of being in the city and and writing about rural America really influence your understanding of the rural urban relationship?
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. And, actually, I I just got back from a week in New York City too where I was thinking about this again. New York City is it's such an interesting place to me in part because I just I love it. Right? I mean, it's New York.
Ann Eisenberg:It's the Big Apple. I'm from Upstate. My my late father was from Long Island and Brooklyn. It's where I go to have so much fun, eat incredible food. I love the theater.
Ann Eisenberg:But even this past weekend and when I was when I was writing the book, just walking around the city, just touch something, anything, and ask where it came from. Right? Whenever I'm in a big city, I'm always thinking about imports. Where did they come from? Many of the imports that fuel what I think of as the mega cities, really.
Ann Eisenberg:Many of the imports are coming globally. We're such an interconnected world. Right? A lot of them, I'm sure, come from rural regions of The United States as well. And I I I actually find it kind of devastating to think about because I suspect that the vast majority of those supply chain are exploitative and oppressive and ecologically destructive.
Ann Eisenberg:And that's where, you know, I've ended up sounding crazier and crazier on this topic over the years because the mandate of the law professor is usually to come up with, like, a helpful idea. And my helpful idea is that our entire way of life is unsustainable. And that keeping a place, keeping a mega city, a highly concentrated growing mega city afloat. I'd I conceive of it now sort of spatially for one place to rise, another place has to fall. I don't know if that's a 100%, you know, if I could map that out exactly.
Ann Eisenberg:But so again, I I love New York. I've been lucky to spend a lot of time there. And I really have nothing against New York. This is where I wanna differentiate myself from the pundits who would rail against cities as centers of crime. I absolutely understand why people wanna live there.
Ann Eisenberg:But what does it take? What does it take to have sort of our modern society? And what it takes is a lot of resource extraction from distant invisible places.
Ellen Wolter:I love being in the city too, Anne. And I I love New York City. Although, I couldn't live there because it's a lot of energy. I have to go back to a quieter place. I wanna read this quote from your book, Anne, because you describe all of the ways in which cities are supported by by rural imports.
Ellen Wolter:When I would go to a Manhattan Shake Shack or to a new building made of beautiful materials or when I threw something away or when I turned the lights on or lit the Airbnb's gas stove, I reminded myself all of these materials come from or are going somewhere. All of them are touched by human hands whether in The US or beyond. Beef, salmon, milk, lettuce, coffee, gas, rubber, steel, cotton, water. My New York trash may well have ended up back in South Carolina. My Manhattan light switch may have been powered by a plant or windmill upstate.
Ellen Wolter:Maybe New York City will be self reliant apart from rural contributions to its operations one day, but I have trouble seeing it. So to your point about sustainability and all of the things that come to urban places from a rural place, that's a lot of things. You sort of talked about as a law professor, what is your idea to be helpful? And so your idea is to think about rural as a commons. And so tell me a little bit about what a commons is.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. And so this gets back to a couple of scholarly threads in a few different disciplines. So there's the work of Eleanor Ostrom on how do we take a shared resource. The example the classic example that comes up is often like a shared field where farmers or ranchers are going to graze their cattle. How do we manage it?
Ann Eisenberg:How do we take care of it and share it? There's this damaging concept out there of the tragedy of the commons, where if you looked up Garrett Hardin, who kind of popularized that term, and he's not somebody who should be given a lot of credibility. But there's this notion of if we try to share, bad things happen. The resource gets exhausted because people are selfish. And Ostrums were did this exciting thing of showing that actually, there's this long tradition in many societies throughout the world.
Ann Eisenberg:And this is knowledge, a lot of different perspectives and and societies have known for a long time. There are a lot of sharing tradition in society where people come up with systems to manage their fisheries communally or something like that. Right. And so my take is and I'm wearing a more sort of practical hat that involves living with the society we have instead of the one in my imagination. If we're going to keep taking from rural places to support urban places and industry, we have to do a better job of it.
Ann Eisenberg:So, you know, the plight of Appalachia is a good example of what happens when the approach is just take take take. Well, you end up with a region that has many profound challenges. And it turns out that the challenges of that region don't just stay in that region. They do affect the whole society in harmful ways. And so my theory of rural as a commons is, okay, if we're going to say that the urban majority of the country is entitled to rural resources, which is being put out there as a theory more right now in the context of renewable energy, the data centers, which I I haven't even begun to wrap my head around.
Ann Eisenberg:But rural land is needed for renewable energy. Right? And so my take is if rural is going to be used to support the rest of society as it historically has, we need to treat rural America itself as this as one big fishery. Right? And treat rural America itself as this shared resource.
Ann Eisenberg:And the thing is when you have a commons, you want to make sure it doesn't run out. You wanna make sure it's not abused. You wanna make sure it's not depleted. So we wanna do basically the opposite of what we've been doing for the past fifty, a hundred years, hundred fifty years. And so it's a theoretical case for investing in and taking care of rural communities and workers and infrastructure and people as a way of stewarding all of these rural resources that everybody else needs.
Ellen Wolter:And and, Anne, you specifically laid it out and you shared that thinking about agricultural land, energy production, and infrastructure real infrastructure could be governed like a commons as characterized by their collective importance to rural and urban areas. So is that where you see a lot of the governance happening is sort of in the legal system itself?
Ann Eisenberg:So I I think the trend we've seen in how our legal system treat rural regions and amenities, and this reflects sort of broader patterns of society too, The the trend is commodification. Commodification and privatization. So things that many societies have considered sacred historically, land, natural resources, you know, other shared things, water. We treat land as this commodified asset. Right?
Ann Eisenberg:Which makes it sort of a a play thing for whoever owns it. And even though we have kind of aggressive systems of private property, private things can still have a lot of public importance. And so the question is, how do we start to do a better job of treating things that might be owned privately and kind of recognizing and accounting for their public importance in in better ways? And so that that implicates diverse areas of law and is really complicated. Property is hard in The United States, but it is kind of one of the foundational pieces and kind of the lack of accountability for the broader import of the thing.
Ellen Wolter:One of the other articles I discovered through your book is the city as a commons.
Ann Eisenberg:That gave me permission, I think, where I was like, oh, well, if we can think of the city as a a commons, then we can think of the rural as a commons. Why not? And in a way, the city is easier because it's more contained geographically.
Ellen Wolter:What have been some of the responses to this idea of rural as a commons? Because certainly, there are implications obviously for rural communities, but also curious what you've heard from urban folks too.
Ann Eisenberg:I I haven't yet gotten a ton of direct engagement on the common theory. But in terms of reactions to the book, generally, the the people who sort of run-in my circle. Now they might be being nice to me because they're largely my friends. But people interested in rural policy seem to like my book and seem to find it helpful. But what's kind of funny is I wrote this for the skeptical urban audience, and I don't think they're reading the book.
Ann Eisenberg:So that that actually kind of perfectly speaks to the problem here of of me sort of saying, here I am to educate you all. You're welcome. But because we've already been sorted into buckets, who's interested in what, it's a much bigger bridge to cross that I haven't haven't done the work to do yet.
Ellen Wolter:And in regard to the commons, what do you think are the pros and cons of that approach?
Ann Eisenberg:I think the pro that I was going for is I wanted a simple, elegant, accessible framework to guide decisions. Since we're in this moment of what do we do? What can we possibly do about this problem? This problem is so intractable. And that's where I thought my one interjection here could be we need a principle of stewardship as opposed to abandonment, neglect, exploitation.
Ann Eisenberg:Right? There are many, many cons with the theory. You know, how do you take a simple theory like that and apply it to national development policy that implicates a lot of diverse areas of law and policy. I often get the pushback of, you know, many rural people are not going to like my ideas. That's true.
Ann Eisenberg:So when I when I'm wearing the hat of the rural commons, I'm accepting the premise of the urban majority needing some kind of access to rural resources. I can put on another hat that I think probably aligns with more common rural political sympathies, which is that the urban majority is not actually entitled to rural resources, and the extraction and tradition should stop. And rural people and places should be left alone. And there should be more thought given to the development that doesn't require these patterns of extraction. What's hard is that now we have all these mega cities that have to be propped up and sustained.
Ann Eisenberg:So I don't think there's any interest whatsoever in scaling down New York. Right? My intent was here's a simple guideline that that might help direct this conversation.
Ellen Wolter:What are some of the ideas or suggestions in reviving rural America that you're most hopeful for that you see the most promise in? What are ways in which you're most hopeful just for rural America in general? Where do you see a path forward?
Ann Eisenberg:I am most hopeful about rural entrepreneurialism and rural ingenuity. Just the way is historically and today, people have adapted to the loss of infrastructure, the loss of services, the way people get creative and come together and help each other out and form mutual aid. That's actually one of the reasons I like having a footprint in West Virginia. Things really get bad. I'm like, well, West Virginians have already kinda handled that, and I know people will take care of me, and I'll take care of other people.
Ann Eisenberg:Right? Like, that that cultural thread, that ingenuity, that kind of survival capability, and just the creative hardworking effort all throughout the country. They they truly inspire me. And so that's always gonna be a source of hope, even though I think our country should be doing more to facilitate those champions not burning out and being able to have more of an impact.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. Well, Anna, it's such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for all of your amazing research and work. So glad to have you on today.
Ann Eisenberg:Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening
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