Welcome to Down Yonder – our weekly roundup of good reads we’ve found around the web.

Our goal is to showcase more perspectives on national and global issues through a rural lens. Expect Down Yonder on Saturdays. Enjoy!

Stateline: Why Rural America Is Joining the Movement for Black Lives

April Simpson at Stateline asks why small towns are responding to the Black Lives Matter movement in unprecedented numbers. She finds that it’s a change in demographics and attitudes, coupled with the unvarnished truth of video images of police violence. Still, some rural organizers of have faced pushback, including threats.

New York Times: Farmers Get Billions in Virus Aid, and Democrats Are Wary

As the administration sends up to $16 billion in additional subsidies, critics are concerned that the funds could be used to ensure that the president maintains the backing of one of his key voting blocs.

ProPublica: Big Money Bought the Forests. Small Logging Communities Are Paying the Price.

Logging is booming around Falls City, a town of about 1,000 residents in the Oregon Coast Range. More trees are cut in the county today than decades ago when a sawmill hummed on Main Street and timber workers and their families filled the now-closed cafes, grocery stores and shops selling home appliances, sporting goods and feed for livestock.

Grist: Who belongs where? A new way to think about migration.

“That idea of climate migration as a sort of boogeyman, a terrible catastrophe that’s going to befall us — it’s in good faith, but it inadvertently casts migration in this extremely negative light,” Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration said. “We have to look at that in a different way. Migration isn’t the crisis; it really is the solution.”

The Southern Illinoisan: In Wake of Floyd Death, Rural, White Southern Illinois Towns Are Reckoning With Racist Past

Joining people across the nation, hundreds have gathered across Southern Illinois in recent days to protest the death of Floyd, a black man who died after a white officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

The Conversation: Globalization Really Started 1,000 Years Ago

The rapid spread of the coronavirus and the resulting social and economic shutdown around the globe have changed everyone’s understanding of the dangers of globalization