Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
Every so often, I encounter a capital-E environmentalist – someone with an environmental academic degree and a job at one of the big nonprofits from which I’ve somehow accumulated dozens of ballpoint pens – who asks me (when really they’re telling me) about how it must be really hard to discuss the environment, or more specifically climate change, with rural communities.
I understand the thinking behind the “question” because I’ve been in classrooms and workplaces where rural perspectives on the environment were assumed to be both right-leaning and apathetic. But this misconception fuels a reductive narrative about who rural America is and risks excluding people from the vital task of taking care of our planet.
Many rural folks I talk to share deep concerns about the fate of their communities with me, even if they’re not using the language of a “typical” environmentalist. Usually, I interview people with multi-generation history in their community, and this generational knowledge of place comes with an intuition when things aren’t right.
Take Boardman, Oregon, for example: this community of just under 4,000 people in the eastern part of the state has been organizing for clean drinking water ever since their neighbors and family members started getting sick from tap water thirty years ago. Nitrate levels high enough to slowly kill a person were found in Boardman’s residential wells because of runoff from nearby corporate agriculture operations, and three decades later, little has been done to stop the pollution. Rural people of all ages, ethnicities, and political beliefs have been fighting for accountability with the corporations even as their state government failed to act.
Boardman residents care deeply about their environment because they understand how it affects their health, both individually and collectively. Rural people want to see their communities thrive, and environmental degradation does little to support this goal.
When I talk to rural people about the environment, I ask them about the specifics. I’m much less interested in their personal beliefs on climate change than I am in how last year’s heat dome affected their small business. A failing of capital-E environmentalists is that they get too caught up in the abstraction of our climate crisis: I, too, am deeply concerned about the existential threat we face, but existentialism doesn’t serve the average person. Specificity – here’s what warming temperatures are doing to your home – is a much more digestible concept.
Climate change denial has been dramatized as a maligned, depraved belief, and while I agree with this when it comes from politicians who do actually know the impact of carbon emissions but refuse to act because of powerful lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, when the denial is from a person whose carbon footprint is negligible, I worry less. If saying “climate change” will alienate somebody, I just won’t say it. Instead, I ask about the weather, because that’s all that climate change really is. And anyone can talk about the weather.
The environment wasn’t always a liberal issue: Former Republican president Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed several pieces of consequential environmental legislation like the Clean Air Act that led to widespread reduction of air pollution, a trend that only in recent years has started to reverse because of pollutants from wildfire smoke.
In a 1988 campaign speech, George H. W. Bush said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect’. In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House … We will talk about global warming.” (Of course, his promises didn’t play out during his presidency, but that’s another essay…)
Environmentalists should listen to rural perspectives because rural people often have intimate knowledge of the specifics of renewable energy, mining, and agriculture issues, to name just a few. These industries are often located in rural areas which means rural people see firsthand their effects, and can usually speak about them with more specificity than anyone else.
All this to say: the environment is not a Republican or Democratic issue, nor is it an urban or rural issue. Every single one of us is affected by the environment because it’s the very air we breathe and water we drink. Assuming that whole sections of the U.S. population don’t care about the environment creates chasms rather than bridges, and environmentalists would be wise to avoid this mistake.
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