In recent months, I’ve been working to harmonize a lot of ideas that are in my head and that have appeared in these essays. Ultimately, these essays are about creating a better community for the future, one that is built to last, to sustain prosperity for multiple generations. It’s impossible to do that without some form of economic development, but for years, I have viewed rural economic development as a “chicken or the egg” proposition—do you bring jobs and let the people follow or bring people and let the jobs follow? Of late, I’ve concluded that the answer might actually be “neither.”
Last week, I quoted author and rural activist Wendell Berry, who spoke in 2013 of the sobering landscape of rural Kentucky. He remembered when all the towns in his area were thriving economic or social centers. Now, those towns are all dead or slowly dying. That’s a harsh picture, but an accurate one that has been replicated all across the landscape of rural America. It does not serve any productive purpose to merely lament this decline. If we want to revitalize rural America, we should ask ourselves *why* it changed. By doing that, we can find a path to revitalization and bringing life and energy back to rural communities across the land.
A couple of months ago, I introduced in these essays the concept of holistic management. Pioneered by ecologist Allan Savory, this management philosophy focuses on the interdependence between people, animals, plants, and the land within an ecosystem. Because each piece of ecosystem is affected by the other pieces, good management of one piece must consider the impact on all the rest of the pieces of the ecosystem. Otherwise, it leads to any number of unintended consequences and degradation of the larger ecosystem.
Which brings me back to the *why* of rural America’s decline. If you study the history of how our communities developed, it is hard not to see them as ecosystems unto themselves. Communities sprung up from the dust of the plains. Each of the constituent parts—business, government, labor, churches and social clubs, etc.—grew with an interdependence on one another. The success of the whole community/ecosystem depended on the success of the individual constituent parts working in some semblance of harmony. To be clear, this not to say that everyone was harmonious with one another or that everyone succeeded. Just like in nature, there was strife and discord. Some of the constituent parts and individual participants thrived at the expense of the failure of others, while others mutually thrived together. But above all, it was an ecosystem that was more successful as a whole than as the sum of the individual parts.
In the 20th century, America continued its rapid shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy and ultimately to a service and technology-based economy. I could write an entire essay on this history, but prior to modern highways, each community was far more dependent on itself than it is today. Almost all of a person or family’s shopping and professional needs came locally. It was simply not realistic (or even possible for many people) to travel to “the city” to shop for groceries, buy new clothes, or see a doctor or lawyer. In many cases, if it was not available locally, you simply did without.
Now, in many ways, life is better because more goods and services are more readily available. Only a fool who has never read of the hardships of pioneer life on the plains of West Texas would root for us to revert back to that life. But along the way, for reasons I will explain, we lost that sense of local community as a local ecosystem. And as I will further explain, if our communities will again thrive (they can!), it will be because we once again treated our communities as an ecosystem that was greater together than the sum of its individual parts.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.
Looking forward to reading this series.