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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
The Capsule
Rural System is a proposed philanthropic, for-profit corporation, a citizen-owned conglomerate of over 70 small natural-resource-related enterprises. Some of the enterprises, subsystems, are new, some very old. The corporation is a system doing modern, sophisticated, computer-aided management of the lands and waters of an eastern US region in order to sustain long-term profits and quality of life for citizens. Concentrating on outdoor recreation, specialized tourism and rural development, including forest and wildlife management, it works on preserving some areas and restoring, enhancing, and gaining lasting profit production from the total rural resource base.
The umbrella entity may use national and state lands and waters but, most importantly, it provides opportunities for the owners of private lands and waters (often absentee owners) to experience profits related to superior land management. While managing the assets of such lands, Rural System provides related services and products from the unified business units. Half of these units work from the managed lands called Rural System Tracts (about 300,000 acres of privately-owned land), units that are under contract. A central managerial unit provides incubator-like services and allows the corporation to harvest public research investments, to achieve economies of scale and division of labor, to gain synergism, and to stabilize employment.
The enterprise leads the region in computer-aided, year-around, private land management. It shares funds with citizens and originators. It links citizens as well as visitors to the land and its long-term potentials for profits. It provides an alternative regional identity, one of a place for modern rural resource development and management. It links buyers and users with producers of certified forest products and wildland resource opportunities from well-managed rural land and water resources. Successes are achieved via diligent work with personal incentives, diverse enterprises and products, and computer optimization of a total system. It affiliates with and potentiates existing enterprises. It overcomes the old failures of natural resource management, i.e., diseconomies of small-scale operations, mixed objectives, lack of diversity, seasonal work and special events, lack of area-wide annual income, and failure to add value to products and efforts. It capitalizes on innovative uses of the Internet, global satellites, and computer mapping that can provide precision in site-specific work throughout the region.
The vision for the enterprise is that its success in improving the social, economic, and environmental health of the region can allow the enterprise to become more effective and expand. It invests in private land to enhance their productivity. Thus, similar influences can be transferred, years later, throughout Virginia, then internationally. The work will be recognized as the product of a special paradigm in rural resource and wildland management. As such, Rural System will become a profitable conglomerate operating well past this century, given its 150-year planning horizon sliding forward annually.
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