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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
Preface
This is a book for people who have farmed, been to a farm, or appreciate that their very existence depends on sustained production of products and other benefits of rural areas of the US and the world.
For most of my career as a natural resource specialist and university professor, I was involved with the pieces and parts of lands and natural resources and I even taught systems ecology for 25 years. Over that period of 50 years I poorly understood the content of this book, a practical union of economics, ecological, environmental, and esthetic topics for people living in, investing in, and visiting rural areas. I see clearly a singular working system that is essential for people now and tomorrow and I am eager to share it.
I started dedicated work on these ideas and, at age 70, I began to realize that I did not have the energy to see through the creation of an enterprise that I called Rural System. I decided to write my dream. Perhaps the limitations can be corrected and the next workers can get the job done. Perhaps what I offer herein is no more profound than the extension agent getting the new corn variety adopted by farmers by planting a demonstration plot. I'd like to call this "Volume 1, Design," but I doubt if I'll live long enough to see the subject matter of "Volume 2, Implementation," or "Volume 3.The Aftermath."
I woke up from a deep sleep about rural areas and their people. My task was to answer a land owner: What do you do with a lot of land that you bought years ago in order to mine coal, and then the coal runs out? What do you do when you live in an area, work there, and love the place, but the work runs out, when salary potentials are cut in half? What do you do as a rancher when the meat prices plummet or as an administrator when your park budget is split? What do you do with "family land" when you move to the city or into "assisted living"?
There are simple statements that are available that sound like answers to these questions. You can tally the land as a loss like a piece of depreciated equipment; get all that's left; survive "as best you can," or move out. Of course you can pray that something else "really good" happens, but with The Reformation's Martin Luther, I suggest praying as though God can do everything, and work as though He or She can do nothing. A small list of things to do is not a real answer for corporations, individuals or families, and certainly not for society.
When it's time to move, when the resource runs out, perhaps land can be sold to someone else. But who would buy it, and for what uses? (If we knew, we'd stay and develop it for the same purposes and uses!) We could sell it to the government if they were buying (and that is now rare, and as if they were not "us") and they could add it to the now under-budgeted National Forests, the Bureau of Land Management, or National Parks, or even to military areas. Perhaps, but that action is not part of the free-market or of the American capitalist message. It may seem that government takeover is all that is left.
There is an alternative. This book is about that good alternative for people who love these areas and want desperately to live on them - not just for visitors. It is about alternatives for urban people who badly need vital working areas with their wonderful human component. I have to be confident (even if it sounds arrogant) because if I am not, the solution, the answer, will float away in the vapors of ten "devil's advocates," a hundred committee meetings, a thousand "well, but ..." 's, and ten-thousand bright graduates saying or thinking, "My opinion is as good as yours." (Such claims show the weakness in university education. An opinion needs to be a studied and thoughtful one. An opinion about the solution to the rural problem set may be worth more than the one that I present. I doubt it. I think it should be considered seriously… when the person presenting it has studied and thought-about all of the alternatives and selected the one that best balances all objectives, risks, values, and constraints for a changing group of people for their lives over the next period of 150 years.)
Industrial agriculture, claimed by some to be the rural future, will not grow tall enough from deep in its recent past failures of massive soil erosion and degradation, pollution by chemicals and animal-factory wastes, depleted aquifers, spread of pests and animal diseases, cruelty to animals, and exploitation of laborers. It quakes, as does the national food supply system, before the threat of acts of biological terrorism and inferior quality.
I've already been to the committee meetings and have seen the dead camels, elephants, and giraffes, the "horses" that they met to design but failed. Calls for accountability and excessive litigation have left some committee members quivering or drop-out-napping. No one dares decide; no one is responsible. I've seen time pass and the warnings ignored about the declining coalfields, steel mills, superior construction wood, ocean fisheries, and family farms. Now (2008) only 16% of the total jobs in the nation are in rural areas. Plans made to prevent crises are now dusty and their dust flames up in the badly managed knowledge-silo, the fire of the present crisis. People suffer. Time's up!
There's a need for a departure from conventional ideas about the future of Virginia's mined-out southwestern corner; Virginia's and North Carolina's textile and tobacco areas; the forest communities of the Pacific Northwest; the desert lands of the Southwest. A "departure" does not mean that people must physically leave the land. It does not require a new plant crop or mulching scheme. The need is to move into a new realm of thought and action. That move will not be easy, but it is very clear that doing nothing, which is pretty easy, will not solve the problems or reduce the sharpness of the pain that some of us now experience or see. We need a different way of thinking about ourselves and our future, a way to work together. We cannot be happy when surrounded by others grieving and in pain. We need a new way of seeing ourselves as the center of a vast, important activity with new procedures and attitude. It is Rural System.
I've spent 40 years wrestling with bright undergrad and graduate students and their rich imaginations as they spent time reading and studying. I was observing reported successes. My past, my loyalties, and my knowledge trapped me. I was dedicated to improved natural resource management for people. I was called one of the "environmentalists," but I've seen some of these limits, errors (Lomborg 1998), and destructive behavior. I saw my specialty as being wildlife management but that quickly blurred as I realized that everything else in the world, everyone else, was in control of "my animal populations." I was not managing them. I was far too small and removed for that, much too narrow, too isolated, a "small dose." Wounded, I've escaped over the professional barricades.
When I was a small child, my great uncle, a railroad man in Lynchburg, Virginia, would encourage me to eat as he spoon fed me and say, "Fire the boiler!" I think he would like a railroad analogy of the present situation and need. Imagine that in the rural area there is a great rail yard, full of immobile rail cars (by analogy ideas, information, research results, theories, assumptions … the results of investments and learning, and …more). It is time to pull out the needed cars, inspect and hook them up, and move them off to a destination where their cargo is badly needed. The railcar difficulties are evident, but railroad people solve them and make such moves daily. The analogy may be useful, even inspirational, but we need to be sure of the destination and market. That's not yet clear for rural society and those that depend upon it. I think this book can help provide clarity.
I've decided to offer this book freely so that the ideas and concept might be used. A three-year delay in getting it published would deny the imperative I now feel for active work.
If I could "go around again," I'd try to use the design and concepts presented here. They are the best that I can produce. Perhaps they are stepping stones, at least warnings for slippery and dark spots. I do not know what else to do. I continue writing, as if blowing on sparks to start the campfire while trying to decide whether to stop and look for firewood. Rare either/or decisions! I growl and face more both/and types of decisions. The needs grow, even change; new ones germinate as we harvest. I hope, desperately, that someone, some group, will dream along with me and begin to use the ideas and images here. I share other parts of my dream world at the top of each chapter.
Robert H. Giles, Jr., November, 2007
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