No Urban America Without Rural America

I live a dou­ble life.

Most recently that life has been spent amid a cacoph­ony of rum­bling trains on the ele­vated sub­way line out­side my win­dow, the din of car horns from the drive-through fast food restau­rant below my build­ing, shrieks from emer­gency vehi­cles, bangs and clashes from the con­struc­tion work on Columbia’s new cam­pus across the way, shouts from passersby, and yes on rare occa­sions, gunshots.

In con­trast, I spent the major­ity of my life – I’m only 35 – in rural Amer­ica where the audi­ble equiv­a­lent to my cur­rent urban con­text con­sisted of insects louder than the 1 and 2 trains rum­bling above Broad­way, roost­ers and wild turkeys announc­ing the com­ing day­light, soli­tary cars on the high­way just down what use to be a dirt road when I was a kid, the dis­tant haunt­ing drone of the Sil­ver Meteor or the Pal­metto pass­ing through town three miles west, and, though with more fre­quency but less sus­pi­cion, gun­shots.Lately, I’ve been giv­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of thought to just how these two extremes, both of which I love for pecu­liar rea­sons, are actu­ally two sides of the same coin. On Wednes­day, May 23, 2007, that coin got a tad bit weighted to one side as sci­en­tists from North Car­olina State Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia pro­jected that the earth’s human pop­u­la­tion, for the first time in his­tory, had become more urban than rural.

Even as these sci­en­tists urged us to avoid plac­ing greater impor­tance on urban pop­u­la­tions in light of these find­ings, much of acad­e­mia rushed to exploit and skew this infor­ma­tion with untold num­bers of urban stud­ies. Urban had become aca­d­e­m­i­cally fash­ion­able in a way it never had been before. In actu­al­ity, we’re not talk­ing about some dra­matic shift; the United Nations esti­mated that by 2010, less than two months from now, there will only be a 2.6% dif­fer­ence in favor of urban pop­u­la­tion numbers!

This isn’t a zero-sum game. Urban and rural com­mu­ni­ties are not in com­pe­ti­tion with each other – at least they shouldn’t be con­sid­ered that way. Rural com­mu­ni­ties pro­duce goods and resources that are then processed by our cities for both urban and rural con­sumers. Inter­est­ingly, researches sug­gest that if either had to sus­tain them­selves with­out the other, “few would bet on the cities.”

But there’s a dark side to this rela­tion­ship between urban and rural com­mu­ni­ties. NC State and Geor­gia researchers con­cluded that not only do rural areas have more than their share of poverty and low edu­ca­tion attain­ment, but they also receive a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount garbage, pol­luted air, con­t­a­m­i­nated water, and haz­ardous waste pro­duced by their urban counterparts!

Urban Amer­ica, regard­less of its newly estab­lished major­ity stand­ing, can not afford to con­tinue dump­ing on rural Amer­ica.  While one might go so far as to con­sider this immoral, I believe it’s just plain dumb. Cities need the resources pro­vided by sur­round­ing rural areas for their con­tin­u­a­tion. Con­versely, rural Amer­ica can­not be left out of the con­ver­sa­tions that are going on across this coun­try regard­ing infra­struc­ture, sus­tain­abil­ity, com­mu­nity empow­er­ment, edu­ca­tion, and the arts.  It just will not do.

As I con­tinue to dis­cover the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between my dou­ble lives, I look for­ward to shar­ing them and mak­ing the con­nec­tions more mutu­ally mean­ing­ful. Mov­ing for­ward, it’s quite clear there can be no healthy urban Amer­ica with­out a equally healthy rural America.

Orig­i­nally posted at Aribra.com on Novem­ber 17, 2009.