Professor: Rural America's assets have been stripped away

Mark Edelman

A 2021 paper called "Hollowed out Heartland, USA" details how financial and political elites have bought assets of rural America, from banks and newspapers to hospitals and homes. That has contributed heavily to rural decline, held rural America back from meaningful advancement, and helped usher in the increasing popularity of authoritarian populist politicians, says the paper's author, Hunter College anthropology professor Marc Edelman. For The Daily Yonder, he sat down with Olivia Weeks to discuss his case.

The siphoning of rural wealth and assets to urban shareholders has "intensified long standing American ideas about self-reliance and hard work," Edelman told Weeks. "It fueled resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites, who don’t work with their hands, don’t have 'real' skills, and somehow seem to make money, nonetheless. It also vitiated any working-class consciousness that might have been there when people worked in factories and belonged to unions."

Edelman refers to many rural communities (and low-income neighborhoods in large cities) as "sacrifice zones," which he says means places "where capital came in, extracted wealth, and then left people worse off than they were before. The more dramatic examples include communities where uranium tailings or other toxic waste surround abandoned mines, where fracking for gas contaminated drinking water, the 'cancer alley' around the refineries and chemical plants of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, or the CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations – where ponds of hog or cattle manure cause horrendous rural air-ollution and health problems."

The consequences of such asset siphoning can trigger massive problems in small towns, Edelman says: "When communities go into decline, their tax bases suffer. Since public schools and so many services depend on local tax revenues, it becomes difficult to provide education, healthcare, elder care, recreation, and so on. The downward spiral affects people economically, emotionally, and politically. All the social and medical pathologies that people associate with inner cities – drugs, gun violence, domestic violence, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression, and suicide — are rampant in rural communities. Well-off urbanites rarely have any idea of how difficult things are in some rural areas and small towns." Read their in-depth interview here.