Very rural New Mexico reaps millions in oil revenue

In the U.S., only Texas produces more oil than New Mexico.
(Photo by Laura Mann, Unsplash)

New Mexico's state treasury began reaping millions in oil revenue after global crude supplies were strangled in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Despite the predominantly rural state's dependence on fossil-fuel-generated revenue, the windfall has sparked mixed feelings for "Democrats who oppose the war and would rather reduce their reliance on fossil fuels," reports Morgan Lee of The Associated Press.

The Democratic-led "Land of Enchantment" is second only to Texas for oil production, and the "state’s revenue from taxes, royalties and lease sales helps cover the cost of college tuition, all school meals, health insurance and a new initiative for free universal child care," Lee explains.

Even seemingly small increases in crude oil prices can mean big money for the state. Lee reports, "For every $1 fluctuation in the average annual price of oil, New Mexico sees a roughly $59 million swing in state government income."

The state's treasury automatically channels increases in oil revenue "into a series of trust accounts designed to gradually reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels," Lee writes. Through investments, those trusts "underwrite Medicaid, early childhood education, infrastructure projects and an expansion of mental healthcare" in a very rural state that is "entrenched [with] swaths of extreme poverty and the nation’s highest enrollment rate in Medicaid."

New Mexico isn't the only rural state to see surges in state income because of the war with Iran. Lee adds, "In Alaska, the state forecast an additional $1.05 billion for the current fiscal year and the one beginning July 1."

Opinion: Iowa editor considers where Americans can 'find center again' after this year's elections

Art Cullen

By Art Cullen

Editor, The Storm Lake Times

What comes after Nov. 5? Most Americans and the betting markets believe that Kamala Harris will win the election. . . . No matter what happens, we need to find center again. Quick like.

What the Republic cannot endure, and which gives enemies of freedom oxygen, is the contempt that has taken hold American-to-American.

We talk past each other and grow apart.

How do we talk to the other side?

We know what we want in Iowa: clean air and water, safe schools that teach you how to be a citizen, good food and good basketball, smooth roads and friendly neighborhoods, easy access to comprehensive and affordable health care. The ability to prosper. That’s pretty much it.

We’re not getting what we deserve, except for the basketball.

Trump and Harris voters can agree on that. So we should start there.

Farmers who vote Republican are not gung-ho for pipelines going wherever the power brokers would like, and neither are environmentalists. Each likes supporting more on-farm conservation. White males and Black women are suspicious of unchecked corporate power. A lot of union members will vote Republican for a whole host of reasons, but find common cause with Democrats on basic human equity.

We all want to strengthen rural healthcare. We like independent producers and businesses. . . . It’s not as if there is not common ground. . . . Right-to-repair is not left or right. Neither is enforcement of anti-trust laws. . . . We all recognize that it is tough to fill jobs in food and agriculture because it’s tough work. Nobody expects to get rich, but they expect respect and a wage that lets them get ahead.  

This is why people are anxious and don’t think that things are working their way. They’re not. Things work for people with a firm grip on power. We can organize ourselves around how to make our place better, instead of how we can lock up our adversaries.

It starts with city hall, the courthouse and the school house. It starts by us talking about issues and confronting power that prevents progress. It starts by listening. . .

Art Cullen is the editor of the The Storm Lake Times in Storm Lake, Iowa, covering Buena Vista County and parts of neighboring Clay, Pocahontas, Sac, Ida and Cherokee counties. This opinion was lightly edited.

Opinion: Indictments aren't enough to account for law enforcement's 'epic' failures at Uvalde school shooting

Teachers and students followed active shooter survival steps.
Law officers did not. (Adobe Stock photo)

On May 24, 2022, Salvador Ramos, 18, entered Robb Elementary School with his AR-15-style rifle and started looking for victims. When shots rang out from his gun, teachers and students implemented their live shooter training. The Uvalde, Texas, police arrived at the scene within five minutes of the first 911 call, but they did not enter the building. In the 77 minutes it took for police to breach classroom 112, 19 children and two teachers were shot dead.

Last week a grand jury indicted former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales on criminal charges for failing to protect the victims, but many Uvalde residents feel the indictments fail to hold the larger law enforcement community accountable, writes Neil Sturdevant in his commentary for the Uvalde Leader-News. "Perhaps to some, the 29 felony indictments for child endangerment/abandonment feel like justice served, but we think otherwise. Other officers, especially those in leadership positions who failed to intervene. . . should not walk away without consequences."

Arredondo served as the "de facto on-scene commander," as concluded in the 575-page Department of Justice report released last January. "The veteran officer bore direct responsibility to protect life on the Robb campus," Sturdevant explains. But his mistakes multiplied the victims. He treated the shooter as though he was a "barricaded suspect" instead of an active shooter in a school filled with young pupils. 

Gonzales was the "first on the scene and was able to quickly identify the classroom where the carnage was unfolding. . . and yet he did not approach the classroom," Sturdevant writes. "Gonzales had undergone active shooter training and taught the course earlier that year." But Arredondo and Gonzales weren't the only officers who abandoned students and teachers. Four other officers actively delayed intervention, which allowed more children to be shot or bleed to death while they waited for help.

"We wonder how evidence presented to grand jurors failed to illicit similar indictments for [those other] men," Sturdevant asks. "The same can be said for members of the Uvalde Police Department, elite Texas Rangers and state police who milled in the Robb hallway during the rampage killing. . . . Now two men stand alone as the sole source of blame for one of the most incompetent police responses in U.S. history."

"How does Uvalde district attorney Christina Michell look families in the eye and say this is a good deal? Mountains of evidence outlined a failure of epic proportions," Sturdevant writes. "The children and teachers who were carried, limped or dragged from their classrooms. . .were clearly abandoned by police. Now our criminal justice system has failed to right those grievous wrongs."

Researchers find urban communities have about 150% greater access to legal services than rural residents

Farm Progress map, from Data Axle, 2022

In urban and metro American cities, lawyers and legal help are relatively easy to find, but for rural communities, legal representation is becoming so sparse some counties don't have access to legal advice. "Rural communities often lack the necessary infrastructure to provide essential legal support. This gap can leave individuals without the means to address crucial legal issues, ranging from family matters to property disputes," report K. Aleks Schaefer and Andrew J. Van Leuven for Farm Progress. "A 'rural legal desert' refers to areas where residents face significant challenges in accessing legal services and representation."

Researchers Schaefer and Van Leuven "collected firm-level data from 2014-2021 from more than 350,000 law offices together with socio-demographic data for 3,108 counties in the continental U.S. to statistically quantify the scope of the rural legal desert problem and shed light on potential solutions," they write. "We found that— when evaluated on the basis of legal employees per capita — urban communities have approximately 150% greater access to legal services than those in rural areas."

Legal resources vary among rural communities, and those with greater per capita incomes provide better legal access, Schaefer and Van Leuven explain.

With knowledge of the stark differences in legal access and protections for rural residents, Schaefer and Van Leuven advise advocating for policy changes and creative solutions. They write, "Our findings highlight the need for targeted policy interventions and innovative solutions to address the rural lawyer shortage. One policy intervention that appears to have been successful is Project Rural Practice established by the South Dakota Legislature in 2013. The PRP program provides incentive payments to attorneys who commit to serving five continuous years of practice in an eligible rural county."

Writer finds that gratitude is a feeling and an 'ethical choice'; but she says there's also a darker side

Gratefulness can be a 'spiritual practice.'

One writer didn't like the social implications of "gratefulness," but as she worked to embrace the practice, a different picture of what the experience is emerged. "For the author of a book on gratitude, Diana Butler Bass has what might be a surprising admission: Gratitude didn't come naturally to her," reports Erik Gunn of the Wisconsin Examiner. Bass published Grateful, her 12th book, five years ago. But before writing it, 'I would not have considered myself a naturally grateful person,' she says. 'I always struggled with cultivating gratitude, or even trying to understand why I should.'"

Exploring different angles of what she described as a "spiritual practice," Bass "came out of the experience 'realizing that gratitude is both a feeling — one that arises naturally as a response to beauty or wonder or an unexpected gift — and it's also an ethical choice'. . . . Nevertheless, writing the book pointed her to evidence that historically, gratitude has had a darker side. It has often been part of a system of hierarchy, she writes, that reinforces social divisions and solidifies power in the hands of a few at the expense of many. "

Bass has been a "leading liberal Protestant chronicler of contemporary American Christian thought as it intersects with culture, politics and generational change," Gunn reports. "Her research for Grateful began in 2015 and kicked into higher gear when she saw a survey reporting that 78% of Americans told pollsters they felt 'strongly thankful' in the previous week. That astonished her. She'd read research about the beneficial impact of gratitude. Yet in political surveys leading into the 2016 presidential election year, she saw little evidence of that sort of outcome."

The darker side of gratefulness exists from the transactional experience many Americans have of giving. "In American culture especially, . . . .'(w)e think about it as a transaction — somebody gives me something, and I have to do something in return. There's a real quid pro quo mentality that we've attached to gratitude. . .. . Besides being transactional, this sort of gratitude system also has a hierarchy. 'Benefactors are richer, better, more moral,' she says, acting out of a sense of obligation, with the implicit superiority that carries."

As the holiday season speeds past, how can gratefulness become an experience that isn't linked to hierarchy? Gunn writes, "Bass says, as a form of personal spiritual discipline, gratitude can be a call to social justice on behalf of everyone, everywhere, at a time when social ties are fraying and severed."

Kids who grew up poor in rural areas fair better later in life than urban kids, a study shows. Researchers look at why.

Two-parent households may give rural kids an
advantage. (Photo by Arseny Togulev, Unsplash)

Researchers looked at income outcomes for children who grew up poor in rural areas compared to their urban counterparts and found a surprising difference: rural children tended to earn more later in life, reports Sarah Melotte of The Daily Yonder. "Authors of a new study on social mobility found rural children born in poverty gain higher incomes as adults compared to low-income urban children. . . . Factors like community trust, social capital, and the rate of two-parent households help explain more upward social mobility, or positive change in one's economic status, among rural children born into poverty, according to a 2023 study." 

The study's lead researcher, Dylan Connor, an associate professor at Arizona State University, told Melotte, "People have noticed this rural advantage but haven't really been able to explain it. The conventional thing that people have said is that conditions are so bad in these rural places that kids grow up and leave. . . . Rural places actually seem quite favorable compared to urban places." Melotte adds, "In response to this trend, Connor and other researchers think it's important to look at places that are still delivering opportunity and to try to determine what characteristics of those places make them favorable."

A defining advantage that rural children have is more two-parent families. "Connor and his colleagues found that rural children in poverty achieved higher incomes as adults than urban children in poverty did. One explanation is that a greater share of rural children are born into two-parent households," Melotte explains. "The rural advantage doesn't just apply to the people who grew up in a rural community but moved to a city as adults. The study demonstrated that both low-income children who remained in a rural community through adulthood and those who left experienced an income advantage compared to their urban-born peers."

The study also revealed a rural bias that favored male income and opportunities. "On some measures of income attainment, girls born in low-income households don’t benefit from the same rural advantage as boys," Melotte reports. "With personal income – which refers to the incomes of each adult member of the household, not their combined incomes – women earned significantly less than their male peers. . . . Disparities in personal income between men and women are greater in rural areas than they are in urban ones." Connor told Melotte: "Women actually seem to benefit from growing up in a city in terms of pursuing their own careers and so on.”

Opinion: We could end poverty. 'Why don't we do it?'

Census Bureau graph

In 2021, U.S. poverty hit the resounding record low of 7.8% -- a good thing, but only a reprieve. Once pandemic benefits ended and inflation shot upward, the number of Americans living in poverty soared, with the Supplemental Poverty Measure posting a near 60% increase, with 11.4% of U.S. citizens living in poverty in 2022. "And it's all because politicians allowed proven income support programs to expire," writes Lakeisha McVey in her opinion for OtherWords.com.

"I'm an expert on poverty. I've lived it most of my life in Iowa. I studied it as a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow in rural West Virginia and in Washington, D.C., and now I help people experiencing poverty across the country tell their own stories to change policy.

"People can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get an education, and work multiple jobs. But in the face of rising prices, low wages, high rents, and a broken healthcare system, it's often not enough. Without a safety net and a level playing field for families, financial security is often out of reach.

"When I was growing up in Des Moines, my mom had a stable job with the state, but her pay wasn't enough for a real home for my two siblings and me. Iowa, like every state, has a low-income housing crisis. And families of color like mine experience greater challenges obtaining affordable housing. We bounced around shelters, churches and motel rooms.

"Despite a stigma about accepting public assistance, we benefited from SNAP (aka 'food stamps') and the Women, Infants and Children program. But like other low-income families, we had to navigate the 'benefits cliff.' When my mother made just $10 more, we'd lose the benefits we needed for sufficient, regular meals.

"My father suffered from opioid addiction. When he was eventually able to get stable employment and rejoin our family, we finally got an apartment where the schools were decent. But a brain aneurysm suddenly took his life, and we ended up back on the opposite side of the city where the underfunded schools offered less opportunity.

"I wanted to stay in my school, so I spent four hours a day commuting on public buses and on foot. I knew I needed to get into college to be able to help my family financially. Now I have a steady job, and so does my husband.

"But everyday struggles don't end. The brokenness of our healthcare system burst into my life again when our baby was born with a fatal condition. The medical costs ran nearly $1 million in just the first few months of his tragically short life. . . . What could prepare someone for that?

"Thankfully, my employer pays 100% of my health insurance. That's a rarity. If I'd been out of work or worked elsewhere, we would've gone bankrupt as we suffered the most tragic thing that could ever happen to us as parents.

"These are just a few of the structural obstacles low-income people face every day. But there are solutions. The advocates I work with reported enormous relief after politicians finally agreed to invest in helping children and families during the Covid-19 crisis.

"The expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half. Expanded food programs through SNAP lifted more than 3 million people out of poverty and staved off an expected spike in hunger. Housing subsidies kept nearly 2.5 million people out of poverty and in their homes. And Medicaid enrollment protections reduced the number of uninsured people by 1.5 million.

"The year those programs were implemented, the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell to 7.8% — its lowest ever level. But when politicians rejected continuing this vital help for families, it increased by a record amount. This is a failure for families across the country. We need to renew and expand those programs as soon as possible. . . . Poverty is solvable. We know what works. Why don't we do it?"

Lakeisha McVey is a bereaved mother, social justice advocate and leader of the Experts on Poverty Program at RESULTS.

Loyal Jones, interpreter of Appalachian culture, dies at 95

Loyal Jones

Loyal Jones, whose Kentucky pastor called him "the indefatigable and beloved interpreter of Appalachian life and culture," died Saturday morning in Black Mountain, N.C. He was 95.

The author and co-author of several books and dozens of published articles about Appalachian culture, people and humor, Jones wrote about the resiliency of mountain people and their culture and said the region should be judged by its own values—family, land, and traditionalism—rather than mainstream values of accumulation, wealth and power, said Ron Eller, former director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky.

When he received the top award from the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation in 2017, Jones said, "We have a viable culture here. We have a lot of problems, but we have a lot of people with great values."

Jones, a native of western North Carolina, held degrees from the University of North Carolina and Kentucky's Berea College, where he ran its Appalachian center in 1970-93. It is named for him. Jones "had been diagnosed with cancer, and earlier this year had decided that he didn’t wish to continue treatment," center Director Chris Green, who is editing Jones's memoirs, said on Appalnet, the list-serve for Appalachian academics, whose discipline Jones helped create. "Despite this, he kept up correspondence, worked on his memoir, and was only occasionally down with his afflictions."

The Rev. Kent Gilbert, pastor of Union Church in Berea, wrote, "He loved good dry and wry humor, music of all kinds, a lively conversation, and was a craftsman, musician, and an appreciator of the arts in every form. Truly a man of many talents! A fierce champion for those whom the world had handed a bad hand, he worked hard against the causes of poverty and injustice. If he had impatience with anything it was the too-evident arrogant hypocrisy of politicians who said much but did little to improve other’s lives."

George Brosi, another Appalachian academic who lived in the same retirement community as Jones, wrote on Appalnet, "Nobody devoted more of their life to Appalachia than Loyal Jones, and he contributed as much as anyone to Appalachian studies. He set the tone for our field with humor, grace, integrity, erudition, and wisdom."

Few Americans know much about the First Amendment; survey shows only 3% can name all 5 protections

In 2006, 22% of polled Americans could name all 5
Simpsons family members. (Image via NCC)

Americans' understanding of the First Amendment is not getting better with time. In 2006, the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum commissioned a poll, which revealed that many Americans knew more about the Simpsons than the First Amendment, reports the National Constitution Center. "The phone survey found that only 28% of Americans could name more than one of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution's First Amendment, but more than half of Americans could name at least two members of the fictional Simpsons family. In addition, 22% of Americans could name all five Simpsons family members, while just 11% of folks knew that freedom of the press was guaranteed under the First Amendment."

Fast forward 17 years: Americans have a breadth of information at their fingertips that 2006 did not offer. Do we know more about the First Amendment? "Survey says: No," reports Sean Stevens of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. "In a recent AmeriSpeak panel conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, FIRE asked 1,140 Americans if they could name any of the specific rights protected by the First Amendment. . . . Almost a third of Americans could not name a single enumerated right protected by the First Amendment, and another 40% could name only one — usually freedom of speech. Among Americans who named one or more enumerated rights, roughly two-thirds named freedom of speech, about a quarter (26%) named freedom of religion, 20% named the right to assemble, 15% named freedom of the press, and 8% named the right to petition. Only 3% of Americans could name all five and, on average, could name 1.33 First Amendment rights."

Fire's survey also revealed that older Americans and citizens with a bachelor's degree had more First Amendment knowledge. But what can be done to help the rest of the country? "Americans cannot protect, preserve, and exercise their rights if they don't know what those rights are," Stevens writes. "But, there exists a ray of hope, as the Freedom Forum has also consistently found that high school students who have taken classes that include content about the First Amendment are more supportive of free speech rights. This suggests that a culture of free speech can be fostered by increasing knowledge of the First Amendment."

FIRE image

To help support First Amendment learning, FIRE offers a variety of free courses on the First Amendment, including "The History of Free Speech," "Can I Publish This?" and "The Case for Radically Free Speech," Steven reports. "We provide college orientation materials and maintain a syllabus database of courses that focus on freedom of expression. We also provide teaching resources to help K-12 teachers enrich and supplement their existing instruction on the First Amendment. We even send out complementary copies of our comic book, "Finding Your Voice," which shows teens the empowering effects of knowing and using their First Amendment rights."

Entries sought for Hillman Prizes for 'investigative journalism and commentary in service of the common good'

The Sidney Hillman Foundation is accepting entries until Jan. 30 for the 2023 Hillman Prizes honoring excellence in investigative journalism and commentary in service of the common good.

The prizes celebrate investigative reporting and deep storytelling that exposes social and economic injustice and leads to meaningful public policy change. They are awarded in these categories:
Book (nonfiction)
Newspaper Reporting (print/online)
Magazine Reporting (print/online)
Broadcast Journalism (story/series/documentary, with at least 20 minutes in total package length)
Web Journalism (story, series or multimedia project, which appeared online and may include text, photo, video, graphics); and
Opinion and Analysis Journalism (commentary and analysis in any medium)

Entries must have been published or broadcast in 2022 and have been made widely available to a U.S audience. Your material and a cover letter explaining how the entry meets the requirements can be submitted here. There is no fee to enter.

Winners will receive a $5,000 honorarium and a certificate at an event to be held in New York City, on May 9. The judges are Jamelle Bouie, columnist, The New York Times; Maria Carrillo, former enterprise editor, Tampa Bay Times and Houston Chronicle; Ta-Nehisi Coates, bestselling author and former national correspondent, The Atlantic; Alix Freedman, global editor for ethics and standards, Reuters; Harold Meyerson, editor at large, The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher, The Nation.

“The Hillman Prizes go to watchdog journalists who bring us the stories of the marginalized and voiceless and hold power to account,” said Alexandra Lescaze, executive director of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. “Investigative journalism is a cornerstone of a well-functioning democracy and has the potential to initiate the public policy changes that move societies forward. The Hillman Prize is an acknowledgment and a token of gratitude for their essential work.”

Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored journalists, writers and public figures who pursue investigative journalism and public policy for the common good. Sidney Hillman was the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, a predecessor of the Service Employees International Union. An architect of the New Deal, Hillman fought to build a vibrant union movement extending beyond the shop floor to all aspects of working people’s lives.

David Sawyer remembered as a changer of lives through challenges to build confidence; helped start AmeriCorps

By Al Cross

Director and Professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky 

David Sawyer, a Kentucky-grown back-to-the-lander who ran a student-service program at Berea College, helped start AmeriCorps and became an international consultant on the environment, civic engagement and a wide range of other topics, was remembered fondly Saturday as someone who changed people’s lives.

“He centered his life’s work on service, right livelihood,” longtime friend Peter Hille, president of the Mountain Association, said at a memorial service in Berea’s Union Church for Sawyer, who died Nov. 25 at his home in Portland, Oregon, at 71.

Hille said Sawyer took the beauty and suffering of life and “held them as if they were high-voltage cables, and with that current thrumming through him, he just glowed, didn’t he? David was incandescent, and he burned with the intensity of that truth.”

Hille and Sawyer, a Lexington native, met in the 1970s as neighbors, two of many who had moved to rural Kentucky to follow alternative lifestyles and try to live off the land.

David Hartwell Sawyer III

Sawyer became director of the Students for Appalachia service program at Berea, and when Bill Clinton became president and wanted to start a national service program for young people, the White House asked him to help start the pilot project started before Congress actually created AmeriCorps.

“We were chosen to train 50 people to train the first participants of the AmeriCorps program,” his widow, Jennifer Sawyer, said at the service. “That to me is the thing that will live on about David the most. He changed people’s lives.”

And not just with AmeriCorps. Most of the 15 speakers at the service recalled times when Sawyer turned their lives around.

Professor and therapist Blake Jones of Midway, Ky., said Sawyer “believed in us when we couldn’t believe in ourselves,” always using their last names when he got serious about something they should do. Jones recalled this exchange:
“Jones, I want you to be the student director at SFA.”
“I’m sorry, David, I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can, and you will.”

“David called himself a Buddhist Christian and I just assumed that’s just what they did; they just said stuff and just walked away. . . . So I became the student director," Jones told the crowd. “I needed unconditional love and I needed accountability, and he gave both those things to me.”

Lisa Perkins-Orta spoke at the service. (Photo from Zoom)

Lisa Perkins-Orta, an art therapist in Huntington, W. Va., told a similar story.

“He saw in me something I never knew existed,” she said, recalling how she came to his home for an SFA staff retreat and “I started crying because of how it smelled. It smelled like my Mamaw’s house and I hadn’t been home for a long time.” Without asking her permission, Sawyer told the group the story: “Perkins came in here and just wept.”

“He just bared me in front of God and everybody,” Perkins said. “That moment gave me the life lesson that who I am and what I am experiencing is worth something. . . . That was the first time that I ever saw my tears as something strong. . . . I was a little girl from Webbville, Kentucky, who didn’t want to keep on being in Webbville, Kentucky. Because of his belief, I became who I am.”

After a decade at Berea, Sawyer facilitated other national leadership programs, a global conference on climate change, and spent four years working with the BP energy company, coaching senior leaders, designing the cultural dimension of its merger with Arco. He was executive-in-residence for Kansas City’s Kauffman Foundation, promoting citizen engagement and civic innovation; the first executive director of Social Venture Partners Portland, and chief culture officer for gDiapers, maker of the world's first flushable and compostable diaper. He co-founded Converge, a network of consultants who help form social-impact networks, and at his death was president of Context, a consultancy on strategy, leadership and culture. He worked in many fields, including sustainable agriculture, education reform, national service, social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, the emerging green economy, and multisector collaboration.

Some of this material appeared in the obituary published on The Rural Blog Nov. 30.

David Sawyer, who built an international consulting career on his work in rural Kentucky and Appalachia, dies at 71

David Hartwell Sawyer (Photo via Legacy.com)

David Sawyer, who built an international consulting career on his work in rural Kentucky and Appalachia, died Nov. 25 in of heart failure in Portland, Oregon, after a year of declining health. He was 71.

Sawyer was president of Context, a consultancy on strategy, leadership and culture, and a cofounder of Converge, a network of consultants who help form social-impact networks. He worked in many fields, including sustainable agriculture, education reform, national service, social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, the emerging green economy, and multisector collaboration.

For a decade, Sawyer directed leadership and service-learning programs at Berea College in Kentucky, earning him the nation's highest award for voluntary service from the White House. He designed Save the Children's Appalachian Teen Leadership Program and traveled to India to meet with the Dalai Lama to help design a Tibetan refugee education program at Berea. He worked with the Clinton administration to help launch Americorps and facilitated The New Generation Training Program and other national leadership programs.

Sawyer spent four years working with BP, coaching senior leaders, designing the cultural dimension of the BP-ARCO merger, and facilitating a conference on global climate change in Washington, D.C. He was executive-in-residence for the Kauffman Foundation, promoting citizen engagement and civic innovation; first executive director of Social Venture Partners Portland, and was chief culture officer for gDiapers, maker of the world's first flushable and compostable diaper.

"Though Sawyer's professional accomplishments are vast, his lasting impact lives in his deep love for his people, his community, and our planet," his obituary says. "Sawyer was a dedicated and generous friend to many. He was clever and wise, fun and funny, deeply serious, and eternally committed to creating positive futures for all. His life's work could perhaps be summed up by a simple tattoo on his arm that read: 'maximum positive impact'."

Sawyer, whom his Kentucky family called "Buzz," is survived by his brother, religious artist Stephen Shelby Sawyer of Versailles, Ky. Their cousins include Diane Sawyer of ABC News.

UPDATE, Dec. 4: A memorial service will be held at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 17, at Union Church in Berea. Live streaming will be available and a reception will follow; details to come. Organizer Peter Hille writes, "In lieu of flowers we request that you consider making a contribution in David's honor to an organization of your choice. Or, if you prefer, send flowers to someone you love."

'The biggest social and environmental injustice' in a town of 10,000 is to be eliminated, mainly with federal money

Veterans who live in the neighborhood were on the front row
for Gov. Andy Beshear's announcement of the federal grant.
(Photo by Marcus Dorsey, Lexington Herald-Leader)

In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the year after it made Civil Rights Act the law of the land, the City of Paris, Ky. (current population 10,000), built a waste incinerator in the main Black neighborhood of the 13% Black town. The site, which had been a park for Blacks in the days of official segregation. Then it also became the city's transfer station for solid waste, now getting 30 trucks a day at the end of a residential street. Residents have long called the site "the city dump," a term mentioned by the Bourbon County Citizen in its Aug. 11 story about a $2 million federal grant to move the station.

“It’s been the biggest social and environmental injustice in our county,” Bourbon County Judge-Executive Mike Williams said after a press conference Monday to formally announce the grant. Beth Musgrave of the Lexington Herald-Leader paraphrases him: "It’s like so many public-works projects in the 1960s — it was placed in an area that had little political will to fight it." Or political power.

The community development block grant, from federal funds, is contingent on the city coming up with another $2 million by 2024 to finish the project. City Manager Jamie Miller told Musgrave that it might use pandemic relief money.

The sign on the building says "City of Paris Municipal Incinerator." (Lexington Herald-Leader photo by Marcus Dorsey)

Lewis, 'grandmother of Appalachian studies,' dies at 97; paper in her native Ga. county paid tribute before her death

Appalachian historian, sociologist, and women's rights activist Helen M. Lewis died Sunday at age 97 following complications from Covid-19. From her obituary: "Helen spent a lifetime as a radical educator and activist, working for justice from the Deep South to Appalachia and internationally. Helen taught in colleges and prisons; went to jail for civil rights and stood on picket lines; planted gardens and wrote poetry. In all her work she connected, supported, and pushed people to work together and go a little farther to build communities and make change."

Helen Lewis in a coal mine in the 1960s
(Appalachian State University photo)

Lewis often advised organizations such as the Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes The Daily Yonder. The Yonder called Lewis a "towering figure in the fields of Appalachian studies and scholar activism," and noted: "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while on the faculty of Clinch Valley College in Wise, Va. (now the University of Virginia College at Wise), she pioneered new courses that opened mountain students’ eyes to their history, culture, and pressing social issues like the environmental cost of strip mining. She later joined the Highlander Research and Education Center, where she developed techniques for communities to conduct their own solutions-oriented research on local social and civic issues. Her areas of scholarship and activism included environmental justice, community development, empowerment of women, and community health."

Mike Buffington of the Jackson Herald in Jefferson, Ga., in Lewis's native county, wrote a tribute to her last year, which concluded: "While she lived in Georgia with her sister, she gave a sermon to the small church she attended in Cherry Log. In that sermon, she said the following: 'We don't all have to be protestors, but let us remember those who have confronted pharaohs, governors, county commissioners, corporations and unjust laws. Let us remember those who broke the law to do the right thing, and those who are developing alternatives and building and rebuilding communities.' Helen Matthews Lewis lived a remarkable life of purpose and protest."

In its tribute, the Yonder excerpted two of Lewis's essays from a 2012 book with writings by and about her. In the essays, "She argues that rural community development must begin with a moral economy," the Yonder says. From "Rebuilding Communities: A Twelve-Step Recovery Program":

Rural communities are still part of national and international economies, the agendas of which do not include preserving or reviving small rural communities. Until the needs and agendas of these communities are included in national and international development plans, community efforts will be stalled and short-circuited. Rural communities will continue to be disposable, and the creativity and participation, which these grassroots movements encourage and develop, will be ignored. That is why communities must also enter the policy arena, change development policies so that this vigor, energy, and social capital can be used to develop socially responsible, democratic, and sustainable communities throughout the world.

From "The Highlander Center: Working for Justice and a Moral Economy": I am seeing the beginnings of a new social movement of students and young people questioning the status quo and asking for a new social order. There are many community grassroots groups trying to rebuild their communities, deal with environmental problems, develop coalitions. Many women have emerged as leaders trying to rebuild communities. But people seem less confident of what to do about the many problems. The inaccessibility of economic decisions leaves people feeling both frustrated and very vulnerable. We need something today to bring people together to deal with the destruction of our communities, degradation of the environment, growing poverty, economic distress and alienation and not just in our country but worldwide. We cannot hide from the fact that we are part of a global economy, but we can work to be cooperative, helpful and not exploitive. We live on a fragile planet—we are all spinning around together and need to come together to save us all.

Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group to hold virtual meeting on rural environmental justice Friday

The Aspen Institute's Community Strategies Group will hold a virtual meeting about rural environmental justice from 1 to 3 p.m. Friday, June 3. To register, click here.

Aspen CSG says, "Rural America’s majesty derives from vast expanses of natural landscapes and ecosystems that produce value and benefit for our country and the entire world. However, inequitable practices and policies based on race, place, and class have too often burdened the most vulnerable rural communities with negative environmental and social consequences of an extractive global economy. Today, new rural and tribal efforts focused on environmental justice, just transitions, corporate stakeholder engagement, scientific conservation efforts, and Indigenous wisdom are helping balance natural ecosystems and strengthen local communities."

The meeting will include an optional meet-and-greet for peer networking, then the whole group will be in a discussion moderated by Bonita Robertson-Hardy, Aspen CSG’s co-executive director.

Nine justice-reform programs for rural areas will get extra support and provide inspiration to other programs

Justice reform programs in nine rural communities have been identified as innovation sites under the "Reaching Rural Initiative" and will receive extra support to further their goals and provide inspiration to other emerging programs, says The Crime Report, published by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

The Rural Justice Collaborative and the National Center for State Courts launched the initiative last year because rural areas have complex justice issues that urban models often can't address, TCR says: "Although the problems of the justice system in urban areas have received the lion’s share of attention in the media, rural America is reeling from underfunded court systems, overcrowded jails―and has been especially hard hit by the opioid epidemic. Rural Americans are more likely than urban residents to be jailed, and to lack professional help for substance use and mental health issues. But efforts to export strategies that have worked in urban settings often fail in small communities or rural areas, where public health resources are strained."

Tara Kunkel, executive director of Rulo Strategies, which organized the collaborative, told TCR: "Before this, there has been no nationally concerted effort for justice leaders and their collaborators in other sectors to share what they know. The innovation sites provide a framework that others can build from." Selected sites will host leaders from other rural communities, discuss their strategies in webinars, and will get travel expenses for up to two regional trainings. The winners are:

• The Rural Incubator Project for Lawyers, in Montana, which has a 24-month fellowship program that trains and supports small legal practices that provide services to the poor.
• The Center for Empowering Victims of Gender-based Violence in Kansas, a research and collaboration center that puts domestic violence and human trafficking survivors on the road to economic freedom through social entrepreneurship.
• Texas Dispute Resolution System: Rural Mediation, which provides in-person and virtual mediation services for rural Texans as a dispute resolution alternative to the court system.
• South Carolina Victim Assistance Network Reaching Rural Initiative, which provides resources to crime victims remotely and in their own communities.
• Lazarus Recovery Services in North Carolina, which provides prevention and recovery support to people with substance-use disorders.
• Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota, which recruits lawyers to practice for five years in rural counties where older attorneys are retiring with no replacements available.
• Public Defender Corporation Recovery Coach Project in West Virginia, which connects indigent criminal defendants with substance-use disorders to certified peer recovery coaches who arrange for substance use treatment opportunities immediately after a client is released from incarceration.
• Scott County Coordinated Community Response Team in northeast Tennessee, a multi-agency effort that provides various services and support to victims of domestic violence, elder abuse, human trafficking and sexual assault.
• Family Accountability and Recovery Court in North Carolina, which serves families involved in the child welfare system due to allegations of child abuse, neglect, or other parenting issues related to substance dependence.

The Rural Justice Collaborative is accepting applications for Innovation Sites through Jan. 17. Click here for more details or to apply.

Quick hits: PG&E charged with wildfire manslaughter; meatpacking workers say their injury reports were ignored

Grasshoppers in the Field, created by artist Gary Greff in 1999, is one of seven sculptures along the "Enchanted Highway" (which has no road number) near Regent, North Dakota. (Photo provided)

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email heather.chapman@uky.edu.

An artist has single-handedly turned a 32-mile stretch of highway in North Dakota into a tourist mecca of art called the Enchanted Highway. It started in 1990 in Regent, a farming town struggling from economic troubles and a declining population. Local teacher-turned-artist Gary Greff decided to try to make the town into a tourist destination, so he began erecting large metal sculptures by the roadside. See how things are going for Regent now.

A social-justice activist raised in rural Montana has launched a project to train white people who have never thought of themselves as activists to organize and confront racist policies in their communities. It's not an issue of white guilt, he says, but rather because most people don't benefit from our current social structure. Read more here.

California utilities giant Pacific Gas & Electric has been charged with four counts of manslaughter and other felonies for allegedly causing 2020's deadly Zogg Fire. PG&E is accused of not properly maintaining the vegetation around equipment, which allowed a sickly tree to fall onto power lines and start the fire. This isn't the first time PG&E has been found responsible for a wildfire: In 2020, PG&E pleaded guilty of 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the 2018 Camp Fire, after it was discovered the company did not maintain electrical equipment in rural areas. Read more here.

Native American tribes demand 'immediate action' from the Biden administration to restore the boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument after Donald Trump shrank it by 85%. Read more here.

At one of the nation's largest meatpacking plants, workers say their complaints of serious injuries were ignored or downplayed, reports the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. One man was pushed to work with what turned out to be a fractured vertebra. Read more here.

Writer explores idea of four Americas, defined by their own narratives: Free, Smart, Just and Real (the most rural one)

A country with a two-party system and a three-piece geography (urban, suburban and rural) is actually four nations, George Packer writes in a seminal piece for The Atlantic. Based on recent history and current events, he names them with names they might choose themselves: Free America, Smart America, Just America and (this is the most rural one), Real America.

They are not really nations, of course; they are competing narratives about what the United States is and what it has been. To Free America, "the most politically powerful of the four," it is libertarian ideals and consumer capitalism, Packer writes. Smart America is based on the new "knowledge economy" and is mainly urban residents, but "their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions. They believe in credentials and expertise—not just as tools for success, but as qualifications for class entry." Just America (or Unjust America, the name Packer actually prefers) "assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today." And what about Real America?

"Real America has always been a country of white people," Packer asserts. "Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way: evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. . . . Its attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism and international engagement, but ready to respond aggressively to any incursion against national interests. The purity and strength of Americanism are always threatened by contamination from outside and betrayal from within. The narrative of Real America is white Christian nationalism." That is strongest in rural areas, but those areas have more diversity than many think.

Recent events have alienated Real America, Packer writes: "Meeting anyone in uniform in Iraq who came from a family of educated professionals was uncommon, and vanishingly rare in the enlisted ranks. After troops began to leave Iraq, the pattern continued in Afghanistan. . . . The financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, had a similar effect on the home front. The guilty parties were elites—bankers, traders, regulators, and policy makers. . . . Working-class Americans [were] thrown into poverty by a pink slip. The banks received bailouts, and the bankers kept their jobs. The conclusion was obvious: The system was rigged for insiders. The economic recovery took years; the recovery of trust never came."

But Donald Trump came. "He had a reptilian genius for intuiting the emotions of Real America—a foreign country to elites on the right and left. They were helpless to understand Trump and therefore to stop him," Packer writes. "He was the first American politician to succeed by running against globalization—a bipartisan policy that had served the interests of 'globalists' for years while sacrificing Real Americans." Packer says that became clear to him during Trump's campaign, "in a town near Canton, Ohio," where local locked-out steelworker Jack Baum told him he liked Trump’s “patriotic” stands on trade and immigration, "but he also found Trump’s insults refreshing, even exhilarating. The ugliness was a kind of revenge, Baum said: 'It’s a mirror of the way they see us.' He didn’t specify who they and us were, but maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he believed—he was too polite to say it—that people like me looked down on people like him."

Packer says racism played a role in Trump's rise but it has been overblown. "Racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women. Or why the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn’t race but the combination of race and education. Among white people, 38 percent of college graduates voted for Trump, compared with 64 percent without college degrees. This margin—the great gap between Smart America and Real America—was the decisive one. It made 2016 different from previous elections, and the trend only intensified in 2020."

Summing up, Packer says all four narratives "emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself."

He concludes, "We remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives: Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on."

Looking at the racial divide between Black Lives Matter activists and officials in Alamance County, North Carolina

A Confederate monument stands in front of the Alamance County Courthouse in Graham, N.C., on June 29, 2020. Nearby in 1870, the Ku Klux Klan lynched the town's first African-American official. (Photo by Julia Wall, Raleigh News & Observer)

After George Floyd’s death, movements for racial justice arose in places large and small, including North Carolina’s Alamance County, population 150,000, between Greensboro and Durham. "As the 2020 presidential election approached, Black community activists were stymied by law enforcement and targeted by pro-Confederate vigilantes," the Raleigh News and Observer reports. "On the last day of early voting, police used riot enforcement tactics on a crowd that included community elders and children as Confederates watched. Over the past year, dozens of Black Lives Matter activists were sent to jail. Many of the charges were later dropped or dismissed."

The News and Observer, with the help of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, has produced "Sound of Judgment," a video-enhanced report on the movement. Read and watch it here.

Study: Readers' attitudes about news media driven by moral values; suggests ways to better connect with audiences

Media Insight Project graph

A major study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, opens up a new way of looking at the issue of media trust and may offer new avenues to address it," API reports. "The study finds that not all Americans universally embrace many of the core values that guide journalistic inquiry. And uneasiness with these core values of journalism is more connected to people’s underlying moral instincts than to politics. When journalists say they are just doing their jobs, in other words, the problem is many people harbor doubts about what the job should be."

The study tested public sentiment about five core journalistic values:

• Oversight: How strongly a person feels there is a need to monitor people in power and know what public officials are saying and doing. The flip side of this value is concern about intrusiveness or oversight becoming a hindrance or placing too much importance on insignificant events.
• Transparency: The idea that transparency is usually the best cure for what's wrong in the world, and that on balance it's usually better for things to be public than for things to be kept secret. The flip side is that sometimes the need to keep things secret is more important than the public's right to know, and the notion that most problems can be solved without embarrassing facts being aired publicly.
• Factualism: This value measures whether on balance more facts are always better and facts are the key to knowing what is true. The flip side is that the truth is more than just a matter of adding facts and that this emphasis on factualism can mask bias.
• Giving voice to the less powerful: This value measures whether people want to amplify the voices of people who aren’t ordinarily heard and if a society should be judged on how it treats the least fortunate. The inverse instinct is that inequalities will always exist and favoring the least fortunate does not always help them.
• Social criticism: This value measures how important people think it is to put a spotlight on a community’s problems in order to solve them. The flip side puts more emphasis on the value of celebrating things that are going right or working well in order to reinforce them and encourage more of them.

Only 11 percent of those surveyed embrace all five principles and they're mostly liberal. But the widespread distrust goes beyond partisanship. Some groups that tend to be liberal (Democrats, women, or people of color) are skeptical about some core journalism values, while some values resonate with conservatives.

"How people view those core values of journalism, moreover, is closely associated with deeper feelings they have about what moral values are important generally," API reports. "People who put more emphasis on the moral values of loyalty and authority, for example, tend to be more skeptical of some of the core values journalists try to uphold, or at least worry that these values could be taken too far. People who put more emphasis, by contrast, on the moral values of fairness for all and caring for the less fortunate tend to be more aligned with core press values. These differences persist even when we control for a person’s political partisanship and ideology."

Only two in 10 people they surveyed strongly support core journalism principles, which "suggests that some of the traditional framing journalists bring to stories, and many of the traditional marketing appeals journalism organizations use that trumpet traditional journalism values, will only reach so far in rebuilding trust or winning new subscribers," API reports. "If stories are rewritten to broaden their moral appeal, they become more interesting to people in all groups—both those more trusting of media and those more skeptical."

Messaging to reflect readers' core values can help bring in more subscribers, the study found. "To woo subscribers, the media will need to vary its messaging beyond traditional appeals about journalism being a watchdog. The survey also tested different messages asking respondents to financially support a local news organization," API reports. "The findings suggest people’s moral leanings definitely influence what kind of messaging about journalism they find appealing. People who most emphasize care or fairness, for instance, were more motivated by a message that highlighted the outlet’s commitment to protecting the most vulnerable through their news coverage. People who emphasized authority and loyalty preferred a message about the outlet’s long-term service to the local community.