Today’s dominant narratives of American advancement present urbanization as progress and rural America as a wasteland. The misconception of rural decay helps rationalize rampant labor and resource exploitation and slows the nation’s ability to respond to national challenges including climate change, housing inequality, and finite natural resources.
In Rural America as a Commons, Ann Eisenberg advocates reconceptualizing rural America as a common resource (“the commons”), belonging to everyone in America, including the urban majority. She adeptly centers key questions at the heart of this contentious relationship: Does rural distress warrant urban intervention and why should urbanites care?
Eisenberg defines the commons broadly as a collectively important resource that is both consumed in some fashion as well as challenged by competing users. This characterization implies that competing users must account for different levels of proximity to, embeddedness in, entitlement to, cost-bearing for, and stewardship of the commons. Thus, collective reliance on rural America’s rich resources and labor force necessitates shared responsibility.
Eisenberg highlights the role of centuries of legal policies in perpetuating the continued misuse and neglect of rural America. She offers property law, agricultural policy, and environmental regulations as examples of “culprit[s]” that facilitate the private sector’s hoarding, abuse, and waste of the commons.
For example, agriculture and agricultural land can be considered a rural amenity with collective import. Agricultural policies directly influence public health and have contributed to obesity, “toxic food culture,” and food insecurity across the entire country. Similarly, the agricultural system yields far-reaching consequences for climate change, the economy, pollution, and water waste. Despite the immeasurable scope of influence, the legal system has permitted private interests to co-opt the agricultural system to pursue private benefit as opposed to the public good.
Rethinking rural America as a commons can promote better governance practices by offering guidance to help redistribute the social and financial burdens of caring for the commons. The commons frame upends the often adversarial characterization of the rural/urban divide, situating these two sides instead as neighbors in the shared project of survival, not as competitors.
Eisenberg interrogates how rural America and its resources affirm both rural significance and urban entitlement. She situates the urban relationship to rural resources as firmly interdependent and simultaneously suffering from collective abuses enabled by law and legal policies.
In doing so, she reassigns the significance of caring for the commons to all who benefit from it. She posits that rural America has collective amenities that transcend regional uses. These amenities, including agriculture, energy, and infrastructure, reveal the symbiotic, yet paradoxically invisible, reliance of the urban on the rural.
Eisenberg illustrates the connectedness between urban and rural America with two other major rural resources: energy production and infrastructure. These resources take on all the more significance in light of the impending climate catastrophe arising from the depletion and disregard of rural amenities. Rural America bears the environmental brunt of extractive industries with minimal local, state, or federal legislative support.
The failure of state or federal actors to protect rural amenities has cosigned their quickly coming devastation, a reality that implicates urban regions just as significantly as rural regions. Unless urbanites mobilize to assist, the commons faces continued destruction.
Eisenberg cautions against the urban majority seeking to govern the rural commons without centering rural needs and their proximity to the amenities being stewarded. She affirms that governance is not a matter of lordship over resources for either side. Rather, she advocates reconciling these competing relationships and interests by affirming urban entitlement to the rural commons. But in the context of this entitlement, importantly, the urban bears responsibility for the rural.
Ultimately, Eisenberg’s work is forward-thinking and necessary. A time is coming when climate change may make middle America a more desirable place to live than coastal cities, which are expected to experience more extreme weather patterns and the consequences of sea level rise. Rural America is situated to be central to renewable energy efforts, which necessitate sound governance. Without robust and competent governing frameworks, private interests will prioritize their financial interests.
Eisenberg’s work reflects a truth too many resist, especially in this era of heightened geographic polarization: urban and rural are more connected than we perceive. While the essay dives into some detail on the legal regulation of rural resources, ultimately, Eisenberg’s message is simple. We must learn to care about each other. We must learn to care for each other. Our collective survival depends on it.
