This chapter presents themes that appear in earlier chapters and makes the case for legal reform to create an agricultural framework that represents the “real” west, rather than John Dutton’s west.

Introduces readers to the history and legacy of Black homesteading through the story of the Dearfield Colony, established in Colorado prior to the Dust Bowl Era.

The Sagebrush Rebellion provides a backdrop to the story of a notorious ranch in Nevada, where Wayne Hage fought a thirty-year battle over grazing on public lands with the BLM and Forest Service.

Describes complexity of ranching for Tribal members on reservations, due to historical removal of Tribes, allotment of their lands, and resulting jurisdictional barriers.

One family’s history of grazing in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge results in a month-long armed occupation and standoff, which ends in the fatal shooting of one rancher organizer.

Many suburban and urban residents spend little time contemplating where their food and energy come from. This chapter begins with the author’s introduction to West Virginia – coal country – in all its complexity. That complexity includes regional domination by fossil fuel interests, environmental and economic degradation, and political conflict, intermingled with the region’s uniquely appealing cultural traditions, natural amenities, and local efforts to fight for a better future, including through labor uprisings, law clinics, and savvy politics. West Virginia serves as an entry point for the book’s broader analysis of the half-truths often told about rural communities generally to justify extraction of rural natural resources for urban consumption. The analytical lens of law and political economy is introduced as the book’s tool to debunk myths about rural communities. Centrally, rural America is not, as we are often told, a product of benign markets operating organically. Rural America is a creature of public creation. The book illustrates how US laws, institutions, and policymakers have created, perpetuated, and justified rural disadvantage. By highlighting the human role in geographic inequality, this search for accountability can help inform a more prosperous, equitable, and resilient future for all, especially in the face of climate change.

This chapter seeks to debunk the myth that rural disadvantage does not exist, or is unworthy of investigation, because rural populations hold disproportionate political power. Noting other scholars’ efforts to challenge common assumptions regarding rural voters’ inordinate power in legislatures and the Electoral College, the chapter takes an alternate approach by exploring widespread challenges rural local governments have encountered in the face of economic transformation over the past several decades, which, for some regions, has come with regional depopulation, high rates of property vacancy, broad socioeconomic distress, and strains on municipal and county budgets. Officials in distressed local governments often struggle to provide even the basic services needed to keep a community afloat, such as enforcement of the building code. Rural local governments’ struggles challenge the stereotype of the overly empowered, enraged, conservative rural voter holding the rest of the country hostage to his political whims. The story this chapter tells is one of a shrinking public sphere, the limits of law’s efficacy in places with few resources, the role property plays in regional prosperity, local efforts to work with little to achieve what they can, and the national abandonment of places no longer deemed useful for extractive purposes.

This chapter addresses the myth that rural America is a relic of history and that rural contributions to society are no longer as critical as they once were. This chapter argues that rural America is the current and future site of essential national amenities and services. These underappreciated rural amenities include agricultural land and clean energy production, as well as rural regions’ status as the national safety net for a society that will need to migrate inland from the coasts where much of the population is concentrated today. The chapter makes the case that agricultural land, clean energy production, and rural infrastructure should be treated as commons resources, stewarded for our society’s collective benefit. Reconceptualizing rural America as a commons helps provide broad normative guidance for the challenging governance task of reconciling local entitlement to rural resources alongside regional and national entitlement to them. The chapter proposes five principles that would help better govern rural America as a more resilient commons, including recognizing more rural work as work in the public interest, building capacity to avoid boom–bust cycles, democratizing rural resources, pursuing racial justice as central to resilience, and recognizing that investing in rural infrastructure benefits society as a whole.

This chapter challenges the idea that rural communities have “declined.” It argues that the term, “decline,” discounts how laws and policies have actively facilitated rural marginalization and socioeconomic distress for decades. “Decline” reframes an active phenomenon as one that occurred passively, making current rural challenges seem natural and inevitable. The chapter assesses how twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and state laws and policies undermined traditional rural livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource and energy development, and manufacturing. The chapter then provides a legal history of transportation and telecommunications deregulation, and the role deregulation played in exacerbating geographic inequality. Overall, the chapter proposes that instead of declining, rural communities have been undermined, as policymakers have consciously traded rural welfare for some other perceived benefit. While those trade-offs may have afforded tangible societal benefits in some fashion, the decline framing discounts how rural communities were in fact knowingly sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

This chapter addresses the widespread perception that rural politics are characterized by irrational antigovernment sentiment, right-wing conspiracy theories, and other ideological drivers. This perception includes the stereotype that rural residents are generally conservatives who “vote against their interests” when liberal policies might appear to help their communities more. The chapter argues that rural views on government are just as often rational reactions to the unique impacts of law, regulation, and government in rural communities. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the chapter argues that rural grievances toward the federal regulatory state specifically reflect predictable concerns relating to procedural justice, substantive outcomes, and a sense that agencies prioritize concerns other than rural residents’ concerns. Although rural views vary, and intersect with other identities such as race, diverse rural populations exhibit common concerns about agencies posing threats to livelihoods and failing to offer protection from environmental threats. The chapter argues that overlap between subjective rural sentiments and objective structural features of the regulatory state lend credence to rural views as not irrational. Barriers to public participation in agency rulemaking, regulatory cost–benefit analysis, and implementation of the Endangered Species Act all illustrate instances of the regulatory state often failing to take meaningful rural concerns seriously.

This chapter addresses the myth that rural regions are unsustainable due to challenges with economies of scale and the perception that rural life must be “subsidized.” While urban life is commonly viewed as dynamic and efficient, rural life is often considered a waste of resources. These views cause skepticism about investing in, and supporting, rural life more robustly. There are several problems with the myth of rural unsustainability. First, it neglects urban–rural interdependence and the fact that cities are subsidized by rural provision of food, energy, fibers, and other natural and processed resources. Second, the myth discounts the decades-long tradition of utilities and common carrier regulation in the United States. Economic regulation, which was more substantial prior to the deregulatory era since the 1980s, was designed to help facilitate geographic convergence, guard against concentration of resources in mega-cities, create a cohesive national economy, and make the distribution of resources and opportunities across landscapes more equitable. The chapter interrogates the concept of economies of scale, explores overlooked urban dependency, and reviews legal history and legislative debates surrounding transportation and telecommunications regulation, such as through the Interstate Commerce Commission, to make the case that rural communities should and can be sustained, and are thus “sustainable.”

This chapter challenges the myth that rural communities lack racial diversity and that “rural” is synonymous with “white.” The chapter addresses in particular the misconception that, where rural regions do overrepresent white people, there is something natural or innate about the connection between rurality and whiteness. The chapter uses a critical-legal lens to examine the history and modern conditions associated with rural landownership and livelihoods. This analysis helps illustrate, in the words of Jess Shoemaker, “how rural landscapes got so white.” Certain experiences of the Gullah-Geechee people of South Carolina offer a case study for exploring heirs’ property, racial discrimination, and other mechanisms used to contribute to rural racial minorities’ land dispossession. The discussion demonstrates how property law, federal interventions, and other areas of law have facilitated the construction of rural regions as disproportionately white and racially stratified. Once again, the analysis reveals how rural America is a manmade project of public creation, rather than the product of benign or natural forces.