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.

Inquiries into rural conditions are sometimes viewed as not worth pursuing in the first place. This chapter takes on “foundational myths,” or assumptions that make “rural” seem uncompelling as an investigative lens. The myth of rural hyper-simplicity suggests that rural challenges can be solved with easy, one-size-fits-all interventions, such as rural residents relocating. Conversely, the myth of rural hyper-complexity suggests that the rural United States is so vast and diverse that to pursue analyses beyond specific regions is an exercise in futility. Finally, the myth of rural immateriality suggests that “rural” is not an interesting or relevant lens, as other analytical frames (such as a population’s race or national origin) are more explanatory. The chapter addresses these myths by offering a definition of “rural” that incorporates intersectionality theory, highlights common challenges associated with population sparseness and remoteness from urban centers, and reveals rurality’s salience to law. This chapter introduces the concept of “urbanormativity,” or the treatment of rural conditions as deviant or incomprehensible. The chapter summarizes scholarly explorations of urbanormitivity in rural sociology and law and rurality. It seeks to establish that rural conditions are complex, but they have common themes that are capable and worthy of being understood and addressed.

Nearly three decades since democracy, equitable land reform and redistributive justice continue to elude most South Africans – especially rural women. This chapter argues that traditional leaders’ disproportionate powers account for this failure in ‘traditional areas’. Substantial data and research evidence address (1) how land is a primary site of contestation over traditional leaders’ powers and (un)accountability; (2) how traditional leaders use powers and unaccountability afforded by the apartheid government to stand in the way of democratic governance and economic progress; (3) the citizenship implications of rural people’s subjection to leadership without consultation or choice, and dispossession of ‘informal’, ‘communal’ land rights without consultation or consent, and (4) the direct tie between the impoverished systems of rural democracy and the continued and deepening impoverishment of the people (mostly women) who live in these areas. Analysis of the Itereleng Bakgatla and Ingonyama Trust cases shows how the opportunities and objectives that the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act 31 of 1996 (IPILRA) presents for inclusive land reform remain unrealised.

Land use change has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change that could be potentially catastrophic for both humankind and the environment. Chapter 5 explores how this threat is related to the underpricing of natural landscape in all economies, and how addressing this critical problem is essential to creating the incentives, institutions and innovations needed to change humankind’s relationship with nature. The underpricing of natural landscape also perpetuates rural poverty, and the impacts of land use change are borne increasingly by the poor. Decoupling development from excessive land use change leading to ecosystem decline is necessary to make our economies both more sustainable and inclusive. Global biodiversity conservation is also plagued by underfunding, as the international community struggles to compensate developing countries for protecting valuable terrestrial habitats. Collective action will require commitments not only by rich countries to assist poorer ones in protection and restoration efforts but also by the private sector to invest in nature to reduce the risks from biodiversity and ecosystem loss.

This chapter presents the government’s economic policies and the oppression of peasants by state agents and large landowners. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish republic was financed largely through taxes and monopoly revenues extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey’s economy was largely based on agriculture, and accordingly, the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Oppression and coercion by state agents such as tax collectors and gendarmes and local dominants such as large landowners or village headmen accompanied the economic exploitation of peasants. This chapter gives a detailed picture of the exploitation and domination mechanisms that afflicted smallholders and the rural poor. It also sheds light on the impact of the Great Depression on Anatolian peasants.

Although traditional Spanish farming was slowly being replaced by a modern, scientific agriculture dependent on industrial inputs, productivity remained low and living standards for many were poor and precarious during the first third of the twentieth century. Social problems were contained while surplus farm labour could easily find employment in the cities, but the limits of traditional agriculture to create employment became brutally exposed during the 1930s Depression. Unlike Northern Europe, the use of dry-farming techniques were required over much of the country, which created major obstacles to increasing output by employing more labour. The growing possibilities for mechanization by the interwar period offered benefits to the large cereal farms, but threatened to make small farmers, with their highly fragmented holdings, uncompetitive. Technological change also threatened to eliminate a significant source of seasonal employment for landless labourers, and force marginal cereal producers to sell their land.

This chapter challenges contemporary beliefs that latifundios were inefficient by showing that farmers were quick to respond to changes in factor and commodity prices. Land ownership in southern Spain was heavily concentrated, both on the rich cereal lands of the Guadalquivir valley, as well as the huge dehesas found in the less populated upland regions. Contemporaries believed that large numbers of landless workers lived in extreme poverty at the same time as absentee landowners left significant areas of fertile land abandoned, or under-cultivated. In fact, large farms by the late 1920s were especially suitable for extensive cereals and livestock given the growing possibilities for reducing labour costs through mechanization, and there were difficulties to extend labour-intensive olive and vine cultivation. The chapter also shows that the living standards of rural workers improved over time, although they were vulnerable to economic downturns because of the erosion of traditional safety nets, and the failure of the state to create new ones. Finally, it examines why large landowners were often uninterested in extending state capacity.

A resurgence in work requirements for safety-net programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has marked the early years of the Trump administration. Some lawmakers at both the federal and state level have moved to revive and expand SNAP’s work requirements, despite evidence that such work requirements do little to increase self-sufficiency or improve long-term economic outcomes among those living in poverty.This chapter takes up the issue of work requirements in the context of rural communities, where the need for safety-net programs and food system supports is acute. We begin with a brief overview of SNAP and examine the recent push to make SNAP work requirements more strict.We then turn to an overview of the need and current state of use of the social safety net in rural America. If work requirements are to be effective – and, indeed, appropriate – work opportunities must be available.We, therefore, consider employment data and information on safety-net use across the rural-urban axis. Finally, we present a case study about the results of relatively early efforts to impose work requirements on SNAP receipt in Maine.