In a BlueOregon guest column, Pat Hayes from Prospect, Oregon discusses BlueOregon: Urban Greens vs. Rural Progressives.
He makes some a pretty broad generalization:
When I first worked in the woods, loggers, miners, mill workers, farmers and ranchers voted moderate to progressive D. There was a wise and healthy distrust of management, financiers and the mercantile class who voted moderate to conservative R. Now the former vote solidly and consistently conservative to lunatic fringe R, having been sold down the river by urban and green interests for absolutely no discernible or logical reason.
Pat offers no specifics are offered to back this up.
However, he does make a good point about the iimportance of operating from inside rural communities:
We have the opportunity to develop resilient and adaptive communities, but it cannot be achieved by organizations headquartered in Portland or Eugene. Come and live with us in Burns or Lakeview or Nyssa. Help us educate our folks to move from logging to Linux.
Evan Manvel of 1000 Friends of Oregon chimes with a more nuanced analysis:
The urbans and greens have been there to fight against the larger forces that led to unemployment in the rural areas — that is, exporting jobs oversees, replacing humans with machines, big box retailing, etc. The green press was full of stories about the corporate timber owners who bought up companies only to outsource and replace workers with machines, even with record timber cuts and record timber profits.
And the greens have been the backbone of support for land use planning, which does its best to keep those nasty wine-sipping liberals from converting productive farm and forestland into tract housing. There are groups like 1000 Friends of Oregon or Pacific Rivers Council, who opposed Measure 64 (the clearcutting ban) in 1998. Both 1000 Friends and the Oregon Environmental Council have farmer advisory groups, and have worked to create partnerships with cattlemen.
And then there are progessive groups like Oregon Rural Action, Rural Organizing Project, and others, who are NOT based in Portland or Eugene (to be fair, 1000 Friends has six offices around the state, and other groups have offices in Medford, Klamath Falls, etc.)
Instead, I think that the media (and others) have been attracted to the areas of conflict between certain urbans and greens and the value-driven rural folks. There are certain folks who HAVE worked hard to pass measures that would significantly change current farming and forestry practices, via initiatives, legislation, lawsuits, etc. And apparently those folks have managed to drive away a key constituency of progressivism.
But in the end, the rural and the urban areas aren’t as different as they are similar. In each place, out of any three people, one’s a conservative, one’s a liberal, and one’s in-between. We would do well to remember that person in the middle, who, as you say, can become an ally if we take the time to work together.
To me, this kind of dialogue does point out the need for the environmental community to invest more time and effort in developing leaders from rural communities and putting them front-and-center in the public dialogue.
I think one of the big problems we face today is that neither party has the economic interests of the working class in mind. Clinton gave us NAFTA, Reagan gave us trickle-down. The working class isn’t dumb–they’ve seen the Dems sell them out just as quickly as the Reps. But, the Reps have social issues that resonate with a lot of Americans–over half the country thinks that abortions are a bad idea. Since either choice gives you the same economic result, you may as well chose the party that matches your social outlook. Thomas Frank addresses this situation in his book What’s Wrong with Kansas. Here’s an interesting interview he gave.
Fearing the slice and dice of editors I kept my post short. As to your comment re:
specifics…Mansfield, Melcher, Metcalf, Pat Williams, frank Church, the Udalls,
Andrus and a host a govs and state legs in the inland west. My core belief is that
progressives can alter the tipping point and recapture state offices by old fashion
community organizing. I put much of the onus on greens on the basis of twenty+ years
work in rural communities. Too many fail to respect the fragility of single industry
communities and fail to recognize the unintended consequences of protest and litigation.
Pat, the specifics that I thought were lacking were how rurals have “been sold down the river” by urban environmentalists. I would argue that rural communities have been sold down the river by extractive industry far more than by greens. (Example: spotted owls have cost far fewer jobs than mill automation.)
As to the importance of old-fashioned community-based organizing, I couldn’t possibly agree with you more strongly. Some of the most effective groups I know (Northern Plains, Oregon Rural Action, etc.) are those that do this kind of nuts-and-bolts organizing.