Occupy Goes Rural

Posted by Good German on November 6, 2011

Lilac writes on the Earth First! Newswire:

Rural land use in the US has followed the pipeline of the American Dream. Since the Great Depression, farm ownership has fallen by two thirds. Today, half of farm sales come from 2% of farms. Meanwhile, timber companies increasingly exploit low wage labor, by-passing the unions at saw mills, and selling their product overseas. Mountaintop removal is yet another way corporations have found to destroy the environment while hiring fewer workers. The accumulation of land and etiolation of the work force has led to an economic and ecological tipping point that coincides with the crisis of capitalism. The product is a friction and energy that forms an unrecognized centrifuge of the Occupy movement.

Rural areas paint a picture of worsening economic conditions, shifts in climate, droughts and floods, farmer paralysis and ensuing chain reactions throughout the country. Their narratives unravel a context of rising prisons, persecution in the cities, and rampant dispossession and repression at home. In an important step, a site called OccupyRural.org has cropped up online, and is generating a sound cloud of these narratives for all to hear. In some ways, they have already formed part of the bedrock of the Occupy movement. Blogger Matthew Fluherty of The Art of the Rural, states, “the Occupy movement could hold even greater possibility for rural place and rural citizens: we see a drastically different sense of geographic and community scale in rural places, and we may find that — despite coming from different ideological backgrounds—the Occupy movement in rural America could allow for folks to not only raise awareness of pressing, unacceptable, national problems but also to work as a community to solve them on a local level.”

Read more here.