RURAL AMERICA REBOOT
The Outhouse Capital of the World, for the multitudes who wish to know, is Elk Falls, Kansas. The tiny community of 100 souls also calls itself “The World’s Largest Ghost Town”. Had it not been for its annual Outhouse Tour and that World’s Largest moniker, coined in desperation in the hopes of warding off extinction, Elk Falls would have joined the 6,000 abandoned places that once called the great Kansas prairie home.
Elk City is a rural revival success story of sorts. Tourists, artists and craftspeople now flock to the well kept tiny burg in good weather. But the community beat terrible odds. Rural America is emptying out. Of the 3,142 counties (or county equivalents) in the United States, 1,515 are in population decline, and of those 746 are in protracted decline over decades now. Rural residents have been and are flooding into urban areas in ever greater numbers.
With all due respect to the Elk City faithful, outhouse tours do not a sustainable hamlet make.
What is needed in Kansas, and, in fact, in most states and provinces in North America, is an altogether new model of community to meet the looming challenges of a continent increasingly buffeted by climate shocks, galloping globalization, political shenanigans, urban sprawl and blight, rapacious capitalism, environmental degradation, and wholesale rural flight.
Reviving rural America will require a rethinking of community, a full reboot of what it is to be a town. I’ll venture one guess at rural revivalism.
What makes human life possible, viable, and secure? We humans need access to pure food, clean water, shelter, light, heat, dry goods like clothes and shoes, medical care, child care, education, a peaceful and stable environment, transportation, social interaction and, for many, spiritual outlet. While much on this list is self-evident, many are becoming scarce in great swaths of rural North America. As rural towns waste away, supermarkets and shops close, schools shutter, medical services are often hours away, churches fall silent, gas pumps pump nothing.
The remedy to slow rural death is the creation of a new form of habitation, an intentional holistic community built from the ground up, one that is self-contained, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and produces the lion’s share of its own food, energy, materials, and housing. Such a habitation would provide essential services internally, and would plan purposely to do so in a steady-state for centuries. Such a community, planned by its own residents, would structure itself so that it may be sustained no matter what the fortunes of the outlying township, county, state, or even the nation.
Sustainable for centuries?
Ten miles from my little rural enclave, an Olive Garden restaurant was erected ten years ago and operated for maybe seven years. Then the food emporium closed. The new building was actually torn down hastily to make way for something else, essentially a glorified candle and bobbles outlet. In that same location, in a small mall-like setting, there are two large rather new stores that sell nothing. No one wants to rent the space in the age of Amazon.
All over America, not only are the rural towns dying, but the strip-mall retail madness that drains dollars and community life away from rural hamlets is giving way to retail dystopia. Enough of this flash commercial detritus on the deserts of paved over landscape. Time to kill it off for good and replace it with permanence.
On a dead-end road in Colebrook, New Hampshire, on the 45th parallel halfway between the north pole and the equator, is an experimental community called Le Cite Ecologique (the ecological city). It’s a twin, the first one being brought into this world in nearby French-speaking Quebec, Canada. It is a hamlet of a few dozen people, greater in population than the vast majority of the 6,000 abandoned places in Kansas.
Le Cite Ecologique looks nothing like the crumbling ghost communities from Alberta and Saskatchewan down to the Rio Grande in south Texas. There are farm fields, pastures, and gardens here, and a greenhouse complex, too. There is a community center and outlying dwellings on the hillside. There is a small manufacturing/marketing center nearby. Solar panels and a small wind turbine produce electrical energy.
This little bustling experiment has something in common with two much loved historic places in New Hampshire, the two Shaker villages, one at Enfield near Hanover, and one in Canterbury near Concord, the state capital. The Shakers religious sect members of the 19th and early 20th century lived in these beautiful self-contained villages that are now living museums. They produced absolutely everything to sustain themselves and sold their surplus into the greater New England marketplace. For a century, their wares were considered some of the finest goods attainable.
Le Cite Ecologique has similar goals to that which the Shakers lived by for no less than six generations: live well by working smart, producing foods and herbal medicinals, soft and hard goods, building materials, energy, and more. Husband the land organically, so it may steadily improve and produce abundantly for the very long haul. Create an environment that daily addresses the universal needs of all its inhabitants: infants, children, new mothers, adults and their families, and the elderly. Ensure that all in the community have the sustenance, the resources, and the education needed to live a full and productive life, and then, if there is a surplus, sell the bounty to help sustain the whole community.
Before one tacks a frown-mouth “ism” onto this alternative mode of living, it is best to explain that something like this form of lifestyle is 200,000 years old. We Homo sapiens lived in small bands for more than 95 percent of our entire human history. Although our forebears over 4,000 generations were primarily hunter/gathers that entire time, they thrived within a tight-knit communal bond and became the foundation of who we are and our global society is today because they produced the raw materials from their local environment that guaranteed their own survival and the survival of their tribal members every day of their lives over 200 milennia. That’s quite a track record. The only fundamental difference between our hunter/gatherer forbears and ourselves today is that we invented farming after the close of the last Ice Age and settled down to form permanent hamlets, then towns, then cities, and now megacities of 20 million and more.
I will argue that the ages-old lifestyle that got us here into the 21st century is the very lifestyle that will get us to the 31st century and beyond if we rediscover the skills and knowledge of our ancient forebears and apply it to our oh so impermanent digital present.
So, intentional communities quite like Le Cite Ecologique, now springing up all over the world, are essentially a rebirthing of our age-old lifestyle. The citizens attracted to these wellsprings of living want stability, want equal access to local sustainable resources, want intimate social interaction, and a beautiful and sustainable landscape free of chemicals, plastics, and pollutants. They want (here’s that word again) permanence.
There is more. These new pioneers want to meet the gathering challenges of climate change by breaking their dependency on hydrocarbon fuels. They desire to overhaul the employer/employee chain, too, by working for the benefit of themselves and their town-mates. They want true one-vote democracy. They want human-scale enterprise. They want handcraft revival. They want to throw away our throw-away habits. They want the excitement of forging a new reality, a new world model free of the excesses and dangers of global hyper-consumerism.
They want a world their great grandchildren can actually live and thrive in.
