More than four in 10 adults living in rural Appalachia cite drug abuse as the biggest issue facing their communities, according to “Life in Rural America: Part II,” a report released this week by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from […]
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Couple Traveled 100,000 Miles Exploring Rural America, Here’s What They Found
Deborah and James Fallows wrote a book called “Our Towns A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America.” The husband and wife duo bought a small low-altitude plane and spent just over four years traveling 100,000 miles throughout small towns across America. Before embarking on this journey, they traveled the […]
Read MoreWhere is Rural in the Green New Deal?
Among the packed agenda of the 2019 Democrat-held House, one particular project went from barely noticed to hotly debated almost overnight: The Green New Deal (GND). The deal is an ambitious social, economic and industrial reform program being proposed as a potential catch-all solution to current climate change regulations and […]
Read MoreRural Drivers Can Save the Most From Clean Vehicles
This post was written in collaboration with Maria Cecilia Pinto de Moura The transition to clean vehicle technologies such as electric vehicles will benefit consumers everywhere, promising lower operating and maintenance costs, along with less pollution and a cleaner environment. But the drivers with the greatest economic potential to gain by […]
Read MoreRural ‘Recreation Counties’ Show More Population Resilience
From 2010-16 nonmetropolitan America lost population. But counties that have recreation economies (hiking, whitewater, climbing, four-wheeling, etc.) grew slightly over the same period, according to a new report from Headwaters Economics. Rural counties with recreation-based economies are gaining population slightly while non-recreation rural counties are losing population, a new study finds. Households moving to rural […]
Read MoreHow Do You Reinvent a Rural Economy? $100 at a Time
“Explore Elkin” takes small individual investments and parlays them into bigger returns for the old mill town of Elkin, North Carolina. Instead of a pop and a fizzle, the program has created a slow burn of special events, marketing, and accurate self-promotion. The invitations, hundreds of them, had been sent. Ads were […]
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