Jonathan Peterson ‘23
Staff Editor
PLACE and Power, an ongoing series held by the Program in Law, Communities, and the Environment (PLACE), kicked off this week with a conversation about “the importance of rural places in shaping the laws, customs, and attitudes of the people who live in them, as well as their role in the cultural and political future of the nation.” The speakers were Professor Emily Prifogle, a legal historian and professor at the University of Michigan Law School; Earl Swift, a Virginian journalist and the author of Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island; and the moderator, Professor Jonathan Cannon, who is head of the PLACE program here at UVA Law.
Pictured: Tangier Island, a small community threatened by rising waters. Photo Courtesy of richmond.com.
The trio began by talking about the guest speakers’ backgrounds. Professor Prifogle’s research places her in the rural Midwest, whereas Swift has spent fourteen months living with the watermen of Tangier Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The pair’s experiences, although undeniably different, yielded no shortage of cultural similarities between the populations. Swift’s watermen were admittedly more insular, relatively cut off from the rest of the country by the Chesapeake Bay when compared to their midwestern counterparts. But, nonetheless, the similarities were there. Both speakers saw a heavy reliance on anecdotal and experiential knowledge in the communities they studied and, as a result, more skepticism of government regulation. A farmer in Wisconsin can, with an inspection, generally tell good farming land from bad farming land. Similarly, one of the Tangier watermen can spot an oyster bed or a good area for crabbing simply through their experiential and cultural knowledge of the area. Neither group sees the necessity for relying on scientific knowledge in their day-to-day lives.
Similarly, both communities distrust outside law enforcement, particularly state and federal enforcement. Swift in particular noted the way in which the community on Tangier handles malfeasances within the community. The community preferred to use local law enforcement and social customs to deal with problems. The same is true of rural communities in the Midwest, although to a lesser extent as a result of the federal highways connecting them to the rest of urban society.
This documented mistrust of outside authority and scientific knowledge can have disastrous consequences, particularly for Tangier, where time is running out quickly. The small island is scheduled to be one of the first to disappear as a result of rising water levels, but according to Swift, the people of Tangier don’t see it. What it comes down to is simply different means of data collection. Local knowledge is, at its base, data collection. As Swift puts it, the locals of Tangier learn about their environment by going out and looking at the water, looking at the catch, and watching the weather. But people, with just their eyes and their boats, are not in a position to analyze accurately the movement of the environment over a long period of time. The people of Tangier will have a hard time seeing the effects of rising water levels without the right resources. For example, one needs an airplane to see the extent of the water level’s rise. And one needs to take periodic measurements of factors like water temperature, marsh accretion, and water levels to begin to understand more minute changes in the ecosystem. These are resources that could come from the State or Federal level.
Despite being on the periphery of urban life and the national news, rural communities with a population of 2,500 people or fewer make up approximately 1/5th of our nation’s population. Even more impressive, according to the U.S. Census Bureau they inhabit 97 percent of this country’s land. Clearly, this is a significant portion of the U.S. population. That is why the talk ended with this question: What do we owe rural communities? For Swift, the answer relates back to the American identity. These people help to establish the breadth of our cultural identity as Americans. Swift sees them as existing on the edge of American culture “where all the spice is.” Valuing these kinds of pluralistic experiences is important because, when we write off the nuanced and astute perspectives of people on “the edge” of mainstream urban culture, all we’re left with is a “bland, flavorless center.”
Prifogle, agreeing with Swift, wants to do away with the narrative of decline surrounding rural areas. She believes that we owe rural communities the same thing we owe to everyone in our country—respect. Rural inhabitants deserve to be taken seriously and they deserve the same access to public goods as any of the people in our country. And ultimately, as the custodians and stewards of 97 percent of our nation’s land, the best way to bring these people into the conversation is to do just that—meet them in the middle, and include them in the conversation. By doing this and by fostering relationships between rural communities and governing bodies, we can begin a conversation that benefits everyone at the table and promotes active stewardship from every citizen.
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jtp4bw@virginia.edu