On what rural and urban America owe each other, and how we can all work together for the common good.
“[R}ural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.”
That’s Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and economist, who writes and thinks in the traditional Keynesian sense (following the belief that government intervention is necessary to maintain economic health). While I don’t completely agree with Krugman’s claim, I suppose I can empathize with his frustration.
This article, published in 2024, was widely criticized, famously by Wendell Berry, responding with sadness and nostalgia, and pushing back against the notions that 1) rural America is one, collective raging unit and 2) that this rage begets undemocratic ideals that spread like wildfire. In Wendell’s opinion, when rural areas experience economic decline, portraying these communities through a primary lens of anger encourages further neglect or withdrawal of resources by institutions like the government, businesses, or younger populations. This then creates more of the same frustrations described in the first place. It’s self-reinforcing and it’s harmful.
What Krugman gets right is this: Today’s economy increasingly rewards large metropolitan areas, as industries continue to consolidate. But that reality didn’t emerge from nothing. It was shaped by decades of policies that concentrated investment, encouraged extraction, and weakened economic foundations of rural communities. The result wasn’t just a shift in where jobs are located — it was a shift in where opportunity, wealth, and political attention flow. But rural America is not a monolith. Far from it. Reducing rural areas to a single emotional state can obscure the variety of experiences and responses that exist within these communities. And technological advancement doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
These are big themes I keep returning to because they seem to exist in a constant feedback loop, oftentimes cloaked in urban elitism. Who decides what’s valuable in rural America? How is this value created and maintained? Who decides what’s brought into the future versus what stays in the past? Is industrial development always harmful to local rural communities? Can rural regions pursue economic growth and innovation while protecting their autonomy and natural landscapes? Are these the only options?
The Case of the Finger Lakes: Old Tactics for New Solutions
Take the Finger Lakes, for example. Its history of citizen-led and almost predictive environmental activism can perhaps serve as a playbook for state-level action.
The small town of Dryden, New York (population 13,500), sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive oil deposit that stretches all the way to Alabama. The town, through the Dryden Resource Awareness Council (DRAC), won a landmark legal battle in 2011 against the oil and gas industry by utilizing local zoning laws to ban horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (known colloquially as fracking). In 2014, the case made its way to New York’s highest court, which upheld the ruling, effectively protecting New York communities from heavy fracking by setting an important precedent. All of this transpired in the wake of the drilling boom of the 2010s, when it felt like fracking was a necessary evil in getting access to natural gas and decades-long industry disinformation campaigns were only just beginning.
“It was one of those issues … the same anti-economic growth arguments anytime some extractive industry wants to come into town and exploit the town.” For Jason Leifer, Dryden town board member since 2008 and town supervisor since 2015, the rise of DRAC presented an opportunity to utilize local laws in ways that actually supported constituents. DRAC was formed after a fossil fuel mogul approached residents and engaged in intimidation tactics to convince landowners to hand over their leases.
Oil execs insisted that the water remained safe to drink and utilize as normal, all while refusing to drink it themselves.
DRAC began a two-year educational campaign which included forums, lectures, and paper pamphlets, culminating the campaign with a petition signed by 1,600 residents from all ends of the political spectrum. The lesson that won most of them over? Speaking directly to their Pennsylvania neighbors who had been in the same boat years prior and since that time, had seen the adverse effects of the industry (false promise of jobs, lack of local economic returns, and zero protection of natural resources, to name a few).
That, and when asked, an oil exec refused to drink the local tap water in Dimock, Pennsylvania, after it had been poisoned with methane. Dimock is home to one of the most egregious fracking-related water contamination cases in the country. After faulty gas wells allowed methane to leak into the groundwater and constituents reported health problems, oil execs insisted that the water remained safe to drink and utilize as normal, all while refusing to drink it themselves. The incident led to years of litigation, and finally, criminal charges and settlements against the operator.
Concurrently, Leifer began a campaign to convince the town attorney, who was concerned about being sued, to collaborate. “But did they get sued?” you ask. They sure did. Almost immediately, by the Anschutaz Exploration Corporation (a very powerful and wealthy privately held oil company based in Denver, worth around $7.5B at the time). But through examining state-level zoning laws, DRAC and their devotees found that New York had been classified as a “home rule state,” meaning that local municipalities can dictate land use through zoning. In other words, if an activity is not explicitly permitted in zoning laws, then it’s prohibited. Using this approach, Dryden fought back. And this held in court, making its way through three rounds of litigation, eventually landing at the New York State of Appeals, the highest court in the state.
“We are in favor of development when it actually employs us and doesn’t threaten our water supply or quality or make it more expensive for people to keep doing what they’re doing without raising prices.
“The law is on your side,” Leifer said to me when asked about the mechanics of his strategy. “Citizens who want to make change shouldn’t let their town boards use expenses as a crutch to not do something. If you have a town board that won’t do what you want, then replace your town board. Direct democracy is strongest at the town level.”
But this approach reveals something important about rural politics that Leifer believes to be true: Political talking points aside, when rural communities are approached about issues that matter to them, there are striking similarities across the board. We want the same things. “We [the residents of Dryden] are in favor of development when it actually employs us and doesn’t threaten our water supply or quality or make it more expensive for people to keep doing what they’re doing without raising prices. This leaves a lot of options on the table.”
Finding New Tactics for New Solutions
“It’s not accurate to say that rural landscapes are declining but they are being reevaluated by outside forces at this moment,” says George Frantz, associate professor in Cornell’s City and Regional Planning Department. Frantz refers to this as “rural sprawl,” when outside development interests not only swoop in and hoard resources and wealth but also take up land that would have been useful for local populations, either for agriculture, housing, or something else entirely. It’s doubly a missed opportunity for rural communities, where attachments to a place, identity, or attitude matter significantly.
Current developments with proposed AI datacenters once again take our discussion away from questions of rhetoric into material examples. In August 2025, TeraWulf, a digital infrastructure and Bitcoin mining company, announced plans to build a data center just outside of Ithaca, New York. The site in question was used up until 2019 as a 322.5-megawatt coal-fired power station.
Development of the proposed AI datacenter sparked outrage from advocates as well as constituents, citing concerns with rising utility bills; unsustainable water and energy consumption; noise and light pollution; long-term harm to soil and to the land itself; bottomless promises about the potential for economic returns (the actual number of jobs created has been unclear); and overall, the propensity to which local voices shape how land around them is used. A petition filed by advocacy organizations in January questioned the legality of a datacenter under permitted land uses. The case will be heard by the court later in June.
As the anti-data center movement has gained solidarity across the country, the TeraWulf debate mirrors national discourse in the way that disruptive protests and local organizing serves as a pointed form of leverage with a unified target. Not only are these movements concerned about the health and wellbeing of local communities; they also reveal larger concerns about the growing precarity of the tech bubble, continued unchecked power of corporations at the top, and the harms of AI itself, as a product.
The movement voices an array of shared concerns which converge with a larger concern about the role of democracy itself.
Not unlike Ithaca’s fight to ban fracking, local action with supporters across political divides has shown again and again that this is an impactful avenue for making preferences and voices heard. Just like with DRAC, the datacenter fight is a fight to reach tech moguls who may be otherwise unreachable. Just like with DRAC, the movement voices an array of shared concerns which converge with a larger concern about the role of democracy itself.
Local fights continue to proliferate, rooting themselves in a variety of hyperlocal responses (New York State legislature recently passed a 1-year statewide moratorium on the construction of datacenters above a certain size threshold, Manitowoc County in Wisconsin enacted an 18-month moratorium for datacenters above a certain storage threshold, and Oklahoma City passed a pause until 2029 focused on rezoning requests rather than prohibiting altogether). Other proposed solutions have included enacting water budgets, electricity caps, or bans around AI specifically. This fight is one in support of democracy.
I don’t consider myself to be an optimist or pessimist, but I like to think that I’m a realist. Paul Krugman presents a compelling and rational argument, relying on the language of economics and business efficiency. But it’s important to look beyond that framework to consider the tangible impacts of rural development, which is very much a reality for a large swath of the American population and has oftentimes not been an experience of salaried opinion writers.
Rather than viewing the question of rural development like we might consider the trolley problem, which is quite literally the first writing assignment I had in college, we might consider larger power dynamics at play. The classic moral philosophical thought experiment asks if it’s morally permissible to harm one person in order to save a greater number of people. If so, under which conditions?
While not a complete analogy to our question at hand, perhaps a more interesting question is to examine who has access to switching the lever. Krugman, much like someone reasoning through the trolley problem, approaches these questions primarily through an economic lens. In doing so, social relationships, historical context, and systemic inequalities are seen as secondary. This detachment allows moral questions to be reframed as matters of efficiency, obscuring the power dynamics that shape whose communities are sacrificed and whose are allowed to prosper.
What may look like resistance is often a demand for development that creates lasting benefits for local communities rather than leaving them to deal with environmental damage, economic risks, or loss or control.
What if we viewed rural America as a commons, towards an alternative structure of governing shared resources? Not in the sense that urban majorities would be entitled to dominate rural regions, but rather that they would bear a greater responsibility towards them. Such a framework would emphasize stewardship over extraction and mutual obligation over market logic, and would maybe even ameliorate political polarization across the axis. Rural communities would not be seen as economically obsolete spaces whose decline is an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of progress. Instead, they would be recognized as places deserving investment, care, and long-term commitment.
Both rural and urban spaces are legitimate forms of human settlement, optimized for different land uses. In a very boiled down way, rural areas supply food, fuel, fiber, water, outdoor recreation, and access to the land and resources urban America relies on to grow. Cities can provide rapid innovation and entrepreneurship. And yet, local development in rural areas has not always yielded local prosperity. Too often, the benefits of extraction and industrialization flow outward, while the environmental and social costs remain rooted in place. This is, of course, not solely connected to geography but deeply intertwined with class connection. The wellness of rural areas impacts the wellness of us all.
Rural opposition to industrial development should not be misread as anti-growth. Rather, these communities are often asking a simple question: Who benefits, and who pays the price? What may look like resistance is often a demand for development that creates lasting benefits for local communities rather than leaving them to deal with environmental damage, economic risks, or loss or control. In other words, people want autonomy in how their neighborhoods change over time. This reveals an ideal that is more characteristic of rural values than any other: The way forward is through building communities of mutual respect and solidarity, with access to collective resources, pathways to democratic engagement and input, and an overall sense that we care about each other because we are responsible to and for one another.
Rural and urban areas are not anathema to each other. Instead, they can engage in reciprocal co-production, building the futures they want and finding answers to Paul Krugman’s most challenging questions.
