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529 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1993)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0529 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE After reading these articles, I hope you are like the amazed teacher who asked his student, How many seconds in the year? and was given the answer, Twelve: January 2nd, February 2nd.. . . This volume is designed to kill some myths and stretch some views about the tussle that is occurring in rural America. Put simply, rural America is shifting to a different paradigm, from geogra- phy to community. The rustic image of the rugged yeoman working the soil is fading. Rising is a new image of complex multiplex networks that link individuals into regional communities that target the world as a market for their services. This is not happening easily or painlessly, but it is happening. Rurality used to be agriculture. Society used to be agriculture. Some 200 years ago, 95 percent of the jobs were rural. They were needed to provide basic sustenance and to support the 5 percent of the jobs that were filled by lawyers, doctors, politicians, newspaper editors, and other soft-service occu- pations. Now the percentages are reversed. Less than 5 percent of American jobs are needed in production agriculture to provide food for the 95 percent of the nation's people involved in industry, management, and services. The growth of agricultural productivity has been utterly astounding. President Lincoln in the 1860s charged a few agriculture scientists to provide seeds and knowledge to America's farmers. The result has been a concerted knowledge machine that has conducted research, developed technology, and extended practice to millions of farmers. In the late 1700s, T. R. Malthus wondered if we could control science to sustain 1 billion people. Today, 200 years later, world agriculture provides for almost 6 billion people. To a great degree, it has been rural American agricultural enterprise and its worldwide technological extension that supports the added 5 billion people. But the wealth and security from want that agriculture has provided has undermined rurality. The talent that typified the Grange, the development of community and conservation to improve production, has been eroded by the success of agriculture. Expanding metroplexes, extended roads and air routes, and instantaneous communication became possible because fewer jobs were needed to work the fields for food. Agriculture's success removed investment from rural communities and placed it into other ventures that eroded the very communities that nurtured agriculture. Now the remaining rural base has awakened to reassert the underlying value of community, systems of symbiosis. Failing rural towns, fewer jobs, and out-migration of youths have forced what is left of rural America to rethink its mission. Two events have already occurred. One is that rural America no longer considers agriculture, forestry, or mining to be its primary economic mainstay. Second, energetic business, academic, and government 8

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