Adverse climate change impacts on some rural towns

Context

One of the factors that led to our ex-president, Lyin' Donnie, to win the Electoral College in 2016 was a sense of fear and unease in many rural areas. Voter concern was about the long-standing stagnant job and wage situation. Changes in agriculture practices including efficient megafarms slowly decreased the number of farm jobs and who much income they generated. Some small rural towns slowly withered away.

In the 1970s, the Soviet government did an economic analysis and concluded that some small rural towns and villages would be economically viable for the foreseeable future, while others would not. The USSR kept supporting economically viable rural areas and left the rest to slowly wither away and eventually disappear. In forest areas, villages slowly returned to a natural state and wolves roamed around in what was left of dying villages as their populations slowly dropped to zero. A 2013 New York Times article, The Russia Left Behind, described dying villages and towns on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg (discussed here in 2019). 

Eight miles west of the M10 [Moscow to St. Petersburg highway] lies 

the village of Pochinok, Russia, one of hundreds of disappearing settlements. 

The wilderness is closing in around Nina and Vladimir Kolesnikova and their children.

Ludmila and her grandson Maxim at her sister Nina’s house in Pochinok. 

Nina’s family is the last in her village in an area where 

towns are becoming villages and villages are becoming forest.

At that time I became aware of adverse economic influences on rural areas. Ever since, the concept has stuck with me. More recently, a 2016 essay by Kevin Williamson published in The Nation launched a scathing attack on economically dying rural areas in America. Last March I discussed Williamson's essay here, which included this blistering condemnation of people whining about rural decline and what to do about it:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Williamson was clearly saying, get a U-Haul, get out of town and go where economic opportunity lies because your economic situation is not tenable. Williamson got a major blast of criticism for his bluntness, but his logic still seems worthy of consideration.

Similar rural decline is being seen in some rural areas of Canada.

The climate change angle

Today, the New York Times raised another issue relevant to the matter of adverse economic forces in some rural areas. The NYT writes:

FAIR BLUFF, N.C. — It’s been almost five years since Hurricane Matthew flooded this small town on the coastal plain of North Carolina. But somehow, the damage keeps getting worse.

The storm submerged Main Street in four feet of water, destroyed the town hall, the police and fire departments, and flooded almost a quarter of its homes. After two weeks underwater, the roads buckled. The school and grocery store shut, then didn’t reopen. When Hurricane Florence submerged the same ground two years later, in 2018, there was little left to destroy.

Climate shocks are pushing small rural communities like Fair Bluff, many of which were already struggling economically, to the brink of insolvency. Rather than bouncing back, places hit repeatedly by hurricanes, floods and wildfires are unraveling: residents and employers leave, the tax base shrinks and it becomes even harder to fund basic services.

Damage in downtown Fair Bluff, NC. The town cannot 

afford to buy ruined buildings and tear them down.

That downward spiral now threatens low-income communities in the path this week of Hurricane Ida and those hit by the recent flooding in Tennessee — hamlets regularly pummeled by storms that are growing more frequent and destructive because of climate change.

Their gradual collapse means more than just the loss of identity, history and community. The damage can haunt those who leave, since they often can’t sell their old homes at a price that allows them to buy something comparable in a safer place. And it threatens to disrupt neighboring towns and cities as the new arrivals push up demand for housing.

The federal government has struggled to respond, often taking years to provide disaster funds. And those programs sometimes work at cross purposes, paying some people to rebuild while paying their neighbors to leave.

Fair Bluff is small-town idyllic, nestled among fields of corn and tobacco near the South Carolina border, shielded from the Lumber River by a narrow bank of tupelo gum, river birch and bald cypress trees. But its main road offers a sobering glimpse of what climate change could mean for communities that can’t defend themselves.

On a recent afternoon, the sidewalks were empty and the storefronts abandoned, their interiors smashed up and littered with trash, doors ajar. The roof of one building had collapsed, a battered American flag stuck in the debris; inside other buildings were ransacked shelves, plastic containers full of Christmas decorations, an upside-down tricycle. Speakers on a Methodist church played recorded hymns for no one.

Some stores were strewn with cleaning supplies and half-full garbage bags, as if shopkeepers had first tried to fix the flood damage before giving up.

“If you look at what the folks here called downtown, really the only business that came back was the U.S. Post Office,” said Mr. Leonard, who splits his time between Fair Bluff and four other towns, none of which can afford a full-time employee on their own.

Stephen Potter, the Seven Springs, NC, mayor. “Long-term, we’re not going 

to be able to stay financially solvent on just our tax base alone,” he said. “Now, what happens when we have another catastrophic flood? I don’t know. I really don’t want to be the mayor that presides over the death of Seven Springs.” 

The NYT article goes on to describe other small towns that climate change, e.g., repeated floods, has made barely economically viable or unviable. Once a town gets too small, it no longer has a tax base sufficient to maintain itself. So, it slowly spirals into non-existence as residents die or move away and businesses go out of business.

Questions: Should the federal government intervene to try to save economically unviable towns, or is that too much like Sisyphus trying to push a boulder up a hill but never able to do it? In other words, can one ever successfully fight against economic forces that are implacably arrayed against success? Should the US do what the Russians started doing decades ago?