“Car Dump Canyon” by Jacob Barlow
Cindy is a professor in OSU’s WGSS department, and I’m currently enrolled in her Women Writer’s literature course. I reached out to her for an interview because I figured her training in political science might help me unpack the political and cultural mindset of rural Ohioans.
Conservatism and Rural Ohioans
One topic that’s been looming over my research is this generalization that rural Ohioans are conservative. Cindy explained that yes, when you are looking at rural Ohio as a whole, it can be generalized as conservative. It’s hard to get past generalizations when you’re looking at the urban versus suburban versus rural regions. When you start to divide the regions and look at the municiple county level, things will look a little different.
“The more carefully you look on the ground at a smaller and smaller picture, the more varied it becomes.”
If we were to look at the different regions of Ohio, Central, Southwest, Southeast, Northwest, Northeast, we would see that the Appalachian region (South, Southeast), is more conservative than any other part of Ohio. Rural areas of Ohio are consercative, but they are not as conservative as Appalachia.
Cindy says the root of this can be explained through the political history of the region.
“At one time, Appalachia was identified with the Economic Populist Democratic Party, and over time they came to identify solidly as Republican.”
This was a huge transformation over a 40 year time period. Economic Populists are considered economically liberal, while socially conservative. What happened was economically liberal people became more conservative when their cultural views were made more salient. The Republican Party basically flipped the economic and social dynamic in order to bring conservative culture more to the forefront, flipping Appalachia from Democratic to Republican.
We see this continue to play out in the present when we look at the 2020 election, where Trump won votes from Southern Ohio by a landslide. We can say that some voted Democratic, but only a tiny minority. Because Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is from Ohio, people who are already predisposed to voting for Trump are even more likely to vote for him. Based on past voting patterns, it makes sense politically to predict Southern Ohio will vote Republican again.
Appalachia
“I’m from West Virginia,” Cindy told me, which took me by surprise. I asked her if she identified as Appalachian and she explained that she was born there but she didn’t grow up there since her father was in the military and as a result her family moved around a lot. While she herself isn’t Appalachian, her family is from the region. Her mother is from a small unincorporated town in West Virginia, so small that it didn’t have a name. Her father is from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania.
When Cindy’s father started going out with her mother, at the time he had a job at a funeral home. He would wear a suit to work and drive a big black car. As he drove up the winding dirt mountain roads to pick up Cindy’s mom, people would shoot at him. They saw the suit and big black car and assumed he worked for the government there to enforce rules and regulations upon them. Eventually the townspeople stopped shooting when they learned he was there to pick up Cindy’s mother.
I asked if it was still like that today. Cindy said that while it’s less like that today, the culture is there. Trump has leveraged those cultural ideas and pointed them at the Democratic Party.
Americans are a lot more likely to get our backs up when we’re told what to do. Americans are much more likely to resist than say Europeans, which is part of political and cultural history. Anything that seems to be an encroachment on our autonomy incites resistance. This is deliberately leveraged by political actors.
“In the past 10 years, that’s happened more than it’s ever happened in my lifetime.”
It’s a feature/piece of culture. [Political leaders] have taken that piece of culture and weaponized it for their own advantage.
Culture Shifts
[I explained to Cindy that my project is specifically about waster and litter managament, but also more broadly about creating awareness of sustainability. I asked her how I would best go about creating that kind of cultural shift with this demographic of people.]
Cindy recommended that “a shift or program is done very much in concert with people on the ground.”
The problem with politics right now is the successful denigration of higher eductaion among people who support Trump. Politics is now organized around resistance against expertise. Trump is a particularly malignant figure in using hatred in order to build his brand.
“There has never been a case in my lifetime that politics has been organized around resistance like this.”
“Politics have become one side saying ‘we should do our best to figure out what to do to make our world better,’ and the other side saying, ‘don’t listen to them, they’re making stuff up'”
With interventions, you can’t parachute in and tell people something is bad, that what they’re doing is wrong. Because people will be like ‘who are you to tell us what to do’.
“You have to downplay the imposition from above.”
You have to find people on the ground to work with, find partners, do the work through trusted partners. This will be less likely to stimulate resistance.
Cars, Fridges, and Cliffs
[At some point when Cindy was talking about West Virginia, she mentioned how people will dump cars and fridges over cliffsides. I’ve never heard or seen people talk about that, so I asked her to eleborate.]
In West Virginia or mountianous parts of the country, if you have bigs things to get rid of, you have to pay to get them recycled and taken away. It’s common for people to dump cars, fridges, washing machines, appliances, etc. over the sides of cliffs “where it will never come back to haunt them.”
If you’re driving through mountains in West Virginia and you stick your head over the side of a cliff, chances are you’ll see someone’s fridge.
It’s actually a problem in West Virginia where where massive cleanup efforts have to happen because people don’t want to have to pay to properly dispose of things. You’ll see no dumping signs, but unless you have a mechanism holding people responsible, mountain people tend to be very autonomous. The feel like any rule is inappropriate because it’s constrinaing their liberty.
[I asked if the car and fridge dumping is part if a larger throwaway culture in the region.]
“People do love the land, they treasure it.”
“We’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, you’re destroying the environment.'”
“They’re thinking, ‘The world is so big and so powerful, we can’t destroy it.'”
People historically thought they couldn’t damage the environment. They think no matter what we do, we can’t damage it. There’s a lot of anti-climate change sentiment because they don’t understand that people can actually change the climate of the Earth. They think you’re lying because you want to control them.
“The reality is, in northern West Virginia, you can spend generations dumpinf things over a cliff. After a while, the forest will just grow right over it.
It excites me to find out that people in the Appalachian region of Ohio, people who are considered conservative, a region where sustainability intiatives aren’t as successful, do value the land. They just value it in a completely different sense. It’s not that urban/suburban sustainability approaches are less successful with rural people because rural people are more inept when it comes to sustainability. It’s because there is a completely different culture and history to the land that results in different political, social, economic, and environmental perspectives. Addressing sustainability is not a one size fits all solution, and it’s also not about getting everyone on board with this concept of ‘sustainability’. The people of Appalachia are already on board, it’s about meeting them on their terms.
Knowing that there is this culture of resistance to outside enforcement, how do you show instead of tell people about their impact on the environment?
Barlow, J. (2016, November 20). “Car Dump Canyon.” JacobBarlow.com. https://jacobbarlow.com/2016/11/19/car-dump-canyon/
