Change Anything You Want Once I’m Dead

Enlisting Rural America in the Climate Fight

By Bill McKibben
Illustrations by Maggie Chiang

I’ve spent almost all my life living in dirt-road rural America. It’s been about evenly divided between deep red upstate New York (Elise Stefanik’s congressional district) and deep blue Vermont (think Bernie). But they have more in common than you’d think. 

One of the things they share—and that in some ways I think most rural areas share—is a particular sense of time, in that it should move slowly. 

To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to talk about a city. Not long ago, my wife and I were doing a series of stories for a magazine about immigrant and refugee enclaves in America, and one of the communities we profiled were the 150,000 or so Ghanaians who have taken up residence in the Bronx. We had planned a weekend full of reporting—restaurants, cultural centers, and so on. But we began by taking a taxi to the big apartment building that by common consensus was the heart of “Little Accra.” And when we got out of the cab, my wife looked up at the giant building and said, “Oh, that’s where my grandparents used to live.” Her grandparents—like many of the residents of the mid-20th-century Bronx—were Jews descended from eastern Europe. The borough’s main drag is the aptly named Grand Concourse. (“You remember Rhoda? Rhoda Morgenstern’s parents lived on the Grand Concourse.”) Anyway, there are hardly any Jews left—they moved to the suburbs in the period of white flight. And the communities that replaced them have moved too; at least in these blocks, it’s now Ghanaians. And no one really expects anything different in a city, which we perceive as “dynamic.” Change comes; sometimes people call it gentrification and oppose it, but no one is surprised by it. Indeed, the efforts to lock cities in place—especially by zoning designed to make it hard to build denser housing—have come under steady fire in recent years, because that dynamism is thwarted and it seems unnatural. Places like California are steadily dismantling laws that tried to keep out change. This so-called Yimby (yes, in my backyard) movement has been fueled above all by urban young people, who can’t find affordable housing.

But there aren’t that many young people in rural America. The average age of a rural American is seven years older than the rest of the population. Vermont, say, is both the second most rural and the third-oldest state in the union (Maine leads in both categories). And there isn’t a lot of growth—the Covid-era phenomenon of people fleeing the cities is a small blip in the long steady decline of rural populations in this country. 

I don’t mean to analyze these trends; they have been analyzed aplenty. But I do think they produce a particular psychology, one that’s about the opposite of urban dynamism. I’d call it “attachment,” a kind of devotion to how things are. It wasn’t always this way: when the Erie Canal and Native dispossession opened up the West for easy claiming, the population of Vermont, for instance, dropped in half in a matter of decades, as restless people fanned out in search of topsoil. That was two centuries ago, though; those who stayed perhaps had the staying gene, and as they’ve settled in place, here and elsewhere, they’ve tended to stick. Heavily rural states like Ohio and Pennsylvania have extremely high rates of native-born population. A kind of small-c conservatism takes hold, and often it translates into a rightwing politics but not always (Bernie, remember). But everywhere it seems to me to translate into a preference for stasis—for holding on to what we know.

“There is, no doubt, stagnation in rural America, but there’s also deep inhabitation.”

You can see this form of attachment in very small things (try changing the name of the high school sports team so it isn’t the Red Raiders anymore), and you can see it in very big things, like the ongoing and spreading opposition to wind and solar power installations. I’ve watched this happen in that red upstate New York terrain, where a plan for wind turbines was blocked just down the ridge from me, and I’ve seen it happen in blue Vermont, where we have a de facto moratorium on building any windmills at all. We have what we have: our local industry, or our view of the mountains, or our school, and we’re not going to let you change it. Sometimes I think the rural American motto should be: Change Anything You Want Once I’m Dead. 

I confess to admiring and sharing a good deal of this conservatism; that it shares a root with conservation is no accident. I think the constant churn that capitalism so admires and requires is largely change for its own sake; I like living somewhere where half the streets are named for the families who used to live there and in a great many cases still do. Perhaps the most important writer in my personal pantheon is Wendell Berry. There is, no doubt, stagnation in rural America, but there’s also deep inhabitation.

And yet change comes.

• • • •

In this case, two sets of changes, each of them capable of redefining what it means to live out here. 

The first great shift, obviously, is in the climate. Having spent my life engaged in the effort to slow climate change (a Sisyphean effort thus far), I don’t want to go on needlessly about what people already know. Suffice it to say that 2023 was the hottest year in the last 125,000, and that so far 2024 is hotter still. Even if we somehow get our act together now, enormous change is unavoidable.

I think, however, that it is worth saying this change will hit rural Americans particularly hard. This is contrary to the way we often think about these things: there is endless discussion of the effect of heat waves on big cities, and on the dire prospects from rising sea levels. Which makes sense. Most people around the world, and most people in America, now live in cities and suburbs, and they are very much at risk. But cities and suburbs are where our economic assets are concentrated, so they’re also in some sense protected. What I mean can be summarized by a quick look at New York City property values from the website Metrocosm:

• At 305 square miles, New York City makes up only 0.008 percent of the total land area of the U.S., yet its $1.5 trillion of housing value is about 5 percent of the nationwide total. Only four states are worth more than New York City, one of which is New York State.

• Manhattan’s housing alone is worth about $733 billion, which would make it the 14th most valuable state in the country. Manhattan measures only about 20 square miles, 7.5 percent of New York City.

In fact, you could make it even finer-grained than that. The Upper East Side, which occupies less than one square mile, has an astounding $96 billion of housing value. That places it above Staten Island and the Bronx as well as above six states: New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, and Alaska.

Which is to say, as long as there’s money left around in state and federal budgets to protect places from climate change—to build floodwalls and drainage systems, for instance—it’s going to go to protect places like this. I can (I have) walked around the Upper East Side—it takes maybe 90 minutes to compass it. You could, expensively, protect it. But rural areas are vast and spread out and you’d have to protect them one by one; it’s impossibly expensive. I live in a town of 500, but it would take more than a day to walk its circumference. It has a paved road in, from the west to the east. When that road floods, as it did last summer, it’s often out for days or even weeks; eventually the state may grow tired of paying to rebuild it. 

Rural areas have their own advantage, of course. The electoral college and the two-senators-to-a-state rule mean we have far more political power than we deserve. I can offer no rational explanation for why Vermont should have as many senators as California, but it means that we can count on continued federal funding. Still, not enough to deal with the spread-out nature of our populations. The Upper East Side has a couple of (now underground) creeks running through it that cause flooding problems in hideous rains; my tiny town has dozens of miles of river and stream. The larger your geographical footprint, the greater your chance of a natural disaster.

But there’s another climate vulnerability for rural areas too, and that’s the work that supports our communities. In many places, it’s farming or forestry, and these are exquisitely vulnerable to climatic disruption. Vermont again: in 2023 we had a warm winter, and the apple orchards all bloomed early, only to freeze when a normal spring frost hit. Many fruit farmers lost their entire crop. Our local cider mill was buying all its apples from a distance last autumn instead of harvesting its own, which is not a way to make a living. And then those summer floods wiped out everything for many row-crop farmers. There were sad pictures of them scrambling to harvest whatever meager amount they could as the water rose. 

Again, this is blunted somewhat across the interior of the continent, because the political power of the farm belt is enough to ensure cheap crop insurance. But at a certain point it becomes impossible: drought and heat starts to shift where you can grow things. By 2100, a recent study at Emory University found, the Corn Belt won’t be a sustainable place grow crops anymore. “Climate change is happening,” Emily Burchfield, author of the study, explained, “and it will continue to shift U.S. cultivation geographies strongly north.” The shift will be significant enough that it will also make it difficult to raise soybeans, alfalfa, and wheat. So if you have farmland in Nebraska or Iowa, land that has maybe been in your family for generations, it could be worthless by 2100—certainly uninsurable—and a farm kid born this year is quite likely to still be farming, or trying to, by then. 

Urban and suburban areas, by contrast, don’t really depend economically on a stable climate in the same way, at least not directly. If you job involves driving an air-conditioned car from an air-conditioned home to an air-conditioned office where you tap things on a screen… well, climate change might be a bit of an abstraction. 

And then there’s just the psychological toll. Almost by definition, living in the country means that you notice the world around you—notice that winter is being replaced by a long mud season, notice that the lilacs are out too early and that the river is too hot for trout now. A suburb is a device for hiding how things work—who knows where the water comes from? But if you live in the country and do know where the water comes from, the fact that it’s not coming anymore is both a practical problem and an emotional one. 

All I’m trying to say is, this is a big, big change—potentially a game-over change—for large parts of the rural world. Already there are places where living too close to the forest or too close to the coast or too close to the floodplain means you can’t get insurance, which means that eventually, maybe even soon, you won’t be able to live there at all.

• • • •

But there’s another enormous change too—one that could potentially cut the other way. 

Modernity has been defined by the access to cheap energy. Modernity began when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, and that’s as true in rural places as urban ones—in some ways more so, since settlement in rural places is now defined by the distances that cars and trucks can cover. Combustion is us. Especially in rural areas. The average center-city dweller uses fifty percent less fossil fuel than the American average overall. 

But—in the almost literal blink of an eye—that necessary dependence on coal, gas, and oil has changed. Over the last decade,, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of renewable energy 90 percent. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, followed by catching the winds produced when that same sun heats the earth. That change potentially gives us a way out of the worst of climate change. A quick transition to renewable energy offers some hope of blunting the rise of temperature and averting ever worse droughts and deluges. In so doing, it would be a great boon to both rural and urban areas. 

“The end result of climate change in those places will be change on an epic scale—whole landscapes written off, too hot or too dry or too wet, too uninsurable or too uninhabitable. ”

The countryside, though, could reap a particular bonus. That’s because large-scale renewable energy projects require the thing we have—land. Not an enormous amount of land (by many accounts, just a few percentage points of the total acreage). But that’s not available in cities and suburbs, which are small and compact and crowded. It is available in rural areas. And so it’s possible to imagine every part of the country and the world as its own modest Saudi Arabia, a low-key Texas. The benefits come in four forms: lease payments to landholders, tax payments to communities, construction wages, and operation and management wages. (Wind turbine technician is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the country; there are places where oil and gas workers are being trained to do the work, which, unless you’re scared of heights, is considerably physically easier than roughnecking.) Taken together these benefits could be significant. If localities can help develop these sites themselves, the economic development potential is even bigger. Vermont again: we spent $2 billion on fossil fuel last year, money that immediately exits the state, headed for Exxon’s shareholders or Kuwait’s emirs. That’s money that, with a little creativity, could stay much, much closer to home. 

• • • •

But all of that would require a willingness—a desire—to overcome some of that small-c conservatism. It would require being willing to look at the world in a slightly different way. 

To give an example: the largest crop by acreage in the US is corn. If there’s a standard look to rural America, at least in the humid states, it’s a field of corn. We’re used to it: the rows rising behind the Pioneer seed markers. To us it seems natural and normal. 

But if you think about it, a corn plant is a solar collector, turning the sun’s energy into calories that we can use. It’s an inefficient solar collector: to make it work you have to pour nitrogen on it every year, and that flows into rivers and streams, causing myriad problems. In the middle of the Corn Belt, a recent study at the University of Iowa found that more than half of state’s assessed river and stream segments and nearly two-thirds of its assessed lakes and reservoirs are too polluted to use as drinking water or to fish. Those problems, by the way, get worse as the climate warms. Three years of drought now has encouraged Iowa farmers to increase the application of fertilizers, priming the state for a sudden influx new pollutants, currently sitting in place in the top soil. Once the rains resume, says Chris Jones, a former University of Iowa researcher, “it’s going to be epic.”

And corn is inefficient in other ways too. Lay aside the fact that 40 percent of the nation’s corn crop is used for cattle feed. Almost half of the nation’s corn crop is used for ethanol—that is, half of the acreage of our biggest crop is growing gasoline. Instead, as two hundred agronomists from thirty-one Iowa colleges said in a statement last year, you could get the same vehicle mileage by putting up solar panels on 1 percent of the acreage, producing electrons that could be fed into electric vehicles. Ethanol, as ag writer Tom Philpott has put it, is simply “comically inefficient solar energy,” and totally dependent on government subsidy to make it work. 

But it seems normal. And it supports, sort of, a farm economy, albeit one that has seen the gradual depopulation of rural America over many decades, along with widespread water pollution. You could replace it with renewable energy, earning useful returns, and opening up lots of land for other uses, from recreation to high value crops. The same is true in the arid West, where cattle-grazing and oil and gas production are similarly destructive and where other uses make more economic sense. But these changes aren’t going to just happen on their own—or, rather, not fast enough to save us from ourselves. If we’re going to address climate change in any meaningful way on a timeline that matches the urgency of the crisis, we have to defeat that small-c conservatism. Which means that conservationists, too, have to be willing to change.

Because, as I’ve said, we have a deep-seated aversion to change, the idea of renewable energy in rural areas has often bred a kind of resentment, much fostered by the fossil fuel industry and its friends. The industry’s goal is to continue combustion at all costs—setting coal and oil and gas on fire, instead of relying on the fires of the sun. Since that’s no longer an economically sound proposition, they’ve needed to make clean energy part of the culture wars, and with increasing success.

In some places, this resentment is understandable. Native Americans, say, have been the victims of every single phase of economic development since the first encounters with Europeans; if they decide they want, on the lands that they have been left, not to participate in the next round, it seems to me they have that right. But less so the rest of us. Especially if we care about life in and around the rural places we inhabit. The end result of climate change in those places will be change on an epic scale—whole landscapes written off, too hot or too dry or too wet, too uninsurable or too uninhabitable. 

If what you want—and it’s what I want—is a rural landscape that resembles (in both natural and human ways) the current one, then accepting and indeed embracing a certain amount of change is required. The world is changing, energy is changing. If we want time to keep moving slowly, then we have to move fast for a few years. 

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