Dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America, the Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Telling Stories from "the Rest of California" in Photos, Audio and Text
Photographs from "Real Rural" by Lisa M. Hamilton
Starting next week, many BART riders will look up from their smartphones to see the weathered faces of farmers, rodeo riders and country poets staring back at them, thanks to an innovative public information campaign designed to connect urban Californians with their rural counterparts.
Launching on January 31, the project "Real Rural" is the product of a collaboration between the writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton, the nonprofit organization Roots of Change, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Working with a media fellowship from the Center, Hamilton spent much of 2011 criscrossing the state, capturing offbeat portraits of the state's remarkable scenery and seeking out stories about the diverse residents of what she calls "the other California."
Hamilton writes,
Real Rural is meant to start a new conversation, between two parts of California that are at best disconnected, and often at odds. Many people in our cities think they already know the story of rural California: who’s there and how they think, their values and their struggles. I have aimed to demonstrate that in fact this place and its people are far more diverse and dynamic than most of us from outside realize.
Working with Geoff McGhee, the Center's Creative Director for Media and Communications, and the San Francisco design firm MacFadden and Thorpe, Hamilton has crafted an elegant, interactive and multimedia rich website that tells the stories of twenty rural Californians.
We welcome you to come celebrate the launch of the project's at the California Historical Society on Tuesday, January 31 at 5pm, where Lisa will talk about the journey she took to find extraordinary stories hiding in our midst.
For more information about Real Rural, please contact Kevin Herglotz at HP Strategies (kevin@hpastrategies.com, 415-963-2601). And watch for stories in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle and on KQED Radio's "Forum" and "California Report" next week.
Call for Participants: Rural West Conference in October 2012
Photograph: Native American Woman with Basket of Huckleberries. OSU Archives WilliamsG:USFS281580 via Flickr Commons
Building on the work of the Rural West Initiative, the Bill Lane Center for the American West will hold a conference titled "The Rural West: Toward a Regional Approach to Common Issues." Scholars, journalists, policymakers, and others are invited to propose papers for the conference, which will be held October 12-14, 2012 at the David Eccles Conference Center in Ogden, Utah.
Participants will engage in seminar-style discussions of pre-circulated papers. Following the conference, selected peer-reviewed papers will be published in Rural Connections, a publication of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University.
For more information, please view the Call for Participants. »
Ecological Urbanism for the 21st Century
In the age-old cultural ebb and flow between city and country, the city has made a remarkable turnaround. Not so long ago, cities were seen as a cancer that would have to be contained if we were to save the planet. Now cities are more often portrayed as the best solution to what ails life on earth.
Even more remarkably, this turn has taken place at the same time as a crucial demographic shift: Globally, more people now live in cities than in the countryside. During a similar transition in England in the 19th century, there was a romantic cultural turn to the pastoral, as Raymond Williams observed in his classic The Country and the City. In the United States, in the early 20th century, this demographic transition was marked by President Theodore Roosevelt's creation of a Commission on Country Life amid profound cultural angst about the fate of rural America.
We've come a long way from the Roosevelt commission's concern with the "deficiencies" of country life, although the Obama administration recently created a White House Rural Council to "address challenges in rural America." To be sure, we still hear plenty of paeans to that "real America," though only one out of five Americans lives there now, as well as to "wild nature," though most ecologists have come to accept that virtually nothing about nature is untouched by humanity.
The dominant discourse these days, however, unabashedly celebrates the city as the future, in books with titles such as David Owen's Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (Riverhead, 2009) and Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press, 2011).
We share much of their excitement and optimism, but we are wary of this urban triumphalism. We worry that it is blinding us to problems as well as to opportunities for understanding the vital relationship between the country and the city, and right at a time ripe for innovation in the academic fields most concerned with this relationship, particularly urban planning and ecology.
Read the rest of this essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review.
