Best of the West: How the Rural West is Different

The Center’s Geoff McGhee will join a panel discussion at the Rural Sociological Society’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. The panel will be moderated by the legal scholar Lisa R. Pruitt of UC Davis, and will also feature Stanford Law professor Michelle Anderson and Paul Larmer, the Executive Director and Publisher of the Paonia, Colorado-based High Country News magazine.

From the organizers:

The western region of the United States is different from the rest of the country in many ways, and the same can be said about the rural West.  Distances are more vast, populations are more sparse, and water is more scarce.  The federal government holds and manages a much larger percentage of land in the West than in other parts of the nation.  This panel will take the opportunity of RSS’s Annual Meeting taking place in the West –an infrequent event—to explore these western differences from a multidisciplinary perspective with a panel touching on demography, geography, natural resources, history, politics, and the presence of Indian Country and a significant American Indian population. This panel will provide an overview for and complement other panels sponsored by the Rural Studies and Natural Resources Research Interest Groups (RIG), as well as a panel sponsored by the Poverty RIG on Rural Poverty in the West.