Mary Hendrickson quoted in The Guardian
Mary Hendrickson quoted in The Guardian
A recent article in The Guardian titled “US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’” quoted Mary Hendrickson, Professor in Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security. The article discussed how many companies that are trying to build AI data centers have attempted to buy large swaths of farmland. However, farmers have by and large resisted these efforts to purchase their land. Hendrickson provided expert knowledge on the importance of farms to rural families and communities, noting that many farmers feel a responsibility to previous generations and citing the tragedies that occurred during the 1980s farm crisis. She also notes that transforming farmland into AI data centers would likely be irreversible.
Ryanne Pilgeram from the Wilderness Society, along with co-author Mark Haggerty, recently published a report titled “Decoupling and Public Lands: Ensuring the future of public lands while supporting communities who bear the burden of shifting fossil fuel markets.” The report outlines how Congress should establish a permanent fund to manage natural resource revenue so communities can diversify fossil fuel-reliant economies and keep public lands in public hands. Their work highlights that public lands are economically entwined with fossil fuel extraction, which creates incentives to continue fossil fuel development. However, boom-and-bust revenue cycles from fossil fuel markets harm local budgets. They recommend creating a predictable, stable revenue source for resource communities irrespective of market fluctuations via establishing a permanent resource revenue fund and note that decoupling budgets from annual extraction revenues can reduce political pressure to sell or develop public lands.
Tim Slack, professor of sociology at Louisiana State University, and Shannon Monnat, professor of sociology and Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health at Syracuse University, wrote a paper for the Aspen Institute’s Health Strategy Group’s recent report “Meeting the Health Needs of Rural America.” In their paper, titled “Population Health in Rural America: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities,” Slack and Monnat highlight the heterogeneity of rural America. They note the intertwined and fluid nature of rural and urban areas and, while acknowledging significant disparities, also note that many rural areas are “healthy, successful, and thriving.” They call for a response that focuses on upstream policy interventions that will yield better health.
Gregory Fulkerson, professor and chair of the Geography & Environmental Sustainability Department at SUNY Oneonta, recently published a book in Bloomsbury with his colleagues titled “Inequality at the Urban-Rural Nexus.” The book examines examines the systemic and structural nature of social inequalities and how inequalities shape identities and access to opportunities. The authors argue that it will be impossible to build a more just and equitable society without addressing the urban–rural nexus.
John Green, past president of RSS, was recently appointed a community development research fellow with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Community Development department. Green is the director of the Southern Rural Development Center, housed at Mississippi State University, and a professor in the Agricultural Economics department at the university. Green, a rural sociologist and demographer, focuses his research on rural development, population change and the factors shaping the well-being of rural communities. During his fellowship, Green will collaborate with Community Development staff and partners, author and coauthor research publications, participate in seminars and present findings related to community and economic development.
Dudley Poston, professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, recently published an article in The Conversation titled “China’s new condom tax will prove no effective barrier to country’s declining fertility rate.” In the piece, Poston analyzes the potential impact of this contraceptive policy on declining fertility in China. He notes that while China is the world’s most populous country, it has low fertility rates. In response, the country has adopted pronatalist policies, which Poston predicts will be ineffective at stopping this demographic shift. Poston notes that China’s historical policies surrounding limited childbirth have likely contributed to declining fertility even as more births per family are now permitted.
Pierce Greenberg from Clemson University recently published an article in Nature Sustainability titled “Social factors shape federal environmental crime prosecution patterns in the USA.” As he notes, enforcement of environmental laws and regulations is critical to achieving a cleaner environment and alleviating inequitable distributions of environmental harms. He and his coauthors examined the geographic patterning of US federal environmental crime prosecutions from 2011 to 2020, finding that counties with higher levels of socioeconomic status have more environmental criminal prosecutions, on average, while environmental conditions such as air and water quality have no effect on environmental crime prosecution patterns.
Joe Donnermeyer, a rural criminologist who is retired from the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University, recently published a book with Routledge titled “Farm Crime: An International Perspective.” It is billed as the first book to summarize the existing literature from across the globe about agricultural victimization and seeks to demonstrate the vulnerability of farms and farm families to both property and violent crime and how it threatens their livelihood and lifestyles. The book provides both a descriptive synthesis of agricultural victimization and a discussion of various criminological theories applied to its study and is useful for a variety of researchers and scientists.
Edith-Marie Green, a PhD candidate in the Population Health Sciences program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently published a policy comment in World Medical & Health Policy titled “Hospice and Palliative Care-Related Policy in the United States and Germany in the Context of Recent Governmental Changes.” Green draws on principles of demography, political science, and her own previous research to discuss the current policy landscape for hospice and palliative care in the United States and Germany, as well as the political complexities that impact these policies. This research is especially important, she posits, as the global population continues to age.