Munis & Nemerever: Rural Residency, Rural Resentment, and Attitudes Towards Public Land Management
In Rural Residency, Rural Resentment, and Attitudes Towards Public Land Management in the United States, authors B. Kal Munis and Zoe Nemerever (both Political Science, Auburn) explore attitudes regarding federal public land management along the urban-rural divide. The authors find that while both rural and non-rural Americans are broadly supportive of federal public lands, a subset of “resentful ruralities” are markedly unsupportive of public lands as part of a wider position of opposition to the federal government.
Against the backdrop of broad American support for federal public land management, the authors attempt to characterize resentful ruralite attitudes towards federal public lands. They point to movements like the Sagebrush Rebellion, started by ranchers in the 1970s who were violently opposed to government regulation of grazing on public lands. They find that a similar opposition to federal regulation is present amongst rural Americans who harbor high levels of place-based resentment. These Americans understand politics primarily through the lens of place-based identity and feel unjustly left behind in American politics, culture, and the economy.
The authors first delve into why America, as opposed to other western industrialized countries, experiences a particularly extreme urban-rural divide. They cite factors like geography, demographics, social pressures, and the politicization of placed-based ideas. In the context of environmental and resource policy, the authors additionally point out that rural Americans have a different experience interacting with and relying on natural resources and often live in much closer proximity to federal public lands than their non-rural counterparts. Through surveying, the authors discover very little divergence between rural and non-rural attitudes towards federal public land management—because public opinion in the US is highly nationalized, public land management is not a particularly salient issue, and most rural Americans value their proximity and use of federal public lands. However, the authors also found that high rural resentment motivated by a targeted anger at the federal government is strongly correlated with a significant drop in support for federal public land management.
Munis and Nemerever highlight two takeaways from these findings for the shaping of environmental policy going forward. First, any efforts to shape public opinion will be more successful when directly addressing those harboring rural resentment. Second, this resentment should be understood as primarily targeted towards the federal government and not state governments. Looking forward, the authors suggest the need for a greater understanding of the nature and reach of place-based attitudes.
