Challenges for Social‐Change Organizing in Rural Areas

Abstract Corporate criminality and corporate welfare proliferate, and their victims mount. Rural inhabitants, human and nonhuman, are among those most affected. Rural areas are particularly affected by chemical contamination, fossil fuel exploitation, the absence of coverage of relevant local issues by the media, marginalization by governments, and the loss of cherished places and ways of life. There has never been a greater need for collective opposition to the forces undermining rural life. But conditions make it especially difficult, with growing poverty, dwindling and aging populations, lack of transit, unreliable, spotty telecommunications, and other obstacles. These factors and others are used to illustrate why ramped‐up activism is essential to protect the rights of rural residents, the natural environment, and the farmlands that feed the majority of the U.S. population.