Rural Depopulation.
People have been abandoning the country for a long time.
September 17, 2008.
Ever since the start of the industrial revolution, and to a greater extent in the technological revolution, the rural parts of our country have been depopulating. Traditionally the trend has been driven by the lack of meaningful work in rural areas, and the lack of value to rural products. Food products can be manufactured so cheaply with industrial techniques that there is little value in farming. Non-food products are made industrially, so there is little need for rural labor.
People have been moving from the country to the cities and suburbs for decades. In the late 1960s there was a trend for people to move back out to the country for the rural experience, but that movement was slowed and reversed in the 1970s as fuel prices made rural land unattractive for commuters. After fuel prices dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, rural commuting became the fad once against.
Yet, the era has once again come to an end. High gas prices makes commuting a very expensive proposition, even with the latest in fuel saving technologies and small cars. If you are consuming a couple of gallons of gas each day just to get work, it is becoming impossible to survive. People are moving back to the cities, slowly, but at increasing rates, especially as particularly undesirable areas filled with crime and pollution are becoming gentrified.
Not that this trend is a bad thing. Cars are terribly polluting, particularly as they leave the countryside for the urban masses. Millions of people commuting long distances creates incredible amounts of pollution, traffic jams, horrific carnage on highways, parking issues, and so many other horrible problems. Small subdivisions fragment the rural landscape, and create the potential for conflicts between traditional rural land uses and new owners.
Many of the people who lived out in Rural America where never particularly serious about the rural life anyways. They where happy to just to commute in the car to the nearest big city to make their money, and plow it back into their overly fancy house in the sticks. Owning a horse or having a small garden doesn't exactly make a person a rural one, especially when they go to the school and demand higher taxes for better education or fancy school buses.
>New uses will occur for rural lands. Some will just be abandoned and grow up to be forest lands, some given to the state, and some will revert to traditional agricultural uses. Landscapes will change as technology changes, and man adopts to the new world order. None of these changes are necessarily bad, and indeed from a rural life or environmental perspective, they are good.
