Easy to Exploit | Collapsing the Urban-Rural Divide

Nick Bowlin

So often portrayed as stuck in the past and lagging in the wake of cultural and market currents, rural communities are frequently the first to feel the sting of economic instability. This makes their circumstances a useful portent of the future that Trump is creating. Rural workers have been hurt by automation; more jobs do not necessarily result from productivity gains in sectors like mining and manufacturing. Rural economies, often...

A Good Prospect | Mining Climate Anxiety for Profit

Nick Bowlin

Four billion years ago, our planet was a restive place, full of geological commotion. At the earth’s center, a molten metal core began to coalesce, while heat and radioactive energy kept large swaths of the surface liquid. Violent volcanic forces made and remade the landscape. Over eons, magma pooled and hardened, forming some of the oldest and most stable parts of the earth’s crust. Heat, pressure, and fluid heavy with...

Joke’s on Them | The Democratic Party Meets Rural America

Nick Bowlin

One evening a few summers ago, I walked from my house to the county fairgrounds. It was a long July day, and the sun still hung above the hills that surround the small western Colorado town where I live. People packed the bleachers of an outdoor arena to watch a rodeo. Shortly before the bullriding began, a rodeo clown strolled to the center of the dirt field and began his...

The Land Was Ours | Trump, Biden, and Public Lands

Nick Bowlin

Northern Nevada, not far from the Oregon border, is a vast steppe, where rolling hills and basins stretch on for hundreds of miles beneath sagebrush and other shrubs that can endure the cold winters and dry summers. Beneath the surface are deposits of minerals, the sort that make our phones glow and electric cars run. It is one of the darkest regions — with the lowest levels of light pollution...