Note to rural Nebraskans: better find a hobby

Rural America is changing in ways that we’re bound to feel even more in coming years than we do now.

Based on recent census data that tracks demographic changes through 2007, a new study by Randy Cantrell, of the University of Nebraska Rural Initiative, points to an aging and diversifying population in rural Nebraska — one that is, at the same time, shrinking and decreasingly farming-based. It’s a trend, I’m guessing, we’re probably seeing in rural communities everywhere.

“Population losses continue to characterize much of non-metropolitan Nebraska,” Cantrell notes.  “This trend has been well documented. Less well understood is the effect that depopulation is having on the age structure and racial diversity of the state.”

One particularly disturbing trend for rural Nebraska, Cantrell notes, is that the prime working segment — those aged 30 to 49 — is shrinking across non-metropolitan Nebraska. Maybe that would be ok in the the medium to longer term if trends among younger people weren’t just as bad, if not sometimes worse: “Young people continue to leave their rural communities following their high school educations,” Cantrell writes. “The combined result has lowered the number of residents under the age of 20 years by as much as 30% in some rural counties.”

At the same time, the majority of counties in the state have experienced recent increases in minority populations. And, more fascinating still, Nebraska workers of all ages and backgrounds have shifted slowly away from farming toward wage and salary work — and, increasingly, toward government work or some form of self-employment.

Add it up, and a very different image of the American heartland begins to emerge.

By all indications, these are trends that, to some extent, are reshaping a broad swatch across the middle of the country — in ways I suspect many of us saw coming, but perhaps didn’t see coming so quickly.

A really fun interactive map published recently by The New York Times, for example, indicates similar immigration trends across the United States. Though its most recent data comes from 2000, the map confirms what we already sensed: that the diversification reshaping Nebraska is also reshaping states like Michigan, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Utah and others. I’m pretty confident that if the map reflected data since 2000, the data would be even more striking.

Regarding changes in overall population levels, a more recent map, published last week by USA Today, shows in striking relief the way populations have emptied from the middle of the country out toward the coasts in recent years:

The low resolution on that graphic makes it a bit tough to read. The important thing to know is that blue represents a population loss, red a gain. The darker the blue or red, the steeper the change.

What’s also interesting about this map is to note how much of our population has flowed specifically toward the Sun Belt in recent years. However, new census data indicate that this wave seems to have ebbed slightly, as suburbs across the Sun Belt — whose building booms were driving largely by risky loans and rampant speculation — collapse under the weight of foreclosures. The USA Today article attached to the above graphic reports that unemployment and the housing bubble have led more urban-dwellers in older industrial cities to stay put, at least for now.

This could all change the moment our economy starts to recover. But, as I’ve noted in previous posts, some of the broader trends we see re-shaping America today are more fundamental than that; the fact that they are supranational, for starters, supports that theory. To my mind, these trends speak to some pretty basic shifts in how we communicate, how we work, how we organize, and, indeed, how we perceive and identify ourselves as human beings.

Almost two years ago, The Economist noted that the world’s population had become more urban than rural for the first time in history (“The World Goes to Town,” May 5, 2007). If that seems like anything less than an utter sea change in the evolution of humankind, consider how long we’ve been around, and how quickly the inversion has come about:

Whether you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known as Eden, or more prosaically on the savannahs of present-day east Africa, it is clear that Homo sapiens did not start life as an urban creature. Man’s habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and foraging were rural pursuits. Not until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village, and by that time man had been around for about 120,000 years. It took another six millennia, to the days of classical antiquity, for cities of more than 100,000 people to develop. Even in 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities.

In the two years since I read that article, I have often reflected upon this fact; indeed, I can think of no single statistic or bit of information I’ve heard since whose implications are more profound.

That doesn’t mean cities are “winning” and the country is “losing.” On the contrary, The Economist pointed out at the time that the shift is putting enormous strain on cities, overcrowding them, forcing more and more people into poverty. I’ve spent time in the slums of Manila, for example, which were gowing rapidly with migrants from the provinces, creating whole new and previously unimaginable sub-economies (The most infamous is assembled around the Payatas garbage dump, where, in 2000, hundreds were killed after a mountain of garbage collapsed and buried them after heavy rains.)  And we’ve all seen Slumdog by now. Same issues, and even bigger slums.

I’m not saying our cities are destined to become new, American versions of Mumbai (though the surfacing of places like Sacramento’s “Tent City” — a sort of post-modern Hooverville — are disturbing). But we had better prepare ourselves for the idea that our cities may soon become much more classically Dickensian than they have been in some time.

Meanwhile, rural kids in Nebraska  better start finding some new hobbies. It’s gonna get even lonelier out there.