2018 Conference

Poster Presentation

Though rural portions of the United States account for roughly 97% of the country’s land area, only an estimated 19% of Americans live there.  Yet, rural Americans have an outsized impact on both the conservation of natural resources and on the implementation of environmental policies.  Conservation of ecosystems, water, and wildlife, production of energy – renewable and non-renewable – and many other environmental issues depend on the actions taken by rural residents, particularly farmers, ranchers and forest landowners.  Rural residents also have an outsized political voice in national environmental policymaking due to the representative structure of the U.S. Senate.

Despite this growing importance, the environmental policy preferences of rural Americans have received little attention by public opinion researchers. Developing inclusive environmental policies that garner greater support from rural residents and rural stakeholders requires a greater understanding of how rural residents view conservation and environmental issues, different environmental policy approaches (e.g., regulation versus incentives), and traditional environmentalism.

To this aim, this empirical research project seeks to document and understand the environmental attitudes, policy preferences, and values that drive these attitudes among rural populations in the United States. Through qualitative interviews and focus groups with rural Americans (piloted in North Carolina), this project documents how rural individuals conceptualize environmental issues and environmental policies, the role of government, corporations and individuals in managing the environment, and the most effective ways of communicating environmental issues to the rural public. Initial evidence shows that while local environmental quality is an important priority among rural Americans, there is a disconnect between a desire for a healthy environment and support for the policies designed to protect the environment. We hypothesize that this disconnect stems in part from a distrust of government, and document strategies for overcoming it to build broad support for environmental policies.