Rural people are more likely to be obese, according to a new study, "the first in more than 30 years to use actual measurements of height and weight, rather than self-reported data, which can be unreliable," reports Mary McVean of the Los Angeles Times. The study "suggests rural obesity is a bigger problem than we realized," writes Dr. Julielynn Wong of the ABC News medical unit.
"People tend to overestimate how tall they are and underestimate how much they weigh," said the lead researcher, Christie Befort, assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Kansas Medical Center. "The differences between rural and urban were most pronounced for younger adults between the ages of 20 and 39."
She said the rural-urban disparity could be a result of the "cultural diet" of rural people, which generally has more meat and fat, and isolation from better food sources and exercise facilities. The Times story also says "another factor could be the increased mechanization of farm work," but that presumes that a large percentage of rural Americans work on farms, which is not true.
The study found that 39.6 percent of rural Americans are obese, while 33.4 percent of urban residents were, but the story does not give the study's time period or how it defined "rural."
The study appears in the latest issue of the subscription-only quarterly Journal of Rural Health, which is subscription-only; the journal's site says abstracts of its articles are available from the National Library of Medicine's PubMed service, but the article has not been posted at this writing. for the Times story, click here.
Teach for America, which for 20 years has been placing top students from top colleges in low-income school districts, placed its first teachers in Appalachia only a year ago. The program is expanding, and now has 36 teachers in 20 schools in 11 Eastern Kentucky counties.
This relatively small group of young teachers in Eastern Kentucky is stirring hope that their sharp minds, youthful energy, diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives will inspire their students, their colleagues, school officials and their communities to dream bigger dreams and achieve more of them, raising the region's education levels, attracting brighter students to teaching and boosting the chronically poor region's economy.
And because most of the traditional teachers in the 11 counties are natives who went to the nearest college, the coming of TFA has put traditional teacher-preparation programs under pressure to improve, and focused fresh attention on teacher quality and effectiveness.
All these topics and more are explored in four stories written for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues by its first iHigh writer in residence: John James Snidow, an Eastern Kentucky native who earned a Harvard University degree in economics with honors and is now at Yale Law School. To read the stories, click here.
The worst drought in more than 50 years has expanded slightly for the third consecutive week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Exceptional drought, the most severe category, now covers 6.2 percent of the U.S., up from 6.1 percent last week. All levels of drought increased to 64.2 percent from 63.4, the highest percentage this year.
The beef company most affected by the "pink slime" controversy earlier this year is taking legal action against ABC and its news division for defamation of character. Beef Products Inc. claims the news organization cost the company $400 million. Anchor Diane Sawyer and reporters Jim Avila and David Kerley are also named as defendants.
"ABC ran for about 30 days a vicious disinformation campaign that consists of almost 200 false and misleading defamatory statements," BPI attorney Dan Webb told Tim Carman of The Washington Post. The South Dakota-based company is asking for $1.2 billion because the state's Agricultural Food Products Disparagement Act allows plaintiffs to triple the amount of damages. ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider said the lawsuit "is without merit," and that the organization will "contest it vigorously."
Several media outlets reported on lean, finely textured beef, that was once widely used in fast-food burgers, school lunch programs and sold in grocery stores. But reporters discovered a reference to LFTB as "pink slime" in 2002 by former U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein, and it was revealed that ammonia was combined with meat during the process of making LFTB.
In a highly unusual move, most directors of Kentucky's largest rural electric cooperative have resigned after friction between board members and the co-op manager generated a public controversy.
Anderson told Neal last month that he raised the issue of his employment with the board. "If they're actively trying to replace me, I think after 34 years I deserved for them to talk directly to me," he told Neal. "I think we all understand now that the [co-op] members will be watching and taking stock of what's happening." He said there had been a "rift" between him and some board members when the co-op's 50,000 member-customers didn't re-elect some incumbents. Some co-op employees were reportedly involved in the insurgents' campaigns, something that Anderson said he discouraged.
Yesterday, Board Chairman Richard "Rick" Stephens, left, board members John Pruitt Jr., William Shearer and Charles Gore resigned, along with board attorney Darrell Saunders. Stephens, who was on the board for 36 years, chairing it for the last 12, had been the target of a campaign to remove him from the board, reports Ken Shmidheiser of The Commonwealth Journal. The campaign was led by three local businessmen, who launched a website, Save SKRECC, that listed allegations against Stephens, including sweetheart land deals and possible conflicts of interest.
The co-op paid "just over $1 million, almost double what a company called Speculative Ventures had paid for the land just months earlier," for an 84-acre site for its new headquarters in 2003, reports Bill Estep of the Lexington Herald-Leader. "The Kentucky Public Service Commission denied South Kentucky's request to build an $18 million office at the site in 2009, saying the price was too high."
A significant percentage of Americans have abandoned traditional banking, with 8.2 percent of households managing finances without a bank, according to Census Bureau data compiled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That's up from 7.7 percent in 2009. Another 28.3 percent of households -- an increase from 25.6 percent -- are "underbanked," or still have a bank account, but step outside traditional banking systems by using payday loans or prepaid cards, Gary Fields and Maya Jackson-Randall of The Wall Street Journal report.
The unbanked and underbanked may be disproprotionately rural. Some who have forsaken banks are irritated over banking charges, including overdraft fees that cost customers $31.6 billion last year, and others are spurred by the financial crisis and a loss of confidence in traditional institutions.
"Democratic President Barack Obama has supported rural America as farmers achieved record income over the past four years or is 'anti-agriculture' and helped induce an unprecedented regulatory burden on rural America.
"Republican Mitt Romney will either wreck the rural economy and cut meaningful rural programs or unleash greater prosperity by stopping new regulations on farmers and businesses while more aggressively championing free trade deals.
There's always a push to get more youth involved in presidential elections, but there may be a different angle in the concerted effort by College Horizons, a nonprofit organization focused on the higher education of Native American youth. Aura Bogado of The Nation reports that the magazine's newest community journalist, Hillary Abe, has produced a video in Northern Arizona "geared towards mobilizing rural Native youth to vote."
It's perhaps a noble effort, given that 34 percent of Native Americans aged 18 or older in 2008, more than 1 million, did not cast a ballot. Native Vote 2012, a website geared toward getting youth to register, claims that "the Native vote can have a game changing impact on elections at the local, state and federal level, and that's why in 2012 we are working tirelessly to turn out the largest Native note ever."
House Republican leaders have refused to allow a vote on a new Farm Bill until after the November election, even though the Agriculture Committee approved one in July. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, has initiated a discharge petition, which can bring a bill to the floor if it has 218 signatures, a majority of the House.
But the bill has to be formally reported to the floor before the discharge can be launched, and Speaker John Boehner has kept it from being reported, even though House rules require a "prompt" report, Bob Meyer of Brownfield Agricultural News reports. "Committee Chairman Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., did not report the bill to the House clerk until Monday," reports Michael Catalini of the National Journal, citing an unnamed Democratic aide. "Discharge petitions can only be introduced either after bills have been reported out of committee, or after 30 legislative days go by."
There exists a team of oil and gas regulators, industry officials and environmental advocates who offer comprehensive reviews of state oil and gas oversight programs and make recommendations for improvement. It's called State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations, but states aren't volunteering their oversight programs for evaluation. It's a predicament for STRONGER, Ellen Gilmer of Energy and Environment News reports.
State oil and gas regulatory officials are feeling pressure from the public and environmentalists to increase regulations on the booming industry, but Gilmer reports agency leaders are leery of STRONGER and the services it provides. They either don't have resources for it, or they fear increased public backlash. STRONGER's latest review was in 2007 in Tennessee. It did evaluate North Carolina's Department of Environmental and Natural Resources this year, but the state doesn't yet have any actual oil or gas wells.
The group has been evaluating hydraulic fracturing in Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania since 2010, but "It's unclear which states will come next or whether checked-off states' evolving regulations merit further review," Gilmer writes. Mississippi officials have never asked for a review. Kansas officials seemed interested, but haven't asked. Gilmer reports that Texas could be a candidate, but officials there are writing new rules that will likely have to be finished before a review is requested. (Read more) Many state oil and gas agencies are dominates by people from the industries they regulate.
The emerald ash borer is eating its way up the East Coast, leaving swaths of dead or dying ash trees in its wake. It has been spotted in Massachusetts for the first time, officials said yesterday, in Berkshire County in the hilly western part of the state. Ash trees are the main component of the state's northern hardwood forest.
State officials said they are working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to limit the beetle's impact on forests and the wood-products industry, Ros Krasny of Reuters reports. Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation commissioner Ed Lambert said officials "are not taking its presence lightly" and are defining a quarantine area to limit movement of certain wood products, and working with landowners to properly treat and dispose of infested timber.
Agritourism has become increasingly popular as visitors travel to farms to pick their own pumpkins, get lost in corn mazes or pick their own fruit. Keeping those visitors safe is a top priority for farmers, and now they have access to a website guide that can help them do that.
Farmers can use Safe Agritourism to select virtual walk-throughs that are most appropriate for their property and identify health and safety hazard that could exist. Resources are offered that will help farmers fix these hazards. The guidelines are based on "Agritourism Health and Safety Guidelines for Children" that were published in 2007 by the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety.
Post office in Windsor, Mass.
The U.S. Postal Service intends to quickly implement its restructuring scheme, POstPlan, and is starting by reviewing any post office without a postmaster. There are several thousand post offices in this category, most of them in rural places. The agency is asking for community input, but Steve Hutkins of Save the Post Office says some residents are being left out.
There are 13,000 post offices listed for review under POstPlan, and about 8,000 of those are without a postmaster and will be reviewed "very soon," Hutkins reports. Many patrons of post offices on the list have received a letter describing the plan, with a survey of their preferences about what should happen to their post office.
Though the Postal Regulatory Commission's formal opinion on the plan says all customers of a post office that is being reviewed will receive a survey, in some places only post-office box holders are receiving it, and those on home delivery are not, Hutkins reports. Community meetings with postal officials will be scheduled, but Hutkins reports some meetings are being scheduled during work hours, preventing many people from attending.
The rural U.S. is quickly becoming more diverse as minorities move out of major cities and into smaller towns and rural areas, according to a study released last week. The trend is being led by large Hispanic and Asian populations nationwide.
The study looked at the 15,000 jurisdictions in the country that govern their own fiscal affairs, which are disproportionately rural, 82.6 percent were mostly white in 2010. That was a drop from 93.4 percent in 1980. Localities where whites made up at least 90 percent of the population fell to 36 percent from 65.8.
The study is part of the US 2010 Project at Brown University and is a series of demographic studies by academics across the country. It's the latest study showing that suburbs, small cities and rural areas are now "on the front lines of changing demographics and culture," Conor Dougherty and Miriam Jordan of The Wall Street Journal report.
Homeschooling in the U.S. is on the rise in rural areas, and parents' reasons for the shift are varied, including educational excellence, practical training and religion, author Pamela Price reports for the Daily Yonder. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 1.5 million children were estimated to have been homeschooled in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, and at least one researcher estimated that number to have grown to 2 million in 2010.
The primary reason for homeschooling most commonly cited by NCES in 2007 was "a desire by parents to provide religious or moral instruction in tandem with traditional subjects." Other prevalent reasons included safety concerns, dissatisfaction with academic achievement in public schools, and special health concerns.
More and more drilling applications have been filed during the natural-gas boom for karst regions, with "a type of geology made of rocks that dissolve in mildly acidic water over time," and and oil and gas wells do fail over time in karst regions, which provide easy geologic pathways for pollution, says James Goodbar, head of the Bureau of Land Management's caves and karst resources program, reports Gayathri Valdyanathan of Energy and Environment News.
Scientists worry that contamination will increase if drilling increases in these regions. If drilling is properly done, with the correct amount of steel and cement casings, not much casing is needed in most geologic structures. But when well bores intersect with caves, drilling can pose greater risks. The cement and metal can corrode and leak over time because it's not surrounded by rock. "Threats to the springs and the wildlife that depend on them may be significant," Valdyanathan reports.
Urban and rural wireless carriers are banding together to take on the two largest carriers in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon. The Rural Cellular Association, a Washington lobbying group, is rebranding itself as the Competitive Carrier Association as more small urban, regional and smaller national carriers join the organization.
"AT&T and Verizon Wireless have gotten so big so fast," CEO Steven Berry told Marguerite Reardon of CNET. "The newly branded organization reflects the policy issues that have developed as the market has turned into a duopoly. Whether they are rural carriers or bigger nationwide carriers, they all share some of the same policy concerns around spectrum allocation, data roaming, and device interoperability."
More than 20 mayors from cities and towns along the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to Louisiana, will gather in St. Louis Thursday and Friday to discuss a plan to bring national attention to problems with the river at a time when budgets are tight and money to address the issues is scarce, reports Bill Lambrecht of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Many river communities suffered a "one-two punch" recently as drought dried fields and hindered river traffic, then Hurricane Isaac flooded those fields, drowning much of the livestock of small-scale producers. But local officials were concerned about lack of attention to a laundry list of river issues, including crumbling ports and aging locks and dams, long before this summer, Lambrecht reports.
With the national poverty rate at 15 percent, higher than at any time since 1993, and millions more Americans near the poverty line, you'd think there would be more coverage of them and the problems they face each day. For whatever reason, there is not, and a group of journalists with some experience in covering the subject got together over the weekend to talk about improving coverage of it.
Paul Overberg of USA Today gave an excellent presentation on using Census Bureau data to cover poverty. For his handout on using the bureau's American Community Survey data, click here. For other help in covering rural poverty, go to www.onpoverty.org, a recently revised Washington and Lee site for journalists; www.CoveringPovery.org, with tutorials from the University of Georgia; and www.EconomicHardship.org, whose owners include author Barbara Ehrenreich, who has written best-selling books about the poor and near-poor. For more details on the conference, click here.
As you can imagine, the high speed limit has prompted concern among some safety experts. "When you increase speed limits, you have an increase in the severity of injuries," said Lee Friedman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied the correlation between speed limits and traffic fatalities. Many Texas motorists, he said, likely will exceed the new speed limit and travel more than 90 mph. That would be faster than the average speeds allowed on those famous German autobahns. Veronica Beyer, a spokeswoman for the Texas commission, told Koppel that the toll road has been designed and tested for high-speed travel. "Safety is our top priority," she said.
People living in the small community of Rita in Logan County, W.Va., may be evicted to make way for businesses catering to the all-terrain vehicle trails named for the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Residents were given notice last week by DB Land LLC of Dodge City, Kan., that their rental agreements would be terminated Oct. 1, and they must remove themselves and their property from the area, Martha Sparks of the Logan Banner reports. Most of the residents are elderly, disabled or low-income.
The Hatfield and McCoy trails system was created by the state legislature to generate economic development through tourism in nine southern West Virginia counties. There are six trail systems that featured 500 miles of off-road trails in five counties in 2009, one of them connecting sites related to the notorious feud, the subject of a recent cable-TV miniseries. According to the system's website, "community connecting trails" are offered to visitors which allows them to access "'ATV-friendly towns' to experience the charm of southern West Virginia."
Walmart started a new line of stores last year to infiltrate the urban market, but they are having an impact in rural areas, too. They're called Walmart Express, and they've been popping up in at least three states: North Carolina, Arkansas and Illinois. The company says they are designed to compete with dollar stores, which dominate the convenience and low-price market in rural areas.
Walmart Express stores average about one-tenth the size of a Walmart Supercenter, and manager of Walmart Express in Snow Hill, N.C., told Leoneda Inge of WUNC in June that the small size allows associates to have relationships with all their customers. The IGA grocery store across the street has been closed for years, and the nearest Supercenter is at least 15 miles away in Kinston. Inge reported that the Express stores are "basically grocery stores, with a pharmacy and a few extras."
Larry Gibson, who spent most of the last 25 years fighting large-scale strip mining in Central Appalachia, died yesterday after suffering a heart attack while working on his land atop Kayford Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia. He was 66.
In 1986, Gibson moved back to his birthplace and childhood home on Kayford Mountain and found that coal companies had started mountaintop-removal mining on his family's land, threatening his family cemetery, which was "the final resting place for his ancestors stretching back to the 18th century," reports Mackenzie Mays of The Charleston Gazette. Gibson told the Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. in 1997 that the graveyard and a nearby community park that he built was "the last 54 acres the coal companies don't own. They own all the rest. I don't think the coal companies have the right to take everything."
Gibson was among the first Appalachian people to protest publicly against mountaintop mining and faced backlash from his community as a result, according to his daughter, Victoria, 24. He was shot at, run off the road by coal trucks and burned in effigy by those who disagreed with him, she told Ashley Craig of the Charleston Daily Mail. But he never stopped fighting to save his home and the homes of other from mountaintop removal.
"When my dad passed away you could still smell the mountain air on him," she said. "You could still see the dirt underneath his nails and the stains on his hands. He was working. He lived his life devoted to the mountain."
Gibson once said, "My mother gave me birth, but this land gave me life. Growing up here was an adventure every day. I played with my pet bobcat, my fox, my hawk. All of these things, the good Lord provided on this land, But just a stone's throw away, on that mountaintop-removal mining site, you couldn't find anything alive if you wanted to. It's bare rock, uninhabitable."
He refused to sell his land for mining, and instead put 50 acres on top of Kayford Mountain into a land trust, which means it is protected and can never be sold. He built cabins there, and the area has been the site of the annual Mountain Keeper Music Festival for the last 26 years. Gibson was founder and president of the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, and was director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. He traveled the world speaking with families, communities, churches and university groups against mountaintop removal.
The Keeper of the Mountains Foundation released a statement about Gibson's passing, and Ward eulogizes him on his Coal Tattoo blog, here.