In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXXI, No. 2, November 2001, pp. 289-295 RESEARCH NOTE POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND THE RURAL SOUTHERN VOTE: A NOTE ON THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION1 William G. Moseley INTRODUCTION. In the days and weeks following the year-2000 U.S. presidential election, many Americans attempted to understand the dynamics behind voting results across the nation. Most explanations of voter patterns provided by the news media tended to focus on cultural, political, and economic factors. While such arguments may be used to explain voter preferences in many parts ofthe country, I argue that a political ecology perspective is helpful for understanding the geography of voter patterns in the rural South. This research note briefly examines the applicability of political ecology analysis to voting behavior in the rural South and summarizes how the synergy of environmental factors, economics, and government policy may have influenced presidential voting patterns. The analysis presented in this note is largely descriptive. A fuller, more analytical approach awaits further research. A map of the state-by-state U.S. presidential election results for the year 2000 shows the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, taking the majority of states in the Northeast , West Coast, and Great Lakes region, while the Republican candidate, George Bush, largely captured the noncoastal western states and the South ("The Presidential Vote," The New York Times, November 9, 2000, p. Bl). A more detailed map depicting voting results by county (Fig. 1) presents a more interesting set of patterns . The social dynamic behind some of these configurations is fairly easy to surmise while other patterns demand that one know something about the history ofthe region in question. In terms of surface area alone, the Republican candidate dominated the map, leaving the Democratic candidate with a smaller (in terms of area) conglomeration of counties. Given that the election was so close, simple logic suggests that the counties taken by Mr. Gore must have been more densely populated than those taken by Mr. Bush. Indeed, an examination of the map reveals that, in general, Gore did much better in the country's urban areas while Bush held the advantage in the rural zones. Gore's edge in urban areas might be explained by the dominance of constituencies that tend to vote Democratic, e.g., African Americans, unionized workers, young people, unmarried women. More difficult to explain are cases where selected rural counties voted in favor of Mr. Gore, particularly in the South, a region ofthe country that voted overwhelmingly in favor ofthe Republican candidate. Dr. Moseley is an Assistant Professor in the Department ofGeography, Northern Illinois University, DeKaIb, IL 60115-2854. E-mail: moseley@geog.niu.edu. K) O G" > 2 O m¦< Fig. 1 . Presidential election results, 2000. RURAL SOUTHERN VOTE291 POLITICAL ECOLOGY. I suggest that a political ecology perspective is helpful for understanding the geography of voting patterns in certain rural areas. According to Blaikie and Brookfield (1987, p. 17), "the phrase 'political ecology' combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy." Political ecologists are often keenly interested in scale, i.e., how economic and political policies and processes at one level may reverberate with the environment at another (Blaikie, 1985; Greenberg and Park, 1994). In other words, local environmental problems must be understood within the broader political and economic context. Political ecologists have also examined how the environment acts as political and economic conduit between social groups. Bryant and Bailey (1 997, p. 8) suggested that "a key research objective in . . . political ecology is ... to explore the connections between poverty and wealth, environmental degradation and the political process." In some instances, the rich may largely be responsible for degrading an environment upon which the poor depend for their livelihood. Marginalized groups in society may also be forced (politically or economically) to retreat to live in degraded or low-potential environments. While political ecology analysis largely has been practiced in nonWestern contexts to date,2 there is no reason why it should not be used to study the confluence of environment and political economy in the United States. VOTING PATTERNS IN THE RURAL SOUTH. In examining the map of voter preferences by county, a few distinct Democratic conglomerations emerge in the nation's rural areas. Included among these are the lower Mississippi River valley; a middle Appalachian region centered around the confluence of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia; and a strip of counties that runs through the central portion of several Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina) known as the Black Belt. What is striking about all of these areas is that they are poor and have a history of environmental problems. I briefly touch on the first two cases, and then develop slightly more fully the situation in the Black Belt. The lower Mississippi River valley has been referred to in the literature on environmental racism as "cancer alley." This label refers to the consequences of a history of toxic dumping and location of dirty industries in a region that is heavily populated by African Americans (Bryant and Mohai, 1992; Louisiana Advisory Committee, 1993; UCC Commission on Racial Justice, 1998). Unequal power relations played a role in determining the geography ofthis environmental degradation, degradation that often proved to be deadly in this instance. The two other areas, middle Appalachia and the Black Belt, are now marginal agricultural zones that are home to the region's least economically and politically powerful groups (poor European Americans in the first case, and poor European and African Americans in the second) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000; Weiman,1991; Kantor,1995; Haynes, 1997). Attempts to practice agriculture in middle Appalachia resulted in low returns, high rates of soil erosion, increasing poverty, and eventual abandonment of agriculture (Haynes, 1997). 292WILLIAM G. MOSELEY Fig. 2. Presidential election results, selected southeastern states, 2000. The strip ofcounties that runs through the central portion ofthe Southeast (Alabama , Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina) is one of most apparent blocks of counties voting majority Democratic in the 2000 presidential election (Fig. T). This voting block generally coincides with a region known as the Black Belt.3 Depending on the author in question, the appellation Black Belt has been used to refer to the zone's predominately African American population (e.g., DuBois, 1899; Johnson, 1941; Falk et al., 1993) or to its sticky black clay soils (World Book, 2001). A portion of the Black Belt (particularly in Georgia) also encompasses a topographic zone known as the Fall Line hills, an area of transition between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain (Clark and Zisa, 1976). The Black Belt is known for its poverty, low levels of education, and high rates of environmental degradation (Falk et al., 1993; Gordan, 2000; Hartshorn and WaIcott , 2000), circumstances that are largely explained by the region's social and environmental history. Much of the Black Belt was characterized by high levels of cotton production and slave holdership before the Civil War. Unlike other parts of the South where migration to urban areas was common, many African Americans from this region stayed on as share croppers. The exploitative nature of share cropping arrangements, and the declining productivity of farming systems, augmented the poverty of the zone. Falk et al. (1993, p. 55) noted that "[njowhere else was there a group ofpeople who were 'freed' but remained , quite literally, as peasants." The history of the Fall Line hills area is slightly different from other areas of the Black Belt. Outside of important mill towns in this zone, economic opportunities were limited and agricultural possibilities were of the subsistence variety at RURAL SOUTHERN VOTE293 best. Economically marginalized segments of society were forced to live in this marginally productive environment (poor European Americans and African Americans after the Civil War) (Weiman,1991; Kantor,1995). For example, land markets in 1 9th century that favored wealthy farmers played a role in the economic and ecological marginalization of small-hold farmers in Georgia (Weiman, 1991). As in middle Appalachia, attempts to practice agriculture in this hilly area resulted in low returns, high rates of soil erosion, and increasing poverty (Clark and Zisa, 1976; Kantor,1995). Poverty among African American farmers in the Black Belt (including the Fall Line hills area) was exacerbated over time by U.S. Department ofAgriculture policies that discriminated against African Americans and poor farmers (Brown et al., 1994; Jones, 1994). The Black Belt has been the recipient of a considerable amount of voter rights education since the onset of the civil rights movement (Willingham, 1990; Gordan, 2000). This has meant that African Americans in particular are better able to cast their vote for the party oftheir choice. This enhanced ability to vote freely, ironically , has led to a electoral map that more clearly depicts the spatial pattern ofracial and economic segregation in the contemporary rural South. A pattern, I would suggest , that is the result of intense interaction between political, economic, and environmental factors. If the Black Belt were a modern-day fertile crescent, the spatial pattern of voting we saw in the 2000 presidential election would not have been the same. CONCLUSION. To the extent that poor working-class households and African Americans voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in the most recent election , the geography ofU.S. voting patterns reminds us that class and racial segregation not only exists in urban areas, but in the country's rural areas as well. The spatial correlation between politically and economically marginalized populations and degraded landscapes is best understood by a political ecology approach. The idea that the lives of individuals are shaped by their sociocultural circumstances and physical environments is not new to the literature on the South (e.g., Vance, 1932; Odum, 1936). The old notion is that "natural environments promote specific economic activities that, in turn, produce unique forms of social organization " (Falk et al., 1993, p. 55). The political ecology perspective is different from this older view of human environment interactions (often associated with human ecology) in that it places an emphasis on the interaction between processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales; and on a conceptualization ofthe physical environment not as static influence, but as a dynamic medium though which humans may influence one another. Marginalized groups have often been forced to live in a region's least productive areas, or lacked the political and economic clout to resist direct or indirect degradation of their environment by outsiders. In both cases, the low productive potential ofthese groups' surroundings often exacerbates their poverty. The election patterns might also give political ecologists pause to 294WILLIAM G. MOSELEY consider expanding the girth and direction of their conceptual machinery. While political ecologists have traditionally focused on expanding ecological concepts to include political and economic factors, I would also suggest that it may occasionally make sense to expand political analysis to account for ecological circumstances. NOTES 1I am grateful to Ron Ward and Jim Wheeler for conversations and feedback regarding this paper. I would also like to thank the Northern Illinois University Geography Department Cartography Laboratory for assistance with the figures in this manuscript. 2This largely is due to the fact that political ecology is an analytical outgrowth of other approaches, namely cultural ecology and development geography, that tended to focus on situations in the developing world (Watts, 2000). 3Many have defined the Black Belt as extending beyond the four states I have mentioned, also including areas in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and east Texas. LITERATURE CITED Blaikie, P. M. 1985. The Political Economy ofSoil Erosion in Developing Countries (London, UK: Longman). Blaikie, P. M. and Brookfield, H. 1987. Land Degradation and Society (New York, NY: Methuen). Brown, A., Christy, R. D., and Gebremedhin, T. G. 1994. "Structural Changes in United States Agriculture: Implications for African American Farmers," Review ofBlack Political Economy, Vol. 22, pp. 51-71. Bryant, R. L. and Bailey, S. 1997. Third World Political Ecology (New York, NY: Routledge ). Bryant , B. and Mohai, P. 1992. Race and the Incidence ofEnvironmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press). Clark, W. Z. and Zisa, A. C. 1976. Physiographic Map ofGeorgia (Atlanta, GA: Georgia Department ofNatural Resources). DuBois, W. E. B. 1899. "The Negro in the Black Belt: Some Social Sketches," U.S. Department ofLabor Bulletin, No. 22 (May). Falk, W. W., Talley, C. R., and Rankin, B. H. 1993. "Life in the Forgotten South: The Black Belt," in T. A. Lyson and W. W. Falk, eds., Forgotten Places: Uneven Development in Rural America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas), pp. 53-75. Greenberg, J. B. and Park, T. K. 1994. "Political Ecology," Journal ofPolitical Ecology, Vol. 1, pp. 1-12. URL: http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/ Gordan, T. 2000. "Race, Poverty Link Absentee Voting to Black Belt Areas," The Birmingham News, July 18. URL: http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/jul2000/18-e414381b.html Hartshorn, T. A. and Walcott, S. M. 2000. "The Three Georgias: Emerging Realignments at the Dawn ofthe New Millenium," Southeastern Geographer, Vol. 41, pp. 127-150. Haynes, A. F. 1997. Poverty in Central Appalachia: Underdevelopment and Exploitation (New York, NY: Garland Publishers). RURAL SOUTHERN VOTE295 Johnson, CS. 1941. Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (New York, NY: Schocken Books). Jones, H. S. 1994. "Federal Agricultural Policies: Do Black Farm Operators Benefit," Review ofBlack Political Economy, Vol. 22, pp. 25-50. Kantor, S. E. 1995. "Supplanting the Roots of Southern Populism: The Contours of Political Protest in the Georgia Hills," Journal ofEconomic History, Vol. 55, pp. 637-646. Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 1993. The Battlefor Environmental Justice in Louisiana. Government, Industry and the People (Baton Rouge, LA: Author). Odum, H. W. 1936. Southern Regions ofthe United States (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice. 1998. From Plantations to Plants: Report ofthe Emergency National Commission on Environmental and Economic Justice in St. James Parish, Louisiana (New York, NY: United Church of Christ). U.S. Census Bureau. 2000. "Fact Finder Website." URL: http://factfinder.census.gov/ Vance, R. B. 1932. Human Geography in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Watts, M. 2000. "Political Ecology," in R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, and M. Watts, eds., The Dictionary ofHuman Geography, 4th ed. (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.), pp. 590-592. Weiman, D. F. 1991. "Peopling the Land by Public Lottery: The Market in Public Lands and the Regional Differentiation of Territory on the Georgia Frontier," Journal ofEconomic History, Vol. 51, pp. 835-860. Willingham, A. 1990. "Voting Rights and Community Empowerment: Political Struggle in the Georgia Black Belt," in J. Gaventa, B. E. Smith, and A. Willingham, eds., Communities in Economic Crisis: Appalachia and the South (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press), pp. 123-137. World Book. 2001. "Black Belt," in World Book Online. URL: http://school.discovery.com/ homeworkhelp/worldbook/atozgeography/ ...

pdf

Share