SURVIVING CLIMATE CHANGE IN AMERICA: TOWARD A RURAL RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK

This Article argues that rural America—a land mass encompassing the majority of the nation and the locus of much of our ecosystem services, including the provisioning of food and water—is critical to our nation’s survival and prosperity in the climate change era. Further, this Article posits a key role for rural Americans as stewards of those resources and producers of food and fiber. Given the environmentally and economically compromised state of rural America, this Article proposes using the concept of resilience as the foundation of a framework to guide social investments and policy efforts to better address our economic and environmental sustainability challenges. This Article describes how such a framework could be operationalized to improve social outcomes by applying the proposed Rural Resilience Framework to reformulate the Farm Bill, which directly impacts food security, rural development, and natural resource conservation