WREN, a tiny bird with a big song

What image comes to mind when you hear “rural Washington?”

Fields, farms and forests. Small towns. Flyover country. The frontier. Tribal homelands. Rangelands and desert. Public lands playground. Home.

Welcome to the WREN, where rural means all of these. Our goal at the Washington Rural Environmental Network is to bring a diverse chorus of rural voices to the table when public policy discussions impact our rural communities. We want a voice in sharing the development of our homelands. You can follow and support our work at http://www.wrensong.org

I’ve lived in one of those rural places for over forty years. I’m still a newcomer in Lincoln County compared to neighbors raising their fifth generation on a family farm, or tribal members rooted five centuries deep in the natural landscape. Change has come slowly in my home county.

And then the multinational corporate developers arrived with big plans to transform agricultural land into industrial energy production. It’s a more complex question than balancing hopes of major economic gain for some, possible losses for others. Massive development also has massive impacts on the social fabric of communities and on the functioning of the natural environment.

We worked through it. Lincoln County has adopted a new zoning ordinance for the siting of industrial energy facilities on land currently zoned for agriculture. Spokane County is now facing the same challenge. The debates are continuing in Whitman County. It is hard, knowing that the state stands ready to take the control out of local hands if policymakers in Olympia don’t like the answers we agree will be best for our community.

So many of the questions raised by citizens both in favor and opposed to industrial wind turbines were not going to be impacted by our county planning commission discussion. It became clear these conversations can’t just happen one project and one county at a time. The conversation and the decision making must be holistic. We must as a state be balancing social, economic and environmental impact of development wherever it occurs.

That means involving all people in marginalized communities and transparency in the process.

Public policies driving transformational change in rural communities need robust rural input, more than perfunctory listening sessions leaving rural folks feeling like an afterthought. We live here. We matter.

Rural voices across the state, from remote towns on the Olympic Peninsula to communities in the mountains along the Canadian border, face similar challenges from one-size-fits all policies. The impacts go beyond energy policy to education, healthcare, housing development, public lands management – all aspects of rural life. The problems manifest in different forms because rural doesn’t describe just one kind of community.

Fields, farms and forests. Small towns. Flyover country. The frontier. Tribal homelands. Rangelands and desert. Public lands playground. Home. And more. Washington enjoys greater biodiversity in its boundaries than any other state in the union.

No urban civilization has survived denigration of rural communities and degradation of the rural environment. The WREN is dedicated to singing loudly, with a song much bigger than our small numbers to bring the complexity of rural environments to a statewide audience.

— Sue Lani Madsen is president of the WREN and will be providing a monthly column to our subscribers on rural issues. You can also follow/connect with her at suelanimadsen.substack.com.