Abstract
During the summer of 2020, thousands of Americans flocked to rural locations, seeking a modicum of comfort and freedom from the fears and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. These moves only accelerated the preexisting phenomenon of “amenity migration,” or moves motivated by a desire to interact with nature and, often, express a more authentic sense of self. In her book Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the U.S. West, sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram provides a case study of the processes that facilitate such moves, processes now sped up by the COVID pandemic, not to mention the expansion of global capitalism and the decoupling of work and workplace, for many affluent Americans. Her rich ethnography provides a compelling analysis of how capitalism is always already situated to consume workers and the natural environment. It is an analysis that is needed, now more than ever, as more Americans are poised to gentrify the rural west and inflict more environmental damage.
In this case study of rural gentrification, Pilgeram explores the process by which the Dover, Idaho city council approved a residential development on what was previously the site of a lumber mill. As an instance of rural gentrification, the author shows how decisions and actions on the part of elected officials, community members, former mill owners, and property developers resulted in the commodification of nature and the displacement of long-term residents. With the influx of new part-year residents, Pilgeram documents what is just the area’s most recent example of how capitalism alters humans’ relationship to the natural world. Her study is sensitive to the fact that today’s former mill workers, now displaced by second-home owners, had earlier displaced the area’s Indigenous residents. Together, these patterns reflect a long-term push to monetize nature—a process wherein profit, or exchange value, usurps nature’s use value and human wants and needs.
Working in the tradition of community ethnography, Pilgeram’s book carefully balances attention to the specificities of her research site with consideration of broader regional, if not national, patterns. She is a vivid, engaging writer and brings to life the people and place that animate her research setting. On numerous occasions, I found myself searching the internet for images of this beautiful place and researching its home values and travel opportunities.
Substantively, Pilgeram tells the story of a mill town’s demise, brought about largely by the mechanization of the logging industry. During the middle part of the twentieth century, the mill owners had a symbiotic relationship with the community: they maintained the water and sewage systems and offered public access to recreational amenities on their property. With the closing of the mill, however, the owners allowed the water and sewage infrastructure to fall into disrepair. In a complicated and somewhat obfuscated series of events, the city of Dover took over water and sewage management and, in exchange, allowed the former mill site to be rezoned. Now in control of the community’s infrastructure, the city of Dover applied for and received federal grants to improve the facilities. Once the improvements were completed—on the taxpayer’s dime—the mill owners were able to sell the land at a much-increased price—what scholars of gentrification call the “rent gap”—and new developers were able to transform the land into a privatized recreational paradise marketed to affluent second-home owners.
Theoretically, Pilgeram centers her work on David Harvey’s notion of the spatial fix: a concept that captures the cyclical process by which capital manages its own internal crises—through which capital, despite its boom-and-bust nature, inevitably lands on its feet. She documents a process whereby capital first exploits both human and natural resources (through mechanization and/or poorly managed resource extraction); once complete, capital then steps in to reinvent that which they destroyed, finding new ways to extract profit. From this standpoint, Dover, Idaho’s post-mining era underdevelopment was not a problem to be fixed; it was a solution and an opportunity. As Pilgeram writes, “What happened in Dover is not an aberration but rather a product of a capitalist system of reorganizing its exploitation of human and natural resources” (p. 164). Extraction of wealth is always unsustainable within a given mode of production; therefore, capitalism and its appetites must evolve. Throughout, Pilgeram mounts a forceful critique, showing that the capitalist system is “unsustainable and inevitably destroys these spaces and labor practices by depleting natural resources and exploiting the bodies of laborers” (p. 166).
Methodologically, Pilgeram’s work deftly draws on historical documents and city records—except when they can’t be found. She turns lemons into lemonade in recounting the case of lost or missing city documents. While the author expresses clear frustration over the fact that her analyses lack insight into some of the processes that led to the rezoning of the mill property, she convincingly suggests that the case of the missing documents is intentional. It is somewhat unclear, though, who may have sabotaged the record-keeping—whether it was city officials who may have wished to conceal their complicity in an unpopular development proposal or developers who may have wished to conceal their strong-arm tactics. In making lemonade out of lemons, Pilgeram left me a little unsatisfied: I was hoping for a triangulation of data to fill these gaps—more newspaper articles or interviews with locals directly involved or with memories of the process. More than ten years on, Pilgeram struggles to find good data amid faded memories and the passing of relevant community members. Still, this gap in the data leads Pilgeram to cautiously speculate about how local residents may have been involved in the mill rezoning; but she does not adequately specify their role in the process.
One avoidable limitation of Pilgeram’s work is the voices she doesn’t include. While the author incorporates data from in-depth interviews with old-timers in ways that add local color and bring to the procedural story to life, she provides very little insight into the motivations, perspectives, and experiences of the more recent, second-home-owning arrivals. We see, for example, how old-timers feel about unwelcome menu items that have made their way into local restaurants; the end of the annual community picnic, which had devolved into essentially two separate picnics; and the passage of regulations that defined driveway repair projects as junk. We know very little, however, about how newcomers feel about these same processes, or about their efforts to build community. This gap results in a somewhat partial account of how this community operates in light of rural gentrification.
Analytically, Pilgeram walks a very fine line between critiquing capitalism and suggesting that some capitalisms are better than others. She occasionally loses her footing on this journey. For example, she sometimes seems to romanticize the lives of the mill workers and their families (p. 162). She suggests that the late 1940s through the early 1980s were a golden era in the region, where mill workers held good jobs with union protections; on the weekends, their families could swim, fish, and play baseball seemingly without a care in the world. She occasionally centers the old-timers as more authentically inhabiting the nature in their midst, compared to the newcomers. Pilgeram could speak more directly to the question of whether the old-timers truly held good jobs; whether families were healthy and functional; and whether out-migration may have depleted the community’s energies. In a momentary instance of myopia, the author seems to view the older mill town Dover as the real Dover and imply that the new Dover is fake, a simulacrum, objectively worse than the version that existed in the good old days. In these moments, she occasionally loses sight of her overall goal of critiquing the capitalist forces that created both old and new Dover and that displaced if not destroyed the Indigenous communities that came before. Pilgeram does, however, return to this essential point in her conclusions.
Ultimately, Pilgeram’s work constitutes an excellent intervention into the problems associated with rural gentrification. Because this is a growing field, there remains plenty of room to address questions that are currently unanswered. In the context of Pilgeram’s work, I was curious about any connections or contradictions that might exist between the newcomers to Dover and the region’s white supremacists. Does Dover function, I wondered—either implicitly or explicitly—as what Rich Benjamin would call a whitopia? Future researchers, therefore, can and should attend to questions of how race functions within rural gentrification, and whether and how whiteness serves as a resource—independent of social class—in shaping the transformation of rural spaces.