The Dual Dependency of Natural-Resource-Rich Labor Markets in Contemporary Society

The Need for an Integrated Subnational Theory

The literature reviewed has illustrated the dominant research traditions concerning the relationship between natural resource economic development, dependence, and economic well-being. There currently exists a need for a more integrated theoretical framework at the subnational scale concerning these topics. A more cohesive theoretical perspective is necessary for three main reasons.

Given these reasons, it is clear that a critical theory of subnational natural resource dependence is necessary. This integrative framework must account for both extractive and nonextractive natural resource use while nesting within-country dynamics within the global system. The framework I present has global application, but I tailor my discussion to the case of the United States, for two primary reasons. First, the existing literature has a notable emphasis on the United States, meaning the evidence supporting this theory is on its best footing when applied to this case. Thus, although the theoretical mechanisms undergirding this framework are likely broadly applicable, it will be up to future work to fully establish the level of transferability. Second, the emphasis on the case of a single large nation-state fosters a more precise presentation of the subnational theory. This framework is particularly applicable to other federalist countries with large natural resource endowments. Future work will need to apply the framework of dual dependency in a comparative manner to continue the development of the approach.

The First Form: Dependency on the National and Global Capitalist Economy

Argument 1: Uneven development under capitalism is exacerbated at the subnational scale within the United States due to the unique considerations posed by the political structure of federalism in contemporary capitalism. This places rural labor markets at a structural disadvantage to urban labor markets, resulting in their dependency on the national and global capitalist systems, regardless of natural resource endowment.

To begin, rural labor markets in the contemporary era are not independent of the broader economy but are nested within a series of generally open and free markets at the national and global levels (Frank [1969] 2007; Sklair 2002; Wallerstein [1979] 2015). One cannot discuss a rural labor market in isolation; a “dual” society of separate rural and urban domains does not truly exist. However, the various labor markets do occupy varying positions within this single economic system (Sklair 2002; Smith 1984; Wallerstein [1979] 2015). Different labor markets are structurally positioned along a spectrum ranging from the core to the periphery (Wallerstein [1979] 2015). The core labor markets, often urban, exploit the periphery, often rural, for their resources and labor. This continuum, driven by capitalists within the core labor markets, creates an internal, and ever-shifting, mosaic of underdevelopment across the world and within countries (Smith 1984).

Where a labor market falls along this continuum of core to periphery is contingent on numerous criteria, including the specific history, physical characteristics, transport infrastructure available, mobility of labor, and rate of profit available to capital (Harvey [1982] 2018). The level of development that occurs among peripheral labor markets often follows a dialectical, see-saw pattern, wherein development of the periphery by core capitalists necessarily leads to crises of overaccumulation, improves conditions for labor, and decreases surplus value to capital (Harvey [1982] 2018; Smith 1984). Thus, the rate of profit decreases, and capital exits the market for a less-developed peripheral labor market—what Harvey ([1982] 2018) calls the spatial fix. After capital exits, the labor market begins to decline. Once the initial peripheral labor market declines sufficiently, capital, and therefore development, may return (Smith 1984, 2011). Important to note, this continuum of exploitation does not develop alongside capitalism, or due to a few bad actors, but is built into the very structure of industrial capitalism and the actions capitalists must take to remain successful (Cardoso [1972] 1982; Harvey [1982] 2018; Smith 1984). Thus, as long as ownership of the means of production is concentrated in core capitalist markets—which it is and will be for the foreseeable future—internal sustainable economic development within peripheral labor markets is impeded, and in some cases impossible, due to capital’s necessary flow from the periphery to the core (Cardoso [1972] 1982).

Furthermore, due to the increase in neoliberalism—a view of political economy proposing “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007:2)—as well as continued globalization and the rise of the transnational capitalist class, the uneven development embedded into capitalism may be accelerating (Harvey 2006; Robinson 2015). The transnational capitalist class represents a global power elite who directs the flow of capital with little regard for national borders (Sklair 2002, 2007). This class consists of a constellation of four non–mutually exclusive groups: “(1) those who own and control major transnational corporations and their local affiliates (the corporate fraction), (2) the globalizing bureaucrats and politicians (the state fraction), (3) globalizing professionals (the technical fraction), and (4) merchants and media (the consumerist fraction)” (Sklair 2002:145). These groups, with deep ties to free markets and neoliberal ideals, work together to control the world’s economic and political structures to ensure the accumulation of private profit. The rise of this transnational capitalist class and its actions obscures the state’s role in regulating trade policy and has likely exacerbated historic patterns of uneven development.

Scholars often discuss the world system of uneven development at the level of nation-states (Harvey [1982] 2018; Smith 1984; Wallerstein [1979] 2015) or the global economy (Robinson 2015; Sklair 2002). This is certainly appropriate, but this system has, nested within it, a multitude of smaller, within-country, core-periphery systems of equal importance (Frank [1969] 2007). Thus, unlike the majority of work adopting a world systems theory perspective, I do not focus on the entire world system but instead examine the U.S. system and its core-periphery networks. These subnational patterns of dependency reflect similar global exploitative networks, with the exception of the movement of capital being even less restrained. Global deregulation has run rampant in the era of neoliberalism (Harvey 2006), globalization (Robinson 2005, 2006; Sklair 2002), and the policies and loan requirements pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (McMichael 2017), but barriers still exist to the flow of money and resources between nations. However, these legal and geographic barriers are significantly weaker, and practically nonexistent, when considering the movement of capital within and between states in a federalist country such as the United States, where the constitution prohibits interstate trade regulation.

This unrestricted flow of capital has accelerated following the 1994 Riegel-Neal Act, which opened up interstate U.S. banking and led to significant market concentration in the banking sector (Corbae and D’Erasmo 2020). Large national and transnational corporations now have a heightened ability to steer subnational rural labor markets into specific forms of economic development. Due to this microcosm of free markets and neoliberal trade within the United States, I argue that the expected uneven patterns of development of industrial capitalism will be heightened at the subnational scale: The ability for wealth and financial capital to flow freely and quickly across great distances exacerbates extralocal control of the rural labor market.

Local elites work in tandem with these external interests to achieve the highest rate of profit possible at the point of production. This structure creates a multilayered exploitative system, where exploitation exists in the unequal exchange relationships between core capitalists and rural labor, suggested by dependency theory (Frank [1969] 2007), and within the local creation of surplus value, discussed by Marx ([1867] 1990:1867). In short, both local and external capitalists produce surplus value off of local labor, and then a significant portion of that value leaves the labor market due to unequal exchange relationships. The local elite capture what profit does remain and do not distribute it to labor, ultimately creating a general state of underdevelopment in the market (Billings and Blee 2000; Duncan 2014).

Within this framework, I view the state as playing a role complementary to capitalist interests (and thus give it limited attention here): The transnational capitalist class, along with national capitalist interests, dominates the political structure at the local and global levels to maximize their private profit (Sklair 2002, 2012). This view hinges on Marxist formulations of the state as an agent of the interests of capital (Das 1996). The interests of members of the state and corporate factions of the transnational capitalist class generally align, so the interests of the capitalist and private profit will drive development. Elements of the state will push against specific capitalist interests, and there will always be exceptions (Sklair 2012), but this framework places the ultimate power in contemporary society with the transnational capitalist class and the interests of capital, not with the state (Sklair 2002). This view of the state is especially appropriate in the case of natural resource dependence due to the historical way natural resource interests frequently capture the political apparatus, resulting in detrimental outcomes to both rural economic prosperity and the environment (Singleton 2000; West 1994).

In this theoretical framework, I focus on the outcomes that accrue to residents in a labor market, thus representing local labor. Local labor refers here to the people who live and work in the labor market. As discussed by Harvey ([1982] 2018), labor under capitalism must be geographically mobile to facilitate the accumulation of capital. However, this results in an inherent contradiction wherein labor must be free to move to where work is offered but also geographically stable enough to ensure the maintenance of a reserve labor army. As Harvey ([1982] 2018:381) notes, to address this contradiction the “escape routes must be blocked off by legal requirements or other social mechanisms.” This means labor in rural America is mobile. However, not everyone shares this mobility. Many residents face significant barriers to moving to a new labor market for work (Lyson et al. 1993). Although many people, particularly the young and well educated (Carr and Kefalas 2009), continue to leave rural America for opportunity, many stay behind. Reasons for this lack of mobility include attachment to a home and community (Harvey [1982] 2018; Lyson et al. 1993), racial discrimination (Duncan 2014), identity subversion (Bell and York 2010), preferential education (Carr and Kefalas 2009), and cycles of predatory debt (Billings and Blee 2000; Duncan 2014). Thus, although labor is mobile in rural America, a particularly vulnerable group of immobile laborers remain who bear the brunt of the negative effects wrought by this first form of dependency.

The Second Form: Dependency on the Local Resource-Rich Natural Environment

Argument 2: Rural labor markets with rich natural resource endowments incur exceptionally high levels of underdevelopment and negative economic outcomes due to the perverse incentives stemming from the contradiction between the static nature of natural resources and the mobility of capital needed to ensure a steady rate of profit. This leads to a second form of dependency on the resource-rich local environment.

The multilayered exploitative subnational structure of contemporary capitalism and dependency I have presented exists across rural America, regardless of natural resource endowment. However, when coupled with a resource-rich local natural environment, this dependency becomes particularly intractable. Drawing on research surrounding the negative effects of natural resource dependence on poverty (Lobao et al. 2016), income growth (James and Aadland 2011), and other indicators of well-being, I argue that rural natural resource dependence is a special case of the core-periphery relationship. This special case produces a dual dependency: dependency on both the national and global capitalist economies and the resource-rich local environment.

When a rural labor market is rich in natural resources, it is likely to become overly dependent on the local environment for its economic production. This dependency will be exacerbated due to the existing dependency on the national and global economies and external interests’ ease of access in affecting local decision making through capital investment. In this framework, external interests refers to actors residing outside the peripheral labor market who either own or invest in the corporations developing natural resources in the market. The transnational capitalist class identified by Sklair (2002) comprises many of these external interests. This influence will ultimately result in underdevelopment characterized by higher levels of inequality, poverty, and economic growth relative to non-natural-resource-dependent rural labor markets.

This dual dependency pushes the natural-resource-dependent labor market to the furthest edges of the periphery in terms of the level of economic exploitation of labor. When the natural resources within a labor market are sufficiently rich, the direction of interest among global capitalists becomes obvious and the consequences more adverse. Thus, the resource-rich local environment fosters the dual dependency that allows extralocal control by national and transnational corporations to pressure rural labor markets to stay in a constant state of relative deprivation, boom and bust cycles, and low-quality jobs.

The ultimate reason extralocal interests promote this constant state of underdevelopment unique to peripheral natural-resource-rich labor markets is due to the contradiction—which I term the “spatial contradiction”—between two factors: the spatially fixed nature of the resource base and the spatially unbound nature of capital. Natural resources, unlike a factory, cannot be torn down and rebuilt where labor is cheaper. Thus, external interests face increased friction related to the flow of capital, relative to other industrial sectors (e.g., manufacturing) where capital can more easily exit the labor market when profits fall due to agglomeration, increases in labor power, heightened market diversity, or overaccumulation (Harvey [1982] 2018; Smith 1984).

To fully understand this notion, it is helpful to consider capital investment on a spectrum from completely fixed to completely mobile, where capital is ever marching toward greater mobility. A key example of this move to greater mobility is the speeding up of trade and development via the annihilation of space through time initially described by Marx and further expounded upon by Harvey (2006). This push toward greater mobility ensures trade can happen faster, reinvestment can occur instantly, and greater surplus value can be created, all while avoiding the crises of overaccumulation posed by capital remaining in place (Harvey 2006).

Natural resources, due to their static nature, pull capital toward the fixed end of this spectrum and create friction for increasingly mobile capital. To make up for this friction, natural resource capitalists must pursue greater levels of exploitation. Because the current U.S. political apparatus supports a great deal of external control and domination of rural labor markets by natural resource capitalists, this greater exploitation of rural labor can produce enough profit to make the immobile investment worthwhile. It is only when these more exploitative means of ensuring high rates of profit fail that we see the full disinvestment and relocation of the natural resource capitalist. Thus, it is true that when profit falls enough, we will likely see capital simply disinvest from the labor market and the resource, as happened when market forces became particularly strong in the case of coal and old-growth timber. However, in the current political economic system, when faced with the friction imposed by the spatial contradiction, it is far more prudent for natural-resource capitalists to double down in a labor market via exploitative means as opposed to disinvesting and relocating (Billings and Blee 2000; Duncan 2014).

The extralocal, often transnational, corporations driving this exploitation have little interest in the labor market and will see no direct benefit from real local economic growth. If capitalists were located within the market, as they often were before heightened globalization and the rise of the transnational capitalist class, they might have an interest in broad economic development. However, they themselves are spatially unbound and unattached to the labor market. Thus, extralocal interests prevent the progression of holistic economic development to ensure long-term access and profitability of their specific interests in the resource-dependent labor market.

Due to the perverse incentives inspired by the contradiction between the mobility of capital and the static nature of the resource base, natural resource capitalists intentionally prevent agglomeration effects—that is, the positive externalities that lead to economic growth generated when firms concentrate in geographic proximity (Melo, Graham, and Noland 2009). Some agglomeration related to natural resource development, such as processing, may be limited due to remoteness of the region and the need for economically feasible supply chains (Bunker 2003), but I argue the majority of agglomeration and market diversity is inhibited due to the contradiction between the static nature of resources and the need for capital to move across space. Natural resource capitalists directly inhibit agglomeration to ensure steady rates of profit and continued access to the resource base, at least until it is depleted. To retain these necessary conditions, cooperating local elites and external interests pressure forms of economic development outside the natural resource sector out of the labor market.

Exploitation and the exclusion of other industries from the labor market are dominant strategies within this framework, but capitalists can pursue other strategies to combat the falling profit rates inherent in a spatially fixed resource base. These strategies include technological innovation to reduce costs associated with the cost-price squeeze identified by Freudenburg (1992) as well as pursuit of substitutes for the resource, which can then mold the industry into a more conventional and mobile sector (e.g., the case of synthetic rubber [see Bunker 2003]). Important to note, even if technological innovation reduces the absolute number of employees required for resource extraction, the industry may still pursue strategies to dominate the labor market so as to keep out other interests that are antithetical to their profit. The decline of coal employment in Appalachia due to technological change, and the persistent effort to create a regional economic identity out of line with the employment realities of the area, provides evidence of this strategy (Bell and York 2010; Lewin 2017).

Ultimately, the external natural resource interests and their local allies have a vested interest in keeping rural labor markets underdeveloped to ensure a steady rate of capital accumulation. This vested interest fosters lower levels of market diversity—meaning there are few industries in the region—and increased levels of monopsony and oligopsony—meaning the few industries also have few firms. The natural resource sector, and its few firms, thus end up being the only game in town. These firms, through concentrated landownership and wage stagnation due to a lack of competition, direct the local economy and foster underdevelopment in the region (Falkinger and Grossmann 2013). The suppression of wages in the concentrated labor market prevents the accumulation of wealth among the majority of the population and prohibits diverse local economic development, entrepreneurship, and a transition to a nondependent economy. Although market concentration is generally higher in rural labor markets regardless of natural resources (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum 2020), I argue the problem of oligopsony will be more severe in natural-resource-dependent labor markets due to extralocal actors’ vested interest in keeping the conditions of the region largely the same as well as the economies of scale required to be successful in the sector.

The Alignment of Extractive and Nonextractive Natural Resource Development

Argument 3: Because extractive and nonextractive natural resource development are both located at the spatial contradiction between static natural resources and mobile capital, they both foster dual dependency and have fundamentally exploitative relationships with rural labor.

The arguments up to now have likely been unsurprising, even if they have not been clearly articulated in prior work. However, they were essential to clearly lay the groundwork for argument 3, the principal contribution of this article. The framework of dual dependency I present moves social theory beyond the prior frameworks of natural resource dependence by arguing that the pattern of exploitation caused by the spatial contradiction occurs not just for extractive natural resource development but also in the case of nonextractive natural resource development, such as tourism, real estate, and outdoor recreation. This is because actors who generate profit from natural amenity development and tourism have a similarly vested interest in using the spatially fixed resource base in exclusively one general manner to accumulate capital, while having limited interest in real and diverse local economic growth due to their extralocal nature. Thus, nonextractive capital seeks to keep other economic interests out of rural labor markets via manipulation of the political economy, resulting in nonextractive interests’ fulfilling a function similar to that of extractive interests.

Nonextractive natural resource interests, like extractive interests, face constrained mobility relative to other forms of industry. Nonextractive interests also require the labor market, and its resource base, to remain in a relatively steady state to ensure a stable rate of profit and access to a cheap reserve labor army. The current level of development in a resource-rich labor market is what will have attracted nonextractive interests: The “rustic” character is bedrock to profit. Thus, nonextractive capital will intentionally inhibit development in any other direction (e.g., manufacturing) because it contradicts its interests and is in conflict with future profit.

Given that extralocal national and transnational firms can penetrate labor markets regardless of their placement on the extractive to nonextractive continuum, all the negative aspects associated with extralocal control described for extractive development also hold for nonextractive development. We can find evidence of external interests’ ability to drive nonextractive development in rural labor markets in several contemporary examples. For instance, Vail Resorts—a company traded on the New York Stock Exchange that has seen its stock price rise from $38.30 in January 2012 to $246.29 in January 2020—has applied economies of scale to the ski and tourism industry and now owns 34 mountain ski resorts across the United States, the majority of which were once locally owned and operated (Yannon 2019). In the northern Rocky Mountains, property speculation for vacation rentals and second homes has driven rural gentrification and restructured regional economies around the service industry while making housing difficult to afford for long-term residents (Ghose 2004; Hines 2010; Nelson and Hines 2018). And Delaware North—a global company that reported a revenue of $3.3 billion in 2018 and that is the 140th largest private company in the United States (Murphy 2019)—now owns the rights to gift shops within numerous national and state parks as well as local resorts in many amenity-rich areas, once again applying economies of scale to nature-based tourism in rural settings (Fuller 2016). These examples highlight how contemporary capitalists external to the rural context can penetrate labor markets and steer nonextractive natural resource development.

Now that I have made the alignment between extractive and nonextractive development clear, we can see that a nonextractive natural-resource-dependent labor market still represents a dual dependency on both the resource-rich natural environment and the global capitalist system. In this case, instead of extracting physical resources, the core is extracting experiences and the capital those experiences create. Researchers have observed labor markets transitioning from a historically extractive economy to a nonextractive, often tourism-based economy in a number of places, including Arizona (Davis and Morais 2004), Wisconsin (Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling 1995), Washington (Sherman 2018), and Appalachia (Taylor, Hufford, and Bilbrey 2017).

Where Are Extractive and Nonextractive Development Not Aligned?

Although the extractive and nonextractive sectors have an overlapping interest in the shared resource base, and are mutually aligned at the spatial contradiction between a static natural resource base and the need for capital to be in motion, they are not fully equivalent. My goal here is to organize extractive and nonextractive development within an integrated theoretical framework. That said, there will be significant diversity within and between both sectors.

First, extractive and nonextractive natural resource development do not have the same effects on residents’ physical health, the physical environment, or even the local culture. Externalities associated with each form of development are very different in this regard. Second, price is handled differently in the two sectors. The price an extractive industry can charge for a given commodity is pinned to global commodity markets (Freudenburg 1992). At the raw material stage, a given firm is generally unable to charge more for its specific commodity than any other firm: Crude oil is priced as crude oil.

This is not to say there will be no variability within extraction. The type of resource, whether timber, coal, oil, wheat, or soy, will present specific considerations that affect how that form of development navigates the spatial contradiction and the pursuit of profit (Bunker 2003). However, nonextractive development will see more variability in price within the same sector. Depending on the specific natural amenities available, the level of regional development, and the size of the market, among other things, different firms will be able to sell their very similar products (e.g., the tourism experience or real estate) for different prices. This variability makes it likely that the outcomes of this form of development are more subject to the agency of both investors and local residents than they are in the case of extraction.

Furthermore, jobs in the two sectors are a major point of variation. Unlike many jobs in extraction, where the risk of layoffs is high but the jobs themselves can be of high economic quality, the quality of jobs provided by nonextractive development is often low. Work in the nonextractive sector is often seasonal, provides low wages, offers limited benefits, and presents little room for promotion (Green 2017). These low-quality jobs, when combined with the rising cost of land and living spurred by this form of development (Hunter et al. 2005), can price locals out of their own communities. In some cases where tourism has been successful in boosting rural labor markets, it has been through the use of “ticky-tacky” tourism dominated by external transnational corporations (e.g., Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon-Forge, Tennessee [Deller et al. 2008]). One can easily argue the radical change in these places constitutes a loss of local culture and place-change, a type of transition difficult to measure in dollars and cents.

A further point of difference between the two sectors is the level of temporal variation. Both extractive and nonextractive natural resource development suffer from deep troughs in economic activity. However, the types of troughs they experience vary. Extraction has a long history of wide variation due to the boomtown effect, wherein labor markets face rapid spikes in economic activity followed by deep troughs of unequally distributed material hardship due to the oscillation of global commodity markets (Freudenburg 1992; Jacquet and Kay 2014; Kinchy et al. 2014; Schafft et al. 2018). Nonextractive natural resource development also faces temporal variation, although it is far narrower and more reliable. Due to the seasonality of the tourism and recreation industries, individuals working in nonextractive labor markets often face regular layoffs and find large swaths of the year provide limited economic opportunity. This makes it difficult to find year-round employment, generate savings, and fulfill goals like owning a home (Sherman 2018).

Natural Resource Dependence Is a Process

We should not view natural resource dependence as a steady state a labor market enters into but as a process characterized by the ebb and flow of dual dependency. Given dual dependency’s conceptual footing in a contradiction of capitalism, we should expect it to have a dialectical nature always in a state of flux. Although it is a dynamic process, the theory presented here does suggest some general patterns. As labor markets increase their economic specialization in the natural resource sectors—extractive, nonextractive, or both—they are more likely to tip into natural resource dependence and develop dual dependency. The precise level of specialization where this occurs will vary due to factors such as local political economy, the broader labor market, historical patterns of development, the quality of the resource base, and geography. Thus, two labor markets can have similar levels of extractive or nonextractive natural resource development and one be specialized—meaning it does not experience negative outcomes from development—and the other be dependent—meaning it reaches overspecialization and experiences negative outcomes. However, although the level at which this develops will not be constant across all labor markets, we should expect that, on average, higher levels of specialization will result in diminishing economic benefit in both the extractive and nonextractive natural resource sectors.

Because it is a process, labor markets can exit, and possibly reenter, different forms of natural resource dependence. For example, a labor market could be dependent on extraction, transition into a hybrid dependence on extractive and nonextractive activities, and then transition to solely nonextractive dependence. Important to note, if a labor market reduces its dependence on the local environment, and therefore its dual dependency, the first form of dependency on the national and global economies will remain and likely be more severe than if dual dependency had never occurred, due to the formation of path dependencies. The peripheral location of the labor market in the national and global systems is unlikely to change, and the former industries will have shaped the existing political economy. All that is severed is the dependency on the local resource-rich environment. Labor markets that transition out of natural resource dependence may still experience negative effects for generations to come. Much like people who owned timber land have been able to convert their interests into real estate (e.g., Plumb Creek Timber) and thus pivot from extractive to nonextractive activities as markets warranted, actors who gain power over, and within, labor markets before economic dependency on the local environment ends will likely retain their power in any new economy. Prior historical work by sociologists describes this process of dependency formation, dissolution, and transition (Billings and Blee 2000; Freudenburg and Frickel 1994; Freudenburg et al. 1995; Wilson 2004).

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that while the presented theory operates at the level of the labor market, the negative effects of dual dependency are not felt equally throughout the population. For example, it is not that all of an urban labor market exploits a rural labor market but rather that urban or transnational capitalists exploit rural labor. This distinction is paramount due to the long list of social inequalities that exists within nations (Bailey et al. 2017; Bell and Owens-Young 2020; Chetty et al. 2014; Lobao 2016; Manduca 2019; Williams 2017). These inequalities do fall along spatial lines of rural/urban and capitalist/labor, but they are more pronounced along lines of race, gender, and ethnicity. As Dunaway (2001) notes, to ignore these persistent inequalities in a discussion of world or national systems is to erase how women and members of traditionally oppressed groups are forced to subsidize the capitalist system in exploitative ways; this ignores a primary mechanism by which the exploitative pathways of capitalism are reproduced—the production of people.

As extractive-dependent rural labor markets transition to nonextractive resource dependence, the majority of jobs switch from historically male-dominated physical labor to historically female-dominated service-sector work. As previous research shows, this switch does not necessarily correspond to a reduction in housework and time caring for children (Sherman 2009a, 2009b), so this dependence will likely have more pronounced effects for women than for men. Similarly, although the picture of American rurality is often one of white families, this has never really been true and becomes less so every year (Lichter 2012). In the case of natural resource dependence, American Indians are of particular concern, as they have often faced, and continue to face, the lion’s share of the “development” of the United States. Individuals at the margins of society will feel the negative outcomes of dual dependency first, and strongest. In rural areas, this likely means exacerbated inequality as it relates to women, people of color, American Indians, and sexual minorities. Important to note, people at the intersections of these historically oppressed groups will feel these negative effects the most (Collins 2015).