Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity

The scientists and staffers at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had gathered enough data to know that the trees in the green-tree reservoirs were dying. According to a forest-health assessment, the level of severe illness and death in the timber population was up to 42% at Hurricane Lake. If they didn't act quickly, the future of another green- tree reservoir, Bayou Meto, would look the same.

The commission was partly to blame for the trees dying. The Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries used to flood the bayous naturally, filling the bottomland forests with trees in the winter and allowing new trees to grow in the spring. In the 1950s, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission flooded with a system of levees and other tools after buying bottomland forests for preservation.

The forests were an ideal winter stop for ducks to rest and eat. Arkansas has issued more than 100,000 permits for duck hunters from Arkansas and out of state every year for the last four years. The trees were damaged when the commission flooded the reservoirs too early and at too high a level. The ducks that come to Arkansas love eating the acorns from oaks that are dying.

The director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission knew that convincing the state's duck hunters and businesses that there was a serious problem would be difficult. Delaying the annual fall flooding could mean less habitat for the ducks, fewer ducks stopping in the area, and more duck hunters crowded into smaller spaces fighting over targets, as part of the solution the commission planned to propose to save the trees.

The duck hunters have their own ideas about who to blame and what the solution should be.

Booth gave a speech that was streamed live on the internet. He said there would be a series of public meetings in the following months. When Booth began to plan those meetings, he thought of all the meetings he had attended in politics.

He decided the meetings would be dinners where the Game and Fish staff would eat with the people they sought to convince. He would give a brief introduction, then invite people to ask questions of the staff as they ate and mingled.

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At the end of the dinners, Booth asked if anyone was going to walk through that door without their questions answered or comments taken for the record. According to Booth, the four dinners were attended by between 50 and 100 people.

The dinner program began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required effective science communication to convince the public to accept changes, major and minor, to their lives. There has been a long history of resistance to public health measures and new vaccines, and many researchers suspected that could be the case with COVID-19. The social scientists who study these issues might have counseled the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to use local messengers who could communicate in less intimidating ways.

The U.S. did not do that. The information came from a few sources, usually at the national level. Many places have seen resistance to public health interventions like wearing masks and getting the vaccine.

The intensely local, personal way that Arkansas Game and Fish approached this challenge is difficult and not always the most practical. It shows the kind of intensity it takes to communicate an urgent problem, and may provide lessons for how to approach the next big problems, like climate change.

Matthew Motta, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University, and his colleagues studied parents about giving their children vaccinations. conspiratorial thinking was the most prominent reason. Some parents who delayed their children's vaccines held strong ideas about moral/bodily purity, which correlated with higher levels of religiosity. People who distrust scientists and other experts, as well as people prone to believing in conspiracies, were among the groups that found a home in the Republican Party.

Many of these characteristics also tend to cluster in rural areas, where COVID-19 vaccination rates lag.

One way to get skeptics on board with vaccine is to understand why they are skeptical. Americans who felt that vaccines taint their moral/bodily purity were given information about how viruses also attacked and invaded the body, which raised their opinions of vaccines.

The COVID-19 vaccines did not have a lot of targeted messaging. The country's ability to form a coherent plan was hampered by a series of mistakes made by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States has a lot of public health agencies, each with a different level of authority. Communication strategies were varied because the authority that state and local health departments have varies. In addition to decades of underinvestment in rural public health, hospitals in much of rural America have already gone through waves of closures.

The underlying issues were too deep-rooted for some nonprofits to fully counteract. Rural Americans were less likely to wear a mask, avoid restaurants or work from home. The death rate in rural areas was double that of urban areas last September. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 48 percent of Americans in rural areas were protected from vaccine-preventable diseases.

There are issues that explain these patterns. When scientists come from the government, people in rural areas hold on to old fears. The anxiety stems from an attitude that pits rural, hands-on knowledge against the kind of knowledge obtained from institutions like universities or government bureaucracy, according to a researcher with the COVID States Project.

Lunz told me that land-grant institutions are using their rural extension services to bring the latest agricultural research to farmers who don't want to be told how to farm. In the 1983 TV movie The Day After, a farmer in Missouri points out the impracticality of a government agent's plan to clean up the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. The character yells at the agent.

This attitude has become entwined with partisan politics. In a paper published in the American Political Science Review, political scientists looked at growing distrust of scientists and other experts by Republicans. College graduates prefer the Democratic Party, and white people without a college degree prefer the Republican Party, according to their research.

Barker and his colleagues defined anti-intellectualism to be something other than a person's ability or education. The researchers wrote that those who distrust scientists had positive feelings about trusting their gut and negative feelings about experts and schools.

People with this attitude were more likely to support the Republican Party. Which makes sense. The vaccine-autism myth has been promoted by Trump. Trump's anti-intellectualism attracted voters who already shared these beliefs, but he might have influenced other people to do the same. He was the primary spreader of COVID-19 misinformation.

Barker and his colleagues wrote that the partisan trends spiked during Trump's presidency. The partisan realignment seems to be stronger than ever after Trump left the national stage.

The anti-science attitude is associated with having a rural identity according to work published in February. This identity is held by people who live in rural areas, but also by people who identify as rural regardless of where they currently live.

Lunz Trujillo said it was more how people think of themselves versus where they are. She cited the work of a political scientist who showed that many rural people disliked anything perceived to be urban.

The key insight to all this work is that those who distrust vaccines, science and expertise aren't doing so because they have a knowledge gap or a misunderstanding. Distrusting experts are part of their identity. The work suggests that being anti-vaccine has become an identity. distrusting experts has become a political choice, which means that any message from an official source, whether it is a researcher, head of a government agency or a journalist, is more likely to inspire the opposite of its intentions.

Some experts might be included in these trends. According to a paper released by Motta, about 10 percent of primary care physicians were unsure about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccine-hesitant doctors were more likely to be conservative and rural than other vaccine skeptics. This data suggests a vicious feedback loop for rural areas. People who were suspicious of the vaccines had doctors who were also suspicious.

Barker and his colleagues wrote that the danger of anti-intellectualism becoming entwined with partisanship is that these attitudes become more entrenched and harder to overcome. On both sides, each group believes they have the best sources of information. It hurts public debate.

The problems we have seen with COVID-19 are spreading to new groups of people. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, studied the social science of climate change and found that people are more likely to seek out sources that confirm what they already believe. She sees people on the right and left looking for information that supports their beliefs. She believes that policymakers have a role to play in addressing issues like climate change.

The challenge is how to get into the bubbles.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has a waterfowl program. There is no way to measure this, but the nearby city of Stuttgart calls itself the duck-hunting capital of the world. We stopped at a gas station on the way to the bayou that was decorated in woodland camouflage. During duck-hunting season, the owner of the gas station opens before dawn.

The dead trees were shown to me by the two men, along with a colleague. The bases of some trees were swollen because they sat in water for too long. As we stood on the levee, Jackson and Naylor pointed out a tree that had died over the previous summer and other trees that were showing signs of distress. There were trees that were downed in clusters. Someone without an idea of what to look for would be shocked.

In the 1980s and 1990s, tree experts began to notice these issues. I asked him if hunters had raised their own concerns, and he said they had noticed more now that the issues had been pointed out to them.

The water from the fall flooding was still trying to leave the lake. When the levees were built, they were treated as an engineering problem and not an ecological one. The channels slowed the water's course and made it hard to clear the reservoir.

They wanted to redesign the old levees. Some hunters were unhappy with the changes to the flooding in the fall and thought the real problem was the rains.

We never said it wasn't. It's too late in the year for spring rains to sit in the reservoirs.

Changing the levees to deal with the spring rains would be a multimillion-dollar project. The head of Game and Fish, Booth, said that the fall flooding was a problem they could easily fix and that they were already doing wrong. That is the reason they chose that route first. The key to the program's success was taking ownership of the problem.

I asked if any of the hunters they'd spoken to about climate change were aware of it. No one had. Climate change is expected to bring more severe flooding to Arkansas, and heavy spring downpours are likely to increase in the years ahead, even though the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission intentionally flooded the green- tree reservoirs too early. The northern plains, where the Mississippi River's origin is, are already seeing a lot of precipitation.

It was mostly avoided in their conversations with the hunters, which may show the limits of this approach. If climate change makes the local ecological problem worse, then any method of dealing with it will only be a small piece of the puzzle. Climate change views and how to solve it are affected by partisanship.

Despite being experts in their field, Naylor and Jackson already had a level of trust with the hunters they were trying to convince. They wore camo and spoke with mid-Southern accents. It's hard to imagine that local and out-of-state duck hunters would see them as eggheads. When Booth described his staff's expertise to me, he said they had something similar to how Lunz Trujillo explained the kind of knowledge valued by farmers and other rural folks.

Local experts are able to gather people for friendly dinners. Fisher says that people are often spurred to action only when the environmental damage becomes an extreme personal risk to them and their family, and when it is seen as preventable. She said that many people didn't see the virus as a personal risk because they thought they would be okay.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has a captive audience and has made some changes to green- tree reservoirs. Every year, duck hunters, other hunters and fishermen rely on the commission to announce when public lands are open for hunting. The hunters visit government websites to check water levels and other information to plan their hunting trips. The commission owns and manages the green- tree lands, which means how to manage them is up to it.

I asked James if this approach wasScalable, and he said it was. Arkansas Game and Fish did a great job with larger-scale problems. He said that one of the biggest benefits of the dinners was that hunters and other affected groups could ask questions and be heard, whether or not what they said made a difference in the decisions.

He said that it just needs to be repeated and that people are willing to listen. It's important to have the decision-makers who are invested in the process of gathering that information in order to have the conversations.

The question is how to have those in the first place. It is hard to share information if people reject it because it comes from experts. How we respond to serious challenges moving forward will be determined by that.

The article has been changed to correct a spelling of James Brandenburg's name.