Let's Find Common Ground - Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide— Ashley Ahearn

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

She lived in liberal Seattle and covered science, climate change and the environment for NPR for more than a decade. Then in 2018, journalist Ashley Ahearn made a big jump, moving with her husband to one of the most conservative counties in rural Washington State. In this episode of "Let's Find Common Ground," we hear about the profound rural-urban divide in America, and what Ashley discovered about her new neighbors and herself when she switched from the city to the country, now living on a 20-acre property with a horse and a pickup truck. We also discuss how politics and views of the land and climate differ greatly according to where people live. Recently, Ashley Ahearn launched her 8-part podcast series, "Grouse", which looks at life in rural America through the lens of the most controversial bird in the West— the greater sage-grouse. One of her great passions is storytelling, and helping scientists better communicate their research to the broader public. 

She lived in Liberal Seattle and worked as a journalist, covering science, climate change and the environment for public radio for more than a decade. Then, in 2018, Ashley Aherne made a big jump. She left Seattle and moved with her husband to one of the most conservative counties in rural Washington state. In this episode, bridging the rural urban divide. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Melntite. And I'm Richard Davies. What did Ashley and her discover about her new neighbours and herself? When she switched from city to country, now living on a 20-acre property with a horse in a pickup truck.

I'm also here about her podcast, Grouse, about an endangered bird and what this says about the land and the changing climate. First, I asked Ashley a hern, why did she move an opt for a complete change in lifestyle? Well, several different reasons. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't burned out on city life. I grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, suburban, not rural, but I knew that there was more to the story after the election in 2016, and that the voices from rural America were not being interrogated, covered, or really probed in a way that felt sincere and invested, I guess, for lack of a better word, and that what we have in a lot of media now is a concentration of journalists and jobs in urban centers. And what that translates into from a production

standpoint is journalists that go out into rural communities, parachute in for a story, record, and then pick the sexiest sound bites, maybe in many cases the most radical, most trump-y, most ignorant sounding, and then bring them back to their liberal listenerships in the urban hubs, and it cements and furthers and perpetuates these divides that we see. And so, as an environment reporter, living in Seattle, so many of those stories, so many of those divisions play out around environmental issues. Whether it's conservation of a controversial bird, or logging proposals, or mining proposals, or, you know, you can almost predict how people are going to fall on a certain issue based on what their political leanings are.

This was at a time of increasing partisanship, including a bigger urban rural divide. What changed? Once Trump was elected, I think that's what really brought it to a head for me, was the sincere feeling that I didn't know the people who had elected that president. I didn't know them. I didn't interview them. Or if I did, I didn't spend time with them to really understand the context that would make them say the things that they were saying to journalists like myself. Yeah, so were you shocked or surprised in 2016 by the election of Donald Trump?

Oh, sure, we all were. Nobody saw that coming, right? I mean, I think there were a few outliers that said, we should have been ready. Part of that breakdown in communication between urban and rural and conservative and liberal America is that we didn communication between urban and rural and conservative and liberal America is that we didn't fully understand the scope and the breadth and the depth of his support, particularly in places like Okinawgan County where I live now. Yeah, where do you live now? Tell us a bit more about that. So I live on 20 acres of sagebrush about 20 miles from the Canadian border in North Central, Washington State, in a cabin that is about 650 square feet.

What are you looking at right now or what can you see either out your window or from your front door? So right now I'm going to look out the window and see if I can spot the coyotes that were there earlier this morning. And actually just two days ago, one literally walked through the chickens were out. I have four chickens. They are my first chickens and I'm very attached to them.

And a coyote walked through our yard, literally 15 yards from the house, and swiped Penny, one of my beloved chickens, not a clock, not a feather lost, and just trotted off like he just left the grocery store and never to be seen again. So it's wild out here. It's real. So just to be clear, you're chicken is gone for good?

Oh yeah, that chicken is dead. That chicken is very dead. And I am not a guns person, but in that moment I wanted a gun very badly. And I was just like, you know, just being able to fire off a shot just to put a little bit of the fear of God in them. You understand more, the longer you spend out here, why people operate the way they do

when they live this close to predators and other kinds of animals. And coyotes aren't the only threat, right? In your podcast, you shed a story about a rattlesnake. So this was one of the first nights, I think we closed on the place and moved in June 6th. So the rattlesnakes are out, the sun, it's warm, you're getting up into the 90s, 80s during the day,

and the snakes are out all over the place. We live in a very snakey area. And I didn't know this at the time, of course, because I just moved in. And I was doing the dishes and the window was open, and the dog was out, it was dusk. And I hear this. And I thought it was a sprinkler system. Honest to God was like, oh, I guess I didn't know this house had a sprinkler system. When we bought it, maybe it's on auto, I don't know, it sounded like a sprinkler system to me. And so I got outside and I, you know, it didn't take me long to kind of realize that probably wasn't

a sprinkler system because if you live on 20 acres of sagebrush Probably not worrying about your green lawn irrigation as much So I go outside and I look under the deck and sure enough there is a Pretty medium-sized rattlesnake coiled against the foundation of the house And it of course had been you know hunting mice and hanging out under there in the cool during the hot parts of the day and my dog was messing with it and so I Was of course terrified and you know was screaming at him to get back into the house. Go to bed, leave it alone.

That's not a problem. We're going to solve right now and get up in the morning and we had a carpenter on the property, an awesome local guy named Luke. And I said, Luke, what do we do about this? And then I remembered that some dear friends from Idaho, when we bought the place, had given us as a housewarming gift, a sharpened shovel. At the time, I wondered, again, city person, why would you need your shovel to be sharpened? So it turns out that when rattlesnakes are killed, they can still bite after they're dead.

And it's like a reflex or something to just release all the venom. And so there are stories of people getting very, very, very badly hurt by snakes that are dead. And so not only do you have to kill the snake, you then have to chop the head off. And that's where the sharpened shovel comes in. And so Luke, he had me crawl under the deck. So I crawled under the deck with a two by four and kind of stabbed it against the foundation of the house

with a two by four so that the snake's writhing and I'm screaming and sweating and like, fortunately the dog's inside at this point and Luke's on the other side of the deck and I kind of start pushing the snake toward him and we get it out to the other side and he takes the shovel and chops the head off. I used that story at the beginning

because it illustrates to me how out of my comfort zone I was. And I got more hate mail for using that vignette at the beginning of the show than I ever could have expected. What did people say? You know, how could you gleefully kill a wild animal? It was just minding its own business. It wasn't hurting anything. You know, you're doing a whole show about a wild animal that we should arguably protect. And yet you're gleefully killing an animal on your own property, like snakes deserve to have a place as well. And I don't think those people are wrong. I just think that many of them have not lived in country like this. And I live, you know, again, 20 acres. I see snakes everywhere. The only ones I have ever killed are the ones that are in

the immediate envelope of my home and are endangering myself or my pets. That's it. it envelope of my home and are endangering myself or my pets. That's it. Remind me how many how many years have you lived there now? It's been three years. Talk about that transition. I mean, you were in a city environment. You said you grew up in a suburban environment. What has that transition been like? It's been beautiful. It's been really beautiful. There's a lot of quiet out here, and there's a lot of visiting, you know, country people visit. They don't catch up. They visit. And you really spend a lot of time around campfires. You spend a lot of time on horseback.

You spend a lot of time moving slowly through the landscape. And I think that is what has afforded me the ability to truly fall in love with sagebrush country and the people that I've met here, who I may find some of their political views abhorrent to be clear. But I have learned so much from them about how to live in this place and the history of this place

and the culture of this place. And I think that as I've built rapport and relationships with them, it's opened the door for conversations that I have never been able to have as a journalist kind of showing up for a brief stint or a vacationer coming to country like this. And I think it's made me a better journalist. And I can only say that I think that through conversation and through being, you know, the only person that's think that through conversation and through being, you know, the only person that's driving an electric car on my road, but also drives a pickup truck

and halls horses and moves cows, certain conversations happen with me and my husband in this community that aren't happening among the people who have always lived here, if that makes sense. And I think by translation, I'm learning, and my perception has changed in terms of the kinds of questions I ask, and the way I approach stories and the angles that I choose to interrogate that I don't think would have been possible if I was doing it from Seattle. Ashley, I'm curious about your friendships. You lived in a busy city. How did you job? Are your friendships now in sage country deeper? Do you have more moving or less transactional conversations with people? My memories of living in the city over the years and my 20s and early 30s were, you know,

you catch up with people. You get together and you have dinner. You have a meal. You check out a new restaurant, maybe you go for a walk at the local park. But they're very short periods of time, or maybe two hour dinner party or a nice meal, right? But you're still sort of checking in.

And when I think back on those times, many of my conversations were about work. People are very defined by their careers, I think more in an urban environment, and may have been in the circles that I was traveling in as a really career-focused and sort of obsessed with my work, I would say, in that last period of my life in Seattle. And now? It's a bit of a slower process.

You don't just connect over things that you have in common. In part, probably because I have less in common with many of the people that I'm meeting. But working the land has been a great way to connect. I joined the backcountry horsemen, and they do a lot of trail maintenance work. So getting out and just cutting back brush and clearing old barbed wire from the landscape, making sure trails are open, cutting trees that have fallen across the trails together. You spend hours and so little snippets of conversation happen, but it's less about what you do as a career and more about what you see in the landscape around you,

what your goals are together, you're working with people towards something. Yeah, it feels more concrete in some ways. The maintenance work that you're doing, you are on horseback, you're with trigger, you're horseback. Pistol, pistol. I'm sorry, pistol, oh, God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Pistol. Oh, God. I'm so sorry.

Crapi memory. No, it's all right. It's all right. She won't be offended. She is uppity, though. What about your neighbors? When you moved in, did they just show up and introduce themselves? What happened? Yeah, I still remember when we first moved in, one of the Cowboys up the road came to visit on his horse

and brought a dozen eggs. Just came riding up the driveway. We were like, who is this guy? He's got his full cowboy head on. He's riding a beautiful paint. And there's a deep sense of hospitality. I think that's been tested in recent years as more kind of city people move into places like this.

And I do think it gets a little bit, you have to really reach out. You have to really actively be kind of putting yourself out there. And so I think after a while, it is about consistency and it's about hard work more than it's about anything else I think in some of these places. So I think, yes, it was hard to make friends at first,

but not once you cut through that initial, oh, where are you from? What did you do in the city? Okay. Well, actually, do you want to go ride horses or do you want to go clear some trail or do you want to move cows? And once I was kind of through that door, I think things got a little easier. You've talked a little bit about how you've changed as a journalist,

but how have you changed as a person as a result of this extraordinary immersion into a very different part of the country? I think I'm calmer. I think I spend a lot more time by myself than maybe I ever did in the city. I am healthier. I'm outdoors for hours of every day. And I also made the transition of working for an organization to being my own boss.

And so I'm just as successful financially to be honest. And I control my hours and I control my clients and I control the work that I do and so that's been a Real a really big factor and I think my sense of well-being and kind of happiness in this in this new life is the ability to you know Be up early and be working all morning and then to go move cows all afternoon or ride my horse all afternoon or do trail work so I think my politics have maybe softened a little bit as well. I think I'll always be liberal on certain issues, but I certainly feel maybe more on the property rights issues

and the guns when you look at it from a rural perspective and you ask questions about why certain guns are needed at certain times. For example, if my horse, pistol and I go miles and miles and miles up into the backcountry and if she ever broke her leg, there's not a vet that's going to come. You know, you learn, okay, well, it's a 38 and you make the line from the ear to the eye and the ear to the eye and the bullet goes right in the middle of that X. And that's how you make your horse stop suffering

when you're in the back country. And I shudder to ever think about having to do that if pistol broker leg, but I also know that when we talk about guns, that's one side of that story, right? That's another facet that I think I wouldn't have considered when I was living in Seattle or it's just like, no, just get rid of guns.

We don't need guns. Well, yeah, I'm really glad you raised politics. I wanted to ask you about that, about how you differ from your neighbours politically, because you described yourself, have done a very liberal in Seattle. But so tell us a little bit more about your neighbours of the place that you now live. What do they believe? What are that politics? I have to come here with certain assumptions that everybody was kind of hard-line,

rabid Trump supporters out here, you know, gun-toting, pro-life, all of that. And the truth is much more gray. I move cows for one rancher who, yeah, thinks climate change is cyclical, it's not real. But we have conversations now about how the wildfires are getting worse and more frequent and the droughts are longer and he can't find water as easily in his pastures in some of the high country areas, whereas cows go, that used to be full of water for longer stretches of the summer. And so while I would just assume that some people are just sort of hardliners, I'm finding that, you know, that cowboy at Iad Easter dinner with his wife's a yoga instructor, you know?

And so he's maybe a little more on the conservative side, but I think he voted for Biden. He might have voted for Trump the first time because he didn't like Hillary, but he voted for Biden this last time. And so it's a spectrum, right? And I think that I try not to put people in boxes. And I do have, you know, other neighbors who are hardline,

you know, I have a neighbor who's, he makes gun holsters and he's very conservative. And he calls me a lib tart, and I call him an asshole on a regular basis. And then we laugh, and then we drink whiskey, and then we ride horses, and we go on with our lives. The conversations are interesting because you get to see all of the gray in everybody's politics, as opposed to coming

to the table with the expectation that we're hard-line opposed to one another. And I think, yes, I opposed to coming to the table with the expectation that we're hard line opposed to one another. And I think, yes, I skew liberal in the sense that I am a feminist, I'm pro-choice on certain issues, but in general, I would say I'm moving more toward the independent side of things. And so I may become from a liberal background, but I live in a rural place, and I have deep respect and curiosity about this place. And so I hope that people will talk to me here, because they can trust that I am open to listening and sincerely want to understand, as opposed to pretending that I'm

objective and then finding out later on that I went back to Seattle and reported a story that confirms the liberal bias of my listeners. Ashley, I heard on Let's Find Common Ground. More coming up in a minute. common ground. More coming up in a minute. I'm Ashley. And I'm Richard. Let's find common ground is part of the Democracy Group Podcast Network, one of 15 podcasts that look at the present state and future of our democracy. And the other show that you co-host, how do we fix it, is also a member as it happens. And you are releasing your 300th episode this week. Yeah, what about that?

Six years. Working with Jim Megs, my fellow podcast host, and we ask guests on each show for their ideas about potential solutions. You can find out more about how do we fix it, at howdowefixit.me or on the Democracy Group website, democracygroup.org. Now more of our interview with Ashley Aherne. We mentioned climate change and the environment. What can urban people learn from country people.

I think that we are going to be looking to rural America for survival advice. I think that as we look at how climate change unfolds in terms of more wildfires, more drought, more flooding, more natural disasters, when you live close to the land, you help one another survive. And that can look a lot of different ways, but I think that when we look at a climate-changed future, those survival skills are going to be things that more city people want to adopt and to learn from, whether it's canning your own food, to shooting your own prey, to protecting your house from wildfire and natural disasters,

to rebuilding these basic, like, craft skills that I think people in rural America tend to use more regularly by necessity. And then I think in terms of how we talk about climate change, there's a lot to learn. If I use that word out here or that phrase, I almost say it tongue in cheek. I prefer to talk about it as maybe more broadly changes that we're all seeing on the landscape and start with people's observations of this place. Give us an example of that. So it was one of the first years I was here and we were gearing up for a really bad, really dry wildfire season. And the reason that I was kind of attuned to it

was because all of my neighbors and people I knew were talking about how the creeks and the ponds were lower than they ever are in May. And so I did a story. This community was the site of the largest wildfire in Washington State history until this past summer, unfortunately, but back in 2014, the Carlton Complex Fireburned more than 250,000 acres.

So I started asking people, oh, well, so are you, it's pretty dry this year. I mean, and I went in, you know, our charging, it's climate change, right? Like this is real, this is, these fires are going to be more severe. And I realized pretty quickly that that was a non-starter for a lot of my friends here, a lot of the community. And so I started sort of changing the way I would ask the question,

which was, how have you seen things change? Is this drier than you remember? And I'll never forget it. I was talking to, I was at a backcountry horseman meeting, and I was talking to this, the matriarch of the backcountry horseman here as a woman named Betty Wagner, and she's in her 80s and still rides, and still snowmobiles. She's a firecracker. She's lived in the Valley of Whole Life. I love her. And I asked Betty. I was like, Betty, is it, we know climate change is happening. I mean, the creeks and the ponds are drier. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

it's basically you're overreacting. You're one of those scared city liberals, who's just terrified of this thing. And it's fine, don't worry about it. So maybe this is an on-starter for her. But I went around, and I did the story anyway. And I talked to a lot of other people in the community, and the story went in the local paper. And

Betty saw her peers all collectively acknowledging that things were different, that things looked different than they had in previous years. And sure enough, I saw her at the next monthly backcountry horseman meeting and she said, you know, yeah, it is dryer. It is dryer out here. And it's dryer than I remember, and good job on the story. And I have to say that meant so much to me, not because I think I changed her mind

or she thinks climate change is real now, but I think that it's this iterative process of representing what is actually happening on the landscape that people out here respect more in some ways than the scientific papers that talk about what's going to happen in the future. And what about liberals or progressives? Do you think they understand people who live in rural areas and that can sense? There's plenty of ignorance to go around. There are plenty of ignorant Republicans and conservatives and there are plenty of ignorant liberals. I think that when it comes to how liberals perceive rural people, that people out here are just that have their heads in the sand, right? They don't want to think about this. They're denying

the science and they aren't going to do anything about climate change. And the truth is, people out here are adapting already in the way that they graze their cows, the pastures, that they're true. I mean, I was just out riding yesterday looking for how much water was on the landscape in one rancher's pastures to see Kenny put his cows out here. Or if he can, how long can they be out here and does he need truck water in to get the cows the water they need?

So all these things that, you know, I think, when you, I just hate to point fingers. I don't know, I don't want to just sit here and say, city people don't understand country people and they want to say certain things. So maybe you should ask that question again and I should think harder about how to point fingers. I don't know. I don't want to just sit here and say, city people don't understand country people and they want to say certain things. So maybe you should ask that question again, and I should think harder about how to answer it. Well, you've said to me that those who support new laws and regulations to restrict may not necessarily realize the impact of their proposed changes on rural America.

And that's what I was getting at. I have a theory. I think that some people, when they don't want to believe that climate change is real, if you peel back the onion a little bit on that, it's if you acknowledge that climate change is real, then that necessitates certain actions and certain carbon taxes or reductions or limitations in our emissions that could directly harm people who have lower incomes and live closer to the land i.e. rural America. And what I mean by that is this feeling that

City Liberals will will ring their hands about emissions carbon emissions and then you then go to their nearby airport and take vacations and fly all over the place. Whereas they'll be very quick, though, to point the finger at somebody who drives a pickup truck and gets low miles per gallon. When if you actually do the math on that, driving a pickup truck all year is less than taking your flight to Hawaii for your family vacation, for people. I don't know how people can live out here without a heavy duty vehicle. That's what I mean when, you know, city liberals

and Seattle is particularly aggressive on this. Carbon policy, climate policy is just the talk of, you know, what do we do? How do we make this equitable? How do we, you know, reduce emissions across the state? And I think what that translates into out here is, you know, a very liberal governor, a very, you know, liberal voting concentration populace on the west side of the

state that dictates policy that will affect people out here adversely and will cost them more money and threaten their ability to continue to do their livelihoods, i.e. raising livestock, farming, those kinds of things that really drive economies out here. Your podcast series is called Grouse. Tell us why you decided to do it, why Grouse? What is a growth symbol of some of the issues that are really worth tackling when it comes to a country life and environmental and conservation concerns? Grouse spotted owl.

These are animals that divide us because they become symbols of environmental overreach, federal laws that protect endangered species, that prohibit certain activities in areas where that species can be found. And so this bird, as I spent more time in sagebrush country, it became more and more clear to me that, you know, if it wasn't the sage grouse, it was going to be the coyote, or it's the wild horse, or it's, you know, pick your species that people get riled up about and that speaks to their sort of core values in terms of what side they're going to choose. And so I wanted to use this bird, which many of us may never see in our whole lives, it's very obscure. You can't make the case that it is an economic

driver. You can't say that we need to protect these birds because we make money off of them. Well, there's one part of one episode of Grass that I remember distinctly. It was an interview with Paul Ulrich, Vice President of Jonah Energy, which is an oil and gas company in Wyoming. And here's a brief extract from your podcast. Paul seems genuinely concerned about the birds, but he's also worried about the people in the oil and gas industry. Natural gas production Wyoming has declined 37%

over the past 10 years. People are losing their jobs right and left in the state right now. My nephew was making a living working in the Jonah field with a service provider. He's no longer able to work. He's unemployed. And hundreds of individuals in this county

in the surrounding area find themselves in that same boat today and it's heartbreaking. If you want to see... You want to see a grown man cry, you're seeing it. People in my family have lost their jobs because of what we're going through today. And it's unbearable at times. It really is. Sorry. I found it really surprising what I heard.

Did you, can you just talk about that for a minute? Yeah, that was, um, it meant a lot to me to meet with him in person. And he was gonna take me out around the gas fields, actually, until the pandemic hit. And then we did, instead, we just ended up doing the interview from a safe distance, you know, outside at his house, visiting in person and coming to him with a sincere interest of, I want to understand your business because the truth is, like, America does still run very much on natural gas and we need to own up to that, we need to look at that, but you don't get to just dismiss those people. The transition like fighting climate change is going to hurt, it is going to cost people

their livelihoods. It is going to it is going to affect communities like the gas fields of Wyoming and we need to we need to show some compassion and some sympathy and empathy for those communities. That's that's kind of what I was hoping would come through in that conversation with that man a Lot of these jobs are really dangerous and they've been very much involved in giving us reliable energy for many decades even if we have to transition away, there does need to be some compassion and some empathy for people whose livelihoods

may well be threatened or changed. Well, and I think the other thing that's often missing from these conversations is, okay, if not coal or if not gas, then what in these communities? Why do people still live here? How will they feed their families if this is no longer the industry of note in their community? And coming with some solutions and some other options

would also be a great way to be having these conversations as opposed to like you said, which are just condemning those industries. Our show is called Let's Find Common Ground. Do you think that there are opportunities for people from different parts of the country who have very different ways of looking at the world to find common ground? I appreciate the premise of your show. I think it's important that we still strive for that and try to create spaces where at

least those conversations can happen. I also don't know that we're going to find the common ground we need to address climate change. Some of these entrenched belief systems are so strong, both on the liberal side and on the conservative side in this country that the science doesn't lie. The numbers are not really negotiable. And I did a whole episode about this in the show, the numbers are kind of not really negotiable. And even, and, and, you know, I did a whole episode about this in the show that the idea of compromise and kind of finding that common ground,

oftentimes does not get us to the solutions that are necessary, that the urgency and the crisis that we face requires of us to do in terms of emissions cuts or conservation measures for the sage grouse before we lose this bird. The parallels there between the grouse and the climate action I think are very striking to me. But I really applaud you for trying to find that common ground, and I have gotten so much from the conversations that I've had with people here in my community who see things differently than I do. I do think that there is an opportunity for conversation. I just stop a little bit short of saying that we're going to find agreement. Hey, to end on a downer note. Well, let me ask you, do you think, would

you ever move back to a city or you that a good now? I, it's a long life. So never say never. But I can't, I can't picture the job that would get me back to a city right now. And that would probably be the only reason I would get me back to a city right now. And that would probably be the only reason I wouldn't move back to a city. If my family needs me back in Massachusetts, that's one thing. But yeah, no, it's going to be a tough sell to get me out of the stage, brush. I think I'm entrenched. Thanks for having me, Ashley, and find it's squirreling me out and bringing me on.

Cool. It's really great. Of course. Ashley Aherne, the other Ashley here on this episode of Let's Find Common Ground, she certainly gave us a lot to think about. Yeah, she really did burst her bubble by moving and making friends with an entirely different tribe really, and also learning a lot more about the place she'd moved to through them. Yeah, it's one thing to talk about bursting your bubble, but she really did it.

And if you want to find out more about her work and what she does, Grouse is a good place to start. That's a wonderful series of podcasts, and you can find Grouse by searching the word GrouseGR or OUSC on your favorite podcast app. This is Let's Find Common Ground. Find more of our shows at commongroundcommity.org slash podcasts. We're also on Facebook. I'm Ashley Melntite. I'm Richard Davies and thanks for joining us.