I have never in my life attacked the rural. Southern Utah is one of my very favorite locales and hardly anyone lives there. I don't much like suburbs and exurbs. The houses are too big and wasteful of energy. Most of them are pretty ugly too. All too often people never leave their houses, and there is not much social interaction. Too much of the rural has been destroyed to make the suburbs and exurbs (like in John Gorka's song Houses in the Fields.) Please note that I am not making any comments on the people who live in suburbs, exurbs, or in the countryside. Or cities, either. Except to say that there appears to be a lot of human misery in all of them. Not to say that there isn't joy too.
I don't want to inflame Carrol Cox, so let me just say that, for me, I have to try to get the lay of the land. Kept me out of harm's way on more than one occasion! Learning the lay of the land and how it was changing (which is part of what it is in the first place) helped us, for example, to grasp that it might be possible to unionize the workers on the campus where I taught. What we have to try to grasp, as best we can, are the possibilites implict in the lay of the land. What are the tendencies?
And the lay of the land doesn't just change. We do make our own history, even though the weight of the past
is bearing down on us.