A writer and publisher of the Free River Press, Wolf spoke of what he found, and what could be, in six editorials on KUNI Radio in Cedar Falls last year. His work won the Bronze Medal for radio editorial/commentary from the Society of Professional Journalists, and will appear in "Heartland Portrait," a book of essays by farmers and small-town residents to be published later this month.

When I moved to rural Iowa, almost three years ago, I did not know the troubles it faced. I had heard of rural flight, but as an urban dweller, not facing the daily reality of rural life, I ignored the rural crisis. I moved here, to northeast Iowa, because I wanted to live in beauty and relative solitude, because I thought it might be possible to have a culturally rich life in rural America. I know now that I was overly optimistic and naive. I had, in fact, very little idea of what it would mean to live on an isolated farm 10 miles from either of the nearest towns, trying to earn a living as a writer and publisher.

When I moved here I believed what possibly many others believe: that rural America is a place where people still gather in community, sure in themselves and their friends. I believed the land and water were pure and uncontaminated, even though I had read and heard otherwise. I believed that the best of modern technology had been absorbed, the worst rejected. I believed all these things because I did not live in rural America.

Perhaps I had been affected by the television commercials that try to sell products by identifying them with farms and country towns. I believe that many of us still associate rural America with what is uncontaminated and cleanest in ourselves. It is a myth that helps sustain us. Like the ever-shrinking wilderness, we must have it, at least in our fantasies, a land or town where it is still possible to escape from an ever-more frantic and directionless society.

But that, as I said, turns out to have been extremely optimistic and naive. The fact is that rural America is dying. There is little energy and self-confidence here. And little work. The farmers are leaving their lands for low-skilled jobs in the cities. What few jobs small towns do offer pay mostly minimum wage. The young people, those who can, leave as soon as the high-school diploma is in their hands. What can we do?

A pittance in exchange

I live in the Third World, in Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River. Oh yes, Iowa is part of the Third World. If you need convincing, just look at what Third Eorld countries do, then look at Iowa. Typically a Third World country has natural resources and human labor that it's willing to sell for a pittance, resources and labor that developed countries want, especially at bargain prices.

Does that fit Iowa? You bet. Iowa exports its produce and livestock, and in exchange receives a pittance. That is, the family farmer does. The profits from the small farmer's produce, stock and hard work go to someone else, usually out of state. On the other hand, the corporate farmer makes good money because he's farming in volume. But the corporate farmer, more than likely, doesn't live in Iowa, but in some large metropolitan center like Chicago or Dallas. Thus the profits made from family and corporate Iowa farms flow across its borders.

The condition of the Third World country worsens as its resources are gobbled up and its workers and farmers become more and more destitute. We see that happening here. Corn, Iowa's biggest crop, because it is grown year after year, takes an enormous toll on one of Iowa's greatest natural resources, its soil. But federal subsidies for corn growers encourage this loss. And, of course, Iowa farmers, thanks to the present agricultural system, remain poor and continue leaving the land in a steady stream.

This situation occurs in Third World countries when the industry and agricultural methods of developed countries - the colonizers - disrupt the traditional way of life in the colonies. It lures peasants from their land and villages for jobs in factories, mines and deforestation crews. Likewise Iowans continue to leave Iowa for opportunity elsewhere. Iowa's most valuable exports, more important than its grain and livestock, are its high-school and college graduates. They can't afford to stay.

The colonizer's economy takes away the native's self-sufficiency in a local economy and replaces it with dependence on the colonizer's economy. Control of their own lives is no longer in the hands of the locals. That's Iowa's situation, and the situation of every other rural area in this nation, where local and regional economies have been destroyed, first under development of the national economy, later under pressure from an ever-growing international economy. Meanwhile no one in Washington seems particularly concerned about the state of the Third World within its own borders.

We must rely on ourselves

From the urbanite's point of view, there probably is no reason to keep rural America alive. Most urbanites don't know where their food comes from, and don't much care. It makes no difference to them whether their food is grown on a family farm or corporate farm. Big or small is irrelevant to the final product, which should be tasty, clean and brightly colored, if not smartly packaged.

I am afraid that our federal officials and bureaucrats share this sentiment about our food, its source and the state of rural economies. At least I have not heard of any rural-policy positions or programs emanating from the White House or Capitol Hill.

When President Clinton was first elected I did read or hear something about the administration's concern for building a rural-development program, and now three years later, this spring, he convened a rural-development conference in Iowa. But it was a symbolic gesture, and like much else the president has done, it seemed half-hearted, without passion or commitment.

About a year ago I called Senator Tom Harkin's office, and asked his top aide if he could tell me which think tanks in this country were developing rural policy. He mentioned The Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Neb., but I knew about that. Nothing else came to his mind. He said he would research it and call me back. That was more than two years ago, and he has yet to make that phone call.

I now think that Washington's indifference is a blessing. When President Reagan began dismantling federal programs, in the belief that problems were better handled on state and local levels, I was angry. But now I think he was right. National programs cannot be flexible enough to adjust to local conditions. More important, a centrally directed program will not develop what needs to be developed: economic self-sufficiency and local initiative.

No one is going to solve our problems for us. We have only our brains to rely on, and if they are stuffed with inadequate ideas we're going to pay a heavy price. No one from the outside is going to give us a wonderful future. No one from New York or Los Angeles is going to hand us a $3 billion check.

We create our own future. Either we decide what it is we want, and go after it, or someone else will decide it for us. If we are actively going to create our future, instead of waiting passively for it to happen, we must first decide the kind of future we want. Which means we must work cooperatively. We must think together.

Existing economic system won't work

So long as Iowans and other rural residents believe that they can rebuild their economies and spirits within the existing economic system, their situation will worsen.

When most rural Americans think of improving their local economies, they usually think of either attracting more tourists or of recruiting factories. We have all heard of desperate towns across America giving tax incentives and outright cash to companies that will locate within their borders. And time and again we have heard of these same companies, having gotten a free ride, pulling out for another desperate town or country where costs are even lower. Rural Americans would do better to create their own businesses.

But this will not happen until rural America has banks committed to local development. Perhaps you have that kind of bank in your town, but all too often I hear Iowans complain that the only people who get loans are those who don't need them.

That sort of conservatism is anathema to healthy commerce. Rural America needs banks like the South Shore Bank of Chicago, a black-owned bank committed to the economic development of Chicago's black South Shore district. That bank has developed black businesses, and rebuilt South Shore's prosperity. Now it is working for the development of a portion of rural Arkansas.

But some have despaired of the present banking system altogether, including one rural Vermont town that has decided to secede from it altogether, and has developed its own scrip. Because of disenchantment with so many institutions, I suspect that in years to come we will hear more about the need for rural areas to unhitch themselves from the Federal Reserve System and build their own banks and issue their own currencies.

What does seem clear is that so long as Iowa and other rural areas remain Third World countries, depending on the crumbs from the colonizer's economy for their maintenance, so long as the colonizers run the factories, farms and banks, so long will rural Americans be poor.

How can rural U.S survive?

I began thinking about rural-economic development when I first heard Warren Rudman's claim that if the United States does not drastically reduce its national deficit that someday it will become the world's largest banana republic. Whether or not the deficit will trigger collapse, other factors force rural Americans to think about constructing arks, self-sufficient economic and social entities that can survive the hard times that are upon us.

My own town, Lansing, could not possibly be self-sufficient, but what size area could be? For some reason, perhaps because of the shared landscape of hills and winding vallies and their farm economies, I began to think of northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin. I began to wonder whether this area could be self-sufficient. Someone told me that it has a name, the Driftless Bioregion, so-called because the glaciers did not drift over it. That same person said that northwest Illinois, including Galena, was a part of it.

I learned that people around the country were thinking of bioregions as determinants of future economic and cultural units, not in terms of the nation or of states. The important point when developing an ark is to think in terms of shared values and habits. A bioregion can provide this. The Driftless Bioregion unifies us by virtue of its topography, which in turn defines agricultural practice. And that practice defines our opportunities and limitations. We are bound together in many ways, some not always obvious. Most of the counties of this bioregion, for example, are poor, about the poorest in their respective states. And that's because of our topography, which means our farms are not as rich as flatland farms. But with the application of imagination and courage, this poor region could be transformed into a land of wealth.

Imaginative and energetic people from Minneapolis and St. Paul already are moving into southeast Minnesota and setting up businesses; people from Madison and Chicago have moved into southwest Wisconsin. Fewer have ventured into northeast Iowa, because of its greater distance from the major cities. But it will happen, I'm sure. It's just a matter of time.

Regional economy provides ark

As I've said, a regional economy can provide an ark, a social and economic unit that can enable us to weather these hard times, and those ahead. A self-sufficient regional economy is not a third world economy, nor a region of the colonized.

A regional economy cannot be built directly, but in steps, and indirectly.

In the case of the Driftless Bioregion, encompassing southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa, southwest Wisconsin, and northwest Illinois, the first intermediate step is to begin envisioning a Regional City for each of these areas.

A Regional City is another name for what has been called the Social City. The Regional City, as it is usually envisioned, is an aggregate of cities, not of towns. The point of the Social or Regional City is to maintain a greenbelt between individual cities to prevent the development of one mass megalopolis.

Only three cities within the Driftless Bioregion have populations over 10,000 people, and each is in a different state, so the Regional Cities we might build are radically different from what is usually envisioned. But for both kinds, cooperation between towns or cities is imperative to its functioning. If one town or city developed a technical college or a major hospital, others would refrain from duplicating it. The pie, after all, is only so big.

Major economic and cultural domains, such as tourism, industry and transportation, would be addressed in common planning sessions to develop overall strategy.

In 1993, Joseph Lempke, studio professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, sent a proposal to 10 or so small towns of northeast Iowa stating that for $500 per town the students of his planning class would undertake the task of drawing up a blueprint for transforming northeast Iowa into a Regional City. The price was modest, and the insight that we might have gained could have been enormous. But the towns turned down the project. One of the biggest problems in small towns is their inability to work cooperatively. Towns see each other as rivals, or potential rivals. And to complicate matters, most small towns are divided into factions.