农村空心化及人才流失外文文献翻译中英文2019

外文文献翻译原文及译文（节选重点翻译）标题：农村空心化及人才流失外文翻译中英文2019文献出处：Doug Seale. Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America JAgric Environ Ethics (2011) 24:535543译文字数：7700多字原文Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for AmericaDoug SealeFor well over a century at least, agrarian thinkers have been concerned about the impact of a modernizing and industrialized society on rural areas. From Liberty Hyde Bailey beginning in the early twentieth Century to Walter Goldschmidt (As You Sow, 1947), to Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America, 1977), and Wes Jackson (New Roots for Agriculture, 1980), people who care about rural life and farming have been sounding the alarm that all is not well in the Heartland. Hollowing Out the Middle adds to this literature, in its own way. It is an important sociological case study that focuses on the reasons that many small towns in rural America are dying. Husband and wife team sociologists, Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas moved to a small town in NE Iowa, a town they call Ellis (a pseudonym as are the names of all of the people they interview and profile) to study the phenomenon of the exodus of bright and talented young people. They refer to this exodus and the resulting loss of population as the hollowing out of rural towns. The book contains no deep philosophical or ethical analysis of agricultural or environmental values, but it provides much sociological data that will give the intelligent and aware reader much to think about regarding what is happening in rural American society and why it is happening.The importance of this case study is two-fold. First, it portrays the long-term effects of Americas moving into what the authors refer to as the post-industrial age brought about in large part by the rise of agribusiness and the resulting demise of small farms that so characterized rural life before and that gave small rural towns their special character. The second is Carrs and Kefalass finding that a major factor contributing to young peoples leaving these areas, if not the major factor, is the behavior and attitudes of the adults who are responsible for them in their formative years. These adults are actively encouraging talented young people to leave for bigger and better things, while understanding, in many cases, that their departure could spell the demise of the town itself.It is important to note that it is only a segment of the youth population that leaves. Many, especially those who do not hail from wealthy families or show little academic aptitude, are not given the encouragement to better themselves. Indeed, it is often assumed that they will stay and try to make a life for themselves by getting whatever local, often low-paying, jobs that remain in agribusiness processing plants or other related industries. In the end, Carr and Kefalas do not think this hollowing out is necessarily inevitable. It is certainly not desirable. The book contains six chapters, including an Introduction and a Concluding chapter. The authors research throughout is thorough and well-documented. The books only weakness, in this readers opinion, is that the authors do not go far enough in some of their analyses of the root problems of the rural areas they are writing about, especially the impact of the rise of industrial agriculture, but more of that later.In the Introduction, the authors lay out the social phenomenon they want to understand and identify the causes of the exodus of young people from rural areas in states like Iowa. To understand this hollowing-out of small towns, Carr and Kefalas lived in Ellis for a year, conducting their research by interviewing and speaking with local officials and citizens. Iowa was chosen because, as the authors explain, the state provides a useful bellwether case: Only West Virginia loses a larger percentage of its college graduates to out-migration, and because of this loss of young adults, Iowa is aging more quickly than the rest of the nation (p. 10). A general impression one has of Iowa is that it is dominated by agriculture, but this impression is not well-founded on current reality as trends suggest: Throughout the twentieth century, generations of young people coming of age in the countryside depended on family farms or local plants for their livelihood. As the seismic shifts in agriculture and manufacturing made firms and farms outsource and automate, rural regions witnessed a collapsing demand for labor. With fewer opportunities for work that paid a decent wage, more young people found it necessary to abandon this way of life (p. 5). With just two percent of Americans operating farms now, independent farmers became more like modern-day sharecroppers, and the Jeffersonian ideal of pastoral life was subsumed by the corporate, agribusiness model of mega-farms, the authors say, quoting Kathryn M. Dudleys Debt and Dispossessions: Farm Loss in Americas Heartland. The paradox, the authors say, was that the single greatest cause of the rural crisis was, more than anything else, progress.more than anything else, progress (p. 6). However, Carr and Kefalas do not dwell on the question of the extent to which policies, which one rightly suspects, favor large agribusiness. Nor do they dwell on the tendency towards increasing mechanization and ever larger farms growing through the consolidation of small farms as small farmers find it harder and harder to compete. To be fair, the authors never indicate that these factors play a large part in their analysis and seem to take them as givens. The problem facing rural communities like Ellis, as they see it, is the need to adjust to a post-industrial economy.They compare the plight of rural areas with those of many inner cities such as New York and Philadelphia and observe that the problems facing many cities get far more attention than those facing depopulating and aging rural communities. Part of the tragedy is that Iowa students earn some of the nations highest SAT and ACT scores (p. 19). Since college-educated young people are leaving rural communities, Carr and Kefalas point out that talented young people constitute the states greatest export. In the Introduction, the authors also give the reader a glimpse of the following chapters, most of which focus on one of the three major categorizations of young people who make up their study. They divide young people into Achievers, Stayers, and Seekers. Achievers and Seekers are those who, for various reasons choose to leave, but some of these choose to come back to their hometowns and these Carr and Kefalas treat in a separate chapter, The Returners.In the Conclusion, the authors sum up their findings and offer ideas about how the hollowing out trend might be stemmed or reversed. This is important, they maintain, because so much is at stake. If the trend continues, then small towns will disappear, and thisthe loss of educated young people, an ageing population, and the erosion of a robust local economy is ultimately detrimental not only to the region but to the nation as a whole, because those effects have repercussions far beyond their boundaries (p. ix). Whether their ideas provide real solutions remains to be seen. Carr and Kefalas profile the Achievers first, comparing them to another major group, the Stayers. One Ellis High School Guidance Center counselor sums up what the town is faced with: The best kids gowhile the ones with the biggest problems stay, and then we have to deal with their kids in the schools in the next generation. The best and brightest are generally the sons and daughters of the towns professional class. They seem, the authors note, to have a sense of manifest destiny about how their lives will unfold, leaving to be successful somewhere else (p. 29) Their ranks include the class valedictorians and the first chairs from the orchestra, the track stars and student-government leaders (p. 30). And their success seems to have the support of the entire town; they get more positive attention from their teachers and others than other young people receive.Townspeople have high expectations for these young, we are told, and the young upon whom these expectations are laid internalize them. They soon gather the impression that they are among the chosen, that it is their fate, indeed their duty, to leave small-town life behind. They soon learn that earning good grades, displaying good behavior, and being praised in front of their classmates can grant special privileges and access to adults who can help them break free of small-town life. Expectations can begin at an early age, even for talented children of fairly modest means. But on the whole, these young people tend to be from upper class families. The authors do cite several examples of young people from families of modest means whose parents are not from a professional class (farmers, for example) but who, when young, demonstrate a strong aptitude for some academic subject like math or science.For Achievers, college is the first step in leaving the town. Once these young people have a taste of the world beyond Ellis, some may feel conflicted because they are confronted with people, views, and cultures that are different from what they are accustomed to. Others, however, relish their new-found freedom and thirst for more. The authors make clear that there is often a price to be paid for leaving. Young people make new friends and take on new responsibilities, and in doing so, leave behind their old lives and small town connections. Carr and Kefalas end this chapter by discussing the paradox entailed by the process that facilitates young people leaving: A conundrum lies at the heart of the rural brain drain. Small towns are especially good at recognizing, nurturing, and launching talented individuals. They rally to prepare Achievers to leave, succeed brilliantly in doing so, then lament the loss of their combined talents. The adults of Ellis arent ignorant of the paradox that traps them into expending resources to ensure that their most privileged, and in some ways most promising, young people leave. The challenge is getting these adults to imagine a different way of doing things.In Chapter Two, The Stayers, the authors focus on the young people who are not groomed to leave. To set the context, they provide a look at how the region itself is changing. For example, gone are the mom and pop stores on old Main Street and the family farm that defined the pattern of the countryside. In their place are megamalls, megafarms, and factories where robotic systems perform the tasks once assigned to human beings (p. 53). These changes, combined with the trend that teachers and other town folk invest so much time and attention to the Achievers that resources are drained from those who stay, create an environment in which Stayers options are limited. They realize, we are told, by their junior year in high school what their fate will be. Not all Stayers finish high school (Indeed, because some young people are steered towards graduation and college and others are not, the authors ask whether the schools are real meritocracies.). Those who drop out have much in common with their suburban and urban peers: they typically earned lower grades, score poorly on standardized achievement test, showed signs of low self-esteem, and lacked a sense of control over their own livesAnd yet, in one of the many self-deceptions implicit in how class patterns reproduce themselves generation after generation, the Stayers insist they choose their paths for themselves (p. 60).One of the things that characterizes many Stayers is their dedication to a work ethic that is so strong that they value work over education to the point that many harbor a belief that college changes you to the point that you begin to look down on where you come from. Such observations contributed to an uneasiness toward schooling and its transformative influences (p. 62). Belief in the work ethic is reinforced by parents who insist that their kids will have to work to pay for adult toys such as a car. And underlying this insistence is parents confidence in the American dream, rooted in the unexamined assumption that their kids would be okay, somehow (p. 63).Antipathy towards education does not happen by accident, according to the authors. Stayers do not drift off course without the complicity of adults. When they skipped class, no one came looking for them, and when they didnt turn in their homework, their parents shrugged their shoulders and told them to find a job. Teachers, staff, and parents may be indicted for dismissing the Stayers are rebellious, lazy, or just indifferent to school, thus dooming them to their limited prospects in the regions dying economy (p. 65). Carr and Kefalas attribute this tragedy to Stayers being blind to the reality of blue-collar work in a postindustrial economy .Critical to understanding the changes that small towns are undergoing is the fact that their decline is aided by large big-box stores like Wal-Mart, which draw business away from locally owned hardware and grocery stores. One resident aptly called them Main Street killers. One wishes that Carr and Kefalas had spent more time looking at the effect of such companies not only on the local economy but also on the social structure and the sense of community that is undermined by them. They do come close to a political analysis, which this reviewer hungered for, when they discuss, albeit briefly, global trends contributing to the post-industrialization facing rural America when they point out that NAFTA and the recession of 2001 depleted the manufacturing base of many Midwestern states. And yet in spite of this, middle America is still seen, in many ways, as the heart of America where the salt-of-the-earth live, and where politicians aspiring to national office leverage images of their visiting these areas during presidential campaigns, as did both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008. Both were quick to criticize freetrade agreements and rewards for firms that outsource jobs.With diminished manufacturing jobs, the appropriation of small farms into large agribusinesses, and a strong work ethic in Stayers families, the first job many Stayers have is in agribusiness. And since many of these young people can earn almost as much as the adults they work alongside, the temptation to enter the workforce early is great. With money in their pockets, these young people get treated by their parents as if youre grown up, allowing them to come and go as they please and make decisions for themselves. These social and political trends are a result of the dominant economic system, and, the authors tell us that at first Stayers parents could not grasp the grand sweeping transformations of postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism and the longterm impact of stagnating wages that trapped them. When this trap is finally recognized for what it is, it was too late for them to warn their kids (p. 71). Consequently many young people walk a fine line between minimum wage or lowpaying jobs or unemployment and hardship. To put it bluntly: Many of the Stayers dont fully comprehend the rules of the new economy until they get steamrolled by them.Because many Stayers find a relatively high degree of freedom at an early age, this often leads to early sexual experimentation, early marriage, and the risk of divorce, which then can result in negative consequences for single or unwed mothers and their children. As one young woman puts it, Around here twenty-four is old to be getting married (p. 74). But early pregnancy and divorce are not the only, or perhaps even worst of the problems that young people must face. In addition to early child-bearing, alcohol, the abuse of drugs, especially methamphetamine (which the authors say has grown to epidemic proportions), and suicide are common. On top of these problems, school shootings are more likely to occur in rural communities and the authors footnotes provide ample data to support these claims. Yet, in spite of these problems, Stayers will talk about the comfort and security of small-town life, given the uncertainties they face (p. 82). Because of the choices made and their resulting problems (drugs, alcohol, early marriages, etc.) the authors maintain that Stayers are the harbingers of troubled times in the small towns of the Heartland. They are the people most likely to be poor and they are the targets of the Midwests meth epidemic (p. 83). Carr and Kefalas conclude that because Stayers choose to earn money at an early age instead of pursuing an education, they effectively close off one of the most reliable escape routes from the countryside and their best chance at economic security, which might enable them to avoid these problems.Chapter Three focuses on a third category of young people: The Seekers. Seekers are young people who, with only a high school diploma, yearn for something more than what small towns can provide. They may have romantic notions about the world outside and long for excitement and adventure. With patriotism running high in these areas, it is not surprising that the main path they follow is to join the military. The authors provide many examples of how military recruiters employ tactics to encourage young people to join. Recruiters become regular fixtures in high schools, they call students at home and have heart-to-heart conversations with them. Recruiters are taught how to identify popular kidsknown in marketing terms as the centers of influenceand how to carefully orchestrate conversations with them in highly visible locations where many students can wi