Promoting ethanol in rural Kansas: Local framings and cultural politics

In this paper, we explore how local promoters framed the development of the ethanol industry in Kansas, in the Midwestern U.S, by attaching it to locally salient discourses related to the environment, economic development, energy independence, and the cultural importance of agricultural production. We use a framing analysis to examine the discourse and cultural politics of the promotion of ethanol production in four regional and one state level newspaper, supplemented by data from key informant interviews conducted to understand how both the promises and the impacts of the ethanol industry are reframed at the local level. We argue that by linking ethanol production to localized economic and environmental benefits, and to national security and energy independence agendas, the discourse promoting biofuels development in the local media sidelined any discussion of climate mitigation or conservation agendas associated with biofuels production, and reframed natural resource issues to justify local claims for continued water mining for agricultural production. In particular, water use in biofuels production is naturalized as an entitlement for agriculture and ethanol producers. Our research adds to the rural studies literature that examines how powerful discourses and ideologies interact to advance an agenda that may actually be counter to economic and environmental futures in rural communities.