Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Brain drain is massive problem in most of the Deep South, and the phenomenon is not new. When my friends and I were finishing school in the 1990s, the inarguable sentiment among us was that leaving Montgomery, Alabama was the only viable option for a good life. And many of us acted upon that assumption. (Of course, I didn’t, but that’s another story.) Among my classmates at the Carver Creative and Performing Arts Center were actor Glenn Howerton and artist Ashley Longshore, and I can say with complete certainty that neither would have achieved the same things had they stayed here. Yet it is also important to recognize that this was brain drain: our local community had these talented people, and we lost them to other communities. Today, my mind wanders to what any of those creative and intellectually curious people could have created here where we came from. Of course, for those of us who have stayed, some have found ways to earn a living in the arts and culture sectors of the economy – where our skills and talents lay – but many have not.

As a larger-scale example of brain drain, the statistics provided by Rethink Mississippi are startling. According to their website, of the adults who leave the state, 40% have a bachelor’s degree, and of those who stay only 21% have a degree. Sixty-six of the state’s eighty-two counties had a net loss of population between 2010 and 2020, due largely to outmigration, a circumstance often attributed to a lack of economic opportunities and cultural offerings. Perhaps most startling: the number of other states who showed a net loss of population in the 2020 census— zero.

While Mississippi may be alone in their standing as the only state to experience net population loss, they are far from being alone in suffering from brain drain. In May 2024, al.com reported on a study that showed Alabama ranking tenth-worst in the nation with this problem: “more well-educated residents are leaving the Yellowhammer State than are moving in – 45% more in 2023, to be exact.” That means that we’re losing two educated people for every one we gain. A list later in the article shares that Mississippi ranked second-worst and Louisiana fourth-worst. (As a complete outlier, South Carolina was the only Southern state in the top-ranking group: second in the nation with a 137% net gain.)

Brain drain is not something a community or a state can always recognize directly and daily, like they would a food desert, but it is a problem with real-life effects. When I taught high school, I used to remark to my students how badly our state needed them to stay, live, and work here once they had finished their degrees. Almost all of them shrugged off the notion; some outright laughed at it. But a few gave me the opportunity to explain. Most of them had attended public schools for K-12, meaning that our people had invested tens of thousands of dollars in educating them over thirteen years. Then if they went to college, especially to a public university, and even more especially if they received scholarships, we would be investing tens of thousands more in them— all without any binding obligation or contract that would hold them in place. What a gift! So, if they were born with God-given talents and skills, then added the education and enrichment that the people of Alabama provided, but went on to use and apply those skills elsewhere . . . the Alabamians who’ve invested in them, intentionally or generally, get nothing for our investment. Moreover, people with college degrees tend to earn higher salaries than those without, so by leaving, they would be paying their higher taxes in another state, not in ours. Brain drain leaves people in affected states with the task of educating the next generation with reduced tax revenues, which hampers that next generation from having the opportunities that the last generation enjoyed . . . A few students recognized that I had a point. Continuity, even stasis, becomes more difficult when educated people leave.

Brain drain can also be tied to losing our “sense of place.” This term describes how we feel connected to some geographic locations because of what we experienced there. Connecting the two ideas, we can see a wrongheaded conclusion: if I don’t see modern economic and cultural opportunities in the place where I’m from, then that place must have nothing to offer. This assumption is supported by the often-stated belief that those who “got out” have succeeded. And so those who have stayed . . . must have failed?

This either-or mentality excludes and denies the pertinent lessons of bioregionalism, an idea that emphasizes human cooperation with and appreciation of nature and each other in localized settings. Writing for the Schumacher Center, author Kirkpatrick Sale offered this:

The concern for place, for the preservation of nature, the return to such traditional American values as self-reliance, local control, town-meeting democracy—these things can ally many different kinds of political people; in fact, they have a way of blunting and diminishing other and less important political differences.

If we manage to define a “good life” not by political gains or material wealth, but instead by the desire for harmonious co-existence and appreciation of local culture, the driving forces behind brain drain could be blunted. In a bioregionalist view, it makes no sense to leave the best things in life – family, community, and local traditions – for the possibility of wealth, social prominence, and media culture, which are less valuable (even though they’re certainly enticing). If Deep Southern states have anything to offer, it’s what a bioregionalist says is best: family, community, traditions, and harmony with nature . . . Just sayin’.

For brain drain to slow – or hopefully stop – people in an area need to see two things when they look around them: a culture worthy of life-long participation and sustainable economic opportunities. The first of those has to come from the ground up. Having that understanding could mean giving our young people reasons to stay and bringing back some of the people who’ve left. The second of those can come from the ground up, but has to be supported by the policies of state and local governments, especially in the area of economic development. If we want community, we’ve got to work with each other locally, instead of looking to extractive and corporate interests to discern our path forward.