Rural Futures and the Future of Rural Geography

Global concerns such as climate change and food security have focused renewed attention on the future of rural space. Although the direct engagement of rural geographers with climate change and food security has been limited to date, recent research in rural geography holds a number of lessons on these issues, highlighting, for example, spatial and social differentiation in the development of alternative food networks and the challenge of contested discourses of rurality to technocratic solutions to both food security and climate change. Through such perspectives, rural geography has a strong and distinctive contribution to make to research on both issues.