on the cover / By Ryan Burns

With a Rural Yell

Coincidentally (sort of), the GIS expert at HSU is Dr. Sheila Steinberg’s husband, Dr. Steven Steinberg, a fellow associate professor and director of the university’s Institute for Spatial Analysis. (More on that “sort of” in a minute.) Citing the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, Steven Steinberg says GIS maps help make information accessible to the general public and, perhaps more importantly, to politicians. “Given what a typical politician has time to absorb, maps offer a way to very concisely communicate a lot of information quickly,” he says.

His wife agrees. “If you’re a rural community and you’re gonna go argue your case to get resources, you can’t just go say, ‘We need stuff.’ You have to be able to show and document: ‘This is what we need; this is why we need it; this is what the numbers say.’ And that’s the role that I see our organization providing.”

Sheila Steinberg’s office sits on the top floor of HSU’s Behavioral and Social Sciences building. With the semester over, this massive, eco-groovy new structure is practically empty, as is the rest of the campus (most of which can be seen out Steinberg’s window). The balconies on the opposite side of the building offer a panoramic view of Arcata, framed by horizontal redwood branches, with silvery Humboldt Bay and Eureka beyond. Looking younger than her 42 years, with rosy cheeks and a chipper voice, Steinberg gets animated when discussing her work, emphasizing points with sweeping hand gestures. Her declarative sentences are often punctuated with a lively, rhetorical “right?”

Given her passion for the subject, it would be tempting to assume Steinberg comes from a rural background. “No-ho-ho,” she says with a self-conscious chuckle. “Uh, I’m from L.A.” Among other places. Steinberg’s Obama-like upbringing (her Hindu father’s from India; her mom’s a Kentucky Baptist) took her from the urbs and suburbs of Delaware, Connecticut and New York to the concrete jungle of La La Land. Her love for the pastoral, born, she says, on childhood visits to her grandpa’s Kentucky farm, eventually led her to UC Berkeley, where she earned her Masters in Forestry while focusing on Natural Resource Sociology. Encouraged by one of her professors, she then went uber-rustic, serving three years with the Peace Corps in rural Guatemala where she worked side-by-side with the community on watershed management and tree-planting. “It was a real interesting experience,” she says dryly.

Afterwards, she went on to earn a PhD in Rural Sociology from Penn State. “That’s where I got exposed to GIS, and I started bringing that into the study of people in the context of their place,” Steinberg says. When she arrived at HSU in 2000, her department chair told her to go find the GIS expert on campus. “I was really annoyed with that request because I was new and I didn’t want to deal with it. So I found out who it was,” she says, beaming, “and it was this guy, Steve Steinberg.”

Needless to say, they hit it off. With his background in Natural Resources and minor in Sociology, Dr. Steven Steinberg, now 39, had plenty in common with Sheila. After some good conversations about GIS research and the like, Steven started showing up in Sheila’s classroom, watching the tail ends of her lectures and helping with balky technology like overhead projectors. “We started off as friends, then started writing grants and sharing research ideas together. And then it evolved,” she says. They were married in 2002 and had a son, Joshua, the following year. “We call it ‘GIS love.’” Her laugh fills the office. “So academic, right?”

The CCRP, appropriately enough, came from the community, born out of a diverse local effort to cooperate on a common goal — sort of a local Fellowship of the Ring. Beginning in 2003, ranchers, timber workers, law enforcement, health care personnel and more — representing Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and Mendocino counties — met regularly to discuss rural issues in the hopes of solving nagging problems in the spheres of health care, education and technology. The main organizers included Peter Pennekamp and Kathleen Moxon of the Humboldt Area Foundation, Humboldt Open Door Community Health Centers Executive Director Hermann Spetzler, Casey Crabill (then-president of College of the Redwoods) and HSU President Rollin Richmond.

In an e-mail to the Journal last week, Richmond explained their motives. “We believed, and I think our ideas have been supported, that rural areas like our region often do not receive the attention they deserve when data are gathered about many issues … particularly health care, poverty levels, education and access to important services like the Internet and, for some locations, even telephone.” Two groups were established from these efforts: Redwood Coast Rural Action (a network of local community leaders now led by Moxon) and the CCRP, which is primarily funded through grants from the California Endowment and the California Wellness Foundation and operates under the umbrella of President Richmond’s office.

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