"I've never been anywhere that felt so old and so traditionally American as the Carolina Piedmont, which is the region that Dean comes from. It's tobacco country; there used to be textiles and furniture-making. And then tobacco, as we know, fell with the '90s and the investigations and the tobacco buyout and it kind of laid waste to what had been a very intact middle class and working class part of the country. Dean Price is a son of that region. His father was a Bible Belt preacher; his whole family had been tobacco farmers since the 18th century; they all live within about 10 miles of each other in Rockingham County, N.C.
"And again, around the time of the financial crisis, Dean, who had this truck stop business, watched his business fail — so he turned to biofuels. And he has this whole vision, which I think is a very American vision, of resurgence, a kind of renaissance of the countryside through alternative energy. But he's doing it on his own. No one is telling him to; there's no organization he's part of; there's no union or business trade association or newspaper that he's connected [to]. He's a loner out there; he's a Johnny Appleseed spreading biodiesel across the countryside."
On how American communities are suffering
"As Dean said to me while we were walking around Madison, N.C., the town that he grew up in, the shoe store was closed down, the pharmacy was shuttered, the restaurants were closed, there were just a couple people on the sidewalk — you see this in little towns all across the heartland. He said the guys who used to own those stores were the pillars of this community — they coached the little league teams, they were on the town council. They're gone and communities can't suffer that way without great consequences."
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