Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of ‘‘the Rural’’ Avi Brisman • Bill McClanahan • Nigel South Published online: 28 August 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminol- ogy. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-014- 9241-8, 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including ‘‘the rural’’ as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/ profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might Our inspiration for the title of this article comes from a paper delivered by Travis Linnemann at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology entitled ‘‘Living on the Wrong Side of Town: Toward a Cultural Criminology of the Rural.’’ Linnemann’s paper engaged Keith Hayward’s ‘‘Five Spaces of Cultural Criminology’’ (Hayward 2012) to draw out the complex geographies of several small towns in the rural Midwest and our article continues in a similar ‘‘merging’’ spirit. A. Brisman (&) School of Justice Studies, College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, 521 Lancaster Avenue, 467 Stratton, Richmond, KY 40475, USA e-mail: avi.brisman@eku.edu B. McClanahan Á N. South Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester UK, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK e-mail: Broadwaybill@riseup.net N. South e-mail: soutn@essex.ac.uk 123 Crit Crim (2014) 22:479–494 DOI 10.1007/s10612-014-9250-7