She lived in Liberal Seattle and worked as a journalist, covering science, climate change and the environment for public radio for more than a decade.

Then, in 2018, Ashley Aherne made a big jump. She left Seattle and moved with her husband to one of the most conservative counties in rural Washington state.

In this episode, bridging the rural urban divide.

This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Miltite.

And I'm Richard Davies. What did Ashley Aherne discover about her new neighbors and herself?

When she switched from city to country, now living on a 20-acre property with a horse in a pickup truck.

I'm also here about her podcast, Grouse, about an endangered bird and what this says about the land and the changing climate.

First, I asked Ashley Aherne, why did she move an opt for a complete change in lifestyle?

Well, several different reasons. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't burned out on city life.

I grew up in small towns and Massachusetts, suburban, not rural, but I knew that there was more to the story after the election in 2016.

And that the voices from rural America were not being interrogated, covered, or really probed in a way that felt sincere and invested.

I guess, for lack of a better word, that what we have in a lot of media now is a concentration of journalists and jobs in urban centers.

And what that translates into from a production standpoint is journalists that go out into rural communities, parachute in for a story record,

and then pick the sexiest sound bites, maybe in many cases the most radical, most Trump-y, most ignorant sounding,

and then bring them back to their liberal listenerships in the urban hubs.

And it cements and furthers and perpetuates these divides that we see.

So, as an environment reporter, living in Seattle, so many of those stories, so many of those divisions play out around environmental issues,

whether it's conservation of a controversial bird, or logging proposals, or mining proposals, or, you know, you can almost predict how people are going to fall on a certain issue based on what their political leanings are.

This was at a time of increasing partisanship, including a bigger urban rural divide.

What changed? Once Trump was elected, I think that's what really brought it to a head for me, was the sincere feeling that I didn't know the people who had elected that president.

I didn't know them, I didn't interview them, or if I did, I didn't spend time with them to really understand the context that would make them say the things that they were saying to journalists like myself.

Yeah, so were you shocked or surprised in 2016 by the election of Donald Trump?

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