Across the country, rural land is falling into disuse.In the West, Southwest, and Appalachia, mines shut their doors or become mechanized, leaving thousands of miners without jobs. In the upper Midwest, farmland lays fallow as farmers retire or quit farming because they can’t stomach the high costs and low commodity prices. Rural towns have become snaggle toothed with darkened gaps between storefronts as businesses move out of town. Students get their diplomas, hightail it out of town, and don’t look back.

No jobs, no people, no future.  This is the ‘graying’ of rural America.

But rural America has always had something urban America doesn’t: abundant natural resources.  We’ve been farmers, loggers, miners. These resources – our land, water, plants, minerals – have sustained rural economies for centuries and fueled America’s growth.

In 2011, the United States Department of Agriculture released a report confirming what many of us already knew. Resources for the generation of renewable electricity, like wind, solar, and geothermal, are more available and more useful for development in rural regions – especially the Southwest.

So let’s turn the graying of rural America into the greening of rural America. Let’s put our farmland back in rotation and our miners back to work.

Many people have figured out how to do this already. Fly over the Southwest and it’s hard to miss the solar arrays dotting the land, including Nevada itself. In rural Colorado and California, communities have turned to geothermal energy and both large-scale and community solar investments to attract tech investment, community colleges, and recent college graduates back to town. Renewables are putting small towns back on the map, as well as providing both an economically and environmentally sustainable future.

Yet despite this potential, US resources for solar are tremendously underutilized and underexploited. Less than 10% of US power comes from non-hydroelectric renewables, but only than 1% of that 10% is solar. There’s a lot of potential energy hiding in plain sight in the sunny deserts of the Nevada, which has the best solar resources in the country.

It’s an election year, and solar is on the ballot in Nevada. Nevada Question 6 calls for the state to require utility companies to acquire 50% of their power supply from renewables. Nevada has vastly underexploited solar resources: it’s ranked first in the country for solar potential, yet 88% of Nevada’s energy is imported from outside state lines. Question 6 would spark investment in solar and other renewables, a win-win for the environment, economy, and consumers. But the biggest winners of all would be local economies.

The Department of Energy found that renewable energy standards, like Question 6, don’t significantly raise energy rates – in fact, they often result in cost savings for consumers. At the same time, standards like the one Question 6 set have been shown to create thousands of jobs, many in rural areas. Question 6 is an opportunity for Nevada to stop sending money out of state to buy power, and instead spend the money in its small towns and counties.

In states with similar standards, like Minnesota, where utilities are required to produce 30% of their energy from renewables by 2020, the standard has prompted massive investment in solar.  These investments are not only in utility-scale solar and wind, but also in on-site home solar, which puts the benefits of renewables directly back in consumers’ pockets by reducing their energy bills. Consumers with at-home grids sell their power back to the utility – on sunny days, the electricity meter will run backwards.

It’s not hard to imagine something similar happening in Nevada, which has far more solar potential than a northern state like Minnesota. In fact, Nevada’s already well on its way to meeting its current standard of 25% renewable energy by 2020; Question 6 would keep the momentum going and encourage even more local energy investment.

At the end of the day, clean energy is not only true to our rural identities as builders, producers, and providers, but it’s also a solution everyone should be able to agree on. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, jobs are always a good thing. Keeping class in session in rural schools is a shared priority. And going back to the land and resources is true to the identity of many rural communities. If utilities are required to produce more of their power from renewables, they must increase their energy investments in rural areas, because that’s where the sun is.

Put the power back in rural communities. Vote yes on Nevada Question 6.