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While 'economic development' projects have long been proposed and supported by local growth machine elites, technological change has affected the social desirability of large projects in three ways. First, large development projects-we examine water transportation-have grown in size, meaning that backers often seek public funding. With increased size and the need for external funding, many years or decades can elapse by the time a project can be conceived, politically supported, funded, and built. Second, during that time, the technology of the industrial sector in question may have changed radically-to the point that the project can be obsolete, or rapidly nearing obsolescence, by the time it is actually completed. Third, the massive size of the project may also mean that even if the project is obsolete as well as environmentally harmful, we may find ourselves unable to undo it or the environmental damage that it has caused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implications of natural resource extraction for local economic development have become the subject of sharply conflicting expectations, with long-term outcomes predicted to range from regional economic growth and development to "progressive underdevelopment." These differences in longer-term expectations cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the use of cross-sectional or short-term data. In addition, existing theories tend to be stated in universalistic terms that discourage rather than facilitate the examination of differences across cases. These points are illustrated through a case-study examination of what has been called the first mining boom in the United States, involving lead mines in the Upper Mississippi Valley during the first half of the 19th century. The developmental consequences of this mining boom appear neither to have been as favorable as predicted by the most enthusiastic proponents of extraction nor as negative as those predicted by the harshest critics. Instead, outcomes appear to have reflected intersecting configurations of physical resource characteristics, the organizational form/scale of extractive activities, the historical period in question, and the nature of relationships among competing resource uses and users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raw material extraction once offered an effective route to economic development, but societal relationships with environment and technology have changed so fundamentally that extractive industries today appear more likely to lead rural regions to economic addiction. Key characteristics of addictive activities include rising costs of operation at most extractive facilities, combined with downward trends in world commodity prices. Key characteristics of vulnerable communities and regions include increasing geographic isolation, imbalances of scale and power with respect to extractive industries, and the absence of realistic alternatives for diversified development. Key pressures toward addiction are created by ambiguities that mask the addictive tendencies, including ambiguities of price signals, of employment and development possibilities for remote regions, and of resource exhaustion. The net result is that, while the encouragement to develop extractive industries is often coupled with advice to avoid developing an excessive dependency on a single economic sector, the very regions and nations having the greatest need to hear such advice may also have the lowest realistic ability to respond to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partly because of the field's efforts to deal first with the kinds of impacts that have been the most obvious and pressing, the traditional focus of social impact assessment has been on the impacts taking place during the most intensive phases of developmental activity. Recently it has become increasingly clear that a number of predictable, significant impacts take place both before and after the periods of most intense activity; these impacts are missed by social impact assessment approaches that are excessively narrow in focus. This paper offers a conceptual frame-work that is relatively simple but that deals with impacts both across time and across potentially affected systems of the human environment, doing so in such a way as to improve the promise of social impact assessment to become more nearly comprehensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the difficulties of integrating environmental variables into sociological analyses is that societies have a dualistic relationship with the biophysical environment. Humans are like other species in depending on the environment, yet humans are also unique among all species in the potential for altering and sometimes evading environmental constraints. A second and related difficulty results from the degree to which humans incorporate the environment into their everyday views of reality; the process often seems so automatic that the biophysical realities can be forgotten, taken for granted, or ignored, both by residents and by those who study them. This problem is particularly significant for studies that fail to be sufficiently comparative to be able to observe significant variations in environmental and technological factors. The problem is illustrated with a study that deals with a relatively traditional social- psychological dependent variable-attitudes toward a proposed development The focus is on the apparent paradox of a form of industrial development that has been welcomed with open arms in one area of the country while virtually opening armed warfare in another, namely drilling for offshore oil. To explain the marked differences across regions, it is necessary to understand the influence of biophysical and technological variables, as well as the social and historical differences across the regions. Implications for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]