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Rather than seeking ivory-tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world's most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real-world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself. This point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment-society relationships. Most past discussions of humans' roles in environmental problems have focused on overall or average human impacts, but rural sociologists have played leading roles in identifying what I have come to call "the double diversion." First, rather than being well-represented by averages, environmental damages are often characterized by high levels of "disproportionality", with much or most of the harm being created by the diversion of environmental rights and resources to a surprisingly small fraction of the relevant social actors. The disproportionality appears to be made possible in part through the second diversion, namely "distraction"--the diversion of attention, largely through the taken-for-granted but generally erroneous assumption that the environmental harm "must" be for the benefit of us all. There are good reasons why rural sociologists would have been among the first to notice both of these "diversions"--and why they will give even greater attention to both in the future. (Contains 1 figure.)

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]