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We propose four ways that the urban growth machine theoretical perspective can be expanded for social scientists whose focus is not necessarily urban. First, we believe the thesis is useful for analysis at larger and smaller geographic scales than the city. Second, once focused on a goal and set in motion the growth machines have inertia. This leads to continuity over time and also leaves records which are useful in analyzing how particular outcomes occur. Third, the processes growth machines set in motion can lead us to practices that are on the edge of our ability to control, potentially resulting in unanticipated and even disastrous consequences, having relevance for the study of disasters. Finally, the very success of the growth machine, particularly when growth is centered on the exploitation of land based resources can lead to the exhaustion of the very basis of its success and thus to collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic debates can be entertaining and even useful, but they can also have drawbacks. The present debate has at least three of them. First, despite our ability to discern differing central tendencies between ''environmental'' and ''resource'' sociology, the excitement of a debate can cause such modest differences to be exaggerated, potentially being reified into a ''divide.'' Second, only a limited number of social scientists are studying resource/environmental issues, even today, so any researcher attention that is focused on navel gazing or worse, navel warfare is being diverted away from the research topics themselves. Third and most disturbingly, as human impacts on the environment grow more pervasive, we are likely to see an increasing number of cases where problems involve both ''resource'' and ''environmental'' issues, simultaneously. The true need is thus not to argue about differences or to create them but instead to develop synergies across differing points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparison with urbanites, rural residents live in environments that are less heavily modified by human activity. They also depend more directly on the extraction or use of natural resources and are more likely to suffer the kinds of economic weaknesses that could lead them to favor economic development even at the expense of environmental protection. Yet while some studies have found rural residents to express lower levels of environmental concern than do urbanites, other studies have found that low levels of rural environmental concern may actually reflect lower concerns among farmers in particular. These varied results may be affected by methodologies, including the degree of focus on local environmental concern and the need to separate living in polluted areas from working for polluting industries. Drawing on rural areas with significant employment both in agriculture and in mining, this paper presents data on more specific local concerns about the environment and technological development. The findings show persons in agriculture express higher levels of concern than do other rural persons in the same communities. The results suggest that widespread support for environmental protection may make it difficult to isolate groups having low levels of environmental concern unless greater attention is devoted to the specific environmental issues having the greatest local salience. [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]