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Recent advances in gas and oil drilling technology have led to dramatic boomtown development in many rural areas that have endured extended periods of economic decline. In Pennsylvania's Marcellus gas fields, the recent development of unconventional shale gas resources has not been without controversy. It has been variously framed as a major opportunity for economic revitalization at the local and regional levels and energy independence at the national level, but also as a significant environmental risk, with uncertain and uneven economic benefits. We use data from a survey conducted in 309 school districts located within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region to study the ways local stakeholders perceive both risk and opportunity associated with gas extraction from Marcellus Shale. Our analyses indicate that there is a strong positive association between perceptions of risk and opportunity associated with gas extraction. Further, the intensity of perception of both risk and opportunity is directly associated with the amount of local drilling, suggesting the complexity of local contexts within which local stakeholders evaluate rapid boomtown-associated community change. In total, these findings complicate the framing of unconventional gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region, and indeed boomtown growth overall, as fundamentally polarizing issues. (Contains 4 tables, 1 figure, and 5 footnotes.)

The agricultural sector offers a unique opportunity to examine the topic of climate change because agriculture is more susceptible to climate disruptions than many other industrial sectors. Based on the analysis of the survey data and in-depth interviews with specialty-crop producers in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, we test the capacity of ecological modernization and treadmill of production perspectives to explain how resource-intensive producers recognize water availability and climate change as threats to their operation's economic viability. We find that producers in capitalist markets recognize natural resource problems; however, they fail to respond to climate change beyond natural resource problems. We also find that local markets play a positive role in raising environmental awareness of producers. Finally, our finding on the association between the perceptions of water availability and climate change goes beyond the treadmill of production dualism that only theorizes the impacts of economic factors on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of industrial maize farming in Turkey during the first decade of this century points to the primacy of economic development over ecological concerns at a time when global nitrogen and phosphorus flows already exceeded safe limits. In this article we focus on the relations of production as the driver of an economic sector that not only has ecological but also social costs. Through a trend analysis of maize yields as our ecological indicator, we explain how relations of production influence industrial maize farming in this period and how different modes of production (e.g., simple‐commodity producers) participate in a corporate market. A "treadmill of production" perspective argues that simple commodity producers are excluded from industrial treadmills. Our findings indicate that provinces with predominantly simple commodity production experienced significant increases in maize yields and adapted to the industrial maize treadmill. However, there is a significant difference between simple‐commodity producers and large farms that widens over the decade. Our results suggest that simple‐commodity producers are included in ecologically harmful economic practices with significant obstacles. We call for a revision of the assumed relationship between the size of economic operations and their ecological impacts in the critical sociology literature and policy approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]