AGRICULTURAL STRUCTURE AND RURAL ECOLOGY: TOWARD A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT.

Rural sociologists in North America and Western Europe have shown increasing interest in the issues of rural environmental quality, the structure of agriculture, and rural underdevelopment during the past decade. This paper seeks to demonstrate the profound connections among these phenomena, particularly in terms of how ongoing changes in agricultural structure have had major impacts on both the rural environment and the socioeconomic fabric of rural communities. It is argued that while many of these changes are rooted in the dynamics of the Western capitalist societies, state policy has also been crucial in shaping change in rural society. A case is thereby made that a more holistic or integrative perspective -- essentially a political economy -- is necessary to understand the origins of these rural social and economic problems and conceptualize strategies through which they can be solved. Selected examples of the application of such a perspective are developed in the final portion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]