Rural Sociology and the Environment

With increasing awareness of the limits that natural resource reserves and environmental concerns impose on economic growth, rural sociologists have developed new ways of looking at the relationship between man and his environment. This volume surveys changing sociological views of that relationship and explores a holistic, cooperative model of human/nature interaction that reflects the needs of the post-industrial age. In their introduction Field and Burch review significant landmarks in natural resource sociology and comment on some of the underlying aims of rural sociology. The remaining chapters focus on three distinct periods during which rural sociologists have sought to examine man's relationship and adaptation to the environment.

DONALD R. FIELD is currently Associate Dean, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin. When this book was written he was senior scientist in the National Park Service and Professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. The former Associate Regional Director of Science and Technology and Regional Chief Scientist of the National Park Service in Seattle, he is coauthor of Leisure and Recreation Places and coeditor of Water and Community Development and On Interpretation.

WILLIAM R. BURCH, JR., is Hixon Professor of Natural Resource Management in Forestry and Environmental Studies at the Institute of Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is also Director of the Tropical Resources Institute, a research sociologist with the National Park service, and an affiliate faculty member of the College of the Atlantic. He is the author of Daydreams and Nightmares: A Sociological Essay on the American Environment, coauthor of Measuring the Social Impact of National Resource Policies, and editor or coeditor of Social Behavior, Natural Resources and the Environment, Beyond Growth--Essays on Nature, Society and Alternative Futures and Readings in Ecology, Energy and Human Society.