Rural areas have a disproportionate share of the US poverty population. Like poor urban communities, the persistence and severity of poverty in rural America can be linked to a limited opportunity structure which is the outcome of both past social and economic development policies and current economic transformation. Many rural communities lack stable employment, opportunities for mobility, investment in the community, and diversity in the economy and other social institutions. They are increasingly socially and spatially isolated and particularly vulnerable to adverse effects from structural economic change. This study reviews research on rural poverty and traces its relationship to its historical roots in social, political, and economic inequality and to current economic restructuring. Relevant sources of information on rural poverty include classic community and regional analyses, studies of rural-urban migration, regional development and underdevelopment, economic restructuring, and labor market analysis.

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well‐studied “social bases of environmental concern,” which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people's environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed‐effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource‐based industries, and individual social‐position and ideological factors, there remains significant place‐to‐place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual‐level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences.

Foundations and the neil and Louise tillotson Fund of the new Hampshire Charitable Foundation.

Urban and rural poverty researchers have been paying increased attention to the social context in which the poor are embedded. This paper argues that the scale, familiarity among social actors, and relatively bounded nature of poor rural communities offer unique advantages for understanding why poverty persists across generations in the same places. Rural sociologists can observe the social interaction associated with particular class and race relations, track the evolution of these patterns over time, and uncover the process through which the social class context perpetuates poverty and underdevelopment. Studies of poverty in rural Texas, rural Mississippi, and Appalachia are reviewed to illustrate how political economies that rely on low wages and extreme control over labor generate rigid stratification. This structure of inequality determines social interaction and the allocation of opportunities in rural communities, blocking upward mobility, and undermines investment and trust in social institutions, blocking development.

Marine fisheries and fishing societies develop around the resources provided by a particular ecosystem. As they exploit these resources, fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes fishery and society to adapt in turn. This process is illustrated by fisheries, ecological and social data tracking dramatic changes on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula and its adjacent marine ecosystem, the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. There a longstanding fishery for cod and other groundfish collapsed in the 1990s, and was replaced by fisheries targeting invertebrates. The new invertebrate fisheries have different socioeconomic characteristics than the former groundfish fisheries. The shift in target species reflects deep ecological changes that were underway at least a decade before official recognition of the crisis. Our analysis of biological data reveals that the main ecological changes occurred during "the glory years" of the 1980s, when Newfoundland's domestic fisheries were at their peak. Overfishing and interactions with adverse climatic conditions drove the changes. As the ecosystem transformed, human population declined due to outmigration, and social indicators show signs of distress. Accounts by outport residents paint a generational picture of social change.