In rural places that sit at the uneasy crossroads between ‘traditional’ natural resource-based production and ‘new’ economies and cultures of aesthetic landscape ‘consumption’, ideas of landscape become increasingly important and contested. This paper examines one such conflict in Nevada County, California - a former mining and ranching community in the Sierra Nevada that has experienced rapid ‘exurban’ in-migration and gentrification. In-migrants brought with them particular ‘aesthetic’ or ‘consumption’ views of landscape that long-time residents with continuing ties to the ‘old’ production landscape viewed as political threats. These tensions have recently ignited a political firestorm over a proposal by the environmentalist-dominated county government to incorporate landscape-scale aesthetic and environmental principles into county planning. The ferocity of this contest reflects the multiple issues at stake, including competition between different forms of rural capitalism, class conflict and social control, and cultural frictions. At each level of this multi-tiered conflict, ideas of landscape are key. Together, political ecology and new cultural geographical studies of landscape provide powerful insights into the ways that the politics of landscape - revolving around the question of who ‘owns’ the landscape or decides how it ‘should’ look - become a pivotal node in the shifting human-environment dialectic.

Explaining why poverty exists in natural resource-dependent areas (NRDAs) presents a formidable challenge, given variability in the nature, spatial manifestations, and social character of human well-being. Nonetheless, there are structures and processes unique to NRDAs, including resource degradation, increasingly restrictive public land use policies, concentrated land ownership, and high rates of occupational injury that create the potential for impoverization in NRDAs. Given this complex context, we examine two theories of poverty. We find processes such as the shift from labor to capital-intensive resource extraction, profit squeezes, and increased capital mobility identified in advanced capitalism theory help to explain NRDA poverty. In addition, processes identified in the theory of internal colonialism such as unequal exchange, the clash between traditional and secular cultures, and the

In the on‐going sociological debate over rural‐urban differences, rural conflict over natural resources is often attributed to environmental attitudes of new residents from urban areas. An alternative hypothesis is that new residents provide not new attitudes, but a new voice for attitudes already held by many local residents. Data from a survey of residents of communities near two national forests show little support for the hypothesis that residential status affects forest management attitudes, dissatisfaction, or action. The findings support the “new‐voice” thesis and show that it is often a female voice.

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ABSTRACT. In 2014, the Third International Conference on the resilience of social-ecological systems chose the theme "resilience and development: mobilizing for transformation." The conference aimed specifically at fostering an encounter between the experiences and thinking focused on the issue of resilience through a social and ecological system perspective, and the experiences focused on the issue of resilience through a development perspective. In this perspectives piece, we reflect on the outcomes of the meeting and document the differences and similarities between the two perspectives as discussed during the conference, and identify bridging questions designed to guide future interactions. After the conference, we read the documents (abstracts, PowerPoints) that were prepared and left in the conference database by the participants (about 600 contributions), and searched the web for associated items, such as videos, blogs, and tweets from the conference participants. All of these documents were assessed through one lens: what do they say about resilience and development? Once the perspectives were established, we examined different themes that were significantly addressed during the conference. Our analysis paves the way for new collective developments on a set of issues: (1) Who declares/assign/cares for the resilience of what, of whom? (2) What are the models of transformations and how do they combine the respective role of agency and structure? (3) What are the combinations of measurement and assessment processes? (4) At what scale should resilience be studied? Social transformations and scientific approaches are coconstructed. For the last decades, development has been conceived as a modernization process supported by scientific rationality and technical expertise. The definition of a new perspective on development goes with a negotiation on a new scientific approach. Resilience is presently at the center of this negotiation on a new science for development.