The state of Coos County: local perspectives on community and change

Coos County residents are largely optimistic about their future despite significant economic challenges, especially in the Berlin/Gorham area. As part of a three-pronged effort to understand the ongoing changes in New Hampshire\u27s North Country and surrounding counties, researchers at the Carsey Institute have surveyed more than 1,700 adult residents of Coos County, New Hampshire, and Oxford County, Maine

Race, class, and community in a southern forest-dependent region

Based on a Community and Environment in Rural America survey, this brief looks at four counties in Alabama. It finds blacks and whites have different outcomes in the community, despite expectations of regional stability and greater equality. Though they reported similar rates of social mobility, African Americans in the Black Belt of Alabama are disproportionately poorer and employed in lower-skill jobs than whites

Continuity and change in Coos County: results from the 2010 North Country CERA survey

This brief from Chris Colocousis and Justin Young uses the most recent North Country CERA survey to focus on change and continuity in Coos County between 2007 and 2010, and then makes comparisons of the present conditions across the three study counties. The authors examine such topics as community problems, environmental and economic concerns, and community cohesion and confidence in the local government. They report that Coos County residents remain highly concerned about the lack of economic opportunities in the region, and their concern about population decline has increased in recent years. Coos residents see the economic future of their communities primarily tied to both recreation and traditional forest-based industries, though they have become somewhat more polarized with respect to levels of support for economic development versus environmental protection. The authors conclude that challenges stemming from the economic restructuring of the past decade have been deepened by the most recent recession, and issues of limited economic opportunities, financial hardship, and population decline have become more pronounced. As the North Country moves into the future, one of its primary challenges will be working out a balance between what can sometimes be conflicting demands on the region’s substantial natural resources

Environmental, economic, and social changes in rural America visible in survey data and satellite images

This brief focuses on the changing landscapes of different types of rural America where social, economic, and ecological changes are occurring over large areas: the Northern Forest, Central Appalachia, and the Pacific Northwest. These three study sites embody varying historical reliance on land and natural resources and represent very different socioeconomic dynamics. Their common and unique challenges are explored, along with the far-reaching implications of land-cover change in their areas. Data used includes both telephone surveys and satellite imagery to illustrate the unique changes seen in rural America in recent years. (Please note that it is best to print this brief in color.

Community change in the Northern forest

In 2006, the pulp mill in Berlin, NH was closed and dismantled, marking an end to more than a century of dependence on the pulp and paper industry. The city\u27s location in a high-amenity and recreation-dependent region suggests that the rebirth of the local economy would follow a general transition from a production orientation to consumption. Using in-depth interviews and other qualitative methods, survey work, and secondary quantitative data I chronicle a century change, focusing on how the industry has shaped the community and its present ability to reinvent itself. I analyze the ways in which patterns of change and redevelopment are structured by the local social, economic, and environmental contexts, emphasizing society-environment interactions. The community became stigmatized on the basis of industrially-produced environmental harm, and this negative image has proven a subtle, though real obstacle to redevelopment. The physical decline of the city\u27s built environment, the mill site\u27s central location, and a heavily industrialized river corridor have also constrained development opportunities. More than a century of forest management for pulpwood production has left the surrounding region with a relatively young forest comprised of smaller-diameter and lower-value timber stands, and large-scale biomass energy production has emerged as the primary new wood-based industry. Discourse about the community\u27s economic future has largely centered on potential uses of the former mill site. The local small business community has been instrumental in shaping these discussions, though in ways consistent with divergent consumption- or production-oriented economic interests. I call into question the ubiquity of the post-productivist transition in high-amenity rural communities. Despite Berlin\u27s location, the community has not turned squarely toward tourism and consumption as its new economic base. Instead, elements of place---particularly its embodied industrial history---have led the community into a mixed turn in which both production- and consumption-oriented activity are emerging alongside a broadly public sector-dependent local economy. In employing a case study approach to rural redevelopment I have shown how the specificity and distinctiveness of particular arrangements of geographical location, material form, and meaning--- place---matter in great ways for how patterns of social and economic transformation play out across space

Place effects on environmental views

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\u27s 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. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Place matters: challenges and opportunities in four rural Americas

A survey of 7,800 rural Americans in 19 counties across the country has led to the Carsey Institute\u27s first major publication that outlines four distinctly different rural Americas—amenity, decline, chronic poverty, and those communities in decline that are also amenity-rich—each has unique challenges in this modern era that will require different policies than their rural neighbors

Migration from resource depletion: The case of the Faroe Islands.

Abstract Modern fisheries crises present special cases of the boom-and-bust cycles common to natural-resource-dependent communities. The Faroe Islands, an affluent North Atlantic society that is among the most fisheries dependent on earth, experienced a crisis during the 1990s after resources became depleted through a combination of overfishing and environmental stress Unemployment and business failures ensued: out-migration, mainly by young adults, altered the size and composition of the islands\u27 population. Out-migration paralleled changes in fish catches. In the wake of this crisis, the islands\u27 population now is older. Smaller communities tend to have deficits of young women, although that pattern predates the recent crisis. These findings replicate observations from other fisheries-dependent societies, but during the Faroese crisis the demographic impacts of environmental change were notably rapid and strong. © Taylor and Francis Inc