This book is intended for people interested in the environment, American society, rural and urban affairs, social impact assessment, and urban structures generally. It is also aimed at industrial and community planners and natural resource development firms, and formulated to implement a social policy concerning resource development and public agencies. "Ranching, Mining, and the Human Impact of Natural Resources Development "reports and observes people whose lives have been importantly affected by industrialization of rural communities in the American West. Such community change research is rarely done, but is invaluable for its real world groundings for a variety of social science theories. This study evolved out of ethnographic research of Western communities done over a full decade. Initially performed to meet requirements for social impact analysis, these studies have a much larger concern, namely identifying those areas of social change that contribute to the standing of small communities and how they persist in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds of the highly advanced urban complex. Professor Gold has written the first work which examines and accounts for the rise of local citizens' groups to a sense of being a community. Its account of this process covers both ordinarily slow and extraordinarily rapid areas of change in Western societies. It places the "Gemeinschaft "in proper perspective as the foundation upon which all other aspects of community social structure are built. In this regard it is a contribution to basic social theory, showing clearly the interrelation between small community and large society elements of the structure and functioning of community life. The work is subtly textured, combining structural, cultural, and symbolic perspectives in its account of the experience of the community of Sagebrush. Gold's monograph is one of a kind. No other book brings together the story of social effects of natural resource development projects in the American West.