ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the applicability of an ecologically-oriented rural sociology to the understanding of socioeconomic impacts on global resources. It provides several comments on the nature of the larger discipline of sociology and of the subdiscipline of rural sociology. Rural sociology, perhaps the most longstanding speciality in US sociology, has not survived for and grown due to its innovativeness alone. That rural sociologists were at the center of an emergent ecological viewpoint in the larger discipline of sociology no doubt had many origins. Rural sociology has been shaped by the same centrifugal forces that have characterized the larger discipline. For the vast majority of the Latin American rural population, however, human survival, let alone survival as a self-provisioning or commercially-oriented peasant, represents a protracted struggle with extant socioeconomic and ecological conditions. Data for Brazil and Ecuador effectively illustrate the contrasts between the estate and subfamily-subsistence sectors in Latin America.
