Collaboration for Sustainable Development: Activists, Agents, and Academics in Alabama

Abstract

"Alabama is endowed with a diversity of renewable and non-renewable natural resources. These resources have played a critically important role in the state's social and economic history and will continue to do so into the next century. The state's wealth of natural resources contrasts starkly with the poverty of large numbers of its citizens.

"Research conducted under a previous NRI project has documented that nowhere in the United States is the connection between natural resource dependency and poverty more clearly demonstrated than in Alabama. Historically, natural resources (e.g., coal, timber, ground water and surface water, farm land, and fisheries) have been exploited with little regard to long-term consequences. At the close of the 20th Century, this extractive mind-set has been largely replaced by a narrow commodity production mind-set within both resource-based industries and related public institutions. A sustainable, resource-based rural development strategy has yet to be articulated for the state."