Appalachia is a region in trouble. Even in the more remote coves and hollows, major social and economic changes are disturbing the traditional ways of life. The conditions which have made it a pocket of poverty cannot be easily eradicated; and the rapid changes of recent years have added further severe problems of adjustment which deeply affect the family, church life, education, the folk sub­culture, and, above all, the individual. Out­migration, psychological dislocation, and cultural alienation are the result. The nine contributing scholars have lived and worked in Appalachia; they know the people and their customs, their problems and their needs. They are thoroughly familiar with the programs now in operation, and are well qualified to evaluate their success or failure in terms of those needs. Furthermore, their findings can be applied to other regions and nations, wherever an isolated group has been abruptly incorporated into the mainstream of society while many of its peculiar problems remain unsolved. Rural Appalachia may in fact be considered a microcosm of the underdeveloped nations of the world; the issues raised here far transcend the importance of a regional study. The essays are grouped according to four general areas of research. The first part deals with the individual in his society; the second with six social institutions—economy, government, family, religion, education, and power structure; the third with methods and objectives of change; and the fourth with the aims of change agencies, particularly the Extension Service of the future. As the tangle of problems, strains, and tensions is explored, the focus remains steadily upon immediate and long­term effects on the individual. The book is dedicated to "the professional field workers in programs of directed change . . . struggling on the one hand with ideas, theories, and conceptual innovations, and on the other hand with the immediate realities of the local situations."

In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.

Think of this small book as a collection of action snapshots of a region on the move. Sometimes the focus is on the land itself, such as "brownfield" sites in western Pennsylvania or small farms in southern New York. Often it's on infrastructure, like a replacement for an aging bridge in Tennessee or links between roads, rail, and a waterway in northeastern Mississippi. Frequently the camera zooms in on sophisticated technology, such as laptops used by schoolchildren in Georgia or satellite-assisted surveys in western Maryland. Always, always, we see people in action-working together to build something. What they're building may be a structure, like a water line along a rocky ridge in western Virginia; or a strategy, like a Kentucky program designed to produce homegrown doctors for rural Appalachia. Sometimes they're investing in projects whose payoffs may not materialize for a generation, as with a West Virginia youth leadership camp or an Alabama county's efforts to encourage its talented high school graduates to stay in the area. One way or another, all these stories are about capacity building-acts of faith in the future of Appalachia. They're also about collaboration within communities, across the Appalachian Region, and with partners in the larger world outside Appalachia. In that respect, they're evidence of how Appalachia has changed during the 37 years since the President's Appalachian Regional Commission called Appalachia "a region apart" from the rest of America. But they're also examples of a continuing commitment to the vision that made change possible. In 1965, economically speaking, Appalachia's eggs were in a very few baskets, each vulnerable to market shocks. The Region depended heavily on the extraction of natural resources and on agriculture. In the southern states, manufacturing meant mostly low-wage textile mills; in the northern Rust Belt, it meant heavy industry in aging plants employing fewer and fewer workers. From 1950 to 1960, a decade when national employment grew 15 percent, Appalachian employment actually declined. One in three Appalachians lived in poverty, a rate 50 percent higher than the national average. The Region's narrow mountain roads choked off the growth of commerce and industry and constricted people's access to jobs, schools, and services. They were used by trucks hauling coal and timber to railheads, and, all too often, by some of the Region's most talented young people moving to places far away