Proposed energy resource development in the arid western United States raises a number of potential problems for an environment that does not have a great deal of resiliency. Projected population increases associated with large-scale development activities may go beyond the capacity of small, isolated rural communities to absorb them; and constraints on western agricultural and industrial development-for example, demands for water already exceeding the supply available-also limit energy development. The authors of this wide-ranging book first evaluate western energy resources, then objectively discuss the consequences of development on the region's physical and social environments. Among the questions they consider are: Who will reap the economic benefits of development, and who will bear the environmental costs? What will be the effects on the environment? The social structure? The quality of life? Are open spaces a national treasure in their present form, or should they be regarded as space available for development? What are the unique demands of reclamation in the arid west? And, given the recent trend of western states-rights militancy and shifts of population to the southwest, what impact will new federal and state policies have on resource management?

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"Cyrus M. McKell is vice-president of research at NPI, a biotechnology firm in Salt Lake City, Utah. Botany, plant ecology, and natural resources management are among his specialties. He has written over 160 articles on arid land management, physiology of rangeland plants, land rehabilitation, land use planning, and shrub biology. He served on the Utah Council for Energy Conservation and Development and is currently chairman of the AAAS Committee on Arid Lands. Donald G. Browne is a petroleum geologist working out of Denver, Colorado. His areas of interest include enhanced oil recovery techniques, comparative risk evaluations of energy systems, and the geology of the northern Rocky Mountains. Elinor C. Cruze is senior associate at World Resources Institute in Washington, D. C. Trained in zoology, population biology, and ecology, she has written on sustainable resource development and energy use in agriculture. She is currently directing a policy study using ecosystem analysis to determine the consequences of major loss of biological diversity in tropical countries. William R. Freudenburg, associate professor of rural sociology at Washington State University, Pullman, has specialized in social impact assessment and the policy-making process, especially societal decision-making on controversial issues. He has written more than two dozen scholarly papers on the social impacts of coal, oil shale, nuclear energy, and other types of energy development and is coeditor of Public Reactions to Nuclear Power: Are There Critical Masses? (with E. Rosas AAAS Selected Symposium 93; Westview, 1984). Richard L. Perrine is professor of engineering and applied science at the University of California, Los Angeles. xivHe is the author of numerous publications on enhanced oil recovery; coal; the nuclear fuel cycle; solar, wind, geo-thermal, and biomass energy resources; and environmental and resource management. In 1975, he received the Outstanding Merit Award for Contributions to Environmental Engineering by the Institute for the Advancement of Engineering. Fred Roach is an economist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A specialist in resource and environmental economics, he has written more than twenty papers and reports on water and energy over the past five years."