Reviewer Appreciation and Other News

the next few years it will become more important to face the fact that most cultures around the world have not found ways to create sustainable communities and regions. Perhaps we cannot address enough of the necessary factors on the long list, perhaps we do not have sufficiently effective technologies, or perhaps our skills in engineering public policies are too primitive. What is obvious is that we still conduct our lives so that the waste we generate is shipped somewhere " away " ; costs are externalized to some payer other than the pollutant producer; and persistent toxic chemicals are found in the environment. Human interactions in most geographic regions do not work as well as the feedback loops in ecosystems and homeostasis within a metabolic system. Permaculturist Bill Molison said that " the ecosystem is the teacher " (Molison 1988). Through Holistic Resource Management, Savory (1988) sought to bring an enormous array of natural forces and human tools to bear in ways that allow range land ecosystems to reach higher levels of productivity and stability. But the progress that has been made to date falls far short of the need. In the average county-sized unit (30 × 30 miles) of the United States or the world, the best that can be seen is isolated examples of low-polluting businesses and a few restorative economic activities that build and enhance the resource base. If we are willing to tackle the internal complexity of the proteome, we must not shrink from the search for democratic processes that will enhance human-to-human efforts for sustainable development. A key reason to recognize the lack of progress is that we are exhausting the ways to protect humans and ecosystems. There is an ever lengthening list of chemicals and toxic factors that are produced in increasingly large quantities in industrialized countries. Consequently, the only way to reduce exposures at an acceptable cost seems to be to redesign regional and national economies so that hazardous factors are not generated in the first place. NIMBY (" not in my back yard ") reactions show us that people are concerned about things that pollute close to home. A larger question is, what kind of jobs do people want in their regions? Jobs using green technologies are about the closest things conceivable to a regional panacea; yet industrial development boards and economic development corporations seldom offer incentives to attract or create …