Commodity Ecology is an idea for facilitating sustainable regional development through ongoing collaboration between consumers and producers. It uses 130 material/technological categories to assess sustainable options available, choices made, and potential for sharing resources between categories. Regular meetings and a smartphone app help stakeholders discuss regional priorities and deficiencies to improve sustainability.

2. Commodity Ecology is an idea for how to facilitate social, economic, and environmentally sound development. It is
an ongoing self-maintained regional collaboration between consumers and producers for sustainability in any region of
the world. It is diagrammed here: http://commodityecology.blogspot.com.
Instead of applying abstract social rubrics for goals (that can have highly varied interpretations for how or when they
are achieved), the rubrics for Commodity Ecology comprise a set of 130 different material/technological categories, in
which we can ask three interrelated questions: “do we have enough sustainable choices available in this category yet,
in this particular region?”, and “are we choosing well in this category toward sustainability yet, in this particular
region?”, and “how might we help out local consumers, producers and environment by understanding what products or
wastes in one commodity category might be more productively used in other categories?”
These three questions are aided by a regular conference and by the durable connections of a shared mobile
smartphone application used by practitioners, citizens, consumers, and producers in an area to talk to each other.
What can they usefully talk about? In an ongoing way, they can talk about what material choices are available
sustainably in a region by category, as well as in turn (equally important) note immediately in what categories they are
deficient, for improvement; what useful wastes or products that are found in a region that might be applied well as
inputs into other regional categories; and what sustainable choices are dreamed of in a region that are not available
yet. In the latter, this creates an ongoing venue for sharing knowledge of what sustainable markets consumers do
want in the future that fail to exist yet in the present. This can encourage consumers and producers to pre-develop
such choices for the market more predictably without exclusively relying on the later market mechanism per se, and it
can encourage consumers to invite such a missing producer to their region. This is why Commodity Ecology has been
usefully described as a “grassroots command economy” driven not by states, though by the people in a particular
region. Both consumers and producers use the rubric (and ongoing meetings as well as the conceived mobile
smartphone application) to get clear on what are their own priorities toward sustainability for more efficient uses of
existing products and waste streams economically shared and knitted together. Second, Commodity Ecology has
been described as well as a more systematic ‘rapid rural appraisal’ (RRA) of an entire region’s economy that through
the rubric can be easily debated and shared. It is suggested that what is known in the development trade as the “Four
F’s” (food, fuel, fodder, fiber) might be considered a baseline of priorities for people, while the other wider extensions
of commodity categories would depend on the complexities of a regional economy or its future goals.
Below is a concluding summary stressing the flexibility and multiplier effects of Commodity Ecology and how it
interfaces with a global economy.
For a summary, Commodity Ecology is simultaneously a rubric, a brainstorming tool for facilitating regional
collaboration, and a way to measure progress toward sustainability defined as filling all categories with sustainable
options and sustainable material flows of wastes and products. It is thus a modular organizational idea that can be
fitted to the world’s different ecological, climatological, and cultural settings and different priorities while different
groups still can enjoy and conceive of themselves as part of something bigger. This is because the same rubrics are
being applied in brotherly or sisterly regions elsewhere. After several regions have applied the same rubric, there is a
multiplier effect. Having the same rubrics across multiple regions means that different regions may learn autonomously
and laterally from each other in how they may knit together a more sustainable economy of products and wastes by
learning from mistakes and successes of other regions.
This is not conceived of as a replacement of a globalized economy, though as a useful and sorely required ‘ecological
check and balance’ to maintain our world’s cultural diversity and regional biodiversity as intertwined with multiple
regional economies and nested within such a globalized economy, and as for providing perhaps for the most
vulnerable people stronger options both within a global economy and against the destabilizing ups and down of a
global economy simultaneously. Multiple, regionally-sound sustainable representative of ways of life should continue
to exist for keeping open different options for our future against a current short-term-minded social, economic, and
ecologically corrosive effect of wider economies that fail currently to have a good long term plan for sustainability or for
how we may continue to live well and happy in very different regions worldwide. Commodity Ecologies are seen as
both a future plan for regional development as well as a ‘back-up’ plan against a current globalizing economy which
has no “Plan B” for how people may live sustainably yet. Commodity Ecology provides us all with more options
“economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed” (to quote William McDonough). In conclusion,
Commodity Ecology creates multiple venues for the wealth of material and technological ideas we have already
created for sustainability that are not being applied.

3. Professor Mark D. Whitaker is a Sociology professor and author. He graduated from the highest ranked Sociology
Department in the U.S. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. His degree is in Sociology and Environmental
Sociology, with a doctoral minor in Urban and Regional Planning. He has two Bachelors of Arts degrees, one in world
history and the other in comparative and historical religious studies. Toward sustainability, he researches interactions
between environment, technology/materials, and society in modern states. Additionally, he employs comparative historical
methods for what can be learned about our long-term chosen patterns of environmental problems and sustainability via
deeper historical analysis.
He has lived and worked in Korea for 10 years, teaching at 3 Universities. He was the first foreign hire at the Sociology
Department at Ewha Womans University, in Seoul, Korea. He was the first foreign hire at the Sociology Department at
Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea. From 2015, he is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Department of
Technology and Society, Stony Brook University,SUNY Korea, Songdo, Incheon. He is married to a Korean national.
As an environmental sociologist, he researches the durable social interconnections and interpenetrations between
humans and the environment as the basis of sociology. He is searching for a way to institutionalize a sustainable society.
Information: http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/ He thinks this can be popularized by an ongoing conference and by
building an associated mobile smartphone application, respectively, to facilitate an ongoing real world and digital/online
collaboration to this purpose.
His wide comparative historical interest ranges from how bad choices cause environmental degradation and human
immiseration in ancient societies (environmental policy; technology/materials policy; interactions of political, cultural,
and economic change) to how to contribute to better choices today in current environmental policy toward
sustainability and greater quality of life.
To elaborate the above, he has an extensive familiarity with the history, religions, and politics of Asia drawn from two
previous Bachelors of Arts degrees (comparative religious studies and world history degrees) and drawn from his
dissertation on common environmental degradation processes in China, Japan, and Europe over several thousand years.
He began to publish that dissertation research in 2009 in book form. In 2010, on the strength of this work’s applied policy
implications, he won a grant award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 2013, he won a second grant award
from the Korean National Science Foundation for a co-written article with a Korean professor.
He plans a series of volumes to reorient historical and sociological views to take into account how the politics of
environmental degradation and environmental amelioration can be a common cross-cultural and cross-epoch theme from
which we can learn, for the present and for the future. Drawing on sociological research and political science, his first book
Toward a Bioregional State(2005) was the first book on how a 'green constitutionalengineering' can be a means toward
sustainability: promoting an ecocentric design philosophy for redesigning state constitutions in slow pragmatic steps and
based on howto conceive of an ecological interaction between formal institutions, informal politics,and the environment for
a fresh start. Excerpts of this book are at Google Books, online here: https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=XUFsmeeReVEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=toward+a+bioregional+state&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz15H6y7PZAhWJebwKHY5yBe8Q6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=toward%20a%20bioregional%20state&f=false
His second book Ecological Revolution (2009) was the first in a planned seriesof books of comparative historical
environmental sociology, arguing for a similar process worldwide of how mere choices cause environmental problems or
improvement: either how unrepresentative territorial state organizations and their policies get involved in long-term
environmental degradation, or how more representative ones contribute toward potentially environmental improvement. He
has almost completed a manuscript describing in more detail this “green theory of history.” Subsequent books will be
detailed ‘re-envisioning’ treatments of the separate yet similar histories of China, Japan, India, and Europe that ‘bring
human-created environmental change back in’ to explain an associated political, cultural, and economic change in long-
term historical time, instead of environmentalism only conceived of as influencing present day political economies.
So far he has taught over 20 different graduate and undergraduate courses ranging from regional sociological courses
(Latin America; Comparative World Regions; Sociology of the Bottom Billion Countries of the World) to Environmental
Sociology, Political Sociology, Comparative Historical Sociology, Sociological Methods, Social Movements and Collective
Behavior, Network Society, Comparative Historical Youth Culture, Sociology of Work and Occupations, Futures Studies
and Forecasting, Social Stratification and Inequality, Social Welfare and Quality of Life, Mobile Revolution in Development,
Technology Assessment, and Mobile Technologies in Disaster Risk Reduction. His vita is available by request.
His goals are to explain a common problematic sociological process that leads to environmental degradation or
environmental improvement while being a resource for the many solutions for sustainability currently available technically
and materially. Because of widening environmental crisis, environmental sociology is a useful background for:
technological engineers, public health workers, journalists, politicalscientists, economists, business administration,
material scientists, government consultancy (environmental impact assessment; urban and regional planning), and public
relations. Generally, environmental sociology is useful for choosing a better future by understanding the health, ecological,
and economic ramifications of different choices of state, industrial, and agricultural policies.
SUMMARY: Dr. Mark Douglas Whitaker (U. of Wisconsin- Madison, Environmental Sociology), taught over 20 different
courses; interested in comparative environmental degradation and sustainability policy; two books written; interested in
Commodity Ecology: http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/; email: mark.whitaker@sunykorea.ac.kr.