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. The United Nations Academic Impact Office (UNAI)
ranked “Commodity Ecology” as first in a list of applied implementation models for Sustainable Development Goal #12
(Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns). Commodity Ecology was the only implementation idea in this
SDG category featured with its own UNAI webpage: https://academicimpact.un.org/content/sdgsinacademia-goal-12
& https://academicimpact.un.org/content/commodity-ecology-initiative-facilitate-sustainable-development

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) plus potable water 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 happily 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.
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 12 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 constitutional engineering' can be a means toward
sustainability: promoting an ecocentric design philosophy for redesigning state constitutions in slow pragmatic steps and
based on how to 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 series of 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.