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.