Human interactions are crucial for sustainable development.

In 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 x 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 those kinds of jobs. Cultivating a green industry cluster should become a goal of economic development corporations.

In some regions of the world, methods to protect resources or at least forestall decline are being used with some success. Tuscany (Italy) and New Zealand have enlightened economies that protect, conserve, and restore the countryside in a manner that provides an optimistic and stable future. The Amish in the United States (e.g., Pennsylvania and Ohio) achieve a similar effect by carefully controlling many technology and social factors in the countryside of their farms and villages. Communities in these areas are largely meeting the classic definition of sustainable development--meeting the needs of the present generation while preserving the resource base for future generations.

The city of Curitiba, in Parana, Brazil, also deserves mention for extraordinary efforts at creating sustainability. AS a provincial capital with a population of 2.2 million, Curitiba has systems of public transit, housing, food distribution, parks, and government that avoid many of the environmental ills of other cities around the world. The city has established the Green Exchange, which exemplifies Curitiba's penchant for solutions that are "simple, fast, fire, and cheap" (Hawken et al. 2000). As Neal Pierce, the columnist on local government said, Curitiba "... is benefiting from a flow of interconnected, interactive, evolving solutions" (Pierce 2000).

Although regional solutions are scarce, it is not necessary to look far to find progress at the micro level. West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, has constructed a building that produces more energy from wind and solar power than it consumes. The excess is stored in an electrically powered van that is used [-] or transport errands around the campus. That would seem to be a better form of research to fund than that aimed at fossil fuels or nuclear power. [A picture is available from the Alternative Energy Institute (2003)].

Regarding some of the major flows of materials, there is progress on the recycling of construction and demolition debris. The technique of deconstruction is emerging as a green business that uses what would otherwise be waste materials, conserves space in landfills, and has a built-in job-creation aspect. Deconstruction is the reverse of construction and dismembers and recycles up to 90% of the materials in a structure. When human labors supplant the demolition bulldozer, in creates jobs as well as sellable by-products from resources that are readily available.

When the new campus of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center was being constructed in Austin, Texas, the bidding process called for all materials that were normally hauled away to remain on the site. The soil and stone aggregates were reused to build berms to channel rain water toward the native species plantings. The wood chips from vegetation had to be stored on location for building the trails. A major payoff was that it was much cheaper than the usual method of hauling these materials away to the landfill. Moreover, contractors have continued the practice in bids for site preparation and landscaping throughout the region.

In the regional systems of governance, it is the human interactions at the regional level that do not work to prevent pollution and maintain the resource base. It is a well-known concept that there is no "waste" in wilderness ecosystems; everything decomposes and is reused, driven by renewable energy sources. But wilderness has no human interactions and no impacts from the human economic necessities of job creation, livable housing, income disparities, a health care system, schools, funding of the arts, and so on.

Biosphere II (University of Arizona 1999) proved that one particular approach to creating a bubble environment of human and ecosystem interaction in microcosm did not work. If humans could not create a functioning system in miniature, what hope is there for a working regional system? My answer to this question is that the norm should involve looking at the assets of the entire region. A region's heritage, ethnic influences, folk arts, churches and temples, agriculture, biological diversity, business organizations, landscape, youth, seniors, educational institutes, and climate are just a few factors that should be considered. For example, if the fine woods that are recovered from deconstructing houses and buildings are to be used in making profitable goods, a thriving community, of furniture artisans, carpenters, and interior designers would be needed. Otherwise, the wood would be shipped out of the community to create the high value-added products elsewhere.

In seeking to build the social infrastructure with the full range of diversity, Harvard professor Robert Putnam stressed the importance of social capital. In Better Together, Putnam and Feldstein (2003) break the process down into "bonding" between people of similar backgrounds and "bridging" between diverse peoples. When these processes are used by groups to influence government policy, communities work better to serve their residents. "Environment and social solutions only emerge when local people are empowered and honored" (Hawken et al, 2000).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides a wide-ranging resource on sustainable indicators on human and other social factors that are not often considered. Communities and regions that wish to measure whether factors such as crime, economic development, biodiversity, or pollution levels are increasing or decreasing can find links to several helpful sites with environmental, economic, and social indicators at the U.S. EPA's Green Communities website (U.S. EPA 2003). Maintaining and enhancing social capital with many linkages and public participation is an important precursor to building viable, least-polluting communities.

As we find new knowledge through environmental health research, we need to share this information with those affected by means such as this journal and the community outreach and education programs of the extramural centers. We also need to strengthen our communication ties to regional and statewide economic planning groups.

For regional and national planners, the question will continue to be, How do we live on this land now so that we can live on this land indefinitely?

REFERENCES

Alternative Energy Institute. 2003. Available: www.wtamu.edu/research/aei/[accessed 3 November 2003].

Cook D. 1998. Responding to the NIMBY syndrome. In: Standard Handbook of Hazardous Treatment and Disposal (Freeman H, ed). 2nd ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 3.46-3.52.

Goldstein G. 1999. Waste not, want not. Architecture 88(3):131

Hawken P, Lovins A, Lovins H. 2000. Natural Capitalism. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 2003. Available: http://www.wildflower.org/ [accessed 3 November 2003].

Molison B. 1988. Permaculture, A Designers' Manual. Tyalgum, New South Wales, Australia: Tagari Press.

Pierce NR. 2000. The World's Best Managed City? Available: http://www.newhorizons.org/ trans/international/pierce.htm [accessed 3 November 2003].

Putnam R, Feldstein L. 2003. Better Together: Restoring the American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Savory A. 1908, Holistic Resource Management. Washington, DC: Island Press.

University of Arizona. 1999. Biosphere II. Available: http://www.library.arizona.edu/ images/eng102/biosphere2/biosphere.htm [accessed 3 November 2003].

U.S. EPA. 2000. Green Communities Homepage. Available: http://www.epa.gov/ greenkit/indicator.htm [accessed 7 November 2003].

Don Cook worked at the U.S. EPA for 18 years, and his jobs included Congressional Fellow, director of environmental education, workforce development, and administration of acid rain research. In the 1990s, he worked at the Texas General Land Office in rural affairs and sustainable energy development. He has been in the Community Outreach and Education Program since 1996. He was recently elected to the American Association of Cancer Education. The Community Outreach and Education Program is supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS ES07784).

Don Cook

Community Outreach and Education Program

Center for Research on Environmental Disease

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Smithville, Texas

E-mail: [e-mail]