Reuniting Economy and Ecology in Sustainable Development is part of a series on the various aspects of sustainable development, where "community" focuses on the primacy and quality of relationships among people sharing a particular place and between people and their environment. "Development" means personal and social transformation to a higher level of consciousness and a greater responsibility to be one anothers keepers, and "sustainability" is the act whereby one generation saves options by passing them to the next generation, which saves options by passing them onto the next and so on. The vision put forth in this book is one of melding ecology and economy into a unifying concept of social-environmental sustainability. The author suggests that dividing ecology and economy conceptually will destroy society as we know it. Our task as adults is to repair the environment for the children who must inherit it. The link between economics and ecology and the immense potential of that connection to influence the process of change within communities is the focus of this book. The authors theorize that in a healthy, future-oriented community there is a dominant role for sustainability. Each of these four concepts - economics, ecology, community and sustainability - are intimidating on their own. There has been volumes written on each topic separately but very little written on how they are connected in relation to the environment. Reuniting Economy and Ecology makes those connections and provides a base for finding solutions to achieving sustainable communities.
Russ Beaton is Professor of Economics at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He co-authored Oregon's nationally recognized legislation on land-use planning and has long been involved, both as researcher and citizen, in affairs dealing with energy, the environment, land use, and local and regional economic issues. He has authored studies on timber, agriculture, and urban growth. Among other topics typical of a liberal arts college faculty member, he teaches energy economics, environmental economics, and a course titled "Regional Economics and the Economy of Oregon." Russ lives in Salem, Oregon, and intends to spend the rest of his career involved with issues surrounding the notion of sustainability. . Chris Maser spent over 20 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, and coastal settings. Trained primarily as a vertebrate zoologist, he was a research mammalogist in Nubia, Egypt (1963-64) with the Yale University Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition and was a research mammalogist in Nepal (1966-- 67) for the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit #3 based in Cairo, Egypt, where he participated in a study of tick-borne diseases. He conducted a three-year (1970-73) ecological survey of the Oregon coast for the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. He was a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, for 12 years (1975-87), the last 8 years studying old-growth forests in western Oregon, and a landscape ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency for a year (1990-91). Today he is an independent author as well as an international lecturer and a facilitator in resolving environmental disputes, vision statements, and sustainable community development. He is also an international consultant in forest ecology and sustainable forestry practices. He has written over 260 publications, including the following books: Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest (1989, listed in the School Library Journal as best science and technical book of 1989), Global Imperative: Harmonizing Culture and Nature (1992), Sustainable Forestry: Philosophy, Science, and Economics (1994), From the Forest to the Sea: The Ecology of Wood in Streams, Rivers, Estuaries, and Oceans (1994, with James R. Sedell), Resolving Environmental Conflict: Towards Sustainable Community Development (1996), Sustainable Community Development: Principles and Concepts (1997), Setting the Stage for Sustainability: A Citizen's Handbook (1998, with Russ Beaton and Kevin Smith), and Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development (1999). Although he has worked in Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Slovakia, and Switzerland, he calls Corvallis, Oregon, home.
