Tom Wessel's view of interdependent local ecologies lays out a conceptual framework for human communities and corporations. His rich examples of biodiversity provide great metaphors for how competition and negative conditions can be transformed by natural cooperation and can lead to self-organized, self-managed natural communities that are sustained by emergent systems and can co-evolve. [This talk was presented at the NAMTA conference titled "Nature and Human Development," Seattle, WA, March 10-13, 2011.]