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Adaptive Community Learning. In December, 1999, the journal Nature published a specially commissioned supplement entitled Impacts of Foreseeable Science. One of its articles bears the title "Science's New Social Contract with Society". It argues we must now ensure that scientific knowledge is "socially robust", and that its production is seen by society to be both transparent and participatory. This change should hardly surprise us. It is the culmination of a steady drift over the decades: away, specifically in the environmental sciences, from an accompanying management stance of command-and-control, to one of participation and democracy. In the early 1990s, for example, we saw the rise of Post-Normal Science, a form of science which, when implemented in the conduct of integrated environmental assessments, would entail the democratization of knowledge by an extension of the peer-community for quality assurance. And now we have the newly minted notion of Sustainability Science, which calls for a way of doing science marked by inverse approaches, social learning, and participation. These are pivotal features for us. For we need a continuing process (or procedure) that is adaptive, participatory, engaged in promoting social learning, and "inverted" — in the sense of starting from outcomes to be avoided, as perceived within the stakeholder community, and working backwards to identify relatively safe corridors for a sustainable transition, and clearly so under the prospect of climate change. In nascent form we have already begun working towards developing such a participatory procedure, on an earlier case study of the Upper Chattahoochee (Lanier) watershed (in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and supported by the EPA). Tentatively, it has been called "adaptive community learning". It is intrinsically an inter-disciplinary procedure, drawing equally upon ideas from the natural and social sciences; everything — from Cultural Theory to chelating agents in particulate biogeochemistry — had to be enfolded seamlessly into the research on Lanier. We know what adaptive management is. This seminal idea has become the accepted norm in the practice of environmental management. In essence, policy therein fulfils two functions: to probe the behavior of the environmental system in a manner designed to reduce uncertainty about that behavior, i.e., to enhance learning about the nature of the physical system; and to bring about some form of desired behavior in that system. Adaptive community learning ought both to subsume the principles of adaptive management (so defined) and include actions, or a process of decision-making, whereby the community of stakeholders experiences learning about itself, its relationship with the valued piece of the environment, i.e., the community-environment relationship, and the functioning of the physical environment. The need now is to develop further the concepts and procedures of adaptive community learning, on new case studies, as they arise.