Tremendous progress has been made over the past five years in understanding the physics and impact of starburst-driven winds in the local and distant universe. We now know that starburst-driven winds are common in galaxies with high star formation rates per unit area, both locally (nearby starbursts, luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies) and at high redshifts (e.g., Lyman break galaxies). There is direct evidence that starburst-driven winds have had a strong influence on the chemical evolution of the host ISM and possibly also that of the IGM: (1) Enriched wind fluid has been detected in a few nearby galaxies. (2) Approximately half of the outflowing material in powerful starburst galaxies (ULIRGs) have velocities in excess of the escape velocities. (3) Deep emission-line maps of local wind galaxies indicate that the zone of influence of the wind often extends beyond ~ 10 kpc. (4) Recent results on Lyman break galaxies suggest tentatively that the zone of influence of LBG winds may extent out to ~ 500 h-1 kpc. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done in this area of research; the next five years promise to be equally exciting as the last five!
Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank S. Aalto for organizing a stimulating conference. Some of the results presented in this paper are part of a long-term effort involving many collaborators, including J. Bland-Hawthorn, G. Cecil, P. L. Shopbell, and R. B. Tully and Maryland graduate students S. T. Miller and D. S. Rupke. This article was written while the author was on sabbatical at the California Institute of Technology and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; the author thanks both of these institutions for their hospitality. The author acknowledges partial support of this research by a Cottrell Scholarship awarded by the Research Corporation, NASA/LTSA grant NAG 56547, and NSF/CAREER grant AST-9874973.