History
The concept of biological integrity first appeared in the 1972 amendments to the U.S. Federal Water Pollution Control Act, also known as the Clean Water Act. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had used the term as a way to gauge the standards to which water should be maintained, but the vocabulary instigated years of debate about the implications of not only the meaning of biological integrity, but also how it can be measured. The first conference about the term occurred in March 1975 called "The Integrity of Water" and provided the first accepted definition of biological integrity (see below). In 1981, EPA assembled a field of experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, academia, and its own staff to further refine the definition and identify key indicators to quantitatively measure biological integrity. The conference not only identified a definition, but also methods to evaluate the community, and they established that multiple sites should be used to determine the condition of the environment
Read more about this topic: Biological Integrity
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
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—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)