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 history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)