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 persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)