Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health

Front Cover
David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss
Island Press, 2000 - Business & Economics - 428 pages

Global Integrity Project has brought together leading scientists and thinkers from around the world to examine the combined problems of threatened and unequal human well-being, degradation of the ecosphere, and unsustainable economies. Based on the proposition that healthy, functioning ecosystems are a necessary prerequisite for both economic security and social justice, the project is built around the concept of ecological integrity and its practical implications for policy and management.

Ecological Integrity presents a synthesis and findings of the project. Contributors -- including Robert Goodland, James Karr, Orie Loucks, Jack Manno, William Rees, Mark Sagoff, Robert Ulanowicz, Philippe Crabbe, Laura Westra, David Pimentel, Reed Noss, and others -- examine the key elements of ecological integrity and consider what happens when integrity is lost or compromised. The book:

  • examines historical and philosophical foundations of the concept of ecological integrity
  • explores how integrity can be measured
  • examines the relationships among ecological integrity, human health, and food production
  • looks at economic and ethical issues that need to be considered in protecting ecological integrity
  • offers concrete recommendations for reversing ecological degradation while promoting social and economic justice and welfare
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Contributors argue that there is an urgent need for rapid and fundamental change in the ecologically destructive patterns of collective human behavior if society is to survive and thrive in coming decades.

Ecological Integrity is a groundbreaking book that integrates environmental science, economics, law, and ethics in problem analysis, synthesis, and solution, and is a vital contribution for anyone concerned with interactions between human and planetary health.

About the author (2000)

David Pimentel is professor of ecology and agricultural science at Cornell University. Laura Westra is Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Reed Noss is the Davis-Shine Endowed Professor at the University of Florida. Noss is focused on systematic conservation planning at regional to continental scales. He has designed and directed such studies in Florida, the Pacific Northwest, California, the Rocky Mountains, and several regions of Canada, and has been an advisor to similar projects throughout North America and parts of Latin America and Europe. This work seeks to identify areas requiring protection from development and to devise management policies, approaches, and techniques that will maintain the biodiversity and ecological values of these areas and entire landscapes over time. Noss has helped to pioneer methods of integrating population viability analysis into reserve selection algorithms. He currently focuses on fire ecology, forest and grassland restoration and management, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow and its dry prairie habitat, Florida Scrub-Jays, and the Florida Panther. An emerging theme is the responses of species (especially vertebrates) and ecological processes to environmental conditions along urban-wildland gradients. Road ecology (e.g., responses of wildlife to roads and the design of wildlife crossings and barriers to minimize impacts) and movement ecology (e.g., corridors and connectivity) figure prominently in this research theme.

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