Ecosystem Integrity: A Causal Necessity

Abstract

Ecosystem integrity has become very topical of late. As is usual with emerging concepts, the bulk of what has been written on integrity deals with progressive definitions of the concept. For example, it has been necessary to distinguish between the integrity of an ecosystem and it’s “health”—another popular notion. Ecosystem health was crafted to quantify how well a system is functioning. Costanza (1992), for example, cites three aspects of ecosystem health—vigor, organization and resilience. The first two components refer to the system in its current state. Only the last property addresses the immediate future of the system.