Ecology and Biodiversity at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century: Towards a New Paradigm?

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Ecology is a matter of crucial concern, with people becoming increasingly aware of the increasing environmental crisis. In reality, as a scientific discipline, Ecology was first officially addressed when the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN, now IUCN, with “C” for “Conservation”) was created at the end of 1948: an agenda was drawn up, including the following topic: “the international cooperation for scientific research in the field of the Protection of Nature, especially concerning œcological research in the various fields of exact and natural sciences” (UIPN 1948, p. 15). The first concrete IUPN action was the organization, with UNESCO, of a technical conference, which took place at Lake Success (USA), in August, 1949. The Ecology Section of the conference was introduced by a French biologist, Georges Petit, who emphasized the fact that the relationships between the Protection of Nature and Ecology had been widely neglected, the Protection of Nature having been “considered for a long time only as the results of aesthetic or moral preoccupations” (Petit 1950, p. 304).