visita il sito della Società Italiana di Ecologia

sito a cura di Paco Melià e Renato Casagrandi

precedente: L.2 livello superiore: Letture seguente: L.4

L.3 - Sustaining Living Waters: It Matters What We Measure

Karr James R. (2)*

(2) School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

* jrkarr@u.washington.edu

For millennia, nature-specifically living systems provided food, fiber, and materials to nourish, clothe, and house us. Living systems conditioned the air we breathe, regulated the global water cycle, and created the soil that sustainesure on nature from the impact of 6 billion humans is taking its toll. Living systems in water bodies illustrate this collapse much as blood-cell counts and blood chemistry refled our developing agriculture. They decomposed and absorbed our wastes. Beyond practicality, nature fed the human spirit. But pressure on nature from the impact of 6 billion humans is taking its toll. Living systems in water bodies illustrate this collapse much as blood-cell counts and blood chemistry reflect the health of a human body. Society has remained largely unaware of the collapse because we saw water narrowly, as a fluid to be consumed or used as a raw material in agriculture or industry. When attempted, monitoring focused on the presence of chemical contaminants rather than the character of the aquatic biota. Direct biological monitoring and assessment have gained substantial grond in the last decade because they provide a mechanism to directly assess the condition of water bodies, diagnose the causes of degradation, define actions to attain conservation and restoration goals, and evaluate the effectiveness of management decisions. Society needs a new generation of indicators to reverse the erosion of living systems, indicators that do not disguise the state of economic, social, or ecological well-being. Without these measures, we will not fully perceive the erosion of Earth's life-support systems both human and nonhuman, and policymakers will lack the crucial foundation for informed decision making. If we watch such new-generation indicators as closely as we watch the Dow Jones industrial average, perhaps we will again value all of Earth's living and nonliving systems and so improve the state of the biosphere as well as our own lives.

Short CV: Dr. James R. Karr is professor of aquatic sciences and biology, and adjunct professor of civil engineering, environmental health, and public affairs at the University of Washington. His received his BSc fromi Iowa State University, and MSc and PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has held faculty appointments at Purdue University, University of Illinois, and Virginia Tech University and was deputy director and acting director at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He has taught and done research in tropical forest ecology, ornithology, stream ecology, watershed management, landscape ecology, conservation biology, ecological health, and science and environmental policy. He is a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Ornithologists' Union. He received the 2004 Carl R. Sullivan Fishery Conservation Award from the American Fisheries Society and the 2005 Environmental Stewardship Award from the North American Benthological Society. He has written more than 275 articles, reports, book reviews, and popular essays on ecology and environment. He developed the index of biotic integrity (IBI) to directly evaluate the effects of human actions on the health of living systems.

The following is the established format for referencing this article: Karr (2006). Sustaining Living Waters: It Matters What We Measure. In Ecologia. Atti del XV Congresso Nazionale della Società Italiana di Ecologia (Torino, 12-14 settembre 2005) a cura di Claudio Comoglio, Elena Comino, e Francesca Bona [online] URL: http://www.xvcongresso.societaitalianaecologia.org/articles/Karr.pdf

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