Chapter 3 ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY: RECLAIMING LOST CONNECTIONS James R. Karr l Ellen W. Chu l 1. Introduction Human history, like evolution itself, has been marked by relative stasis punctuated by periods of rapid change. Harnessing fire, making and using tools and weapons, and inventing the wheel were early mileposts signaling, we are told, an unbounded human ingenuity. These and other innovations allowed humans to tap natural capital and spread virtually throughout the world, living year-round from sea level to mountain tops, from equatorial heat to polar cold. The success of humans in these diverse natural settings resulted directly from the ability to adapt to diverse regional conditions and to develop and modify culture and religion. Throughout evolutionary time, the success of living things has depended on the accumulation of information passed from generation to generation in the genetic blueprints of DNA. Humans, though, perfected another connection: the legacy of knowledge and culture passed from parents to their children and their children's children across hundreds, even thousands, of generations. During early human evolution, important knowledge was primarily biological-how to find food and shelter, escape from predators, avoid disease. Humans, like all other organisms, had to know their regional environments and how to support their communities within these environments. But with the agricultural revolution, these connections began to fray. By the nineteenth century, scientific and societal specialization combined with rapid, massive industrialization and free-market economics and seemed to promise escape from dependence on, or even connections with, other living systems. Now the "information age" gives us "virtual reality," completing our isolation from the rest of the living world and, some claim, clinching an end to human need for the biological knowledge so important to our ancestors. Alas, we have not escaped our dependence on nature; we have succeeded only in dominating nature over the short term. We have created a hybrid world--one neither entirely natural nor entirely mechanical. Consider, for example, the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Environmental historian Richard White (1995) aptly characterizes the Columbia as an "organic machine"-a living system, mechanized by humans and maintaining a few natural, "unmade" qualities. But whereas once the Columbia supported some of the world's largest salmon runs and the human cultures linked to these fish, now it supports nonnative species like American shad and carp, and machines mediate the human relation to the river. The mechanization of the Columbia severed the connections within living systems, and lInstitute for Environmental Studies, Box 352200, University of Washington, Seattle, W A 98195-2200, U.S.A. 34 L. Westra and J. Lemons (eds.). Perspectives on Ecological Integrity. 34--48. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.