ABSTRACT
Concepts at the interface of scientific ecology and environmental discourse are inevitably suspicious from a purely scientific point of view. In addition to their descriptive and empirical meaning, these concepts convey a normative (prescriptive) or an evaluative (axiological) meaning. These additions cannot be deduced from scientific ecology without recourse to pre-existing, non-scientific (= ethical) statements. Ecological integrity clearly belongs to this class of concepts because it conveys the evaluative meaning of a state of the natural environment that is in some relevant aspect preferable to a ‘sick’, ‘diminished’, ‘compromised’ or ‘destroyed’ state of the same environment (Woodley 1993, Kay 1993). In communicating evaluative meaning, ecological integrity is a lot more successful than ecological terms with more exclusively scientific meanings but without public appeal (Metzner 1998).
