Introduction

It has been twenty years from the inception of our multidisciplinary quest for an in depth understanding of biological and ecological integrity, starting in 1992 and fully funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) from 1992 to 1999, when I, as Principal Investigator, retired from the University of Windsor. Each of the meetings of the following years after 1992, added some strand to the understanding we were seeking. Some of those findings were reflected in my first book on environmental ethics, The Principle of Integrity (Westra, 1994), but the work of research continued to expand, adding new members to what eventually became the Global Ecological Integrity Group.