Since its inception, sustainability has been human-centric. It came into vogue in 1987, with the publication of a UN report called Our Common Future, which defined sustainable development as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
More than 50 years ago, an ecologist, Robert Whittaker, studied the distribution and abundance of plants at high elevations in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon. Like many early ecologists, he was interested in what grew where, and what controlled the distribution of plants. Mountains were a convenient natural laboratory because many different natural habitats occurred in close proximity. Whittaker’s field notes were left in an archive at Cornell University, when he died in 1980. [Read more…] about An Oregon Mountain high
