| This dissertation develops a procedure to enable development of the socio-physical environment without excessive losses to natural functions and processes by minimizing initial biophysical losses, altering the temporal and spatial scales of socio-physical disturbances, restoring compromised ecosystems, and altering the form of the built environment. This procedure utilizes ecological criteria derived from scientific literature to establish minimum requirements for maintaining ecosystem processes and functions that can then be used to guide the placement and creation of socio-physical development to assure physical conditions that support natural process. In doing so, it provides a procedural link between natural process and sustainable human existence, changes the strategy for protecting nature from a reactive to a proactive stance, and defines the limits of appropriate interventions into natural systems. |
