Introduction - Environmental and Related Biotechnologies

Agathos, Spiros N. [UCL] Stenuit, Benoît [Université de Montpellier]

The 13th of December 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the seminal research article of the ecologist Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, in which he argued that the unconstrained and unrestricted use of an open access resource leads to its collapse. Six years before G. Hardin, Rachel Carson sounded the environmental alarm by publishing her influential book, “Silent Spring”, describing the adverse ecological effects of uncontrolled and excessive use of pesticides to achieve the Green Revolution. Many other forceful warnings on human-dominated ecosystems and resource scarcity on Earth were issued in the 1960s and 1970s, such as “The Limits to Growth”, a report for the Club of Rome which also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018. Recurrent voices to raise the specter of nature deterioration and unsustainable development were gaining ground and resonating more and more with the public consciousness. They provided a powerful impetus for the development of environmentalism, environmental protection policies, new clean technologies for waste treatment and site bioremediation, and new governance of shared resources, including natural ecosystems or intellectual knowledge. In this context, environmental biotechnology has been playing a decisive role by adopting holistic approaches in environmental problem solving and by taking advantage of new generation methodologies in environmental microbiology and analytical chemistry to acquire the necessary knowledge on the contaminated systems and the mechanisms and processes to rehabilitate them.