Rusty Menefee was the ecological engineer responsible for developing the biosphere of Coriopolis, and subsequently chief game warden of its Southern Park system.

Menefee’s first career was the construction of the habitat’s ecosystem — the selection, sequencing, and establishment of the biological communities that would occupy an interior with no prior life, no soil history, and no external reservoir to recruit from. The problem is not conservation but composition: a habitat biosphere is assembled rather than inherited, and must be driven to a self-maintaining state from nothing. The theoretical basis is treated under dissipative adaptation in gyrealm ecosystems.

He retired from that work at fifty-five and took the wardenship of the southern park system, an unusual move in that it exchanged design authority for custodial responsibility over the same biosphere he had built. The arrangement has since become something close to convention in newer habitats, on the reasoning that a wholly engineered ecosystem is better maintained by someone who knows why each element is present.