Nascent:
coming or having recently come into existence • a nascent middle class • her nascent singing career [Merriam-Webster]
I find it odd that this particular word lacked a clear definition in my brain. Noted in “Beyond the Obituaries,” Nancy Knowlton & Jeremy Jackson, The Solutions Journal:
Politically, the implications are clear: success stories rarely just happen–unless a convenient political accident intervenes, such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequent reduction of pollution in the Black Sea. Large-scale solutions may be obvious in principle but they don’t get enacted if people don’t care about solving the problem. In some cases, single individuals work tirelessly for a cause and eventually succeed in inspiring others to take action. In other cases, the environments or organisms—for example, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or whales—are so culturally important that nascent political consensus already exists. For these exceptions to become the norm, global adoption of policies that provide large-scale protection of coastal waters and the open ocean is needed. Only then will overharvested species be able to rebound and coastal ecosystems suffocating in polluted and anoxic waters be able to breathe deeply again.
