Nations should pass laws to preserve any remaining wilderness areas in their natural state, even if these areas could be developed for economic gain. Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of i mplementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.
*** The argument that wilderness areas should not be protected by law is often framed as an opposition between the rights of humans to the prosperity that is meant to result from development and the (less valued) rights of the wildlife occupying the wilderness area. This means that arguing against the preservation of wilderness areas has to be presented in humanitarian terms. However, for a number of reasons, this is very rarely an accurate representation of the problem of preservation versus development. In almost every case, the preservation of wilderness is a beneficial route for all wildlife as well as the vast majority of humans —and only a few people, with powerful special interests, have a genuine motive to argue otherwise. Defending the destruction of wilderness areas by stating that this development will create economic benefits requires that these benefits be greater than those that would be created by preserving the land in its wild state. Past examples of economic gain as a result of the development of wilderness areas, though, display a pattern of negative lifestyle changes for most human inhabitants of the region (as a result of pollution, destruction of both human and animal habitats, and disappearance of sustainable jobs such as properly regulated logging and fishing). Even the economic enrichment that does result is often a product of non-renewable resources, and when these are exhausted, the area is usually depressed beyond hope of recovery. While large amounts of money are often generated by such development, classifying these earnings as “economic gain” requires that one argue that the creation of superrich oligarchs and the misery of many more is a defensible goal. Conversely, when large areas of cherished wilderness land are preserved, the economic benefits of tourism often result. Although this industry requires regulation in order to maintain the land as wilderness, it simultaneously provides numerous jobs—towns bordering the wilderness area will have a robust hospitality industry, and there will be a thriving demand for guides and park rangers within the wilderness area. The statement that “economic gain” would result from the destruction of the wilderness area is, in this case, the argument that huge, often temporary payoffs for a very few is a better outcome than sustainable sustainable middle-class work for an entire community. Describing this argument as having humanitaria humanitarian n motives requires impressive moral gymnastics, to say the least. Furthermore, even in cases in which whole communities (and not simply a few individuals) do indeed stand to gain large economic benefits as a result of the development of wilderness areas, there remains a powerful argument that these areas should nonetheless be preserved. This is because labeling their destruction as being a net benefit to humans requires that the human decision to develop the area be based on perfect, complete, all -encompassing knowledge of the wilderness area, its natural resources, and all the species to which it is a
habitat. It requires that developers have total knowledge of the area, and be able to weigh all the human benefits—both the known, present ones and the unknown, future or potential ones—of the area as wilderness against the economic benefit of development, and conclude that the economic benefit is the greater. This is patently impossible. It assumes developers can move ahead in perfect confidence that the cure to cancer is not to be found in a tiny endangered flower endemic to the area; that a tree frog whose existence as a species is threatened by development could never provide revolutionary advances in DNA research. This uncertainty should cause an intense level of caution and scrutiny before any action against the wilderness state of an area is taken—and this caution, again, is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns. Of course, some people would claim that no humanitarian concerns are needed. They would say that wildlife has an equal claim to land to that of humans, and that appropriating wilderness for human purposes constitutes “speciesism” against the animal inhabitants of the land. But it is not necessary to make this claim in order to make a rights-based argument against the development of many wilderness areas: some of these areas are inhabited by people groups who rely on the wilderness state of the land in order to maintain their lifestyle. This is an argument against oil drilling in Alaska, which would grievously disturb the Aleut and Tlingit peoples living in the oil-rich areas. It is also illustrated by the tragic and genocidal results of gold mining and other industries in several South American countries, when tribes have resisted being moved off their ancestral lands and been killed to the last person. Developing wilderness areas in cases like these may indeed result in great economic gain for certain persons, but for others it results in a tragic change of life or in death. Arguing for development in these areas requires nothing less than a defense of racism, which few modern people are prepared to countenance. Overall, the argument against overhasty development of wilderness areas—even those that could provide considerable economic benefits if developed—is a powerful one, even from a position that considers human interests to be worthy of greater consideration than those of other species. In order to ensure a healthy and vibrant world for the future of the human race, and to ensure opportunity and beauty for its present, wilderness areas should be enthusiastically preserved.
