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I think it's critical to protect wilderness since once an area has been developed by humans it is extremely difficult to impossible to un-develop it. The bottom line is that even a very large and technologically developed human population does not need to exploit every square inch of the world to support itself, and indeed doing so has negative consequences for society. It isn't tokenism to set aside some of the very few remaining patches of pristine wilderness so that they can be studied and enjoyed; it is making the most minimum acknowledgement possible that maybe we neither need to nor should gently caress up every single place on this earth. If you want to focus on what's best for the world ecosystem, then to a good approximation anything that requires or encourages further human intrusion into any ecosystem is bad. Managed forests might be better for CO2 capture, but if we end up having to develop all of the worlds forests and rainforests to this end the impact to the world ecosystem would be catastrophic. If we give any single poo poo about the "world ecosystem", we need to learn how to simply leave substantial amounts of the planet alone. To your second point...maintaining true wilderness almost by definition requires management of human access. In practice this is done either by making access difficult enough, and having territories vast and remote enough that human access is automatically limited, or by having use quotas. I mean even the most popular wilderness areas rarely see more than a few dozen humans per day in peak season. When the amount of traffic is that low, it doesn't matter how people transport themselves there, the overall environmental impact is obviously negligible. You do touch on an important point in that if wilderness is your only category of protection you either end up very limited access to nature or high costs or both, but that is the function of things like national parks. Indeed many wilderness areas comprise the backcountry of national parks. So you have a situation where lots of people can funnel into Yosemite valley, many (but fewer) can hike up Half Dome, fewer still may visit Tuolomne Meadows and the high country, fewer still venture into the surrounding backcountry, and in the 200 miles of mountains between Yosemite and King's Canyon you have a series of designated wilderness areas that on any given day may have just a few people in them (and outside of the summer they generally have none). I think this sort of multi-tiered system works best, where you have easy access to star attractions in land that is modestly protected, and as you expand outwards and upwards, roads become more sparse then vanish, and protection becomes more strict. It doesn't even require much active management or quotas, because the things that most tourists want to see are easily accessible, and even in the absence of quotas exponentially fewer people will visit a place if they have to hike long distances or climb to get there.
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Jun 7, 2017 19:15
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 02:13 |
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