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 implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.
Due to the effects of urban development on the global climate, it would be beneficial for nations to pass laws which would preserve remaining wilderness areas.
Over the past few decades, it has become scientifically evident that the global climate has changed. Average temperatures have increased, resulting in a domino effect of environmental changes including melting ice caps, rising ocean levels, extreme flooding, and increasing rates of significant natural disasters. This elevated temperature level has been credited to air pollution caused by excess levels of carbon dioxide and diminished levels of oxygen; such carbon dioxide levels attack the atmospheric protective mechanism in place to shield the earth from the sun's intensity. By keeping the remaining wilderness areas as they are, the progression of air pollution would be either greatly reduced or, ideally, prevented entirely.
It is imperative to pass laws which would prevent the development of remaining wilderness areas because urbanizing such environmentally helpful regions would further worsen the global climate, which is already evidently on the decline. In eliminating the natural wildlife of these areas, trees would be removed, animals would be forced into new areas--with potentially entirely different climates to which they are not accustomed to-- and an influx of human behavior would take their place. An increased human population would bring with it a large number of buildings, but, more importantly, also a large number of cars. These cars, which emit carbon dioxide, would add to the already large imbalance between carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, thereby destroying the atmosphere that much more quickly. Ultimately, doing anything other than protecting and preserving the decreased amount of wilderness areas present will, in turn, harm our planet even further.
One may argue that developing such areas would benefit society, rather than harm it, as new development creates more jobs and sequentially improves the economy. With this perspective, new jobs will be created to construct the new buildings, to design and implement the new road systems, and maintain these additions over time. Furthermore, more jobs will be created in all of the business created in the new development. All of this, one could argue, would create jobs--improving the state of unemployment levels--as well as increase amounts of spending by creating new goods and services for the population to spend money on. However, this argument is insufficient in that it fails to recognize that the population of such a development would not be a brand new population, rather a supplanted population which came from another area; the latter would then experience decreased levels of spending and may be hurt by such a loss of population.
Nations should, in fact, pass laws which require the preservation of remaining wilderness areas because doing so would slow the present decline in the global climate, while failing to do so would directly catalyze this harmful progression.