Accept No Substitute: Biodiversity Matters By David Dudgeon: Article Analysis

I chose to work on the first article “Accept no substitute: biodiversity matters” by David Dudgeon, as I often go hiking and field trips and enjoy the beauty of nature. I feel close to the topic and would like to know more about ecosystem conservation.
In the article, the author argues that Hong Kong people and government should consider biodiversity conservation when developing lands for housing because development would cause irreversible harm to wetland and biodiversity located in some of the lands. The author also argues that one should never replace biodiversity conservation (concept of conservation biology) with ecosystem functioning and services (concept of conservation science), because there is often a trade-off between preservation
If benefits to humans is the main concern, people would make maximum use of ecosystem like damming a river to generate electricity by hydroelectric power, using freshwater for irrigation and river as a site for fishery (Dudgeon, 2014). Economic interests of humans are achieved at the expense of biodiversity, resulting in overexploitation of natural resources and detrimental effects to biodiversity instead of conservation as claimed (Dudgeon, 2014). It is harmful to biodiversity if humans’ interest was solely economic
(Kareiva & Marvier, 2012). Instead of achieving the goal of conservation of ecological value and biodiversity, such an action result in adverse effects. Conservation biology abandons the access of human by setting up protected area, which translates into a ‘do not touch’ attitude (Kareiva, 2010). Local people who own the land, for example villagers of Kuk Po, are dissatisfied that their opinion are being ignored and feel furious about being exploited their rights, simply for the concern with welfare of butterflies and other non-human things, according to HK connection programme by RTHK. There is a risk that owner would turn out to deliberately degrades the ecological value as a protesting approach. With reference to the review of Africa national park case studies in the International Journal of Biodiversity in 2013 (as cited in Kloor, 2015), “creation of protected areas has resulted in the killing of wildlife”. Setting up of ‘species-only’ image, the conservation biology approach would turn people who had been living with and coped well with nature into enemies of nature and fail to conserve biodiversity (Kloor,