Quality of Life
Affirmative Case
I affirm the resolution Resolved: Developing countries should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two are in conflict. Environmental protection is something that will; to just benefit the developing countries, but everyone in the world and generations in the future. Therefore, my value is Quality of Life and my criterion is Utilitarianism.
Contention 1: Environmental destruction causes extinction.
Mankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis [18–20]. It shows that to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses [11,21–23], in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. This is why environmental protection must be prioritized over resource extraction; environmental damage will cause
I affirm the resolution Resolved: Developing countries should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two are in conflict. Environmental protection is something that will; to just benefit the developing countries, but everyone in the world and generations in the future. Therefore, my value is Quality of Life and my criterion is Utilitarianism.
Contention 1: Environmental destruction causes extinction.
Mankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis [18–20]. It shows that to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses [11,21–23], in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. This is why environmental protection must be prioritized over resource extraction; environmental damage will cause