Unleashing the wild: response to Locke and Dearden's 'rethinking protected area categories'

摘要

Locke and Dearden (2005) assert that the emerging new paradigm for protected areas (PAs) risks taking the PA agenda to a 'tragic failure,' and the planet towards biological impoverishment. They believe the 'new paradigm' contributes to a persistent tendency towards giving social issues higher priority over biological considerations and is based on the promotion of PA categories Ⅴ and Ⅵ of the IUCN (World Conservation Union). Their analysis does not account for a fundamental 'side-effect' of PAs, the boundary effect (McNeely 1990), ignores the PA experience of the past 100 years (Wilshusen et al. 2002) and endangers efforts to conserve many PAs that will not meet so-called 'wilderness' standards. Moreover, their proposition exacerbates the human-nature dualism behind the wilderness idea.