>>92473
>Sometimes I get into discussions about, "Does there really need to be THAT MUCH land in reserve and as national parks?"
There's nothing inherently wrong with conservationism as long as you don't expect other people to give up their property rights in the name of your nature fetish. And if people enjoy nature enough to be willing to preserve it, they will be willing to pay for that preservation. And now you have a market for unmolested nature, that persists so long as there are people demand it and there exist entrepreneurs who willing to supply it. We even have a nice case study in this from the Goy Scouts, in the form of Philmont Scout Ranch. It's 140,000 acres of FUCKING NOTHING as you put it, all owned and maintained by a private organization, and it can sustain this because there are weirdos such as myself that have an appreciation for FUCKING NOTHING and are willing to pay to experience it. If you auctioned off the national parks to private owners, I imagine you'd see similar results. Yellowstone pulls in several million visitors a year, and I imagine quite a few other national parks aren't far behind. It'd be far more lucrative for a shrewd entrepreneur to keep these as nature preserves and sell admission rather than sell them off for housing developments.
Now, as to how to deal with normies when they bring up these points:
>Well, the rainforest is the world's lungs. So, you can't have any development there.
This is mostly public school propaganda, all plants are actually carbon-neutral and the rainforest is no different. Any CO2 that the plants have absorbed over their lifetimes is released when they die as rot sets in.
>Most of those parks dotted around in the Eastern U.S. are to preserve endangered wildlife.
Putting wildlife on the endangered species list doesn't help save them from extinction, at best it just slows down the length of time required. Poachers won't heed the warning, they'll just become more careful, and government bureaucrats don't really have an incentive to stop the poachers, so most ignore them or take a bribe to ignore them. Putting a species on the endangered list also prevents any bleeding heart that wants to help the animals from interacting with them as well, and they're generally law-abiding types who will obey the endangered laws; all you've done is limit the interaction with endangered animals to the negative ones. The best way to get a species' numbers up is to allow some enterprising man to take ownership of a population and attempt to monetize it, as it will be in his own interest to make sure that the size of his investment increases. A nice real-world example of this is the lion hunts in Africa, which have caused a declining lion population to skyrocket.
> Yes, the West is mainly uninhabited wastes and desert, but extremely large expanse of land is O.K. because it's so rare in the modern age to have a place where wildlife can grow as it was meant to.
This is more or less addressed by the point I made above about Philmont. Anyone further down the scale than this is probably beyond helping and should be air-dropped in their favorite wilderness region to live among all the hungry beasts they love so much.
>I almost want to write a satire entitled, "Mao: the Greatest Environmentalist."
It'd be hard to write that even satirically, as the commies have consistently been the worst polluters of them all.