Abstract
The Asian developing region, defined here for the purpose of analysis to include China, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, is one of the most economically vibrant regions in the world. Acknowledging that rapid economic growth has had damaging environmental consequences, leaders in the region have made concerted efforts to strengthen the protection of the regional environment which is home to some of the richest and most biologically diverse habitats in the world. Each country has set up its environmental ministry or equivalent agency and enacted numerous laws to ensure stronger effort in biodiversity conservation and environmental protection. Despite these environmental protection initiatives, however, environmental degradation in the region remains a serious problem. Existing legislative efforts to halt extensive deforestation in the region have been hampered by various unsustainable resource use practices. In an attempt to make headway in an urgent task to contain this critical problem, this paper seeks to develop more adequate perspectives and concepts for an analysis of the complex process, which has led to the present conundrum, and to offer a way out of it. More specifically, in addressing the issues at hand, the paper examines the role of environmental ethics in fostering stronger environmental controlling actions based on the philosophical insights of Aldo Leopold’s land ethics and empirical evidence drawn from field research on the indigenous environmental worldviews conducted between 2007 and 2011 in Malaysia. It is concluded that in halting further environmental decline in the region, it is necessary for the regional leaders to mark a higher level of ethical engagement with the natural environment.
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Notes
- 1.
ASEAN comprises of ten countries of Southeast Asia, which include Singapore (developed nation state), Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Burma (Myanmar) and the Philippines (developing nations).
- 2.
IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) Red List is the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of biological species around the world. The IUCN
Categories of threat for the existing species include “near threatened”, “vulnerable”, and “critically endangered”. The other two categories are “extinct” and “extinct in the wild”
- 3.
Of the 170 countries in the world, a mere 17 countries which has less than 10 % of the global surface but lay claim to 70 % of the biological diversity on earth. The megadiversity concept was created to encourage and prioritize conservation efforts of biological resources around the world especially in these megadiverse countries (Conservational International 1998)
- 4.
Malaysia consists of 13 states with 11 states located in Peninsular or West Malaysia and 2 states, namely, Sarawak and Sabah located in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo
- 5.
Currently, the Indonesian share of HoB’s contribution is 12.6 million hectares while the proposed share is about 16.8 million. For Brunei, its share is roughly 576,000 ha (WWF 2010a). The 23.4 million hectares as stated above covered the proposed figure of Indonesia
- 6.
The term economic growth refers to the amount of goods and services produced in an economy. It may be expressed in term of an increase in GDP (gross domestic product), that is, quantitative growth. As distinct from economic growth, economic development is a wider concept. It is not only concerned with quantitative growth but also, qualitative expansion of an economy as a whole, that is, qualitative growth. Some of the important features associated with qualitative growth are: (i) modern economic transition from an agriculture or primary-product based economy to a manufacturing or industrial-based economy especially technologically advanced economy and, (ii) social improvement in the quality of life or standard of living of citizens. Sustainable development, as defined above may slightly be distinguished from economic development in term of the environmental emphasis it places on development process. That is, it is fundamentally concerned with prudent use of natural resources when promoting development so that future generations will not be worse off than the present generation
- 7.
- 8.
Geographically, the Three Gorges region is located at the lower section on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River (6300 km) with a total area of 56,700 km2
- 9.
For a region to qualify as a hotspot, two strict criteria must be met, that is (i) it must contain at least 1500 species of vascular (higher order) plants (>0.5 % of the world’s total) as endemics, and (ii) it has to have lost at least 70 % of its original habitat
- 10.
The IUCN Red List is the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of biological species. The Red List’s categories of threat for the existing species include “near threatened”, “vulnerable”, and “critically endangered”. The other two categories are “extinct” and “extinct in the wild”
- 11.
The establishment of the subsidiary settlement near the logging camp is to enable the local communities to market their agricultural products.
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Keong, C.Y. (2016). Economic Growth, Sustainable Development and Ecological Conservation in the Asian Developing Countries: The Way Forward. In: Das, I., Tuen, A. (eds) Naturalists, Explorers and Field Scientists in South-East Asia and Australasia. Topics in Biodiversity and Conservation, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26161-4_16
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