Putting to one side all these problems, let us return to and consider an alternative pro-development interpretation of the exposition,based upon varying the initial conditions. In a situation where development has not yet taken place the analysis would start on the far righthand side of thefigure. As shown inFig. 2, this means in an unexploited
environment the marginal benefits have reached zero. The argument
runs that there are only so many bugs and beast that humans can
value and any more adds nothing. Now
the logic of opportunity costs is that there must be higher value land
uses than that. Economic development helps bring in those alternatives
and economic efficiency requires that society start bulldozing
biodiversity