Internal contradictions of nature reserve business

Abstract

Protected areas perform such functions as protective, scientific, aesthetic and recreational. The most important  of them are recreational and environmental and their interests conflict with each other. In the early XX century in the world there were two areas of the environmental movement: environmental protection and conservation of natural resources. Protection of cultural values in Europe complicated of structure protected areas and changed their development toward recreational using. At that time the development of the Ecology has led to prevalence of ideas that protected areas must perform only ecological functions.

National system of protected areas consisted in the time of the Soviet Union, so nationalized lands allowed to create significant amount of nature reserves that had only environmental and protection functions. However, Soviet nature reserves were described in a model of foreign national parks - as attractive objects, so people began to visit them illegally and to demanded access to protected objects. Nowadays tourism and recreation threaten the existence of protected areas, but they finance existence of natural reserve system, so the conflict continues to develop. Philosophy Wildlife wants the complete isolation of protected areas and economic policy wants the complete financial self-sufficiency of them.

The idea of nature conservation is a social product, so inner contradiction depends of the subjective reasons and we need to combine two views in order to avoid conflict. Protected areas have to provide not only preservation of biodiversity, but also to preserve the variety of recreational activities, so their safety has become a priority.