Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice.
The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
"lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty"
Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way.
We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
Arguably, Clovis people at the end of the last Ice Age killed off the majority of large mammals in North and South America. Living at a subsistence level is no real remedy against impact on the environment.
What I believe will happen, and really, we are already starting to see this happen in the United States, is that the concentration of humanity into denser populations in the urban and suburban zones means that the more rural zones become abandoned and grow back up. New England is more densely forested now than it has been in 200 years, because the population has concentrated in the cities, and land that was formerly cleared for intensive agriculture has fallen into disuse.
Which is interesting considering you're posting that argument on a forum on the internet, run by a company whose entire existence is based around economic expansion and acquisition of material wealth.
What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
> Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
Hmm...should save a human or an animal? Wow this sub thread is shocking. Let me throw in my obnoxious hat into the ring; why not get rid of useless/unproductive/racist/bigoted/terrorists/middle management people to save the animals? Even better, why don't I unilaterally decide who is important and who isn't just to save animals? Just....wow.
Nobody is really talking about killing people in this thread. What is being said is that the unnecessary development of Africa will lead to a population explosion and vast increase in consumption of resources that will hurt animals. We should not be encouraging development, and should focus on curating the African wilderness.
Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has.
It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of time, but it is especially hypocritical and racist to say "Oh, sorry, we built some shoddy infrastructure, wrecked a lot of your traditional society, and used you to extract resources, now you should go back to living in grass huts and dying of treatable diseases to save the rhinos."
If Africa can develop by skipping some of the shittier stages of agriculture->industry->post-industry evolution that we've experienced in the US, or Europe, or China, then that's a good thing.
Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
Amen.
Or developed nations should give away clean technologies to developing nations; as I'm writing this it sounds laughable since I can totally see a CEOs saying "How do we answer our share holders for giving away technology?". Well obviously saving the planet is secondary to filling the pockets of a rich few.
No we aren't. Birth rates slow to replacement levels or lower in first world countries. Look at Japan, or the US and Germany which are only growing due to immigration.
The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.