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I go around and around with this concept myself, working as I do with resource protection, and I usually don't like my answers. Generally, I don't believe what we're talking about exists. Whether you think so or not will depend on your definitions of "pristine" and "wild," and the bounds you put on "places."
I consider pristine to mean that the place being described is in its original condition, original in this case meaning before any anthropogenic impacts. In the modern world, with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels greatly elevated over pre-industrial levels, and bioaccumulative synthetic toxins showing up in organisms from pole to pole, it's hard to think of a place that hasn't already been impacted to some degree. That liberated carbon does affect competition between C3, C4, and CAM plants, and those changes ripple out through every aspect of the ecosystems in which those plants live. Those synthesized chemicals do alter survivorship rates in organisms, which also causes changes rippling through ecosystems. To the extent that there are no places (with the possible exception of thermal vents along oceanic ridges) not already altered by these two impacts, I would say that there are no pristine places left.
Those two items out of the way, consider the known impacts of human settlement on landscapes. Often, there is a loss of large vertebrates, loss of virgin vegetation structure, conversion of large areas to agriculture, alteration of hydrologic systems to serve a growing population, introduction of exotic species, and shipping of items grown in one locale to distant locales. Ignoring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and synthetic chemicals all over the place, name a locale that hasn't felt these impacts at human hands. I can't think of one. What you see in the Americas, even in what you may well consider wild places, is a landscape that has been shaped by at least 15,000 years of human use. That timeframe is shorter for some Pacific islands, longer for Australia, and much longer for Asia, Africa, and Europe. Maybe if you pick a certain point in social development associated with civilizations, and say that before humans in a given area reached that point, their impact on or within ecosystems doesn't count, you can wash away the problem with the word pristine, but I don't see where to draw the line. Even in hunter-gatherer societies, species distributions changed, extinctions occurred, and that inevitably altered evolutionary paths and nutrient cycling across the affected landscapes forever.
Wild is a little easier to define, I suppose, if you use the fairly standard definition of "areas within which natural processes operate without ongoing human influence." In that sense, nothing in the Appalachians could be considered pristine, but some areas therein could be considered wilderness. My problem here is that if you take a hard look at what we usually label wilderness, it is influenced by humans. First examples of this would be anthropogenic climate change and synthetic compounds functioning within the area, which do fundamentally influence natural processes, causing extinctions, tipping the balance in competetive relationships, and altering evolutionary trajectories. Again, ignoring these issues still leaves you with problems. Suppose you have an area you consider wild, but that area is missing a characteristic species? Natural processes may be ongoing, and humans may not be on the landscape, but by previously removing a native organism, those natural processes are still being impacted by an affirmative action (the removal of the species). Think wolves or grizzly bears from most of the American west, whales from most oceans, moas from New Zealand, the list goes on.
I think what we're down to is defining both pristine and wild relatively, as part of the scope of the particular place about which we are speaking. An example would be something like defining ANWR using the political boundary, calling it mostly pristine (CO2, petro production impacts, etc.), and mostly wild (nutrient cycling generally untouched, although migratory birds impacted elsewhere alter things here). And that, as you say, is dangerous, because it opens the door to "Well, we can allow just one more impact and still have something relatively pristine, and relatively wild." Stopping that would require a deep understanding of the terms involved, objective definitions of those terms, and a desire on the part of individuals and the electorate as a whole to value those things above financial interests, short term as well as long. We lose on all three counts, always have, and I'm afraid we always will.
Does this all mean we should throw up our hands and go along with the crowd that uses simple terms like "pro-growth," "growing economy," "pro-business," "streamline regulations," and so on, as they lie their way into money at the expense of everyone else? Not at all. What it means is we need to be a little more honest with ourselves about what it is we are trying to achieve. If we can come up with a way to put it simply, such as "destroying public property," "paid vandalism," or "robbing taxpayers," such that those simple terms used by unethical types are not effective or at least less effective in the public eye, then maybe we can slow or stop the incremental loss of what is left.
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