Unsustainable harvesting of medicinal plant products is justified if people’s lives are at risk.

Unsustainable harvesting of medicinal plant products is justified if people’s lives are at risk.

Indicate whether your initial stance was in keeping with or at odds with the position that you were required to take during the debate. In what respects did your initial stance differ from your assigned stance? In what respects did they overlap?— my initial stance was in keeping with the position that i required to take during the debate.
my initial stance is as follows:

Position 1. Unsustainable harvesting of medicinal plant products is justified if people’s lives are at risk.

I absolutely agree with this position statement. I think that if it was any other way, we would ruin humanity by not protecting it. Anything ranging from side effects (leading to potential fatality) to the destruction of an ecosystem should not be justified in order to sustain harvesting of medicinal plant products.

In 1991, a treatment for ovarian cancer made headlines. Nicolaou et al. (1996) states that this treatment was the chemical taxol. The process to get the substance of this drug, researchers had to extract this substance from the bark of the Pacific yew. This process ultimately killed the tree. In addition to the destruction of this tree, it grows slowly and each plant yields little bark. Also, about half of the amount needed for a single treatment would require a gram of the compound. This gram would come from a 1 GO-year old tree (this whole tree would provide exactly enough for this single treatment) (Nicolaou et al., 1996). These listed points alone make it frustrating for those who care about the ecosystems in the world, because, ultimately, our surivival depends on its sustainability. It is not meant for us to "mess" with.

Harvesting the endangered trees (yews that produce taxol) would cause significant harm to the ecosystem. The old- growth forest of the Pacific Northwest is where these trees exist. This area is very delicate (Nicolaou et al., 1996).

In my opinion, the treatment should be haulted due to the destruction of our ecosystem at this point. Fortunately, environmentalists felt the same way. As the number of Pacific yews dwindled, it was argued to protect the few remaining trees.

In conclusion, this was to prove my point that harvesting any medicinal plant products, which harms human beings or in turn, harm us, or animals, should be unjustified.