George's destruction of the wetland is not morally permissible because it does not take sufficient account of other alternatives to eradicating mosquitoes from the wetland. Nobody has to be in favor of letting mosquitoes dominate the large wetland and possibly threaten human health and George's use of the property in order to realize that creating a motocross course much more dramatically alters the ecology of the area than necessary. Accordingly, George's action is impermissible because it is riddled with fallacy: his choice is not only between mosquitoes and motocross. There are other choices that do not seem to have occurred to him. That fallacy of reasoning, however, leads to a moral objection against Geroge's action: his response to a perceived problem was to act in a way that showed profound disrespect for nature and that demonstrated "nothing more than an irrational bias in [human] favor" (Taylor 208).
George's logical fallacy arises from his failure to take into account a host of consequences that were bound to flow from the motocross course. It may be objected that George has the right to control mosquitoes as a health hazard and that therefore George has moral standing vis-à-vis the land and the mosquitoes. In that regard, Bernstein says that biocentric empathy for nonhuman species "casts too wide a net" (243) over the idea that well-being is a valid condition to attribute to species that do not have "subjectivities" or "welfares" (243). Bernstein is discussing trees and not animals; however, his larger point is that interior life, which humans have, trumps the moral standing of beings without interior life.
Supporting George's right to control mosquitoes does not capture the fact that bulldozing the wetland was all out of proportion to the mosquito threat. The motocross dirt course destroyed support for multiple flora and fauna. It would have been possible to get rid of the pests in less radical ways, such as using ...