Part 4. The essence of the Concept of TFET

The essence of the Concept is extremely simple: the integration of existing protected areas into conglomerates that are significantly larger in scale and operate under special legal and economic regimes.

In other words, several existing protected areas are combined, together with the territories between them and additional surrounding lands, thereby expanding them and forming new Territories of Full Ecological Tranquility.

Later in the Concept, this will be illustrated using the proposed Territory of Full Ecological Tranquility in Kamchatka as an example.

In fact, territories with special legal and economic regimes are already being actively created in Russia at the initiative of the state.

A territory of advanced social and economic development in the Russian Federation, abbreviated as TAD or ASEZ, is an economic zone with preferential tax conditions, simplified administrative procedures, and other privileges. Such zones are created to attract investment, accelerate economic development, and improve the quality of life. According to the original idea, they were intended to create “business conditions competitive with the leading commercial centers of the Asia- Pacific region.”

Such zones are created in sparsely populated regions of the country, including, and above all, in the Russian Far East. Therefore, the reference to the “commercial centers of the Asia- Pacific region” is not accidental. Designating territories within a country that offer the infrastructure and incentives needed to launch production is a widely used international practice for attracting major foreign investment. The creation of such territories is even referred to as the “Chinese path” of economic development. Everything appears promising, and the idea looks good at first glance, but… why does it not work?

The answer is extremely simple: it is an outdated idea that worked under the conditions of twentieth-century Southeast Asia.

The idea of the “Far Eastern hectare,” under which people are given one hectare of land in remote parts of the country, would have been ideal for peasants in the nineteenth century, when a similar policy was partially implemented through the Stolypin agrarian reform.

In other words, what we are seeing today is an attempt to carry out a nineteenth-century-style “peasant reform” in a society where the social class of peasants no longer exists, while also attempting to expand industry by relocating enterprises to regions with surplus labor according to a twentieth-century industrial model, despite the fact that these regions are sparsely populated and are certainly not inhabited by “hardworking Vietnamese workers.”

The challenges of the future are now fundamentally different:

• Population decline combined with population aging.

• Growing public demand for health and an environmentally clean living environment.

• The transition from the second wave of globalization toward another stage of division into separate regions.

These are political and economic issues, meaning issues concerning only people and the functioning of human societies. But the most important challenge today is the transition from the paradigm of “developing nature” to recognizing ourselves as part of nature and adopting biospheric thinking.

Thus, the essence of the Concept of Territories of Full Ecological Tranquility lies in integrating the protected areas of all countries into conglomerates that are significantly larger in scale and governed by special legal and economic regimes — special ecological and economic zones.

Instead of isolated and fragmented remnants of wildlife, which make up the current protected-area system, we must move toward integrating these protected areas into global TFET zones.