I came here to say exactly the same thing. Development always begets more development.

The rural wilderness that I grew up in is completely unrecognizable today. Acres and acres of essentially untouched forest now replaced with human housing. Creeks have dried up and animal life is a shadow of what it used to be. We used to have otters, beavers, deer, and more but they're long gone now. That transformation started with mundane uncontroversial things like gravel roads and basic utilities. But it grew to encompass much more as more people moved in.

If you accept that the diversity and abundance of plant and non-human animal life has instrinic value then it's awfully easy to say that blocking further human development in wild areas is the "right" thing to do.

You're wrong. If King Cove was growing at a good clip, you'd have a point but as it stands it's just a remote relatively static Alaskan town. I could point you at my own home town which is at the edge of the Prince William Sound and nearly unchanged over the last 50 years. A few new buildings have been built, and a few have gone down. They did build a new harbor in that time, but Cordova has not turned into Anchorage and it would be brain-piercingly stupid to believe that it would.

How is this anything other than a slippery slope fallacy? Can you provide some examples of where the development of a rural, gravel road led to unstoppable, cancerous development?

> The flaw in this logic is that it sets a new baseline of expectations.

I.e., sometimes the inclined plane does have a low coefficient of friction:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

Your view seems fundamentally misanthropic - instead of autochthonous population having access to a resource that you take for granted, you would rather kick them out into an expensive urban area where their life is disrupted? All for a perceived risk to a comparitively tiny corridor?

Absolutely. The sustainable future is with dense urban living. Reducing humanity's footprint is key.

This "we don't negotiate with terrorists" type thinking is going to come back to bite you the nanosecond the tables are turned and it's some interest you care about that's seeking some tiny compromise.

Comparing a rural community that wants better access to medical treatment to a “cancer cell” is abhorrent. If you want to pay these people to leave, the pony up the money. But until then let them have the basic necessities of civilization and development.