The Cedars and a few other tourist sites if the rest of the country is going to look like junk. Of course, we should not be thinking about what the tourists want to see, but about the future of the very land that gave rise to the Lebanese people and their character, the same land that is being gouged out by bulldozers and discarded into valleys like so much garbage, to be washed into the sea. Lebanon needs to rise above the rights of the individual big landowner and think about its ultimate future by embarking on ambitious land-use plans. Because so much of the country is privately owned, to say that everyone has the right to subdivide and build on his land is to condemn the country to being paved over. Perhaps they can be exchanged in return for development rights in less sensitive areas.
Agriculture needs to be protected to save fertile land from being sold to builders.
It has been done in the US in places such as Portland, Oregon, and in London and Paris. It is a nearly-perfect cone, too steep to build on without massive destruction of land. Until the mid-70's, it was covered with a pine forest on the west side and assorted olive orchards on other sides. The forest was partially cut and burned several times until only a few trees were left on the west face. But the real travesty was when a bulldozer built a road zig-zagging up that side of the hill, spilling white soil down over the remains of the forest.