Nature's Decline Unprecedented; Species Extinction Rates Accelerating (2019)
un.org
un.org
1. Rewild/plant natives where you can, such as your yard or if allowed, easements or verges, ideally from pollinator-safe plant nurseries or places which care for very local species
2. Advocate for wild spaces, wildlife corridors and wildlife bridges and underpasses, particularly on migration routes for small species (guarding frog movements for three weeks a year is pretty neat)
3. Volunteer with local wetlands/trails associations/reserves for whatever their ecologists decide needs doing.
4. Reduce your carbon footprint, and then offset the rest. We are working on helping people do this (and take action on climate change in other ways) at https://projectwren.com
Personally, I am not planning on having kids either way.
If you are not a fit specimen you should consider having none, or at most one with a high quality mate with dominant genes.
People have actively done a great deal of selective breeding of various animals and plant species and the results aren’t a strict improvement over the original wild animals. Agriculture has become about maintaining plants and animals which can’t compete with wild plants on their own.
DNA doesn’t come with an easy score card nor are children clones. Someone with a significant positive mutation should objectively score very highly on such metrics, but good luck find out about that. Further, disease resistance for unknown diseases is incredibly important making genetic diversity critical not just maximizing some specific ideal template. Pushed to the limit, a significant risk from widespread genetic engineering is extinction.
PS: Even just the biological version of this based on physical attractiveness has significant downsides such as excessively large breasts.
Really just anybody who can hold down a marriage. This won't hurt disease resistance.
People with asthma, vision problems, and ADHD etc can still serve. The current criteria are mostly about effective soldiers after minimal training not some test of genetic fitness.
It’s a political talking point that the poor and uneducated have more children but things are never that simple and that’s not genetic fitness. Poor countries for example don’t really translate to genetic factors. Further, poor mothers don’t mean poor fathers.
At the extreme end, people with severe mental or physical disorders are vastly less likely to have children.
As an example to illustrate this - if you create software solution that reduces the need for air travel by a very small percentage, you'll have more impact on carbon emissions over its amortized lifetime than most humans who have ever lived, particularly if you make personal sacrifices to ensure its widespread use and availability.
The people who would look to do better for the planet would just maybe have children who would do the same. It’s not assured, of course, but such a parent certainly loads the deck in favor if they’re otherwise good, supportive and informative parents.
Wish society did more to give people reasons to care about and for one another.
I try to 1-4 as much as possible and more. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money. But it's really hard not to get discouraged about how futile it all seems in the face of the unflinching exploitative momentum of modern civilization.
These are a great idea, but they're going to be very rare because the designs of them are at incredible cost.
A far more pragmatic design is to lay culverts crossways under highways at regular intervals. The culverts can be varying size, even up to 10 feet in diameter. Culverts are mass produced, cheap, and trivial since the highway roadbed is already built up from the land level. Just dig a trench, drop in the culvert, fill in, and pave over.
Make them a part of normal highway construction, and add them whenever repaving maintenance is being done.
No, they aren't as good as bridges. But they're far better than non-existent bridges.