I should also add my 4 key solutions (outside of the zoo/exotic pet options and having less babies):
1) grow your own food. Almost all lost wildlife land is due to agriculture. This may include raising small herbivore animals such as rabbits, chickens, and guinea pigs as oxygen production and manure helps plants grow sustainably in greenhouses (which double or triple the growing season and can boost productivity of the plants up to 5 times). This also affects a lot of diverted water and water pollution associated with both agriculture and with rain run-off of cities.
2) stay at home. Highways are a big issue in animal species extinctions. This is mostly because smart animals do not cross highways. The others of course show up as road kill. The inbreeding that happens from the isolated populations also kills species. Small roads such as gravel roads are a bit less of a problem but still a problem. 40% of the roads in Canada are in the province of Saskatchewan which only contains 2% of the population. This shows how agriculture needs roads so that reflects point #1. The second biggest use of roads in terms of distance of roads dedicated to a single use is forestry. This brings me to the tree hugger section:
3) stop using wood. This includes all wood products but also, for the safety-conscious... quit destroying old buildings. The new building materials are using wood chips because full sized trees are too slow to grow. These trees are poor habitat for most wildlife. These forests are being protected by killing beavers and stopping forest fires but that results in water tables dropping and causing deserts to form. In other parts of the world, bamboo forests are grown or palm tree crops. Native forests are cut and burned to make room for these new forests. Brazil is getting praise for replacing gasoline with ethanol but the sugar cane crops are grown in recently plundered forest land. One alternative is stuff made with straw as most farmers burn the straw as it is too expensive to do anything else with it and too low in price to bother selling it to make these wood alternatives.
4) I left this to last because it is one that surprises a lot of "environmentalists": move to cities. As I mentioned in my previous post, we have to get people out of wild areas and if you make your own food, that will include grasslands areas too. This means the best places for you to live are places were you do not create new roads, do not scare wildlife with activity, do not convert wild spaces into farmland... in short, where you can walk or bicycle everywhere and put as many humans in as few acres/hectors as possible. The carbon footprint of an apartment dweller is far less then a house owner.
PS. if this sounds like environmentalist concerns... for me it is not but purely to save species from extinction. I have a fairly low concern for stuff like global warming EXCEPT for the loss of habitat. Without being able to stop the world from messing with the environment, at least we can get out of the way of nature trying to find new suitable locations for wildlife species in a new hotter world. They cannot move to farmland.
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