What changes would you do for nature in your country?

Nature Talk
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  • Add more road bumpers for reducing cars’ speed and roadkill numbers;
  • Make some more nature reserves for protecting native wildlife;
  • Let children know about nature in schools and get more people involved in ‘green’ activities.
  • Increase fines for littering, clearance and poaching and increase efficiency by installing more cameras to record crimes against nature.

How about you? What would you change in your country to help biodiversity flourish?

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  • make “nature corridors” so that all natural habitats are connected with each other and the animals can roam around freely
  • make public infrastructure (busses, trains, trams) as well as bike lanes better and cheaper ⇒ less cars (also has health benefits, as well as economic benefits)
  • reduce large sealed surfaces (parking lots, large roads) and replace with plants (also has the benefit of cooling the cities)
  • reduce the “lawn” area in public parks in favour of more natural meadows
  • renaturate rivers and streams (also reduces risk of flooding)
  • penalise littering about 100x-1000x more harshly (seriously, some people just dump all their trash into the nearest forest. It is disgusting)
  • reduce taxes on locally produced fresh produce (and perhaps increase the taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to balance it out) (also has health benefits as well as economic benefits)

Edit:

  • also forbid RWE to dig its unnecessary huge holes for coal which afaik isn’t even needed if Germany wants to meet its climate goals
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I will comment on the UK with a moderate suggestion and a more ‘out there’ suggestion -

  1. moderate - turn over unproductive hill farming and grouse moors to habitat restoration. This is a massive chunk of land and comes at very nearly no cost to the UK, though it is a little limited in type of habitat
  2. ‘out there’ - give up on sea defences and drainage efforts in the south east. This would flood an incredible area of land that could be one of the most wildlife rich in the UK. Everyone currently living there would be entitled to a piece of land/housing in another dry part of the country.

Number 1 would achieve most of the UKs nature goals with almost no negative consequences (except political), and could be done overnight.
Number 2 would mean giving up some of the most productive arable land, the resettlement of probably a million people, and would be one of the greatest wildlife areas in western europe, it’s fun to imagine : )

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Change the building regulations so the non-habitable not actually a dwelling space around the house is garden i.e. plants and biodiversity - not pool, paving, deck, garage. Horrified to see plots gouged ‘clean’ and covered in concrete from corner to corner.
Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard needs to modernise from its flush and forget attitude to the ocean.
Protect our Cape Chacma baboons from extermination.

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I would be a bit more drastic:

  • Ban the use of fossil fuels
  • Ban non-electric vehicles
  • Do something (?) about the irresponsible use of water in Las Vegas
  • Put more funding into tallgrass prairie restoration (I imagine places called Silphium National Park and Aldo Leopold National Wildlife Refuge)
  • Ban pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides (except if using to eradicate invasive species)
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Cut all government subsidies to the meat industry. If people are that devoted to meat, then they can purchase it without my taxpaying assistance. At the same time, promote vegetarianism and veganism to create an incentive for replacing field crops with food forests.

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In no particular order, here are some of my ideas (some more serious than others):

  • Stop promoting and subsidizing commodity corn. We have way more than enough corn. We are growing way too much corn.
  • Require cats to be under their owners’ control (on a leash or contained within in a fence), like dogs. Also, actually enforce leash rules at parks.
  • Somehow convince teachers who use iNaturalist for class projects to use and teach some kind of minimal best practices. :sweat_smile:
  • We need to dramatically cut emissions immediately or the rest of this becomes less and less relevant. (…I can still dream.)
  • Public transportation. We should have some.
  • Invest in clean air, indoors and outdoors. People who are always sick can’t do anything for nature.
  • Have an actual public health system that actually encourages public health. (This will inevitably benefit nature because things that are bad for nature are inherently bad for human health.)
  • Nobody needs a lawn.
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Cut subsidies for corn and soy too in favor of prickly pear plantations

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I could come up with various changes like restrictions on pesticides, but the big thing I think we need is a massive government investment in development of no emissions technology, with current technology net zero emissions is not really feasible, especially in transportation. Using regulation to prohibit technologies that pollute without funding development of equivalently capable replacements just leaves us with inferior tech and voting for government officials who promise to cut the regulations, ending up with no progress on climate at all

In my opinion stopping climate change needs to stop being about imposing restrictions on peoples lives and start being about development of new technologies/improvement of existing ones

To clarify I’m not saying all regulations on pollution are bad, but that regulation cannot be relied on as a solution to climate change, particularly when the regulations negatively affect the general public. Right now in my country (US) we have one political party that pretends electric cars are practical for everyone and another that treats fossil fuels as the solution to current shortcomings in electric technology, and rather limited actual progress on climate

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The thing is… These already exist in the form of public transportation.
Sure, it is not a solution everywhere, and infrastructure needs to be built, but there is no reason for every person to have a big car (and I’m not even talking about the US version of big cars which is just absurd, even European big cars are too large). Even if we just start in the cities, that would be a decent chunk of the population covered.

The paradox of “eco-friendly” new technologies is that they don’t lead to significantly fewer emissions, but to significantly more consumption. Cars now are way more efficient than 50 years ago in terms of technology. But instead of making cars that use up a lot less fuel, companies made the cars bigger. So now all that efficiency is being used up by hurling unnecessary tons of metal around the place.

People (in “the west” and probably elsewhere) view it as their innate right to drive a big car. Even worse, a big car is often some sort of status symbol. If there is one thing we are told over and over (albeit not directly) it is: “You must consume, consume, consume. Have more stuff. Have bigger stuff. Have the newest, best stuff.” As long as we don’t change that, we can forget everything else, IMO.
(so yeah, we’re doomed)

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Wait. Why prickly pear? Here that is an invasive alien that requires biocontrol (and also a historical farmed crop for ‘something’)
Your corn is subsidised for corn syrup?

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But unproductive hill farms and grouse moors are wildlife habitats. What do you want to turn them into?

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Better wildlife habitat. Presumably if it’s no longer used for shooting birds, hen harriers etc will no longer mysteriously disappear while visiting shooting estates.

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Any plantation isn’t a great idea, I think.

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Right. But isn’t that a matter of stopping persecution rather than altering the habitat?

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Yes, for the shooting moors. I imagine after the controlled burns stop the habitat will also change. Likewise on the hills when sheep grazing is reduced the habitat will also change.

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I’m not at all against public transit, but as you say it’s not a solution everywhere, and if we are going to reach net zero we need a solution everywhere

The kind of technologies I’m talking about are not efficiency improvements to the existing fossil fuel based engines, but zero emissions tech, like improvements in charge time and range on electric cars, or ways to bring down the cost of hydrogen fuel. Also some of the size increases in the US are the result of government regulations that incentivize or require larger size

Some of the popularity of large vehicles in the rural west is a matter of practicality, I once drove on dirt roads in the rural west (in a crossover SUV with 8 inches ground clearance) and the violent shaking whenever I got up to 9 mph made it completely impractical, a larger vehicle with substantial ground clearance is a necessity just to get down some roads. Also parents cannot transport more than 2 kids in car seats in a standard 5-seater car

I don’t think the main problem with vehicle emissions is the desire to have newer and bigger stuff, buying small cars and running them until they die still emits a lot of CO2 if the cars run on gas

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Because Jason and I are in North America where Opuntia is native, attracts many pollinators, the green pads are edible, and the fruits are delicious.

Our corn is subsidized for ethanol (and cow feed?).

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The issue isn’t limited to rural areas though. Most car companies don’t even produce actually small vehicles anymore. (The average car now is a lot bigger than the average car 50 years ago, despite more people living in cities now than 50 years ago).
I’m also not arguing against big cars when they are practical. But if you look at the streets within cities (especially at rush hour), almost all cars have exactly 1 person inside it, and I’d be surprised if even half of them would be more than half full more than once a month or needed to carry stuff a smaller car wouldn’t be able to.
Does every single one of these people really need their own car? Probably not. Do they need big pickups or huge SUVs? Definitely not.

I know, but emissions do not just come out of the back of the car, nor are they the only environmental crisis we are battling with.
The production of new cars needs a lot of energy and materials. It creates waste and its own emissions. And the electricity for all those EVs has to be generated as well… So limiting the amount of cars that get produced and limiting the size of them where possible is still a good idea.
I’m not against EVs, I’m against unnecessarily many EVs. Therefore the point I was trying to make is that we cannot wait for technology to solve all our problems. We need to act now and a lot of action we/governments could take now is not dependant on new technologies.

Another thing to consider is: If every person globally would live the way the average American or European does, then the earth’s resources do not suffice for us all. That doesn’t mean that we all need to go back to living in the middle ages, reject all technology, nor that there is an overpopulation.
It means that our consumer habits are not sustainable and need to be changed. And that is something new technologies cannot realistically solve in the foreseeable future. (And personally I don’t think of reducing our consumption as negatively affecting the general public.)

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We got our i3 when intentions were green. Small. Light carbon fibre body. Lots of recycled content, and designed to dismantle for recycling eventually. We charge the battery using the solar panels on our roof. (Grid power in South Africa still leans heavily on coal, but the balance is tipping to cheaper wind and solar power)

Discontinued in favour of ‘fuel’ guzzling big heavy models instead.

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