E. O. Wilson has been a friendly, expert voice championing species conservation for more decades than I can recall. He has initiated a project to catalog the estimated 10 million species that our planet harbors, most of them still unknown and unnamed.
This week he explains his plan to set aside half the earth as a wildlife preserve. And it can't be the half that's least useful to us!
Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life
Wilson's OpEd in The New York Times
We are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong; it is growing weaker. Freshwater is growing short; the atmosphere and the seas are increasingly polluted as a result of what has transpired on the land. The climate is changing in ways unfavorable to life, except for microbes, jellyfish, and fungi. For many species, these changes are already fatal. "Read more