Sifr

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

Forty years ago there were zero condors in the wild.

There are over 300 condors now, free and wild and breeding by themselves without our help.

We did that. We did. Lots of people said "that's stupid, you won't succeed" but people made condor puppets and they said "fuck you we're gonna try anyway" and they fed the babies and raised them up wild and did their best with their big human brains and human cooperation and WE FIXED IT!!!!

YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST GENERATION TO CARE.

YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO CARES.

IT IS NOT HOPELESS.

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food.