What is the single best thing you can do to help the environment? Is it to stop eating meat? Drive and fly less? Recycle and use less energy in your home?
It is none of these.
The best thing you can do to help the environment, by far, is to have a small family, or even better have no children at all. By not adding another person to the planet, you are saving an entire lifetime's worth of pollution, waste, carbon dioxide emissions and consumption.
It is a truth universally ignored that a planet on the verge of collapse must address the root cause of ecological annihilation: overpopulation. World population has rocketed from one billion to nearly eight billion in only the last two centuries. Add to this our personal consumption, which has multiplied by many times in the developed world over the last century, and we are potentially heading to a cataclysm of epic proportions.
Allowing the world's population to climb to its current level is the biggest act of criminal negligence ever committed, by ourselves upon ourselves. We know we're heading in the wrong direction, but we blindly follow the path towards the cliff edge.
We have to ask, 'How did we let this happen?' Why is it the elephant in the room? Why is any talk about population off the agenda with virtually no one talking about it? As this book explains, it's a very tricky subject.
We could easily change things for the better if we tried.

Everything you ever wanted to know about overpopulation, but were afraid to ask, is answered here.