Well, concerning the environment, we need to focus on sustainability, because it's an actually achievable goal. You can talk about climate change all you want, but right, wrong, or indifferent, it's not going very far in the US. Focus on ways to solve the problem and eventually you'd get closer to solving it. The following are real things we could be doing now to save ourselves headaches later.
Bamboo: It grows fast, and you can use it on all sorts of things. Sure, it is an invasive species, but our harvesting demand is essentially endless. This plant could provide a readily available source of material for building etc and also some monitored habitats for wildlife. The main selling point to bamboo is that it grows fast and is essentially renewable forever if you manage it.
Insects and biological waste ---> livestock feed (Worms and things feed pigs)One way or the other, people aren't going to eats bugs, but there's a magical and tasty animal that will: pigs. Pigs are wonderful animals, because they take things we won't eat, including rotten food, and turn it into bacon! Moverover, through cultivation of healthy insect populations replacing large, resource intensive livestock feed options for pigs, we save water. Additionally certain insects like worms are good for soil, and predatory insects can keep crop killing pest insects under control.
Basically closed terrarium ecosystems producing cyclical food yieldshttp://norcalaquaponics.com/aquaponics.htmlRead that. You can theoretically do that anywhere, and if EVERYBODY somehow got into a sustainable population control thing, we could feed everybody with food grown right next to them while conserving a LOT of water. Water is going to become rather scarce in certain areas over the next 50 years.
The problem is that it takes knowledge and some startup capital to get these things going, and frankly, nobody seems to want to do it widescale.
And then of course there's the real problem here: IT DOESN'T GENERATE LARGE CORPORATE PROFITS, so it isn't going to get done.