One of the biggest parts of Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s green platform — and one that’s gotten little attention so far — is his commitment to protect nearly a third of the nation’s land and water by 2030. “We need to hit the ground running undoing the damage of the Trump administration,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a Biden surrogate and one of the leading advocates in Congress for a national “30 by 30” goal, said in an interview this month. “But we can’t stop there because that would be like putting a Band-Aid on a life-threatening wound.”

Udall and Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced a resolution laying out the objective last year. But the idea of protecting a certain percentage of the planet was planted by the biologist and writer E.O. Wilson in his 2016 book “Half Earth.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in Miramar, Fla. this month. (Reuters/Tom Brenner)

Restricting human intrusion into nature is necessary, conservation proponents say, not only to curtail climate change, but also to stave off the loss of even more plants and animals to extinction as urban sprawl, agriculture, and oil drilling and other extractive activities continue to encroach on it.

Yet politicians here and abroad have made bold conservation promises in the past, only to fall short. And while the idea of protecting nature is broadly popular in the abstract, actually carrying out that goal can face stiff resistance from those who live and work near protected areas.

Biden is just one of the latest — and most prominent — politicians in the United States to back the burgeoning ‘30 by 30’ movement.

His platform calls on the United States to set aside 30 percent of its lands and water for conservation by the end of the decade.

“We should be taking the plan where we allow significant[ly] more land to be put in conservation, plant a deep root of plants, which absorb carbon from the air,” Biden said during a town hall event on ABC.

According to one estimate, around a football field’s worth of green area is lost to human development on average every 30 seconds in the Lower 48 states. That is playing a part in an unparalleled potential loss of 1 million species, which U.N. scientists say may have profound implications for human survival.

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity — to which every U.N. member has signed onto except for the United States — had pledged to protect 17 percent of terrestrial and inland waters and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by this year. The United Nations says that goal has been “partially achieved.”

Stateside, Biden has called out President Trump for opening the vast swath of caribou and polar bear habitat in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling and eyeing more uranium mining in the West.
Even if Biden wins, the country has a ways to go to meet that goal in the next 10 years.

Only 12 percent of the nation’s lands and a little more than a quarter of its waters are sufficiently protected, according to research done by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Those protected areas include not just parks, but also wilderness areas, game refuges and other public lands with conservation easements.