I am all for conservation, ours is the only house on the street that encourages wildlfe. But then there is this, from Semafor:
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a snail
The Western world is in the grip of a housing crisis, and the best way to fix a housing crisis is to build more houses. But much of the West is limited in its ability to do that, because interest groups are able to use existing legislation to prevent their building. A good example, says the former British civil servant Michael Dnes, is the case of the little whirlpool ramshorn snail. They are rare, and thus protected under British law, and all construction near a colony must take them into account. Dnes has previously written about a stretch of road that has been denied important safety work for years — a period during which six people have died on that road — because of the snails.
Now, he writes, the presence of the snails in a valley in the southeast of England has led to a block on the construction of 20,000 new homes. The valley itself will not be built on; the concern is simply that building homes nearby might reduce the amount of water that reaches the valley. Any project, in an area of 350 square miles home to 250,000 people, must prove that it will not create any more water demand, in case it dries out the snails; simply bringing in more water, perhaps via a pipe, will not do. “No one appears to have stood up and said ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE!?!,” says Dnes. “Which seems like a missed opportunity.”