I actually have a story about how 1 person can save a species that very few people know.

I was researching a family [genealogy] that had a small town named after them in North-Western NJ. In the 19th century the family ran a ferry between PA & NJ along the Delaware River, eventually a town sprung up on both sides of this ferry & the NJ side was named after the ferryman.

At the end of the century an industrial baron who liked hunting bought, seriously, the entire town & surrounding area on both sides of the river. He used the PA side as his own private resort/summer home, and used the NJ side as a hunting preserve and turned the town into a ghost town.

By this point in time deer were extinct in NJ, and pheasant were on their way. This guy wanted to hunt both. So he had dozens of them captured & shipped in from W. Virginia and started breeding them on the NJ side in massive livestock pens. Eventually he had a lot of them and kicked down the fencing and escape into the woods and that [hundred & change years ago] is why there are deer in New Jersey [something to think of the next time you hit one with a car while driving through that state]. The state forest is named after him [Worthington], but because of the land not the deer story. The ghost town was destroyed in a flood fifty or sixty years ago, and no one who lives around there even knows there was a ferry there [and the rangers seem to be pretty secretive about the area's history: try asking them about privately owned cemeteries inside the park system and its like trying to get someone to admit what happens on Area 51, even though I have been in some of these cemeteries and know there are more around there].

Ok so it's not a reptile story, but my point is there are a lot of these success stories out there it's just that people don't know about them. Individuals have been succeeding at species re-population efforts since before the government even got involved with stuff like this.