[logfromblammo]

I'll care about the Earth when I can feel like I can actually own a piece of it. I have no skin in the game, really, other than some vague dread of total environmental collapse.

Ted Turner, now, he has a great reason to be an environmentalist. Let the burden of environmental protection fall primarily on those who claim the most ownership of it. If Ted wants me to separate my recyclables and watch TBS on a TV constructed from recycled material and powered solely by renewables, he can damn well pay me something to do all that.

You don't ask the team that loses by 50 points every game to start playing with their shoelaces tied together. And you don't ask the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich. Developing nations are going to burn coal, and non-rich people are going to eat from disposable paper plates and then not recycle them. Environmentalism is a luxury, and only those who already have a sense of economic security will buy in to it.

But as long as I have an "at will" job and no more attachment to the land than a one-year lease, I'm not going to feel all that motivated.

[Nydhal]

Well some might consider their children as "skin in the game" but still. As far as I am concerned having children is also a luxury. At least it should be considered so, from my moral perspective.

[logfromblammo]

Kids are not inextricably attached to any particular part of this planet. And many parents have no piece of it to give to them after they die, anyway. If I have kids, they would be in roughly the same situation I am in.

The situation is roughly analogous to the entire world being a city block filled with apartment buildings. A few people own all the buildings. Most people rent apartments from them. The buildings are not extraordinary. They need maintenance and repair, or they will deteriorate. But for whatever reason, the building owners are not responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. (But woe to you if your rent check is even half a day late!)

Some tenants, alarmed by the state of their surroundings, spend their own time and money, over and above their monthly rent, to do repairs. But none of the tenants can address all the problems on their own. At most, they can patch up a cracked window, re-wrap the ductwork with better insulation, tighten plumbing connections. No one has the resources to both pay the rent and also pay extra for all the repairs they might want.

Some tenants do nothing, because it is the landlords' responsibility to maintain the properties. Also, they don't have enough money to spend on it, anyway. If the landlords want to be slumlords, then surely it would be possible to move to a better-kept building when things get too bad. Except--whoops!--the landlords that do invest more in maintenance are not accepting new tenants. The properties for sale are too expensive for any slum-renter to buy.

In analogy form, the solution seems obvious, does it not?

[kefka]

And you have at most a 110 year lease on the matter of your body.

I'm going to try to leave this place better than it was given to me. Even if it is a small corner.

[davedx]

This is a prevalent theme of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" (https://thischangeseverything.org/)

That the current system as it stands is not built to let us combat climate change, and we need to change the system too.