If I tell you you are not within prison, the prison is within you, can you believe that?

There's ALWAYS something about to wipe out life on this miserable little planet.

The Great War (aka World War I), World War II, The Cold War with its constant threat of global thermonuclear war, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Oil Crisis of the 1970s before we discovered oil in Alaska, COVID-19.

The world has been under seemingly constant threat of annihilation since well before I was born and yet we are still here, life goes on, there are lots of new and wondrous inventions.

That doesn't mean we don't have real problems. I just think, you know, we expect firefighters and EMS to not run around screaming and flapping their arms histrionically like Kermit the Frog and if we are going to solve those problems, we need to similarly be pragmatic and not freaking out about how IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AND THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN REALLY DO ABOUT IT.

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

This was my mantra online for some years. I stopped because people seem to think I don't actually know what I'm talking about, like it means I'm being flippant or I'm in denial or I'm clueless and not like I'm an environmental studies major who has studied these problems and thinks they are solvable.

If I tell you you are not within prison, the prison is within you, can you believe that?

There are about eight billion humans on Earth currently. Many people seem to think this means the scale of the problem is simply too large and cannot possibly be fixed. I think it means the primary problem is our collective mindset.

My world's on fire, how about yours?
That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored

The above song has lines about global warming that precede the above lines. It's a nice little summary for the crux of the issue: Too many people think they need to literally burn the world to the ground to avoid being bored.

I don't happen to agree with that.

Perhaps it would be better to remain still, use one light and free the mind from fear.

Rather than run around like crazy and make bigger houses and create an America -- as has already been done -- where you have to run faster and faster just to stay in place, we can choose to promote passive solar design, build smaller homes, more cycling infrastructure, more pedestrian-friendly places and better public transit.

Instead of doubling down on insisting the problem is too far gone and simply CANNOT POSSIBLY BE FIXED, start where we are, do what we can, iterate and improve from there. It's a known method for solving big problems that can be summed up as "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at at time."

It's a myth that we can only improve quality of life for individuals by ruining our environment more aggressively. The reality is that it doesn't work well to try to guilt people into denying themselves good things "for the benefit of others" and so on.

If you ruin the world, you have to live in a hellhole.

If you make the world a better place, you get to live in a better place.

You don't need to "do the right thing" for the sake of your friends, neighbors, future generations blah blah blah. You can do the right thing out of enlightened self interest: Because it benefits YOU to make the world a better place.