The problems he describes all fit into three buckets

* Insurance industry rent-seeking

* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)

* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)

I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:

https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...

The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.

That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.

>Are you kidding me? She can’t let people walk on her land and sleep on her dirt because of the fucking insurance costs?!

By proxy this is attributed to lawyers, third party litigation funders, and large jury awards. Have you seen the cost of umbrella policies these days?

It begs the question of how to not be impotent. What can those who feel this way do?

We have a little bit of land, just over 2 acres with woods around. I really enjoy seeing deer and turkeys. Coyotes not so much.

It doesn’t “feel” like everything is caving in while at home. But when we leave, it really does. Like the traffic on the way to the airport this morning.

There seems to be a lot of latent stress. I think that’s what this post is talking about. It’s hard to sum it up in a single sentence. Not even “everything is getting unaffordable” lands…because of all those new full sized pickup trucks.

Something doesn’t fit and even I have a hard time putting my finger on it. I go to the local grocery store which is in a lower income area and I ask myself how all of these people survive. But they do.

But even as someone not struggling to survive by any means I feel what this post is saying.

> I talked to the owner. She told me how upset she was to have to do it but insurance costs keep going up, and she can’t afford to pay them.

> This is the invisible hand of the market at work. This is the invisible hand giving me the middle finger.

Misdiagnosed. Insurance is a competitive business, and operators who overcharge lose customers.

It's the trial lawyers, and their own state legislators giving them the middle finger. The insurance coverage that's gone up and driven the park to shut down is of course that for accident claims, driven by excessive jury awards to victims .

I grew up in Texas and lots of people who hear me talk about it assume I absolutely hate it there. In reality, I have a lot of the same complaints as this author and think it's citizens should demand better. The state seemingly has zero interest in investing in community resources, and what few of these exist are constantly at risk.

Fairfield Lake State Park is a perfect microcosm of this. The lake exists primarily to provide water for a power plant. The state park exists on land leased at very low cost from the power company. The power company closed the plant, and the state could have bought the land to secure the state park. It already had all of the infrastructure you need to run a state park, and had staff lined up to do so. Instead they let the land pass into private ownership and made a halfhearted effort to recover the land after the fact.

A lot of Texans that I talk to assume that the vast public land of the Rockies and Sierras is a geographic inevitability. In reality much of this public land exists because of specific, concerted efforts by communities and municipalities.

I think a lot about the decline of wilderness and just want to mention that animal agriculture drives a huge amount of the land pressure driving conversion of intact ecosystems into degraded states. 3/4 of the world's ag land is devoted to grazing or growing livestock feed. If the world went vegan then biodiversity and ecosystem loss would probably reverse. I think even the marginal impact an individual choice is significant. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/536143a https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abm9982

This post wasn’t exactly what I came for (looking at the title) and a bit more stream of consciousness than expected, but nonetheless rings true. Enjoyed the bit on materialistic consumerism and Wall-E.

This learned helplessness is as much the problem as anything else. The author rants about how once nature is destroyed it can never be recovered, and resigns himself to the thought that nothing can be done about it. Bullshit. One man in Brazil planted 40,000 trees and singlehandedly created a park in a desolate urban strip. You are not impotent unless you choose to be.

Yes, very sad, but that is what you get based on how people vote these days.

But no worries, decendents of all the people moving south will eventually end up as climate change refugees in 50 to 100 years. Then we get to watch a whole new environmental habitat develop in the deep south :(

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