[Altair]

Originally Posted by Found Goat

You may be right about the less spiritually inclined among us (e.g. atheists) seeming to be more tethered to terra mater, what with their mortal outlook on life their gravitational force. This planet is all they have and, understandably, they wish to preserve it as best they can for their descendants. They don’t think of Earth as a stopover.

I think it's more to do with their practicality. They take life as they observe it and don't waste time imagining other worlds or the afterlife because they are more likely to bother about the here and now. I'm not an atheist but I value that practical trait. I think they are at an advantage there..

We can imagine and speculate all we want about pleasant afterlives and alien worlds, but if we can't appreciate a seemingly ''lesser'' world we don't really deserve something we imagine to be even 'better' or 'higher'.. To do so would be entitlement, but this does not really surprise me because much of spirituality is about self-indulgence..

Many religions don't seem to have much of an appreciation for this world. It's vilified and slandered as ''an illusion'' one must ''escape'' from through following a belief system. These attitudes are most certainly a reflection of the advance of civilization where humans have the luxury to dabble in over-conceptualization of their experience of ''happiness'' and ''suffering''. Reduce or remove that and you will have different people with different views about this world. There's something comical about the popular religions.. they go around in circles creating imaginary solutions to the problems we have created..

Originally Posted by Found Goat

I also wonder if it’s not so much a matter of indifference as one of apathy, or more accurately a feeling of resignation, that despite all one’s personal efforts in contributing to ecological awareness and improvement, that in the end these efforts may be too insignificant when the powers-that-be are for the most part living in ecological denial. Whether this is a defeatist or simply a realist position to hold may be a debatable one.

It could be part apathy as well.. but if we all think like that nothing changes. I don't know if you're familiar with the 'Tragedy of the Commons'; it's where resources are depleted because nobody takes responsibility or looks beyond their selfish needs. The tragedy occurs because they all thinks ''what difference does me changing make on the big picture?''
But we gotta start somewhere..