Domain

One person can care for one tree. One person can care for a hundred trees. But one hundred people can’t care for a hundred trees.

It’s just not in our nature to be emotionally invested properly in things that we can’t conceptualize as “ours.” That doesn’t have to be in a selfish, greedy ownership way. It can be in terms of responsibility.

When someone is given a partial stake in a large domain, they tend to want to carve out subdomains for themselves. If you tell a hundred people to collectively care for a hundred trees, the natural and immediate response is for them to start picking individual trees to care for. Expecting them to each care 1% for each tree is absurd. It’s not how people act.

Remember that when faced with large collectives. If you meet a company leader who expects every employee to care equally about all aspects of the company, that’s a foolish leader. People need to have domains, or they’ll make them themselves. And if they do, it will often be at the larger collective’s expense.

If you tell all one hundred people that they each need to care for one tree, and give them access to the resources to do so and organize them, you’ll have a bunch of healthy trees. If you just tell all hundred people to care for all hundred trees, they’ll still split them up, but now they’ll become competitive and zero-sum.

Design the domains and you’ll achieve the goal.