In his novel “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the lifestyle of the rich and careless in a way that might have made Robin Leach blink.

“Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.”

Tom and Daisy Buchanan, you’ll recall, are the “careless” couple at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel. As he wrote, “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Fitzgerald, of course, was writing about the real-life area of Long Island known as the Gold Coast. And though the Buchanans were most likely either composites of people he’d met or purely fictional, it seems he was inspired by one particular house, owned by a woman named Mary Harriman Ramsey.

Harriman Ramsey’s house – mansion, actually – is a French Normandy-style residence located in a part of the island called Sands Point. Designed in 1928, the 5.3-acre waterfront property was renovated and, when put on the market in the summer of 2017, was listed at $16.8 million.

So, you get an idea of just how ritzy the area is.

(Interesting side note: Harriman Ramsey was the daughter of E.H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon who is referenced several times in George Roy Hill’s 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”)

Back to East Egg – er, the Hamptons – I drove the width of Long Island, some 188 miles, after landing late on a recent Thursday night at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. We split up the trek, spending the night in a hotel before continuing on Friday morning.

We didn’t spend any time checking out Gatsby’s world, other than to make a quick stop at a farmstand to pick up some fresh fruit and, a short while later, at a place called Carissa’s Bakery for some exquisite pastries (my almond croissant was especially tasty). We didn’t want to delay because our destination was Montauk, the village (or hamlet) at the extreme eastern tip of the island.

Montauk was where we’d arranged to rent an Airbnb just about a 10-minute walk from the beach. The house was big enough to handle six of us, two adult couples and a pair of teenagers – our grandchildren.

I’d known of Montauk only for two reasons. One, it’s the well-known site of a renowned artists’ retreat that was founded in 1967 by the late playwright Edward Albee. Two, it’s a place that my daughter and her family have come on occasion over the years just to get away from their hectic daily life in Brooklyn.

It turned out to be a perfect place to spend a three-day weekend, walking to the beach, hiking along the shore, playing board games, watching television shows (my granddaughter’s favorite at the time was the Netflix series “Heartstopper”), eating seafood at the street-side eatery Hooked and cooking our tasty meals (my daughter and her husband are great cooks).

However, our visit did bring up a few concerns, both historical and environmental, both of which had me recalling Fitzgerald’s novel.

I wrote about Montauk in a previous post, it being the traditional home of the indigenous Montaukett tribe. Though the Italian explorer Giovanni Verrazzano (for whom New York’s Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is names) mapped the area in 1524, Montauk itself remained mostly unvisited by outsiders for another century or more.

And when those outsiders (mostly Europeans from England and the Netherlands) did begin to visit, and eventually settle on the tribe’s lands, the predictable occurred: Illness, combined with war both with some settlers and other tribes, ended up decimating the Montauketts.

In 1910, a court decision decreed that the tribe was extinct. Legislation to restore rights to the remaining several hundred living descendants of the tribe is pending. Though past bills to do so have been passed by both houses of the New York legislature, they were vetoed first by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and then current Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The history behind how the Montauketts lost their land is long, complicated and ultimately sad. And, clearly, it’s ongoing.

Concerns are being raised about the village’s beaches as well. According to a group called Concerned Citizens of Montauk, at least five of the beaches – long a draw for tourists – are “at risk due to the threat of climate change, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion.” Among them is the beach, Ditch Plains, that was nearest our Airbnb rental.

My daughter stood on the shore, near tears, as she surveyed and then explained to the rest of us how much smaller the beaches had become in just a few short years. Yes, storms have been part of the problem. But those, too, are part of the climate-change argument.

“I’ve seen a lot of panicked people on social media completely freaking out about beach erosion in Montauk,” wrote one local resident. “I want to be clear: I’m concerned about it, and I think we should all care deeply about our environment.”

In Fitzgerald’s day, few people – especially those like the Buchanans – worried about what happened either to the island native tribal groups or about the effects of climate change. This was especially true of the characters in “The Great Gatsby.”

The day is long past, though, when we could afford to have such “careless” attitudes. It’s up to all of us to clean up the mess that we’ve made.

We owe it to our children. And grandchildren.