[mrhappyunhappy]

At the bottom most level it really does boil down to education and awareness. One could argue they go hand in hand. Even in western nations being educated is not enough, you must be aware of your actions. This is why I always point at legislation as the most effective means of getting anything done. Lead by example through innovation, investment into sustainable tech, methods and living and pass legislation that does away with the bad and promotes the good.

I guess to even get to this point we need to rewrite laws on lobbying to get special interests out of politics. Why stop there, might as well get campaign funding an overhaul to eliminate conflict of interest. Put in short term limits that do away with politics as a career choice and pass laws that promote it as civic duty.

To add to the recipe, make representatives directly accountable to votes against public majority with the ability for the people to kick them out of the office through expedited voting where a majority can remove a representative within a 48 hour time window. While we are at it, start imposing prison time for corporate crimes and start enforcing it. Add transparency to all political conversation online and offline for any member of the public to review. Face to face meetings are to be accompanied by a third party for documentation.

Creeped out? Yeah... so I think we need a total overhaul of values, economy, social systems, work policies and many laws to get to a point where we can do some good. Of course it al starts with education which is cut short by insufficient funding by said politicians.

Ok, it’s hopeless and we’re doomed.

[_ptgt]

Coming from someone who agrees with supports environmental initiatives on e.g. plastic management and climate change, I always find it condescending and insensitive when people assume political differences will be resolved by "educating" the other side.

It's difficult to know how Indians would behave in an alternate universe where environmental awareness was a higher priority, but I don't find it hard to believe at all that an Indians (or Chinese, or Americans...) would knowingly pollute the environment even if they were aware of that effects. For developing countries especially, the economic gains of dirty industrialization are very attractive even despite the environmental costs. I could certainly understand many people in developing countries understanding both the benefits and the costs and going on to choose the same path that they're already on.

[notahacker]

One of the first things you notice upon visiting developing countries is that household waste is often dumped in very visible places where it tends to spread naturally and easily, including near watercourses used for drinking. With consumer waste it's less the gains of industrialisation (after all, they consume a lot less than us) and more a lack of interest in ensuring it's dumped further away from their homes and water supplies. Pre-industrial European societies generally saw absolutely nothing strange about dumping excrement literally outside their front doorsteps, so it's not as if we can claim any longstanding cultural obsession with cleanliness either.

Having the resources to deal with clearing it up is certainly part of the equation, and clearly there are still many people in developed countries that happily litter and sneer at the concept of recycling, but I think it's a stretch to say that environmental education and campaigning doesn't have a significant effect on attitudes.