[_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.