Corporations have done a pretty good job of misleading and distracting consumers, but it's not like the information isn't out there. I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.
There's a huge proportion of the population that doesn't even have the luxury of voting with their wallets because the only thing they can afford is the cheapest possible. Cost of living has gone significantly up in the last two or three decades.
Also a bunch of companies out there are actually under some megacorp. Have fun completely cutting off Nestle or Unilever out of your life[0], for example. The information is there, but it's delusional to think everyone can manage to avoid all these brands altogether for various reasons (access to alternatives, price vs. income, etc.).
> I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.
I don't agree. The sheer volume of information that's available in the public space and the size and scope of large corporations makes "voting with their wallets" impractical.
That is true, but it is also true that most people who do have reasonable alternatives still don't take advantage of them. This could be due to laziness, inertia but mostly I'd guess comfort level. We live in a society where people yell at McDonalds employees if their stupid chicken nuggets isn't available one day, out of 5,000 days they've eaten there. Point being, most of us have become too comfortable and expect too much, while not doing enough ourselves at the same time.
Most of these things are very hard to analyze. Let me give you a real-life example.
This winter, my driveway developed some major cracks from the snow melt. How can I solve this problem responsibly?
Not fix it? Then I have to park on the street and drive my car unnecessarily to keep it out of the way of the plow. I will end up with craters and mud slide in my yard, a useless garage, and I'll probably have to fix it anyway if I want to use/resell my property.
Move to a warmer climate? Then someone else moves into my house and we've wasted resources just shuffling people about.
So what I will probably do is go to a company that does driveway repair and have them fix it, because then the space is usable and I don't have to change my whole life or live with a dangerous/ugly pit in my yard. But I can't tell you if they will do it efficiently. They're the experts, so obviously they know more than I do.
What would you do? What would anybody do? How am I supposed to both identify an environmentally-friendly alternative and muster the courage to act on it?
I don't have an answer to this specific scenario that you described. That said, I wasn't saying we should all suddenly become 100% socially responsible overnight - it is just not practical.
There are lots of things that are super easy to do, and yet have positive influence on the environment, society etc. We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping. This isn't hard to do, and will help reduce plastic bags. We don't have to wait for legislation to act on this. We don't have to replace our perfectly working phone, every other year (or every year) and throw it in the landfill. And so on.
These are definitely small compared to the pollution caused by corporations. But corporations exist to sell to consumers. Plus, change has to start somewhere. Why not start at home?
>We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping.
That probably doesn't help. A cotton bag requires about 130x more resources to produce than a standard HDPE carrier bag. If you re-use a plastic bag three times, you'd need to use your cotton bag nearly 400 times to break even. The cotton bag is likely to wear out substantially sooner than that. The plastic bag can be disposed of responsibly by recycling, incineration or as a container for non-recyclable domestic waste.
Isn't that hypocritical though? You want to assign blame to me for not bringing cloth bags, yet you want to coddle me for making that mistake by offering me free plastic bags when I forget? Perhaps I would be more incentivized to bring cloth bags if I had to suffer some for not doing so. Make me buy some at the register, run to my car to retrieve them, or make multiple trips. (Point in fact, I have cloth bags in my car, but I have not once remembered to bring them into a store. Habits are not easy to form. And I'll be thought rude to run to my car after dumping groceries on the checkout line rather than using the provided bags.)
It doesn't really matter who you blame in this case, because the solution is the same either way: stop allowing stores to offer free plastic bags.
And if anyone would accuse my of rationalizing my inefficiencies, then that is just one more reason why you cannot trust individuals to make the right choices.
India recently stopped plastic bags in stores, and most shops don't have bags that you can buy (plastic or otherwise). You have to bring your own bags, or you can carry your stuff in your hands :P It is so painful that people don't forget bags while grocery shopping.
You are expecting someone to say "do this, do that"? This is the opposite of responsibility. One possible responsible way is to learn how the natural biotope in your area looks like and then apply it to your problem. This does not mean to leave some ugly "natural" pit unusable for you there. Instead, recognize ways how nature fights erosion, and then combine stones or permeable pavement with the same plants that do it naturally.
How to muster the courage... I don't know, that's very personal. But it's encouraging to know humans communicated in this manner with their natural environment for thousands of years.
The driveway problem isn't a major problem in my life. It's practically already solved. I cannot go around turning every minor problem into a mountain of effort, and it'd be stupid to think that everybody doing this is going to fix the environment. I won't do it. And nobody else will either.
If they were going to do it, it would already be done. The reason we haven't done it yet is the same reason we won't ever do it. Individual responsibility is not a solution here, so I'd rather we not bet the future of humanity on it being one.
Well, technically they can, it's just that that sort of lifestyle is unrecognizable to us today, and would basically take all your time. They would be totally left behind by modern society, ie hermits.
I mean you're right in a unabomber type sense (i.e. living in a log cabin trapping small animals), but if I wanted to build my own smartphone from scratch, my whole lifetime is spent extracting materials to build the equipment required for making the smartphone. Even if I somehow made the smartphone, I would have immediately violated some patent law.
Even if I were a globe trotting immortal, I cannot legally DIY most common electronics because of patent law.
