A thought occurred to me the other day: Do you think that Americans are going to be able to truly "go green" until it isn't a trendy thing to do?
Think about it. If civil rights was a trendy thing, then after segregation was ended in America, restaurants would be advertising: "Blacks served here!".
My point is that it seems like going green isn't going to really work in a meaningful way until we've been hardwired to not even think of an alternative way of living. Now, that doesn't seem like something positive, but I think at this point the large majority of children are being brought up to not even think of any other possible way to treat black people other than equal to them at a basic human level (by that I mean, if the kid is an starfish, he's an starfish no matter what color his skin is and vice versa). In the context of going green, we'd end up in a few generations saying "Wow, at one point we used plastic bottles that never biodegrade and usually don't get recycled?" We're getting closer with recycling: at this point it's almost involuntary for me to recycle a bottle of coke or a piece of paper when I'm done with it.
So basically, we're not going to be able to go green until we don't think of it as "going green".