Last month, Rani Jayakumar wrote about the importance of personal mindfulness in saving the Earth. “As an environmentalist,” Rani writes, “I want to minimize my impact on the Earth and help protect it for my children.” To do this, she encourages readers to be mindful, aware, and watchful; to “Stop, Look, and Listen” to the world around them; and to make sound environmental decisions like avoiding single-use plastics and cutting out extra car trips.

As uplifting advice for establishing sound habits, Jayakumar’s advice is spot-on. The problem, though, is that it won’t affect the biggest perpetrators in the environmental crisis: large corporations.

When I was a kid in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, cartoons like Captain Planet and a myriad of PSAs offered similar advice for all of us to do our part to save the Earth. “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle,” these messages proclaimed as they aimed to build better consumption habits in a new generation. If these messages were to be believed, then the environmental crisis could be kept in balance if only enough people stopped asking for unnecessary bags at the grocery store.

The problem, though, was that such consumer-driven environmental marketing (along with other, more recent campaigns) has been part of a deliberate attempt by companies to shift responsibility for environmental damage on to consumers. This corporate influencing has recently been exposed on a large scale: to quote one example, in 2021 oil juggernaut Exxon Mobile was found to have consciously targeted corporate messaging to frame global warming as a problem driven by the “energy demand” of “consumers” rather than the oil company’s own push for fossil fuel consumption in world markets.

Framing the environmental issue as a consumer problem allows corporations to take on the role of blame-free bystanders in our climate and environmental crises, as if they’re powerless to change their manufacturing, transportation, and energy systems as long as consumers keep shelling out cash. “It’s your fault for buying plastics and driving gas-guzzling cars,” these companies would have us believe, “not ours for designing, marketing, and selling them to you!”

While consumer demand for greener products (along with companies’ attempts to design and market them) is a step in the right direction, such consumer-driven steps don’t go nearly far enough, and will fall flat as long as traditional polluting options remain available. In a world of shareholder-centered economic policy where companies will always embrace the path that makes them the most money, we have to change the legal and financial rules that allow the world’s biggest polluters to continue doing harm just because it’s cheaper for them to do so.

In her article, Jayakumar encourages consumers to bring a water bottle on plane trips rather than using the airline’s plastic cups. However, instead of sending this mindful message to passengers and hoping they make the environmentally friendly choice (as very few passengers did on my last plane trip), why not enact legislation that prohibits airlines from using single-use plastics and requires them to use reusable cups instead? Prohibitive laws like this would create a far greater impact and prevent far more plastic waste than individual consumers could on their own.

Such actions to prevent plastic waste aren’t without precedent. In July 2020, Japan, where I was living at the time, implemented a policy that required businesses to charge 5 yen (about $0.05 USD) for every plastic bag as a way of discouraging their use, thus reducing plastic waste. The strategy worked, with one survey finding that 72% of respondents avoided purchasing plastic bags at stores. Such firm legislation can create large-scale change while still allowing consumers the option of purchasing disposable plastic bags if they wish, or in situations where they’ve forgotten their reusable bags (as I occasionally did when I forgot mine).

Jayakumar also mentions returning reusable glass milk bottles to stores to save on bottle waste, a system that was the norm in the US for many decades (and that many beer companies in Japan still use). Nowadays, of course, most companies distribute beverages using disposable bottles and cans, but a system that incentivized reusable deposit bottles could make an enormous impact on curbing waste on a large scale. Perhaps governments could offer tax incentives to companies who used a deposit bottle system, and they could tax companies who continued selling wasteful single-use plastic. Or, if smart tax legislation could create a system where buying and returning reusable glass bottles was significantly cheaper than buying single-use bottles, simple economics suggests that people would choose the cheaper, more environmentally friendly option.

Ultimately, the solution to protecting the environment is twofold: the Japanese study I cited above recommends using both economic policies and consumer education of the type Jayakumar advocates for, because together these measures can create far greater impact than curbing personal habits alone. Companies simply can’t be trusted to enact mindful practices when they have very real financial incentives not to, and when they can harness tactics like lobbying and influencing public opinion to maintain the status quo. However, if these financial incentives were removed or changed, we would force companies to work within new guidelines and thus move in a more environmentally friendly direction (since changing companies’ shareholder-centered drive for profit over morality is a whole other battle).

There are many who will argue that requiring corporations to enact such measures is too restrictive, and infringes on their individual freedoms. However, last time I checked, corporations weren’t allowed to hold cockfights, sell alcohol to minors, advertise cigarettes on television, allow air travel without a security check, run gambling casinos next to elementary schools, or sell medicine that hasn’t been properly tested, because our society’s decided that all of these things go against the public good. In that case, isn’t it time we also added conserving the environment—not to mention our rapidly changing climate—to this protection of the public good?

If we really want to help the environment by being more mindful, the best route we can take is to support legislation like the kind I’ve mentioned above, along with politicians who’ll enact it. Such thinking would allow all of us to, as Jayakumar writes, to “go ahead and cross, mindfully, into your future.”

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