How it Started vs. How it’s Going: The Lie that Started the Environmental Movement

Ericka Leigh (she/her)
7 min readApr 22, 2021

How a PSA hoodwinked America into thinking Climate Change was the fault of individual in/action.

Advertisement by the Ad Council for Keep America Beautiful in 1971.

“Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” pause for dramatic effect while trash is slung out of a car window, “and some people don’t.” Insert a single tear. “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

You may recall a certain prolific, slightly racist PSA from the 1970s that I can recall seeing on TV as a kid in the 90s. The Crying Indian commercial that sparked the environmental movement. You gotta hand it to ‘em, it was good advertising. And it certainly got the point across: Pollution = bad.

You may not know that that commercial was funded by a plastic bottling company via Keep America Beautiful through the Ad Council. The lie in this packaged piece of visual influence is that individuals are in control here. While there’s definitely power in the people, here’s a new PSA for you:

People do not start pollution. Companies do.

We, the people, are just the pawns in big oil and big business and big tech’s get rich quick schemes where they tell us that if we buy their product or use their service, then our lives will be better, and all we have to do is dispose of the waste properly.

How about big oil and big business and big tech not create toxic, non-reusable things in the first place? The real damage is done before customers even have a chance to dispose of anything, before the item ever reaches our hands. Most plastics have gone on a long journey through extraction pipes, processing plants, cross-Atlantic travels before they end up in front of us. And even though we didn’t create the demand or mine the product from the earth, the responsibility still seems to fall on us, the individuals, to dispose of it properly when the item no longer serves us. Single use plastic like straws, plasticware, and thin film packaging can’t really be recycled. In fact, much plastic isn’t recycled into new plastic, but rather downcycled into fleece, plastic lumber, lawn furniture, and more where plastic than reaches its final form.

Fifty-one years ago, Keep America Beautiful told us that people start pollution therefore people have the power to stop it. The falsehood in this narrative that has fed the environmental movement for the last half century, that has allowed big business and big oil to continue to pollute, puts the onus on consumers by selling them on the notion that if they recycle their packaging, or throw their bottle in the proper bin, then society wouldn’t have this pollution problem. This careful messaging shifts the accountability to customers and individuals instead of addressing the incredibly polluting and wasteful system that is big business and plastic — which the oil industry created.

Since the postwar era, we’ve been taught to consume more and that more equals happier. The Ad Council is famous for other such campaigns as 1954’s “The Future of America” and 1956’s “People’s Capitalism”, both of which encouraged Americans to consumer more and told them there was power in their buying much stuff.

Here’s another newsflash: Individuals cannot clean up the mess, aka pollution, created by big industry in the same way that a toddler cannot clean up the mess left after a month-long Mardi Gras celebration. As Ginger Strand so eloquently asked, “How can we expect individual choice to right the wrongs of collective decisions?”

Additionally, telling citizens if they just recycle properly is putting a tremendous amount of faith in the hands of individuals to change their behavior and do the right thing. Humans are notorious for letting each other down. Even in a household of one, it can be hard to agree on something, let alone act on it. every. single. time.

What’s ironic about this commercial is its own blatant contradiction. In the same breath, KAB is accepting money from plastic bottling companies and organizing volunteers for yet another highway cleanup where most of the littered items collected are — drumroll please — plastic bottles and other packaging. It makes one wonder who is scratching who’s back.

The detrimental effects of plastic and microplastics in neighborhoods, ecosystems, and oceans are well documented. Well, here’s another uneasy fact for you: of all the plastic ever produced, only about 9% has been recycled. Roughly 12% has been incinerated, and the other 79% is hanging out in a landfill, ocean, or backyard near you.

Instead of continuing on with a system that was not broken — a system of using glass bottles and refilling them — the bottling industry thought it would be more lucrative to make something that can be used once. So they continued to mine a substance deep in the earth, disturbing balance, so they could sell more stuff, increasingly to be used one time. I would like to comment that to mine any substance and use it for the sole purpose to make something that will immediately be thrown away seems like a huge waste of resources, time, and money. And I have to ask: Who benefits?

There’s a Native American proverb I learned in grad school, “We do not inherit the Earth from our elders, we borrow it from our children.” The false narrative of “People start pollution. People can stop it.” preimered 14 years before I was born. I’ve spent the last 14 years changing my habits and becoming more granola. Fourteen years ago, I was in college and that’s when I really started to learn about climate change, global warming, the vast reach of our pollution. I heard that our shorelines will erode and we’ll have more extreme weather events that this is happening in the future, but with the increasing hurricanes, wildfires, and climate refugees, I say the future is now. The threats are here and the window to act is narrowing. My future was compromised before I was born, and I will spend the rest of my life fighting for it. And not just because I’m some granola-loving, Birkenstock-wearing, city-living, millennial hippie; but because it’s the right thing to do. And I’d still like to visit the Florida Everglades, Chile, Cape Town, and the Great Wall of China one day. This world of ours is an incredible place with so much to offer, and I hope to experience it.

So how’s it going now?

Well, there’s definitely been progress. However, there’s still a long way to go and it’s arguable how much progress has actually been made. Big companies are still taking from the poor and giving to the rich, using charitable acts as cover for crimes against humanity and nature. They give with one hand and take with two. With careful marketing and issue advertising storytelling, it can be really hard to decipher where the truth lies.

What gives me hope are the individual actions so many — because there is power in the people. I also feel hopeful because we have Joe Biden now and he has a list of environmental goals. There are also amazing groups like the Sunrise Movement, the student strike for climate, and Fire Drill Fridays all demanding change and holding elected officials accountable. Accountability is key for change.

In the David Attenborough documentary A Life On Our Planet he offers, “To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity — the one thing we have removed.” No more clear-cutting forests for lumber and new farmland. No more trawling the ocean floor for tuna and salmon. No more giant monocropped fields eroding topsoil.

Overall, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done to ease the effects of climate change in the future. And I firmly believe it will take a top down and a bottom up approach to made a dent. As citizens, we have the power to influence change everyday with our dollars and how we spend our money, who we support, and what we buy. I hope you’re using your dollars for good.

What you can do about it

Start where you are. Do what you can. Do more of what you’ve been doing — recycling; taking public transportation or waking places instead; composting; bringing your reusable tote bags to stores and using your own utensils at take-out food places or cookouts instead of plasticware; sewing buttons back on your shirts; and investing in better footwear.

Pay attention to how you shop, where your clothes and your food come from. Quit your fast fashion habit. Buy used. Mend your clothes. Eat less beef. Eat less seafood. Start a compost with your food scraps.

What else you can do: stop banking with Chase; divest and reinvest your money into a climate friendly account; call your local elected officials and ask them what their plan is to fight climate change in your city.

Focus on one change at a time if that works best for you; you’re not required to make a whole system overhaul at once. But once you become aware of the problems and ills of world, including how climate change is affecting us now, it is your responsibility to do something about it. You can do one thing, but you cannot do nothing.

There’s an African proverb I really like, “Little by little, one travels far.” Together, I do believe we can all make it.

--

--

Ericka Leigh (she/her)

Artist. Sustainabilist. Composting my way through life with musings on the intersections of life, death, the environment, art, & fashion. www.sewnapart.com