I'll be talking a bit about a couple of the reasons humans have so much trouble making progress on environmental problems.
Considering this is a very complex and wide-reaching topic, I'm just going to brush a bit of the surface. (And since I've had a long day, I'm mostly gonna throw out a few ideas without trying to tie them together XP )
I won't go into huge detail about this here, but anthropocentrism is one of the main problems. Humans believe that we're the most important things on the planet, and that everything else exists to serve our species. But this gives us the excuse to treat everything else as dispensable tools, instead of living shifting systems full of life. Systems that we need to survive.
Another main problem is that humans are creatures of habit. We're used to doing things certain ways. It's hard for us to change those ingrained ways to make way for more sustainable habits. For example, cars. Most people around here would never consider giving up their car and relying on public transportation. We're used to driving everywhere in our private vehicles (though our public transportation also sucks, which makes it hard to let go of cars. We really need to improve our public transportation).
Some people will do everything in their power to hold onto their old habits. Especially when they're making a lot of money from old ways. For example, the huge fossil fuels companies purposefully sew disagreement about climate change. They try to convince people that scientists are debating about the existence of climate change. Scientists are not debating about it. They know it's happening, despite what media wants you to think.
Big businesses will destroy and pollute, and then just pay any fines that they get slapped with. They find that easier than actually fixing their problems, and trying to be more sustainable. But once a piece of habitat is destroyed, it can take a very long time for it to come back. If ever.
Of course plenty of people fight tirelessly to pass laws to protect our planet. Then some weird new guy becomes president, and they destroy much of the progress that had been made up until then. Undoing laws, cutting budgets, putting big business leaders in charge of environmental programs. The list goes on and on.
In big cities, it can be hard to notice how much forests and nature in general are falling apart. And how much people who live in other parts of the world are affected by the degrading habitats. Plus, it's harder to care about people living on the other side of the planet than it is to care about problems nearer to home.
Also, humans are often pretty bad at planning for long-term things. We're a lot more interested in short-term problems. Which makes it easy to degrade habitats as long as we're getting short-tern gain.
And sort of unrelated (but I don't know where else to put this) are the people who grew up in beautiful, pristine nature. And as they grew up, they watched it slowly degrading until there was nothing left.
How can you use these ideas?
Well, there could be some good character ideas in here. Plenty of villains have been based on some of these points, though you can go much farther than that. Human minds (and societies) are complicated and fascinating, and there are countless ways you can link that to the environment.
Stories that have used this:
Well, most environmental stories include this in some way. I'll mention a few.
The Lorax is the iconic story about short-term gain, long-term loss.
Avatar shows how we view other peoples and distant lands.
The movie Erin Brockovich is based on a true story of the lengths big businesses go to, even if it means huge environmental and health problems.
One film called Salt and Fire is about a man trying to make amends for the damage he caused (not unlike The Lorax).
Pocahontas urges us to see ourselves as part of nature, instead of owners of nature.
And Princess Mononoke is still the most beautiful and realistic portrayal of fantasy environmental problems and the people involved in them.
In Star Trek: The Voyage Home, Spock points out how illogical humans are in their destruction of nature. Well, yeah, it is illogical. But humans do plenty of illogical stuff XP
Tomorrowland shows us how important it is to give people hope. There are studies that show that people are far more likely to act on problems if they have hope of fixing them. If they think we're all gonna die no matter what, they wouldn't have any reason to try to fix things.
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