Could life in solar system complicate space settlement?

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Ian Woollard
(...)
> That's a laugh, the term 'US' is practically synonymous with 'not being
> concerned with the environment'. There's massive numbers of people there
> in
> deep, deep denial about things like global warming being caused by fossil
> fuels for example. About 69% of Americans think that's pretty much all
> just
> some wild conspiracy theory.
(...)

Even though, compared to other places in the world, the United States
States *does* show more environmental concern, dysmal as that assertion may
sound for American environmentalists... For instance, a couple of months
ago I was in San Francisco and I noticed three things showing up a higher
degree of environmental concern than what I see in Brazil:

a) Trash of different kinds is supposed to be collected separately. (I say
"supposed" because, as I noticed during the weeks that I spent in there,
in practice no one knows exactly what to put in each can, and in the end of
the day there was a kind of random mix in each one.)
b) Plastic bags are forbidden and all stores supply paper bags instead. (By
te way, has anyone accounted the much higher expenditures of water and
energy needed to make paper?)
c) The Bay has millions of people living around and surprisingly it is not
a giant cesspool of sewer and assorted chemical pollution like the Guanabara
Bay in Rio or the
Pampulha Lake in my own city .
In fact, people can even actually fish on the bay without risking getting
intoxicated or catching some disease! (Of the three items, this was the
only one that I found worth of implementing, due to the obvious and
enormous public health and aesthetic benefits.)

Of course one can say that San Francisco is a city of peace-loving green
hippies and what I saw was not representative of the US as a whole. (And
indeed when I visited Dallas I was dismayed by the fact that they spreaded
over a radius of 100 kilometers a medium city that would fit perfectly in a
*diameter* of ten kilometers, with many thousands of inhabitants per square
kilometer, as is the case of Brazilian cities - which in that aspect save
lots of arable land and fuel.) But I don't think that I would find a single
city implementing all those measurements in Brazil.