Amold Schwarzenegger, Dia Mirza and Adrian Grenier have a message for you: It’s easy to beat plastic. They’re part of a bunch of celebrities starring in a new video for World Environment Day—encouraging you, the consumer, to swap out your single-use plastic staples to combat the plastics crisis.

    The key messages that have been put together for World Environment Day do include a call for governments to enact legislation to curb single-use plastics. But the overarching message is directed at individuals.

    My concern with leaving it up to the individual, however, is our limited sense of what needs to be achieved. On their own, taking our own bags to the grocery store or quitting plastic straws, for example, will accomplish little and require very little of us. They could even be harmful, satisfying a need to have “done our bit” without ever progressing onto bigger, bolder, more effective actions—a kind of “moral licensing” that eases our concerns and stops us doing more and asking more of those in charge.

    While the conversation around our environment and our responsibility toward it remains centered on shopping bags and straws, we’re ignoring the balance of power that implies that as “consumers” we must shop sustainably, rather than as “citizens” hold our governments and industries to account to push for real systemic change.

    It’s important to acknowledge that the environment isn’t everyone’s priority—or even most people’s. We shouldn’t expect it to be. In her latest book, Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things, Elizabeth R. DeSombre argues that the best way to collectively change the behavior of large numbers of people is for the change to be structural.

    This might mean implementing policy such as a plastic tax that adds a cost to environmentally problematic action, or banning single-use plastics altogether. India has just announced it will “eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022.” There are also incentive-based ways of making better environmental choices easier, such as ensuring recycling is at least as easy as trash disposal.

    DeSombre isn’t saying people should stop caring about the environment. It’s just that individual actions are too slow, she says, for that to be the only, or even primary, approach to changing widespread behavior.

    None of this is about writing off the individual. It’s just about putting things into perspective. We don’t have time to wait. We need progressive policies that shape collective action, alongside engaged citizens pushing for change.

答案精析：根据题干中的“citizens”可定位至原文第四段。该段指出，对于环境的新呼吁忽略了权力的平衡，这意味着作为“消费者”，我们必须可持续地购物，而不是作为“公民”去要求政府和工业推行真正的系统化的改变。作者在此处的言外之意是，我们应当要作为“公民”去要求政府做出改变以应对现在的情形。故正确答案为D。

错项排除：A、B两项在原文中并未提及，属于无中生有，故排除。原文的意思是我们应该去行使我们公民的权利，敦促政府做出改变，而C项说我们已经一直在积极行使我们公民的权利，和原文意思不符，故排除C项。

长难句分析：While the conversation around our environment and our responsibility toward it remains centered on shopping bags and straws, we’re ignoring the balance of power that implies that as “consumers” we must shop sustainably, rather than as “citizens” hold our governments and industries to account to push for real systemic change.

本句的句子主干为…we’re ignoring the balance of power…，主谓宾结构。句首的While引导让步状语从句，表示“虽然；尽管”，从句的主干为…the conversation…remains centered on shopping bags and straws。句子中的第一个that引导定语从句，修饰balance of power；第二个that引导宾语从句，作implies的宾语。句子后半部分的rather than作为并列连词表示“而不是”，as “citizens”后面省略了we。hold…to account表示“使……承担责任”。

句意为：虽然有关环境和环境责任感的讨论仍然集中在购物袋和吸管上，但我们忽视了权力的平衡，这意味着作为“消费者”，我们必须可持续地购物，而不是作为“公民”要求我们的政府和行业负起责任，推动真正的系统性变革。