Born to be a tree-hugger

Since I have memory, my family always teached me about the important of being respectful and friendly with the enviroment.
I think one of the reasons is because we all grew in the countryside, at the side of a lot of hills, mountains and trees.
That's why I have a lot of recycling habits, like divide the garbage (paper, glass, aluminum, cardboard etc.), and dump it into special containers, and also I don't use plastic bags at all.
I always prefer to walk or my bike instead a car or the subway, but unfortunatelly here in Santiago the streets aren't friendly with the bikers.
I think that our society starts to take care of the enviroment, because we all realized that our world's gonna disappear unless we do something about it.
But that's the theoric situation. In fact, at least here in Santiago (and in the way that I can see everyday), the people aren't to interested in helping our world. You can see this in everyday's traffic jam, and in the daily air pollution.
The carbon footprint is one of the newest topics about the contamination and how we can help to reduce it. As I said before, I think that my principal contribution to reduce my carbon footprint is choosing my legs and the bike instead the public sevice of transport or the cars (in the logical distances, of course, because I'm not gonna walk 130 kms. to reach home at the weekends).
But at the end, I understand and don't blame the Santiago citizens, because living here, in a small region with 6 millions of neighbors, it's a difficult situation that (I think) I will never adapt to it.