If you are on an empty stretch of road and no one is with you, you might toss a bottle out. But if your friend, active in the recycling and community beautification activities, accompanies you, you do not throw it out. Peer pressure works. Unfortunately peer pressure is both positive and negative, and can just as easily keep individuals from doing what they know is right. In many areas of field after field of corn and soybeans, local people value a controlled environment without trees.
Trees are messy and disturb the controlled order of the agricultural landscape.
Those who plant them know they are viewed as bad farmers and so few trees are planted. Community counts in terms of environmental quality, and can assist in turning peer pressure from a negative to a positive. Those who see their neighbors farming in an environmentally sound manner and see it working, may decide to try it themselves. Industries find that pollution is an indicator of waste, and that the savings generated by the re-engineering and better use of inputs far exceed the costs of clean up. Farmers have learned that by applying less nitrogen, they can reduce input costs and not reduce yield at the same time that they reduce nutrification of ground and surface water.