That's a twist on the title of an old Doobie Brothers record, "What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits." "Black Water," the band's first number one single, came off that album. (That's the pre-Michael-McDonald Doobies, the guitar-hero outfit, not the super-slick, blue-eyed soul "Steely Dan Lite" it became with McDonald at the helm.)

The point of our headline is that stuff that used to be commonplace has become unacceptable because we know better: drinking and driving, smoking everywhere all the time, not using seatbelts, sexual harassment in the workplace, and more. Randi Kruse, of our own David Suzuki's Nature Challenge, often cites workplace smoking as an example of something that nobody questioned just a couple of decades ago, which has since become unthinkable.

That kind of change needs to happen with environmentally unsound behavior.

The WWF has dramatized the idea in this TV commercial. That's the short version. There's a 60-second version, too. There are print and transit ads that make the point as well.