Environmental awareness and behavior of individuals in the Mediterranean and Aegean region

Human and nature have been in interaction with each other throughout history. In the beginning while nature guided human, in later times human has come to guide the nature. In times of no Urbanization, Human and Nature behaved well to each other so that whatever man does to gave the nature, nature gave him the same reaction. That means, air, water and soil pollution caused by dense population, in other words the damage he has done to nature it is human himself who will be affected by the damage again. This study was carried out to determine the thoughts of individuals living in the Mediterranean and Aegean regions about the environment and how they generally treat their environment. This study was conducted by face-to-face questionnaire survey method with 370 randomly selected people for each region, with 740 people in total. 53.6 % (397 people) of them where female, 46.4 % (343 people) of them were male and the average age was 35.84. Average number of family members living in the household was 3.3. It has been determined that 67,8 % of the individuals are careful not to throw garbage on the street and 63,2 % of them use low consumption devices for energy saving. It has been revealed that the women participating in the study have more information about whether the washing and cleaning agents are environmentally friendly and they take care to use environmentally friendly products. It has been determined that women while shopping they pay attention to whether the product they want to buy harms the environment while shopping, and if it does, they give up.