[ixtli]

I find that the root issue is individualism. There are immaculately clean cities in east asia whos parent societies would definitely qualify as highly "consumerist." It's not consumption that's the problem but the parameters within which that consumption is allowed to proceed. As well, in individualist societies we seem far more comfortable to discard our trash wherever and just forget about it. A more collectivist attitude appears, from my experience, to get people to be more thoughtful.

[lm28469]

> There are immaculately clean cities in east asia

Isn't it because they have armies of cleaning people in the streets ? A friend of mine told me about it, I think he was in South Korea, Seoul perhaps, at the time. He told me people mostly act the same but their cities are more efficient at cleaning the mess before it piles up. I don't know if there are other laws similar to that [0] but it probably explain some behaviours too.

I agree with the underlying point though, some people just don't give a shit. I visited a small greek island last year and was appalled to see that locals were throwing their trash, old furnitures, construction materials, &c. over a cliff, straight to the ocean.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore

[jshowa3]

I've frequented China quite a lot the past year. They usually have people that clean the streets regularly as part of their job. They often hall two wheel carts around to carry their equipment and large brush that has fallen from trees.

However, I don't think Chinese do a great job of separating their trash that well despite having recycle bins and trash bins clearly labeled on the streets.

[bennylope]

I noticed this when I was [briefly] in Seoul. It was a combination of individual and presumably municipally employed workers cleaning up trash throughout the city and private employed workers cleaning around larger commercial buildings. Outside of banks, too, I remember people hosing down and washing the sidewalks. That's something I haven't seen in the US (not with such regularity, at the very least).

[dasloop]

Not in Japan. No armies of cleaning people are required.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

Not true. They clean it every morning. There's trash covering the streets of Tokyo before it gets picked up.

Source: live in Shibuya for 3 months every year.

[Isamu]

There was an article recently of a new wet vacuum cleaner they were using in trains to clean the vomit left from the hard-drinking salarymen.

[jstarfish]

What? They literally keep an army of senior citizens employed on municipal crews to pick up trash and scrape gum off of surfaces.

[mistermann]

Kids clean their own schools in Japan.

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/featurephilia/stor...

Whereas in the West, we just tell ourselves stories like all cultures are equal, and even though it's obviously not even remotely true, most people seem to believe it.

[jsonne]

8 of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world are in East Asia. Of the top polluted cities in the world 8 of 10 are in Asia. Your analysis falls apart with even a cursory search.

[Mediterraneo10]

The grandparent is probably pointing to Singapore. That is a state that is infamous for being extremely clean and tidy. At the same time, it is highly consumerist, with so much of its traditional community infrastructure demolished and replaced with shopping malls.

[whatshisface]

Don't the massive government penalties for littering have something to do with it? It turns out that, yes, after all, laws and punishment do act as a deterrent.

[gambiting]

No, time and time it has been proven that the inevitability of punishment is a deterrent, not the punishment itself. A punishment for littering could be 10 years of hard labour, but it doesn't matter a little bit if there's no one enforcing it and there's no police on the streets. Like.....you know why people are speeding? Not because anyone thinks "meh, the fine is only $200, I can afford that" but because they think "I'm not going to get caught today".

[philliphaydon]

Yes. It works in Singapore. In places like japan and Taiwan though, they have much more respect for their country. Even Thailand. In Phuket I’ve seen the locals who live off tourism on the beaches picking up rubbish the tourists leave behind. Never see that sort of thing in the west. Malaysia and Myanmar however they just throw it out the window as they drive.

[lm28469]

There is a difference between individual pollution and state level pollution though.

Germany may pollute the air/rivers less than China but come to Berlin; in some neighbourhoods you might think you teleported to a third world country where trash are simply threw in the streets to rot for weeks if not months before the public services finally do something.

[chronial]

Come to Munich and you will find no such thing. I don't think single examples can prove a point here.

[jacquesm]

The point these examples definitely prove is that within a single country it is possible to find extremes running both ways and that apparently city governments have a lot of impact on the appearance of the cities.

[magduf]

I was about to write that I visited Munich and other places in Bavaria last year and it was very clean, though there were a fair number of cigarette butts around, but nothing like what the OP was saying about Berlin.

[dstroot]

Munich is such a great city for work-life balance and a sustainable approach to living while still being very “modern”

[chronial]

I'm not sure that I would call "what if we only let rich people in" a "sustainable approach".

[odiroot]

Because, apparently, it's a huge part of rich Berliner culture to "not give a shit about anything".

It's a very individualistic city.

[siphon22]

Individualistic is a very kind, even positive term for that in my opinion. I would think if we called it a shithole city instead, they would be less inclined to act that way due to the shame.

No offense to good Berliners of course.

[LMYahooTFY]

>There is a difference between individual pollution and state level pollution though.

Sure, in the same way that there is a difference between the individual and the state/corporation/organization.

I don't see how this makes allocating carbon footprints any more accurate, nor does it indict "individuality" or any other ambiguous concepts.

[lm28469]

> I don't see how this makes allocating carbon footprints any more accurate, nor does it indict "individuality" or any other ambiguous concepts.

I'm not sure what you are referencing in the first part of that sentence. I was replying to "Your analysis falls apart with even a cursory search." which is false because it compares two things that are close but have no points of comparison. Heavily polluted asian rivers doesn't mean asians are more or less individualist and has nothing to do with the way they handle urban trash.

[easymodex]

Has anyone found or looked into what are the differences between the neighbourhoods where trash is thrown on the street and the ones that are clean?

[onion2k]

8 of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world are in East Asia. Of the top polluted cities in the world 8 of 10 are in Asia. Your analysis falls apart with even a cursory search.

Those rivers and cities are all in the manufacturing regions that supply goods to customers in the west. The root cause of the pollution is our consumerism coupled to the governments of Eastern countries enabling exceptionally cheap labor that we exploit. To blame the nations of East Asia for the problem is a pretty poor analysis on your part.

[brokenkebab]

It's like saying that USA is mostly taiga, and tundra, because there's Alaska. Most of those collectivist societies have very dirty cities (both in terms of ecology, and esthetics). And nobody seems to care. Singapore, and Japan (and Korea, but only in south) stand as exceptions.

[seattle_spring]

East Asian national parks are also completely paved over and devoid of almost any remnant of a natural experience. And please don't tell me it's only westerners breaking all of the rules in US national parks.

[ixtli]

Can you explain why this seems so to you? Totally not my experience with visiting national parks in Korea and Japan. For one thing, much of Japans un-developed nature is such because its largely as impassable now as it was in the 1600s when Basho wrote Ooku no hosomichi. I dunno why you'd bother paving anything.

EDIT: It's also certainly not just westerners, but again, my experience has shown me that there are societies that do better at training citizens not to litter.

[seattle_spring]

Never been to Korea or Japan, but I spent several months exploring the parks of China. I never want to go back.

[yannyu]

So your experience of "East Asian national parks" is just China?

[jacquesm]

You really should not extrapolate to a whole continent from such a small sample.

[cglace]

Do be fair, they did say "east asia" and China does make up the majority of east asia by population and land mass.

[jacquesm]

Yes, but at the same time it is a-typical in its approach to many concepts, apparently including national parks. And even there, given the size of the country there is a very large chance that OP's sample size is small even within China alone.

They could have just as well been more specific and simply said 'China' or name the specific parks rather than to write 'east Asia'.

[rhino369]

Chinese tourists are considered some of the most rude and dirty, and China is a collectivist society.

I think it’s just a problem with tourism.

[paulsutter]

“are considered”?

This is a ridiculous stereotype. I’ve seen Chinese travelers around the world and they’re as sophisticated as anyone

[rhino369]

It's certainly a generalization, but I'm not sure how to talk "societies" (per the post I was responding to) without generalizing. So it's definitely a stereotype, but I don't think it is an unearned stereotype. And like all generalizations, it not accurate on a person by person basis.

Just look at what China did to its own environment to get a sense of how much that society values the environment.

[ubercow13]

Yes I agree, I have been traveling a lot recently and Chinese tourists usually seem respectful and amongst the best behaved. This stereotype is ridiculous.

[tomxor]

I think you're both wrong. Since the dawn of civilization there has and always will be people disrespectful of nature. Your proposed causes are merely localised perturbations.

I think the _recent_ issue is in the title, and it's global, it's social networking. I can't think of any other force in the world that pushes huge numbers of people who have basically no interest or respect for nature, to go out into it, not learn anything, not gain any respect, and then destroy it... Selfies are a natural resource for social networking, and the natural world is full of them, ripe for exploitation.

[PavlovsCat]

> Pictures are the a natural resource for social networking, and nature is full of them, ripe for exploitation.

> [..] it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption.

-- Walter Benjamin, 1934

It's like people shifted from even that, to needing to have a photo with themselves front and center. Trample nature, then mess up the photo, too, and of course, burn a whole lot of kerosene.

To be less bitter about it, if people had more imagination and confidence, they wouldn't need to see everything first-hand, and wouldn't need to collect external proof that they're "someone". That seems achievable and worthwhile.

[naravara]

In spite of our individualism, most Americans still stop at red lights and wait for--sometimes inordinately long--lengths of time for it to turn green before proceeding despite there being no cross traffic and no practical reason why they should. They do this even if they know there is no enforcement or traffic camera.

They do this because they are educated and have the value inculcated in them very early on that "red means stop and green means go." They also learn that behaving in compliance with this rule is critical for the orderly functioning of society. Interestingly, when people are out of their cars, suddenly their ideas about the iron law of traffic lights get way more loosey-goosey. Part of this is because they sense, deep down, that the traffic laws aren't designed with non-car road users in mind, so cyclists think it makes more sense to treat red lights as stop signs and pedestrians resent not being able to walk wherever and however they please.

But a bigger part of it is that all the social conditioning is based on driving and not on walking. So that deep-down sense of "This is wrong" that keeps people in line doesn't exist once they're out of their cars. This guidance even applies in the car for signage that isn't common. Stop signs and traffic lights are explained to you from when you're a child. But Yield signs and 4 way stops are not always and, consequently, you see a lot less compliance among drivers on this front.

In places like Japan, it's not some property of the "communitarian culture" that magically makes people more likely to pick up after themselves. It's drilled into them from childhood. Kids are expected to tidy up at home by themselves. It's a standard part of the pre-K and early childhood education to clean up your spaces regardless of who made the mess. And when the cleaning staff comes by to do the deep cleaning, the children are generally told to THANK THEM for their contributions rather than taking them for granted.

Culture isn't some exogenous force that falls out of the sky or is bred into our genes. It emerges as a consequence of how we socially condition ourselves, what we teach our kids, what we expect from each other, and what we are willing to put up with. To put up with shitty aspects of our own cultures rather than adapting or changing is a choice we make.

[LMYahooTFY]

I don't find "individualism" to be mutually exclusive to "collectivism" in this way. They may counter balance each other to some degree, but I have serious doubts that there is any issue that can be elevated to "root issue".

Especially with concepts as ambiguous as "individualism".

[StreamBright]

How would you explain Singapore then?

[PavlovsCat]

> A more collectivist attitude appears, from my experience, to get people to be more thoughtful.

Doing something good today, just because of peer pressure, means a person might take part in a progrom tomorrow, for the same motivation. I'd rather say collectivism and thought are directly opposed.

> The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.

-- Hannah Arendt, "On Evil"

And when it comes to large scale pollution, plastic flowing into the ocean, Asian nations at the very least don't seem any better than western industrialized ones, do they?