Comment by Guest9812398 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guest9812398 | Hacker News Reader

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I have a related story. I was on an island in Indonesia, and the small town next to the beach (mostly locals, but still tourist related businesses), was full of garbage. I have a photo of a local kid that was sitting on the beach, on top of garbage, because there was no clean place to sit.

Now, down the road a few hundred meters and over a hill was a little cove, with a beautiful beach. It was a little more touristy (about 10 people were there), had a restaurant and chairs to rent, and the beach itself was only about 40m wide with rocks curving around the sides. This beach was also full of garbage. Two tourists showed up, both women in their 20s with snorkeling gear. They wanted to clean up the beach, so they went in the water and start snorkeling around, while picking up the trash. Fairly quickly, they had so much trash they needed garbage bags. They went to the restaurant a few meters away and asked if they had a spare bag, because they're cleaning the beach. Well, they didn't have wallets to pay the local restaurant owner, so they were refused a garbage bag. In the end, they just left the garbage and walked off.

The situation was pretty shocking. This restaurant business relied on this small 40m beach, and not only did they not take the time to keep it clean, they couldn't even do the smallest gesture of providing a garbage bag when someone else offered to clean it for free.

This was something of a problem in America a few decades ago. People thought nothing of just throwing trash along the roads, in parks, etc. Informal dumps were everywhere on vacant lots, in roadside ditches and ravines. This eventuality motivated the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaigns that are credited with changing public attitudes.

But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

> But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

In the situation the GP described, how would concern about litter (i.e. cleaning it up) put the ability to have food and shelter at risk? In fact, one could argue that cleaning up a garbage-strewn tourist beach would attract more tourists and enrich the locals, increasing their ability to provide food and shelter for themselves.

I have a less dramatic but similar story. In Portland OR, there is a lot of Asians (ie, non-American born) and during a conference, we went out to lunch, and we saw a group of Asians, very nice clothes, gold watches, get in to a Lexus and just leave all their lunch (takeout) bags in the gutter. Their cups, straws everything. Just set it down and drove off.

This was in the mid 90s, we were all pretty shocked. But I have since learned, that is what is common in Asian countries, just set your garbage down wherever you want. I even read a blog article where a dev when to a tech convention in some large Asian city, and there were no trash cans anywhere, and that the only place to put garbage was on the ground, and there were people paid to pick it up.

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