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
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.
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.
Source: live in Shibuya for 3 months every year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a very individualistic city.
No offense to good Berliners of course.
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.
They could have just as well been more specific and simply said 'China' or name the specific parks rather than to write 'east Asia'.
I think it’s just a problem with tourism.
This is a ridiculous stereotype. I’ve seen Chinese travelers around the world and they’re as sophisticated as anyone
Just look at what China did to its own environment to get a sense of how much that society values the environment.
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.
> [..] 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.
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.
Especially with concepts as ambiguous as "individualism".
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?