As an aside, pretty baffling that people go to all the trouble to travel through such a unique, pristine environment and still won't bother to clean up their rubbish (just to be clear, actual garbage, not human remains).
If you go to a beach e.g. in Phuket, Thailand, you'll find a mountain of rubbish just off the part where the tourists sit. Plastic bags and bottles, old car parts, tin cans, all sorts of shit. Same in Rarotonga, or many of what you might label third world countries that tourists go to. Right next to where people live and work, blowing around.
In some cultures, rubbish is just ignored. You'd think if you worked next to the beach, you'd at least clean up the little patch next to your stall when you had some downtime, but this just doesn't seem part of the mindset. I don't know if its some kind of "tragedy of the commons" type thinking or what it is.
> NYC probably has people actively cleaning trails and beaches.
> Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash.
This is exactly my experience as well. Every place that I have been, if it is a remote site that no one is actively cleaning up, then it has weeks, months, years, or even decades of accumulated garbage. Popular destinations, like beaches around resorts, well-maintained hiking trails, private beaches; these all have people regularly picking up garbage.
Some of the most "pristine" beaches I've seen were on outer islands of Fiji. But they were pristine because they had resorts on them, or near them. Kayak over the other side of the island, where no one picks up, and it's trash city. The global ocean system deposits garbage everywhere, on every beach. Depending on where you are in the various gyres, that beach gets more or less washup. I've been to beaches in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, Africa, Europe, and both coasts of the US. The primary discriminating factor on how much garbage you see is how regular and thorough the pickup is.
So true. I remember being on the Gili Islands in Indonesia. They are a set of tiny islands with no cars or even police, but also no real way of disposing trash. Yet they attract hundreds of tourists every day. Usually as a tourist you'd go around these islands on the coast line but if you cross them through the middle you'd see a huge pile of garbage being burnt.
Really? Where? I've done several multi day backcountry backpacking trips in national parks recent years, and I can't think of a single piece of trash I've seen or person I've seen leaving trash at camp.
I have personally witnessed people in the Philippines who live next to the ocean quite literally taking out the trash from their bins, then tossing it directly into the ocean current to be taken away. No functioning garbage collection service there either.
I'm sure most people try to put their rubbish in the bin if there are empty bins available. I've found most places are dirty because they don't have the infrastructure built for disposing of trash/recyclables, not that people are trying to be evil.
This is largely the way things are in Jerusalem. There is tons of trash all over the place, stuffed into crevices and just loose on the street. It seems to be largely ignored by the locals (it is like this even in very non-touristy areas as well, so it's not just messy tourists).
What a xenophobic statement. I’m in the UK and I see exactly the same thing here with trash abandoned all over the streets. That’s before you look at the filthy state of our rivers with businesses brazenly dumping waste.
Too many people here (in the US) are just assholes when it comes to this sort of thing. Leave no trace doesn’t apply to them, their trash, their “neat” rock cairns, or their pet’s droppings.
Why should I care if there is a bunch of garbage and feces in a place that no one can even access without paying $70k? There's beaches where normal people actually go that are covered in trash and have raw sewage pumped into the nearby waters...surely that is a more important aspect of the environment to clean up or care about than a mountain in the middle of no where that only rich people visit.
In my experience, backpackers are the least inclined to bring their trash back out with them. Too many selfishly prioritize their comfort (particularly, how much weight they are carrying) over respect for the environment.
There's the whole other aspect of people who don't care to properly bag trash (which attracts more vermin that also spread litter). It's a very frustrating situation.
Oceans are big and mysterious, but land is right here and if you go to just about any forest from California to Vermont, you'll stumble on human garbage about roughly every thirty steps. Cans, bags, shotgun shells, shoes, buckets, really just about anything. And same for inland waterways. And yet besides Earth Day, it doesn't get cleaned up. I put fault on the abstract environmentalism we practice. This is easily done with cheap resources, yet so much is spent on meetings, treaties, awareness and education, science and studies, etc.
Edit: To make things less abstract, I now tend to bring a plastic bag on walks in the woods to collect the litter.
The thing that gets my blood boiling is the discarded trash scattered around everywhere. They removed 3 tons of trash a few years back in a big cleanup attempt. If you can't carry your trash back, you shouldn't be climbing up in the first place :/
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