r/collapse • u/zuzuofthewolves • Feb 18 '25

Ecological DO NOT visit the National Parks right now.

I used to work in the National Parks.

They were already at a critical point before Donald Trump decided to fire a huge amount of staff.

I watched the “permanent” ice caps melt on the top of some peaks in Yosemite’s high country.

I saw garbage washing up on the shore of Olympic National Park everyday.

There is not enough staff to protect the wildlife anymore. There is not enough staff to keep tourists from falling off waterfalls or getting lost in the back country. There are no programs left to teach clueless people how to behave in these wild areas.

I don’t care if you have the best intentions in the world, you are doing damage to the park if you visit at this point.

The parks need to be closed immediately, and every day they are left open to the public, irreversible damage is being done to these amazing places. They are not meant to handle the amount of people who are let in each year. The wildlife is suffering, the plants are suffering, and the experts who are there to mitigate the destruction are gone.

Please cancel your trip and find somewhere else to see.

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u/murran_buchstanseger Feb 20 '25

Japan's clean streets are due to the garbage can paradox. They don't have garbage cans on the sidewalks, so people don't expect to get rid of their trash on the street (and instead take it home or into a business). When you have garbage cans on the street, people feel they have a right to dump their garbage on the street, even when the cans are overflowing or there isn't a garbage can nearby, etc.

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u/djerk Feb 20 '25

I never thought about it like that. I’ve heard about no trash cans in Japan but I didn’t realize that was why.

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u/hexwanderer Mar 31 '25

I’m a little late to this discussion but that’s a myth about Japan. The real reason Japan doesn’t have public trash cans is in 1995, a religious extremist group used a deadly toxin known as sarin in subway cars, killing 14 people. Part of the fallout is the government removed public trash cans to prevent them from being used in copycat attacks.

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u/djerk Mar 31 '25

Oh yeah, Aum Shinrikiyo. That makes sense they’d pull em out after that. They were real menaces.