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A Thai national park is mailing trash back to tourists
- Proven 6y agoI'd rather have private "national" parks which deal with trashy tourists without spending more taxpayer money. A nice way a private owner could address this problem would be to ask each visitors to buy admission ticket and issue a surety bond that could be claimed within 30 days to pay for any damages.
- vladvasiliu 6y agoWhy would this only work for a private owner?
- nix23 6y agoBecause National Parks are the biggest tax-problem in the US? Irony off...
- nix23 6y agoAh yes make national parks private because it's another private problem and not a national one...like schools, streets and health, right?
- mulmen 6y agoIn a previous life I was a truck driver and mechanic on a farm. It was common for people to leave a mess in the driveway to our field. Often it was just garbage. One time someone left a bag of deer guts. Another time someone shot their dog and left the body. Needless to say I have low tolerance for litterbugs. But once someone left their old mail. With their address. The sheriff was happy to give the offender a call and request that they clean up the mess, or else. I fully support this kind of operation.
- VladimirGolovin 6y agoAlso, "the government will take strict measures to blacklist visitors who damage national parks or are noisy and disruptive." I fully support this policy, and I hope it gets implemented in more parks around the world.
- npongratz 6y agoDo those "strict measures" include a full and fair trial, to allow the accused to defend themselves, to confront their accuser, and examine the available evidence that was gathered against the accused? Is there a jury of one's peers involved? A dispassionate judge of high integrity overseeing and perhaps rendering judgment? If any of those things are missing, it seems like it would be easy and cheap to disenfranchise any person, regardless of actual guilt. For what it's worth, I very much despise anyone who litters or damages parks, and hope they are caught and punished properly.
- ido 6y agoThe jury is mostly an American thing, most other countries don't have that - the judge decides who is guilty.
- Symbiote 6y agoJuries are an English thing, from the 12th Century. Countries whose legal systems developed from England's are likely to have inherited them.
- ido 6y agoI stand corrected! either way they are not universal
- kwhitefoot 6y agoWe had juries here in Norway too until 2017. I'm moderately sure that Norway did not inherit the idea from England. Also Denmark had them until recently and Belgium and Austria still have them. So it is not just an English thing.
- Lio 6y agoThis is great. I think I’ve heard the suggestion before that drive throughs should be forced by law to print the license plate details on all packaging so that it can be traced back to the driver who left it.
- npongratz 6y agoMy experience is that 1/3 of the time they fail to get my order right. It is clear that attention to detail is not the highest priority of hiring managers at restaurants. So what happens when my PII gets plastered on someone else's eventual litter? Contesting fines is not an option -- is too often a losing proposition.
- Lio 6y agoI would assume it would be printed via ANPR and then I’d guess the onus is on you to check everything you’ve ordered is correctly present and labelled. If that’s not enough and the retailer can’t get that right I would say that you’re taking a know risk going to that drive through. Avoid them and I the market will make the process reliable.
- npongratz 6y agoI would be depending on someone else to check that everything they have ordered is correctly labeled. That's the problem. If I cannot trust the people whom I pay to correctly pack my meal, I certainly cannot trust some rando in the drive-through queue to read a faded and smudged label, and care about what they just read, and spend time and emotional energy to rectify the problem (which isn't even their problem).
- zdragnar 6y agoWhy would the onus be on me to confirm that what I received was correct? If they get my license plate wrong, that's basically a license to litter with impunity.
- pkaye 6y ago> I would assume it would be printed via ANPR and then I’d guess the onus is on you to check everything you’ve ordered is correctly present and labelled. The onus should on the company CEO. One day in jail for each mistake they make.
- yesbabyyes 6y agoThere is a nature reserve close to where I grew up in the Stockholm archipelago, Björnö (Bear Island). A beautiful place: https://archipelagofoundation.se/area/bjorno/ https://archipelagofoundation.se/area/bjorno/ After one Midsummer some years ago, one of the rangers found a bunch of garbage laying around after some careless people's celebration. Among the beer cans, bags, leftovers and other litter, he found someone's name and number; I'm pretty sure one of them had literally left their business card. He proceeded to gather all of the trash in a garbage bag, looked the guy up, drove into Stockholm (some 40 km), rang the fool's door and handed over the trash while saying something like "Hey, I think you forgot some of your belongings!" Edit: just found out from the Archipelago Foundation's Instagram that today is the international clean the coasts day! https://instagram.com/skargardsstiftelsen https://instagram.com/skargardsstiftelsen
- NullPrefix 6y ago>I'm pretty sure one of them had literally left their business card Business cards aren't free to make, you make them with intent to give them out to people. More plausible scenario was that someone who had received the card just threw it away.
- yesbabyyes 6y agoYou find that out pretty soon when you see the guy in the eyes. If the recipient of the belongings hadn't accepted them as his, the story would never have been told.
- jrootabega 6y agoPeople will gladly retell and embellish stories that never once happened just to hear themselves talk
- yesbabyyes 6y agoRight... I know the rangers so I can just ask them to verify. Thing is, I won't bother for 'NullPrefix describing themselves as "pure cynicism", so I guess it is what it is! The important thing is that the trash was removed, after all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yodsanklai 6y agoI really don't understand how people can be so careless and disrespectful, even more so in a national park (and even more so in a foreign country). They flew across the world and visited a national park because they appreciate the nature, so why spoil it. What goes wrong in their head?
- christophilus 6y agoIt’s a mystery to me, too. I find cigarette butts and beer cans on many of the trails I hike. I can understand the occasional cliff bar wrapper that may have accidentally fallen from a pack. But the rest is intentional and unjustifiable.
- kilroy123 6y agoI think it's entitlement.
- unnameduser1 6y agoYodsanklai you might not have all the facts. Nobody flew across the world. The offender is a Thai person, that’s why the garbage was deliverable by postal mail. Doubt that the national park would pay for international mail. Their budgets are very tight. Also foreigners are not asked for their home address. The ranger just noted down the ID card number of the person who rented the tent. Furthermore the entry to Thailand is very restricted and NO foreign tourists are yet allowed to enter. So no it wasn’t a foreign tourist. Anyway majority of tourists in Thai national parks are Thai nationals. Considering that they charge foreigners 5-12x more for entry it isn’t a surprise. Please don’t state details that weren’t part of original article. In this case it strengthens xenophobia. Edit: typo and corrected addressing the commenter above
- yodsanklai 6y agoIndeed, I didn't read the paywalled article, wrongly assuming that "tourist" meant foreign tourist, and generalizing personal experience with some foreign tourists in Thailand (unrelated with this article content). That being said, tourists visiting national park such as Kao Yai are better behaved than in some beach locations. Also Kao Yai entry fee is about $15, which is affordable for foreigners (who are plenty there in regular times).
- INTPenis 6y agoMe and the camping partners I've had have always had a policy; bring more trash from nature than you brought there. So we sometimes take strolls before packing up just to find some trash. Sadly we almost always do. Sometimes people just dump entire bags of trash on a hill, like wtf did they expect to happen with that? So short sighted.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago> wtf did they expect to happen with that? So short sighted. Not short sighted at at all. It had exactly the effect they desired: no trash to take home. People quite often do things with intent and in full knowledge that their actions are harmful to others.
- c22 6y agoOn many occasions I have found bagged dog crap just sitting on the side of the trail. It's amazing to me that there are people with the forsight to carry around plastic bags and the will to bend over, fill them with shit and tie them closed, but then no further will to take it away with them. I often wish they hadn't put the crap in a bag because then I would not be compelled to remove it from the trail.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoLitter is definitely a collective action, tragedy of the commons, sort of thing. Tangentially, one of the few positives of universal surveillance might be the reduction of littering through penalization. Attaching any, material, negative incentive to littering is quite hard to do and I’m sure society will greatly benefit from any solid ideas as to how.
- enaaem 6y agoThe Singaporean way is to give massive fines and it worked.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoRight, so a societal paradigm shift to the Singaporean model works. It really doesn’t seem like an issue that can be solved in isolation, the rest of society has to change too.
- wraptile 6y agoI've been living in North Thailand for almost 3 years now and littering is still weird here for me. You'd go to the this pristine clean temple where everyone is barefeet and it's so cosy welcoming there then you go back to the parking lot that has a mountain of trash just rolling down hill. The tourist blame is a bit silly too as foreigners are often charged 10 times the price for entering national parks (1$ for thai, 10$ for a foreigner) to the point where whole #2pricethailand movement started. For this entry fee a whole platoon of park maintainers could be hired but I've never seen more than 3 people present even in big parks and the trash cans are often missing or badly maintained, so it seems money is definitely being pocketed at some stage. Generally tourists that go to these parks are quite tidy here and this headline seems like a click-bait.
- unnameduser1 6y agoThe tourists were Thai. Yes the 10x overcharge is discriminatory. Many tourists post online that the 10x price is not worth the visit. As you say there are sometimes issues with maintenance etc. Most of tourists are Thai. We do find sometimes families throwing out trash on side of road.
- actionowl 6y agoI love this, but wonder if the cost of shipping is worth the impact... I hope so! Also, if you ever visit Khao Yai I can't recommend "The Frog Resort" enough. What an awesome place to stay and a beautiful park.
- unnameduser1 6y agoThey might have included a bill for the violation :)
- grishka 6y agoOne question left unanswered by this article: how do they get the addresses of the offenders?
- fluffernutter 6y agoIt's not an unanswered question. It's a meme that the government figured they could use to make people imagine the trash they leave being mailed to them by the government, which then implies the government knows where they live and who they are, whenever they leave trash. Why does there have to be a means for the government to mail the trash back to the people, if just imagining the trash being mailed to them causes them to stop leaving trash? I doubt you are going to leave trash, and the reason why is because you are asking hard questions of an illusion.
- unnameduser1 6y agoIf you check in with your government issued ID then the government knows who you are and can find your registered address :)
- jcrawfordor 6y agoThe trash seems to have been left in a reserved tent, so presumably they had a mailing address on file with the reservation.
- unnameduser1 6y agoThey wrote down the ID during checkin. Standard procedure.
- intrasight 6y agoAlice's Restaurant :)
- DenisM 6y agoI am tempted to buy a few solar trail cams and place them in my favorite spots. I’d even pay for it, but I can’t quite imagine the enforcement process - I’m not there anywhere often enough, and the sheriff deputies are but they probably wouldn’t be willing to access my cameras. There are even several groups in the northwest whose members would likely join me in that. But how do we make this work?