The first picture that pops into my head when I think of California is sprinklers on people's lawns. We don't really have them in Germany. I mean, of course we do, but people are hesitant to put them up because the first thing that will happen is your neighbours standing at the fence judging you for being so goddamn wasteful (seriously). Now, I'm not a huge fan of judging people (that's a lie), but I can't help but notice that americans (seem to) completely lack this sense of responsibility/playing your part/restraining yourself for the greater good/whatever. Another thing we don't really have is air conditioning (might be a climate thing). It's insanely wasteful and chances are you'll be sweaty anyway. So we don't use them.
Unfortunately I have a hard time finding numbers on how much water is actually wasted. I.e., with a somewhat reasonable definition of "wasted."
> Another thing we don't really have is air conditioning (might be a climate thing). It's insanely wasteful and chances are you'll be sweaty anyway.
The average high in Munich in July is 23 °C. In Los Angeles, it's 28.4 °C. In Death Valley, California, it's 47 °C. (That's average. The highest temperature ever recorded is 57 °C.)
23 °C is what most Americans set their air conditioners to. If it never got hotter than that, we wouldn't use them either. For example, where I live (Seattle, near the northern border of the US and on the ocean), air conditioners are uncommon.
Even in Los Angeles, if you're within 5 miles of the ocean and your house was built more than 15 years ago, you won't have AC either. AC is largely a feature of mini-mansions and houses in the more inland areas.
> I can't help but notice that americans (seem to) completely lack this sense of responsibility/playing your part/restraining yourself for the greater good/whatever
Of course there are exceptions, but in general Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual and much less to collectivism and the 'greater good' than Germans. We tend to view collectivism as an inherently oppressive and dictatorial mode of social organization, a cruel enslavement and subjugation of the individual, who is prohibited from doing anything but following the mandates of the collective handed down by some vast inhuman and opaque bureaucracy.
This attitude is less prevalent in more leftist areas such as California and Massachusettes, but I think it's safe to say that it's fairly representative of the average American overall.
I had the reverse experience in Germany: I was amazed at the degree to which many Germans obsess extensively over the minutiae of trivial decisions (such as how far to open the water tap while washing dishes) in terms of what (vanishingly inconsequential in most cases) effect it will speculatively have on the collective good.
Moreover, this seems to be cast in terms of what other people will think of you. Americans care far less about what others will think of them. We tend more towards a philosophy that says if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do. Germans sort their recycling into 9 seperate bins by color and composition. They could easily put everything in 1 bin and make machines to sort it automatically, or hire someone to do it by hand, but instead it is set up so everyone has to do it themselves -- so your neighbors can see that you are or are not complying with the dictates of society.
Another seperate factor is that natural resources in general are far more abundant in the US than Germany. Relative to the US, Germany is a tiny country with a huge population packed into a very small space.
Meticulously conserving resources is imperative when you have a high population to resource ratio, but less important when you have a huge land area with a very low average population density and so vast amounts of resources available for each person. We are just recently starting to reach the limits of what the natural available resources can support in the US. The local limit in Germany was reached centuries ago, forcing more efficient use of what was available.
> Americans care far less about what others will think of them
As a European expat in the US, I find this statement to be very accurate. It can be maddening at times but I've grown to find this characteristic one of the main attractions of life in the U.S.
It can be summed up as "I don't feel guilty about anything I don't have direct control over because it makes life much more enjoyable and it always works out in the end."
I believe this derives from the many immigrant groups that have come to the US over the centuries, each with a very different cultural view of what constitutes "correct" behavior. The only way to avoid constant fighting in that situation is for most people to say, "OK, as long as you are not directly harming me, you do what you want and I will ignore it."
Europe, by contrast, is far more ethnically homogenous than the US within individual countries. Most people in most places share a very similar cultural background and very similar views of what is "correct," so the pressure to conform is greater.
I think the image of Massachusetts as a bastion of "leftist" or liberal thought and ideals comes mostly from people who have never lived here. For various historical reasons the state is dominated by Democrats but many of them are comparatively conservative.
First of all, kudos for not taking it personally. I don't know how any of this is scored but I think you may have won.
> [...] Americans are much more oriented to the rights of the individual [...]
It definitely feels like it. When it comes to things like abortions you can't live up to your own expectations though. Not quite sure why that is.
I love the water tap story. Sounds about right :D
Let me get the recycling thing out of the way and then I'll cover the rest in one go. We have three bins: 1. Organic stuff, 2. paper and 3. everything else. (We have a bag for plastics, not a bin. That's important.) They get picket up by different people and are brought to different places (at least in theory). Kind of makes sense I guess. The reason we do that directly at home is probably because it's the most efficient solution. Our friends in Sweden have way cooler bins. They use one with four compartments instead of four separate bins. Same thing though.
What you said about the "vanishingly inconsequential" effects got me thinking. Maybe that's the real problem. Imagining things on such a large scale is very difficult (e.g., people can't image how small changes caused by evolution lead to a new species). Small streams make large rivers.
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> [...] if you are not (directly) harming someone else, it's nobody else's business what you do.
That's the other thing, right? They're almost always indirectly harming other people. Indirectly is a nonsense term in that context. They're directly harming other people.
I enjoy discussing sociological themes and I never take it personally. If you're ever in San Francisco, I'll buy you a beer and we can continue!
Abortion is legal in the US, though some conservative areas attempt to make it impractical, with varying degrees of success. This derives from controversy over whether and when a pregnancy should be considered a human baby deserving of legal protection. Many religious groups believe that this happens at conception, and thus view the situation in terms of the necessity of preventing one person (the mother) from directly harming another (the baby).
As for recycling.. when I lived in Berlin, we definitely had 9 bins, with seperate bins for green glass, clear glass, brown glass, paper, compost, this or that type of plastic, and so on. I've got pictures -- it was very weird for me. This was a while ago. Maybe they've changed things since then.
As for direct and indirect harm, direct harm is (usually) pretty easy and non-controversial to discern. If you punch someone in the face, you've harmed them directly, so our mythical average American would think it's fine that there is a law against this whereby society tries to prevent such things from happening. Indirect harm is much harder to discern and much more debatable, so the mythical average American will err on the side of leaving it as a private matter when in doubt.
> We tend to view collectivism as an inherently oppressive and dictatorial mode of social organization, a cruel enslavement and subjugation of the individual, who is prohibited from doing anything but following the mandates of the collective handed down by some vast inhuman and opaque bureaucracy.
The number of people I have met who actually 'tend to' believe anything of the sort is very small, and they are all big-L Libertarians. Americans as a whole are certainly more oriented towards individualism than Europeans, but there are plenty of collectivist endeavors that Americans love (see: football, megachurches, the military).
> Another seperate factor is that natural resources in general are far more abundant in the US than Germany. Relative to the US, Germany is a tiny country with a huge population packed into a very small space.
I think that is historically a much, much larger contributing factor to American attitudes on conservation than anything related to collectivism. The many early American communes were just as fervently devoted to expansion and industrious exploitation of the land as the cash-driven individualists.
Sure, there are lots of US group activities, but they are not collectivist in the sense I was using the word. Churches and sports teams and even the US military today are free and voluntary associations. Nobody forces you to join if you don't want to. It's entirely your choice. If you choose to join the group, great -- it's nobody else's business unless you are harming someone else. It's not an intrinsic or automatic part of you, it's a choice you've made.
What I mean by collectivism is the psychological self-perception that one is involuntarily, primarily, and inherently a member of a group (rather than foremost an individual who happens to choose to join some groups) and then considering all decisions in this context of "what effect will it have on this group that I have found myself in?"
Of course these are broad generalizations and they do not describe everyone in either country, and this short summary is incomplete in some ways. Americans do indeed have a somewhat automatic collective identity as Americans, but it's different in character in that it expressly emphasizes individualism as a core value. I think nonetheless that these broad summaries are also not entirely inaccurate.
The first thing that pops into my mind about Germany is lederhosen and beer. But it's surprisingly difficult to diagnose large-scale socio-ecological problems from the other side of the planet.
Summer in New York is significantly warmer than in Germany. Consider for starters that NYC is on roughly the same latitude as Madrid.
Different point but Germans seem to always be up in arms about the American use of air conditioning, and if it's to warm for them they should move to milder climate. Weirdly enough I've never heard anything like it about Nordic countries and heating.
Summer in New York is unbearable, I am originally from Russia, I used to live in New York for many years, 28c degree in New York is nothing like 28c degree in Moscow or 28c degree in San Diego (where I live now). It's very relative, depends on a dryness of the air I guess.
The average for June through September here in the State Capital, Sacramento, is just over 89 degrees Fahrenheit (or almost 32 degrees Celsius). This is not a matter of comfort but of health.
Unfortunately I have a hard time finding numbers on how much water is actually wasted. I.e., with a somewhat reasonable definition of "wasted."