Culture and Law

Ohio has a perennial problem with nitrate pollution harming water quality of lakes and rivers, and even groundwater. The pollution is from farm run off and inadequate public and private waste water treatment systems. People would rather spend funds on other things than cleaning up water, and most of the time this type of pollution is invisible. It only becomes obvious when there are toxic algae blooms that close beaches, or in random individual cases, when private well water actually gets polluted and becomes toxic.

Ohio's water problems pale in comparison with third world countries with high population denisty and no treatment of industrial, agricultural, or human waste. The Ganges River, for example, is more polluted than effluent from a typical septic tank in the United States. EPA standards in the United States force beaches to close when e coli. bacteria count exceeds 235 / 100 mL of water. The Ganges has concentrations of 100,000,000 / 100 mL of water!

So here's the question: would people in the United States install septic systems if they didn't have to? (probably not) But the flip side of that question is: when there are laws for public sanitation, and people en masse don't follow them (for example, in India), then what good is the law?

It seems like cultural imperatives are necessary for the legal ones to have any effect. It also seems likely that the cultural imperatives without the force of law will go lax over time, or allow a society to fracture up into regions where different behavior is tolerated.