Yes, "developing" countries have more litter, but they are also less "developed" -- by which we really mean, the land has not all been converted to farms and cities and industrial buildings and pavement.

Britain is not Mordor, but the shortage of trees and animals is real. Too much of it is an empty green lawn.

Whereas really it should be a temperate rainforest, fuelled by the Gulf Stream. It is a wet, lush, and fertile place. It just needs to regrow.

Ahem, I believe industrial Britain is meant to be Isengard.

Edit:Format

Would you have expected it the other way around?

When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity even with minimal industrialization.

Yes, but enough about the UK

1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/17/rivers-i...

Failed tests is nowhere close to “so much shit nothing can survive”.

Goes to show how out of touch that metric is.

Source? If you're talking about semi-modern countries like India or China specifically it makes sense because they are torn between very poor and very rich areas, both having access to some level of industrial capitalist comforts (eg. people in slums have cell phones and industry-produced clothing).

But, the matter central to this question is that these "developing" countries are in fact the ones producing all the shit we use in the "developed" countries. Production has been outsourced there not only for price of work, but also with the clear conscience that it would reduce pollution in the global north. [0]

> When your entire population shits into the main river that does a pretty good job of killing biodiversity

Yet that's not the only solution. Poop makes for very good compost.

[0] Industry pollution is a well-known problem on a big scale since at least the 19th century, when English/French cities (or at least their popular districts) were filled with acid and lead and other industry byproducts killing the population very fast.

I’d expect the opposite.

Have you? Most places in the world have huge swathes of wilderness. Britain has close to none. It's not so much about how "bad" the human populated places are. It's about how much space is left for the rest of nature.

Obviously it depends on what things they measured. If it's "Number of people named Cumberbatch" the UK would probably be ranked no. 1, so they could've also designed a study to make the UK look bad. But if I can guess, I don't think you read the study and its conclusions.

/s

We actually want to help developing countries to develop without ending like Europe.