this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Why do you think sewage treatment plants exist in the first place? I’ll give you a hint, its not because people came together altruistically to build them (or even regulate that they need to exist).
The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was signed because people, left to their own devices, self-destructively pollute their water supplies. That law mandated people couldnt dump shit in the water. It also was passed because state laws weren’t effective at stopping people from polluting the water
It wasnt enough, so there was the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. And then the Water Quality Act of 1965. And then the Clean Water Act of 1972, which provided funding to create sewage treatment plants, and mandated that all wastewater be treated to a certain standard. And even that wasnt enough, which is why we later invented the entire EPA, an entity dedicated largely to that one issue (among similar things).
None of that would have occurred without centralized authority, nor would have been necessary if a plurality of people were not inherently self destructive when left to their own devices. Anarchism is opposed to any central authority. Thereby, under the most basic logic, sewage treatment plants would be virtually guaranteed not to exist in an anarchical non-society society.
Giving people at large the benefit of the doubt about an issue they have repeatedly shown to fuck up for centuries is silly. And sewage treatment plants require centralization to be built and maintained.
When will it be enough?
It’s interesting that you quietly swap in “people” where history mostly shows industrial corporations dumping waste for profit.
Working class communities were not the ones lobbying to pour chemical sludge into rivers.
Most of the legislation you listed was not the state heroically saving humanity from itself. It was the state reacting to industrial capital externalizing costs onto the public. Central authority stepped in because private ownership plus profit incentives produced pollution at scale.
You’re treating absence of centralized state authority as if it means absence of rules, standards or coordination. That is not what anarchism argues. It argues against concentrated political authority. It does not argue against collectively enforced norms.
You cite centuries of people “fucking up.” A lot of that history is profit driven extraction protected by law, not spontaneous communal self destruction.
If anything, your examples show that concentrated power and profit incentives required constant correction. That is not a great defense of hierarchy.
I didnt realize corporations were sentient entities capable of acting on their own, rather than groups of people doing people things…
The 1899 act was legitimately created because everyday people were literally throwing their garbage into water as a form of waste management. So much so that it was difficult to navigate boats safely, ergo “Rivers and Harbors Act” as in the places that were affected by floating masses of garbage
There are HIERARCHIES that coerce people within them to put profit above all else or they lose their position in the hierarchy. I can't tell if you are a troll or just genuinely haven't put any thought into this at all.
I didn’t realize it takes rocket science to understand the difference between individual behavior and institutional incentives.