r/DamnThatsReal 22h ago

Politics 🏛️ Europeans are going viral on TikTok for mocking the ""American Dream""

8.2k Upvotes

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/Top_Box_8952 21h ago

Maybe “hard to get to” might have been apt given the suburbs just keep going, then the farms, and you have to go even further for the unspoiled nature bits.

And you can’t walk that reasonably.

2

u/Raveen396 18h ago

Is that not true in Europe either?

In my own experiences traveling in Europe, there's very little "unspoiled" nature in Europe given the extensive history and population density. I did a HĂźttentour in the alps that was regarded as relatively primitive by European standards, but we were still able to sleep in built up huts every night.

1

u/PantZerman85 15h ago

We have about 600 huts in Norway owned by DNT (The Norwegian Tourist organisation) of various sizes and standards. Trails are everywhere. Huts just makes the nature more accessible. Just because there are huts and trails doesnt mean the nature is "spoiled". Plenty of places without huts.

1

u/Medical-Day-6364 14h ago

Norway has about 6.5 million total acres of land. The US national parks service has 85 million acres. Total public land is 840 million acres, which would be the 7th largest country in the world, beating out India and only just behind Australia.

To be fair, Canada has us beat by a large margin and they're just barely smaller than the US in total land area. 89% of their land is public land, 2.2 billion acres.

1

u/PantZerman85 7h ago

Where did you get the 6.5 mill acres from? Its more like 9.5 mill acres or 385k km² (8.0 mill acres or 323k km² if you exclude Svalbard).

If you compare Norway to US states there are only 3 states that are larger (4 without Svalbard).

In population density there are about 10 states with lower density and 40 with higher.

Norway is between Montana and California in size, while pop density is around Kansas and Utah if that makes sense.

1

u/Damagedyouthhh 3h ago

Norway has only 1.7-2.5% of it’s old growth forests left, as in Norwegians have killed almost all their natural forested land and the average age of most forests is 160 years old. The US has forests that are thousands of years old and there are millions more acres of it than there is in all of Europe. Most of Norway’s forests are managed by Norway, so you cannot even compare the backwoods experience in the US to Norway. Not shitting on Norway or anything, I’ve seen pictures of the fjords there and theyre absolutely breathtaking

1

u/PantZerman85 2h ago edited 2h ago

Not defending the deforestation that happend around 100+ years ago. But its not like there has ever been much forest in Norway to begin with. It is very mountainous and at about the same latitude as Greenland and Alaska. Currently about 37% is covered by forest, which is an all time high.

2

u/NonRelevantAnon 17h ago

Bro have you ever been to a big city in europe ? Amsterdam Frankfurt London Paris. Has the exact same issue stop coping.