The Power of Individuals Theme Analysis

The job of cleaning up New York then fell to Colonel George E. Waring, a Civil War veteran who, before his military service, had worked as the city engineer responsible for reclaiming the swampland that would become New York’s Central Park. Waring had supervised the design of a drainage system that created the park’s famously scenic lakes and ponds while leaving the rest of it dry. He had gone on to engineer an affordable and efficient dual sewer and drainage system for Memphis that kept storm runoff and septic waste separate. This protected the city water supply from contamination, ending almost overnight the cholera and other waterborne epidemics that had beset “The River City” for decades. Reforming New York’s sanitation department seemed a natural fit for this leading sanitation engineer of the day, who harrumphed into office asserting that he wished to be called “Colonel,” not “Commissioner,” throughout his tenure. His workers were required to salute.

His life’s work, like that of the marketing and design industries he helped create and lead, was dedicated to preventing that from happening, to erase thrift as a quintessential American virtue, and replace it with conspicuous consumption powered by a kind of magical thinking, in which the well would never go dry, the bubble would never burst, oil and all forms of energy would grow cheaper and more plentiful with time, and the landfill would never fill up.

But finding these big pieces of ocean trash was not the main source of Crowley’s mounting despair, though she has known these waters for nearly forty years and sailed here back when they were truly blank and pristine and breathtaking. She knows this sort of trash is a huge problem, entangling and killing more than one hundred thousand marine mammals and an even larger number of seabirds—no one knows for sure how many. But what really alarmed her this day wasn’t the trash she could see. It was what she couldn’t see that troubled her, after the bottles, cups and other bobbing trash had been hauled out, and the mirror of water and foam appeared deep blue and clear, flashing by beneath sun and pale sky as she stared down from the railing.

She tends to see the state of the sea as the ultimate in societal heedlessness—an unintended and untended lab experiment run wild, in which the world finds out just what happens when we dump fifty years’ worth of plastic into the ocean. Now, Goldstein says, it’s time to assess the damage and figure out where to go from here.

At fifty years old, Pritchard was a natural for Trash Track. He’d been working to green himself for years, knocking his personal trash footprint way below the 102-ton legacy. He pegs his trash output at a single paper grocery bagful a month, recyclables included, though he qualifies this achievement by saying he’s single and travels often for work, which cuts down his trips to the home trash can and recycling bin.

He is the world’s first garbologist, and his work uncovered just how poor an understanding we have of our own waste.

Garbology makes it possible for a student to go beyond thinking about saving the world, and actually doing it. It’s within their power to make a difference.

The artist-in-residence program at the San Francisco dump—insiders use the acronym AIR—started back in 1990 as a Southside San Francisco oddity planted a few miles from the airport near the old Cow Palace arena. It has evolved into an unlikely San Francisco icon, frequently copied but outlasting all imitators.

Prior to that moment, he had not thought of those handy-dandy filmy white grocery bags as any sort of problem. They were so thin, so light, he hadn’t really given them a thought. But their footprint seemed magnified now by their dramatic presence in the landfill.

TerraCycle, a New Jersey company that has become a leader in “upcycling,” faced a similar, potentially fatal attack from a larger, richer, established rival just as it was getting traction in the marketplace. Its experience would provide a model for Keller as he struggled to survive what he now calls “The Plastic Bag Wars.”

That’s when Bea Johnson finally got it: There’s power in putting things down instead of putting them in your shopping cart. There’s power in saying no—the power to change a family’s life and fortune. Maybe a community’s. Maybe a whole country’s.

Johnson and her zero-waste crusade are a whole different animal. She has identified a problem not on a campus or a beach but inside everyone’s home and lifestyle. And her family has responded by transforming itself in a dramatic way, becoming happier and more prosperous by rejecting the consumer economy and lifestyle most Americans live and breathe. Is there any wonder why this angers so many people? Agreeing with the Johnsons’ views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change.

Waste-cutting is the secret to sustainability, security and prosperity. That 102-ton legacy doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s in everyone’s power to make it the starting point instead.