‘We’re not hopeless, we’re not helpless’ Q&A with Edward Humes

Photo Courtesy of Edward Humes

Waste is a seemingly regular byproduct of human life on Earth, accumulating around the globe in the form of landfills, garbage batches, rising CO2 levels and climate change. But what about the less visible waste we create every day– the waste embedded in our transportation or energy system?

In his latest book, “Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World”, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Chapman professor Edward Humes sheds light on America’s most pressing waste issues and challenges readers to rethink their relationship with waste, sharing stories of everyday people who are confronting this issue and the environmental harm it causes. 

In a Q&A with The Panther Newspaper, Humes spoke about America’s pervasive waste problem and what we can do to fix it. 

Humes’ answers have been slightly edited for clarity and stylistic standards.  

Photo Courtesy of Edward Humes

Q: What inspired you to write a book about trash and overconsumption?

A: Well, it's the problem of waste. “Garbology” was kind of about defining the scope of that problem. When I wrote that, we were just beginning to become aware that plastic pollution was one of the consequences of our wasteful consumer habits and the wastefulness built into products that we didn't really see very clearly. So helping people see that and then starting a conversation about it was, I think, an important first step.

In “Total Garbage," the idea is that waste is a much larger category than what we just rolled to the curb in our trash cans or take out to the dumpster or put into the recycling bin. It's embedded in everything: our food, energy, and the way we get around. Reframing climate change as a symptom of waste draws a lot more people into the conversation.

Q: Did you find it challenging to frame waste as one of the defining issues of the modern era, especially in comparison to other pressing global concerns?

A: No, because look at one of our major environmental crises–climate change. The CO2’s are the end result of waste. The number one use for natural gas, and coal, although that's declining, is to produce electricity. That's the top energy consumption in our society. The way we make electricity with fossil fuels–two-thirds of that is waste by nature of the process of using combustion to convert (energy) into motion, the spinning of generators and then to convert that into electricity. You lose most of the energy input into that system as waste. So when you go to pay your electric bill, two-thirds of that is paying for the waste inherent in the system. It goes away when you derive energy from renewable sources. 

That's why our cheapest energy is also our cleanest energy: there's no fuel to waste when we're using wind or solar energy or geothermal energy and there's no fuel being burned. So that waste is stripped out of that system and the cost is lowered…it is all about waste. 

Q: In your book, you not only address the issue of pervasive waste in our society but also highlight solutions created by everyday people. Why was it important for you to share these stories?

A: You can't be heckled into doing things. It doesn't work. The way to really reach people's hearts and not just their heads, is through seeing characters who they either would aspire to be like or are like, or sometimes it's the villain in a story that motivates you to do the opposite. When you explain things in human terms in a way that is accessible and isn't lecturing but just sort of showing you, “Hey, this is what this community is doing or this is what this son and his dad did,” I find that personally inspiring.

Q: What discoveries surprised you the most during your research for Total Garbage?

A: I went to this town in Georgia called Peachtree City. What I had heard about it is that they had this sort of dual transportation system, and everybody was driving around in golf carts, mostly electric ones, some gas-powered electric. And that as a consequence, they used their cars a lot less. 

Most of us don't pay attention that our cars are actually kind of wasteful in themselves, beyond the inefficiency of burning gasoline. Most of the time 50% of our trips are three miles or less and 93% of the times we go someplace in a car is 25 miles or less.

That's what this community realized. They built 100 miles of this separate pathway system where you can hike, you could bike, or you could drive a golf cart with no cars. And it goes everywhere. I left there thinking, darn my car is a really crappy substitute for a golf cart. The idea that we could get out of the rat race of traffic and high insurance and gas guzzlers all the time and lower pollution, it's kind of a good enough solution. 

I think it's a really cool idea to look at this community and say, you know, there are solutions we're not really even thinking about to the problem of electrifying our transportation.

Q: What’s the most important takeaway you hope readers will gain from your book?

A: It gets back to what we talked about at the beginning that waste is really the problem that's driving all these seemingly immense and unsolvable problems. But if we start thinking about the waste in our daily lives, it's really a way to see, “Hey, I know waste is a bad thing, here's things I can do individually”

Plastic bag bans started with a few people at the Surfrider Foundation who went to people in Manhattan Beach and said,” Look at our beaches. We've got surfers who get tangled up in plastic bags in the ocean all the time. It's gross. What can we do about this?” Manhattan Beach was the first town in America to ban plastic grocery bags and look where we are now. 

You know, it's no longer the weirdo who goes to the supermarket with their own bag. It's what normal people do now because of just a few concerned people who decided to act and decided to change their own behavior and say, you know, we don't need this. 

So, yeah, the takeaway is we're not hopeless. We're not helpless. It looks like people are coming to that conclusion on their own.

Edward Humes is speaking at Chapman on Monday, Oct. 21, from 4-6 p.m. Tickets can be found more information can be found here.