Edward Humes > Quotes

“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Take a trip in my mind
see all that I've seen,
and you'd be called a
beast, not a human being...

Fuck it, cause there's
not much I can do,
there's no way out, my
screams have no voice no
matter how loud I shout...

I could be called a
low life, but life ain't
as low as me. I'm
in juvenile hall headed
for the penitentiary.
George Trevino, sixteen, "Who Am I?”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“from a child in danger to a dangerous child”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.”
― Edward Humes

“These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“during a hearing on the proposed expansion of a port terminal, a member of the public objected on the grounds that the project would generate more truck trips on already crowded freeways.
"Why do I need a port? the woman asked. "I have Walmart."
There were murmurs of agreement from an audience who felt that these trucks were indeed deplorable, their presence a barrier on the travels and commerce of "real people.”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

“There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

“He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?”
― Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

“Refuse. Because every time you say yes, you are inviting more to be made. You have created demand for more waste. So we refuse all of that.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“What the brain is really good at is toggling between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously. This is the essence of distraction and it’s not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even think they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It’s biology. The”
― Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation – A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Reveals Hidden Truths About Commuting and the Mobility Revolution

“The universally positive way in which these two are perceived makes for a fascinating contrast with the reactions that Bea Johnson provokes in people. The reasons for this are subtle but instructive. The first two trash-fighters identify a problem of waste in the outside world and ask people to give of their money or time to help solve it. And people do just that. They can spend money at a yard sale or spend time on the beach and help save the world - without making any fundamental changes in their own homes or lives.
But 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. A kind of cultural physics comes into play in this sort of situation, a fundamental, almost Newtonian principle that states it's always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Or put another way, picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change - not so much.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“They failed to realize that in science, gaps are different from those in murder cases. Every important and well-accepted theory has its share of gaps in the supporting data—and this is particularly true of historical scientific theories that rely on evidence such as ancient fossils (in the case of evolution) or other indirect observations, as contrasted with watching chemicals react in a test tube in real time. The theory of gravity, the big bang theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, plate tectonics theory—their histories all consist not simply of eureka moments in the lab, but also of a gradual filling in of gaps, a process that continues to this day. That is the nature of science, which continually tests its theories with new information. With large, explanatory theories such as evolution, the fact that there are gaps in the data is expected—problems arises only when gaps are filled and new information doesn’t fit the theory. Then scientists say that a theory has been “falsified.” This is why ancient Greek mathematicians and naturalists stopped believing the Earth was flat long before cameras were launched into space to photograph the globe—they knew the Earth couldn’t be flat, because the available data did not fit the theory anymore. Ships sailed off in one direction but did not find or fall off an edge. On the other hand, the theory that the Earth is a globe was accepted centuries before it was actually “proved.” That didn’t mean there weren’t gaps—such as why objects on the “bottom” of the globe didn’t fall off into space, as the principles of gravity were not well understood until much later (and gaps in that understanding remain to this day). So gaps in theories are not only real but expected in science—and they do not in themselves disprove or discredit a theory. The board members didn’t grasp that distinction, however, and so they enthusiastically endorsed mentioning “gaps” in the belief that this statement represented a valid criticism of”
― Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

“In other words, science and religion occupied two separate spheres; in the pope’s view, Darwin might have explained where the human body came from, but that had nothing to do with the spiritual and divine aspects of human existence.”
― Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

“Gluttony is, after all, one of the seven deadly sins, and it's not because it's associated with obesity, a threat to an individual's survival, but because it represents overconsumption to the point of wastefulness, a threat to an entire community. Today, a gluttony of consumption has become the norm.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“a principle that more recently has become known as exaptation. Darwin explained that some features could develop to serve a different purpose initially, then be adapted for a new purpose later. A small, feathery flap, for instance, too small for flight, could be used to keep a creature warm in cold weather. A bird frequently tucks its head under a wing when sleeping or when cold; what if this was the original purpose of the structure that eventually became a wing? Natural selection could favor these natural capes and select for larger and more thermally efficient variations. If the creature happened to live in trees, eventually this newly shaped limb could prove useful for jumping and gliding, at which point natural selection would begin to emphasize variations that aided flight. Bird evolution would then be well on its way.”
― Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

“The push for us to throw perfectly good things away and buy new things to replace them so that somebody else can get rich--an idea that goes against our own basic instincts and common sense--still holds us in thrall. We are married to a disposable economy dependent on waste.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“(By contrast, 15 percent of Pennsylvania is publicly owned lands, as is 44 percent of California, 68 percent of Idaho, and more than 90 percent of Alaska.) In”
― Edward Humes, Eco Barons: The New Heroes of Environmental Activism – An Urgent Look at Visionaries Saving Planet Earth by a Pulitzer Prize Winner

“Darwin found that if you looked closely enough, nature conveyed a very different message. How could, for instance, the Galápagos Islands serve as home to thirteen separate species of finches, each similar to the other, yet each peculiarly adapted with different-shaped beaks for their particular island habitats? Clearly these finches had migrated over time from the mainland and from one island to another, and then, once separated, had begun to diverge and to become distinct from one another. But how? And why? Why did the giant sloths, whose bones Darwin recovered on his voyage, go extinct, while other creatures thrived in the same environment at the same time? And how was it that some animals seemed poorly designed for their environments, in defiance of Paley’s perfect watchmaker—woodpeckers that lived on treeless terrain, land birds with webbed feet—yet they managed to adapt and survive through makeshift means that no divine designer would ever have intended? Why did pythons have vestigial legs, and why did the bones inside the wings of a bat parallel the bones in the human hand and arm? This was evidence not of a master design, Darwin realized, but of a slow and gradual change in existing forms, spread across the ages, inherited from remote—and shared—ancestors. The evidence he painstakingly assembled on his voyage, then presented, bit by bit, in his classic book, pointed to very slow, very gradual changes in living things over millions of years, to creatures suddenly dying out and disappearing when their forms no longer allowed them to survive in a changing climate or environment, and to new forms of life that emerged and thrived in their place.”
― Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

“Agreeing with the Johnson's views means you either have to accept living a wasteful life, or change. ... It's always easier to oppose change than to propose it. Picking up trash on the beach makes us feel good. Admitting we lead wasteful lives that need to change--not so much.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“But science is not a democracy. Science is a brutal arena where ideas are picked apart, attacked, and tested to see if they hold up. Those that do hold up live to fight another day. Those that don’t are dragged off and discarded. To survive, a theory must be supported by vibrant, meaningful, replicable research.”
― Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

“Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what’s up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first century America and the world.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash