Illinois Native Leading Record Cleanup On Rivers

www.agrinews-pubs.com
Katie Nickas
2010-01-28

INDIANAPOLIS — Chad Pregracke, the 30-year-old founder and president of Living Lands and Waters, knows about rivers and what it takes to keep them clean.

The East Moline, Ill., native grew up playing in, on and around the mighty Mississippi River, where he became living proof that one person makes a big difference in a world where dreams often seem to float along as aimlessly as driftwood.

“I set out with big intentions — to do the biggest cleanup ever on the Mississippi River,” he said during the annual conference of Indiana’s Soil and Water Conservation Districts.

Twelve years later, after slowly wading through technical and budgetary challenges, he is the leader of a nine-state cleaning crew that collectively has hauled more than 6 million pounds of garbage off the nation’s rivers.

“Earth is destroyed piece by piece, rather than as a whole,” Pregracke said. “If a lot of people come together to do something, it can add up to big things.”

Pregracke’s pickup story begins as a commercial shell diver, commercial fisherman and barge hand during the summers of his high school and college years, when he sometimes lived on the islands in the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.

He began to notice the condition of the rivers was worsening because of accumulated trash on the shorelines.

“Nobody was coming out to pick up the trash,” he said. “There were lots of barrels, tires, TV sets, you name it. I knew that it would all eventually drift farther down river or end up in the Gulf.”

With a fortunate mix of beginner’s luck, a social shift toward environmental consciousness, national media attention and hard work, Pregracke was initially given an $8,400 check from Alcoa to basically spend his time on the rivers cleaning up all the debris.

In total, he picked up more than 30,000 pounds of trash along the rivers, splitting his time between collecting it all and hauling the aluminum, barrels and tires to recycling facilities.

In 2008, he assembled a crew of volunteers to set up camp on Bolter Island, where they worked for the next nine months every day of the week cleaning up where the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi rivers meet.

“Looking back, I realized funding was not going to be easy,” Pregracke said. “We did not realize how much garbage there is down by St. Louis.”

Pregracke received phone books from all the main river towns, and he tried to call Anheuser-Busch and other names to get a sponsor for their cleanup project.

The first two years were the toughest, and the muck got thicker. Shortly after founding the not-for-profit environmental organization in his hometown, he and the crew set out to clean a 273-mile stretch of river from St. Louis to Chicago.

On the last seven miles of the trip toward Chicago, the boaters were met with thick garbage and oil that would rise straight out of the mud. “The grossest thing ever,” he said.

After the river cleanup mission, Pregracke said he realized they needed to be spending all their time on the water rather than transporting the boats on a trailer and hauling scrap metal and batteries away.

He managed to secure his first barge after an outspoken meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers and Major General and eventually grew to a fleet of four.

Today, Living Lands and Waters works intensively along the Mississippi, Ohio, Anacosta, Potomac, Missouri and Illinois rivers, with four barges, one towboat, six workboats, two skid steers, five work trucks and a large box truck.

The group has 10 employees and more than 60,000 volunteers and performed 82 cleanups last year.

“We went from boat loads to barge loads,” Pregracke said. “It’s like being in a band, but our tour bus moves really slowly.”

It has been an interesting journey, if not completely comical at times. Over the years, the crew has found thousands of baby doll heads, many of which have been saved and decorated as souvenirs from the rivers.

Living Lands and Waters also now includes the Big River Educational Outreach, the MillionTrees Project and the Adopt-a-River Mile programs.

His book, From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers, was released in April of 2007, and it chronicles his journey on the rivers.

“The main thing I learned is it’s not supposed to be easy,” he said. “That’s why no one’s ever gone out there to clean it up.”

For more information about Chad and the Living Lands and Waters program, visit www.livinglandandwaters.org.


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