The Janitor

So there’s a man.  A quirky, kooky man, who has decided to do something about the Pacific Gyre trash heap. Some of us sit gnashing our teeth impotently and lamenting what we’ve done to this beautiful old world. Others don’t want to hear about it, their sense of tragedy being too much for them to bear confronting it. A few are too brainwashed by consumerism to care.

But Richard Rinehart is sitting up late at night, piecing together drawings of the machines that he hopes to lash together out of scrap iron and military salvage with the help of a bunch of out-of-work welders in San Felipe so that he can haul his arse out to the Pacific Gyre and start fetching plastic from the ocean on a shoe-string budget.

The Pacific Gyre (and this applies to all the world’s gyres) is miles away from all of us. Yet, it is all of our problem. It is an uncompromising testament to the fact that the way we live needs to undergo radical change. Change that we have no idea how to implement. Most of us have no idea how we would even start to contribute to cleanup.

Many have said that the world’s governments need to launch a group effort, but we know we’re fooling ourselves; governments have more far more pressing problems to deal with. The various research foundations involved with the project simply don’t have the budget or the manpower and the rest of us have a living to make.

The gyre has become the embarrassing room in the house of the world – the one we shut the door on so that guests won’t see what’s mouldering away inside.

Enter one madcap hippie and his junk ship. Superpower: Janitor.

His vision is clear; his heart and will aligned. Presently he is looking for a steampunk engineer who will help him design and build his spare-parts trash collecting equipment.

His initial trip to the gyre will be done with a 1/20 scale mock-up so as to iron out practicalities and establish a working system. His long term dream is to scrape up corporate or government funding wherever he can, and build a ship mounted machine that will pull four and a half tonnes of plastic debris out of the ocean every day, compact it and take it back to land where it will be fed into existing large-scale recycling systems that produce building material from waste. “If we have 30 of these set-ups working together,” he says, “it would be a party”.

You can shoot Richard Rinehart down easily. Pick apart his half formed plan, laugh at his lack of large-scale funding, dismiss him as a kook. Or you can admire him for the courage it takes to recognise that something needs to be done and to elect oneself as the person to do it while the rest of us mumble into our beards or stand around in helpless bewilderment as the portly sea lion, the playful dolphin and the ominous albatross choke on our debris by their hundreds of thousands.

And if you think about our history as a species, it always takes this, doesn’t it? For one person to make a start; to leap off the cliff with some wooden wings strapped to his shoulders. Then others follow, offering support where they can. If they do, Richard Rinehart stands a hope in hell of succeeding.

If we do, perhaps it will show that we humans are not such bad eggs after all. That we are still able to come together out of our own free will, step away from the money machines that lock us into consumerism and achieve the ideal of living in a world where we can say that we have showed some respect for the creatures that live with us instead of destroying the planet for the sake of our own greed.


http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=564366903#!/pages/People-in-Support-of-Richard-Rineharts-Pacific-Gyre-Cleanup-Project/164166763619697