Chad Pregracke
FROM COLLECTING MUSSELS TO USING MUSCLE TO COLLECT GARBAGE
The Mississippi River was literally Chad Pregracke’s back yard while growing up near East Moline, IL. The son of educators and river enthusiasts, KeeKee and Gary Pregracke, Chad and his older brother, Brent, spent the majority of their time on, in and around the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Between his childhood and first job as a clam digger, it didn’t take long before realizing that he didn’t like what he saw – above or below the river—and decided to do something about it.
WHAT STARTED AS ‘ONE RIVER, ONE PIECE OF GARBAGE AT A TIME’ TURNED INTO LIVING LANDS & WATERS FULL TIME
At the age of 17, Chad started making calls to government agencies to notify them of the problem, assuming someone would take care of it. Year after year passed by and the problem only worsened. In 1997, Chad decided that if no one else was going to clean up the river, he would.
In 1998 at the age of 23, Chad founded Living Lands & Waters. Today, the organization has grown to include a full staff and fleet of equipment. The crew averages nine states a year along the Mississippi, Illinois and Ohio Rivers, as well as many of their tributaries. Most recently, Chad expanded the mission of the organization to include Student Educational Workshops, The MillionTrees Project, Adopt-a-River Mile, Invasive Species Removal and The Great Mississippi River Cleanup.
AWARDS, HONORS & A BOOK
Chad’s vision, charisma, non-stop work ethic and natural leadership abilities have garnered him an abundance of awards and honors over the years. Most notably, Chad was the recipient of the Jefferson Award for Public Service (America’s version of the Nobel Prize) in June 2002. Chad accepted this award in the United States Supreme Court in Washington D.C. with other award recipients Rudolph Giuliani, Bill and Melinda Gates and Lilly Tartikoff. In 2013, he was named CNN’s Hero of the Year. Chad is also the author of From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers.
OTHER FUN PROJECTS
Whenever he can get away from his rigorous work schedule, Chad enjoys fishing, skateboarding, snowboarding, windsurfing and recycling used and salvaged materials by incorporating them into new projects!
343: Chad Pregracke: One River, One Piece of Garbage at a Time
Many people suggest people as guests who are doing “environmental things”. They don’t know my strategy with this podcast, which I describe in my solo episode Clarifying my strategy. The crux is that I focus on leadership and bringing leaders to the environment before focusing on the environment. I consider our behavior the problem to change. Environmental degradation results from behavior.
Most people are trying to make some process more efficient, like making cars electric or use less plastic in some process. That’s management. It accepts the values of a system that pollutes, and generally augmenting and accelerating it: Uber doesn’t decrease miles driven. It increases it.
Chad started Living Lands and Waters, a non-profit where people get in the river and clean garbage. It started with just him and grew to huge. Here are some videos profiling their work.
I looked at what Chad does and can see what others might: one person won’t make a difference, even the organization won’t, it doesn’t scale. Silicon Valley wouldn’t get it.
Read former guest Anand Giridharadas‘s Winners Take All to get how sickening “doing well by doing good” is. Anand treats the problem of contributing to the problem while feeling you deserve thanks for acting like you’re solving it. He on economic disparity, not the environment, but the pattern is the same.
Chad shows the joy, community, and connection in doing the work—that is, he’s changing the values we act on. You can tell because he works himself, with his hands. He doesn’t tell others to do it instead, in part because he enjoys the work. He met the woman he married picking up garbage.
I heard a guy doing what everyone says is tilting at windmills, enjoying it. He’s changing culture by living the change and bringing others on board.
In a world many people throw up their hands and lament that they can’t make a difference, he’s enjoying himself and cleaning the world, leading others to change. If you say, “But it’s not enough,” well, do your equivalent. He outperformed his expectation and he’s enjoying himself.
I brought him on because I envision a world where, like him, everyone does their part. That’s cultural change. Cleaning the world and keeping it that way means changing culture. You can be jaded and holier than thou. Or you can get your hands dirty, work, and enjoy a life of stewardship, responsibility, joy, community, and connection.