Quotes from Edward Humes

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.

By 2018, the laws had changed in many (though not all) states, and sixty-six US-based innocence projects had launched, with another ten in other countries joining the "Innocence Network" as well.

We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.

WE CAN ALLOW SATELLITES, PLANETS, SUNS, UNIVERSE, NAY WHOLE SYSTEMS OF UNIVERSES, TO BE GOVERNED BY LAWS, BUT THE SMALLEST INSECT, WE WISH TO BE CREATED AT ONCE BY SPECIAL ACT. —Charles Darwin

Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first century America and the world.

That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.

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.

Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

from a child in danger to a dangerous child

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.

They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.

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.

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.

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.

No matter where you are, there's no getting over it, no getting away from it," he has said. "It's a plastic ocean now … We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.

if a proposition cannot be falsified, it is not scientific.

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.

immorality, materialism, and godlessness.

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.