One Can Make a Difference

by Ingrid Newkirk

  I took the idea to a medical instrument company I knew, and they immediately started manufacturing the Heimlich chest drain valve. In 1964, I presented the chest drain valve at an American Medical Association Convention, and a U.S. Navy commander, from the Navy Medical Research Institute came up to me, took six of the valves and flew to Vietnam the next morning. A week later I got a telegram saying, “The Heimlich chest drain valve is a life saving device. Must have 100 immediately.” The demand increased terrifically, but the valve was being made by hand and there were complaints that they were not being made fast enough. Eventually, that valve saved hundreds of our soldiers in Vietnam. The beauty of it is that this valve is easy to understand and simple to use.You don’t need a doctor; you don’t need a nurse. In the end, every soldier ended up carrying the valve attached to a chest tube in a sterile envelope. If they got shot in the chest, they didn’t need to see a doctor or corpsman. Their buddy inserted the tube into the chest through the bullet hole and it would do its job, getting the air and blood out and inflating the lung.

  In 1993, years after the war, I was invited to Vietnam. When I got off the plane in Hanoi,Vietnam’s head surgeon was introduced to me. He said, “Dr. Heimlich needs no introduction. Everyone in Vietnam knows his name.” I thought he was referring to the Heimlich maneuver. Then he said, “The Heimlich chest drain valve saved tens of thousands of our people.

  Dr. Heimlich will live in the hearts of the Vietnamese people forever.” I broke down and cried outright. Every year, over 100,000 Heimlich Valves are now used throughout the world, mostly for civilians. It is most gratifying to have thought about this problem and created a solution.

  DANA HORK

  Change Is Healthy,

  Change Is Good!

  Dana Hork is a modest and understated young woman. When she was nineteen and a student at the University of Pennsylvania, a thought came to her out of the blue. I find the compellingly simple story of how she developed her little gem of an idea—a sort of “add inspiration and it will grow” success story—perfect for this book. The brilliance of it is that the fundamental thought of how to make something so good out of so little can easily be repeated in innumerable other scenarios. Dana shows us that all we need to do is cast about our home, our lives, for ways to make it happen. Starting an organization never seemed daunting to Dana; rather, it was natural. Now, from its humble beginnings, the organization she founded, Change for Change, reaches students and young professionals all over the country. This Reader’s Digest’s “Everyday Hero”and USA Today All-American College Student explains how the whole thing came about.

  I was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, packing up to move back to Minnesota for the summer, when I got the idea. As I looked around my emptying room, I saw the stadium cup into which I had pitched all those pennies from my pockets during the school year. It’s amazing how much loose change a person can accumulate. It was too heavy to take on the plane with me, but I didn’t want to just leave it behind either.That’s when the light bulb came on and I had what I call an “aha!” moment. I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only student facing the end-of-school-year-loose-change dilemma. Most of my friends had similar cups in their rooms. Loose change may not amount to much when it’s yours, but in the collective it can amount to a big something, something really important to others. So, I thought about how meaningful an impact we could have if we put all of our change together and donated it to a charity. I started with my dorm, recruiting everyone I could to contribute their change. People loved the idea. I came up with the name “Change for Change,” and it stuck.

  From rounding up the change out of people’s containers and couches, I then held door-to-door collections in the dorms, partnered with student groups to ask for their support in our collection drives, and even worked with local businesses. I remember the first time we held an official collection, two friends and I ended up with all these coins in a big plastic bag that was almost breaking at the seams. We dragged it down to Commerce Bank to their coin sorter, trying to guess how much we’d raised. We dumped all of those coins into the sorter, and sure enough, the machine spat out what it didn’t want. It was right after spring break and there were pesos and other foreign coins flying back out of the machine: you could get a sense of where the students had been for their vacation. We collected about $1,000 in our first major effort and were thrilled.

  Nowadays, we have lots of college campuses participating and have recently founded a chapter for young professionals in New York City. Each chapter raises funds how and when they choose. For instance, Amherst College hosts collections four times a year, with student athletes going door-to-door to collect change. Their efforts have certainly paid off, as they raised $4,000 last year. Our New York City chapter for young professionals donated $30,000 in its first year. It’s still very important to me that our chapters support local charities while also rotating the causes they support, educating people about how many different charities there are. That way, Change for Change isn’t about supporting just one good cause, but letting those who give learn about a multitude of good causes.

  Since our first drive, we’ve built up a tool kit of additional support, everything from document templates, to an online homepage, to giving small grants to chapters to help with overhead expenses, to simply providing ongoing advice. Having a model and building up Change for Change’s infrastructure is vital. You have to pick the right people—people who are excited to be involved, enthusiastic, who will have fun with it. I love what I’m doing, and the fun is in the challenge—building a Web site, incorporating, finding wonderful volunteers, developing materials, and coming up with fresh projects. Continuing to keep the organization creative has been one of the most intellectually stimulating parts about my work. And the stadium cup—in which I first collected my loose change— has remained a central component of our program. We provide customizable cups to all of our chapters, and they serve to remind young people not only to support causes they care about, but also of the good they can achieve when working with others. Sometimes people think young people don’t care or can’t make a difference. Change for Change shows that they can and they do. When young people get together and pool their efforts, small change can cause big changes.

  REBECCA HOSKING

  Helping Bag the Plastic Plague

  Getting Rebecca Hosking to contribute to this book took some doing. She lives behind the camera, shooting wildlife films for the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and has no desire to be the one standing in front of it or, for that matter, giving interviews. But when the riveting documentary she made, Hawaii: Message in the Waves, came out, she found herself in high demand from both the public and the press. Word had gotten out that she used what she learned on the islands to benefit first her entire Devonshire town of Modbury, and now, towns all over the world. She discovered how the plastic objects we use for almost everything end up in the oceans and on the shores of the world’s most beautiful beaches, where they are killing wildlife. Rebecca’s message is that we might just surprise ourselves by achieving important changes without much more than a belief that they need to happen and a willingness to collect the facts and make the case. I think you will be buoyed by her story.

  I was born and brought up in Modbury, a town—well, a village really—in Devon. My father runs an environmental farm: it’s organic, the whole works. He farmed around wildlife, meaning that unlike many other farmers he never killed off badgers and foxes or birds of prey. Because of him, I pretty much had nature bludgeoned into me as a child! I was so immersed in plant and animal goings-on that, in school, my hand was always the one that shot up when the teacher asked a question about biology. She started ignoring me and told my mother, “We have to give the other children a chance.”

  At fourteen, I picked up a camera and became absorbed in photographing the countryside. I learned everything I could about photography and decided that was how I wanted to spend my life. One day, when I was in my early twenties, t
he BBC arrived to film a documentary about my father’s farm. I was between jobs and these men’s lives—spent traveling the world—sounded so fantastically exotic to me that I made myself indispensable. I knew where all the animals were, all about the local landscape, and I knew cameras inside and out. I was the perfect assistant, from looking after their lenses to showing them around. They ended up agreeing to take me on permanently.

  A few months later, I was employed to assist a BBC producer named Andrew Murray, a terrific man whom I’ve worked with ever since, and he suggested that I apply for the prestigious BBC Bursary. That was a two-year training scholarship that anyone wanting to break into the business would absolutely die for. He nagged me incessantly to try out for it, although I thought there was absolutely no chance I’d get it. I did apply, along with 7,000 other applicants, and when it got down to the final twenty, apart from me they were all boys! My joke, after I was chosen, was that the BBC must have decided to check the politically correct box, so that if I’d been a one-legged, lesbian, black, working-class single mother, they’d have picked me, too. But being the only “girl” was enough.

  On that training course, I worked on Sir David Attenborough’s world-renowned wildlife series, and I had the use of the most expensive equipment imaginable.When the two years were up and I graduated, I had to buy my own equipment and went into debt. My nickname for my camera today is “My House,” because that’s about what it cost me. It has taken years to pay it off. But I need it. I’m now one of only three women wildlife photographers in Britain, and one of only six in the world.

  Out on the job, I began to be bothered by what we do. For example, we always show how beautiful nature is, and it is beautiful, but things aren’t as perfect as they seem. There aren’t that many real virgin areas left. Civilization is usually a lot closer, and the wilderness areas are usually far smaller than they appear on television. If you moved the camera a little to the right or left, for instance, you would see a lamppost, a road, sludge. I wanted to make something that addressed this disparity more honestly. With this in mind, our crew shot Message in the Waves in Hawaii. I’d become aware of the tremendous amount of plastic pollution worldwide. Every piece of plastic ever manufactured is still on our planet in some form. It doesn’t break down for 500–1,000 years, no one exactly knows how long. In Hawaii, the pollution is particularly pronounced. The North Pacific currents work like a toilet bowl that never flushes; the water keeps going around and around because it’s in the center and it acts like a vortex for the rubbish and debris from all the countries along the Pacific Rim and from America, Asia, and Russia. The whole lot just comes to rest there. We could have filmed in the Azores or along the North Cornish coast; there are countless places where this is an issue, but a larger audience would tune in if they imagined palm trees and paradise, and it was important to reach as many people as possible. At heart, it’s a global film with the Hawaiian Islands representing a microcosm of the whole planet. In some areas of the oceans, for instance, the ratio of plastic to plankton is thirty to one, depending on the currents.

  Tourists visit Hawaii and have no idea that the popular beaches are cleaned twice a week or twice a month. But, go to the beaches that are harder to reach and you’re in for the shock of your life. On the south side of the big island of Hawaii, for instance, the plastic is four to six feet deep because the beach is only cleaned once a year. You’re tromping over everything from brushes to ointment tubes to microwaves to CD players to cups to ink jet cartridges, children’s toys, dummies, even alarm clocks. It may be solid or it may be particles, but it’s all there. I’ll never, ever buy a plastic coat hanger again; I saw so many of them. After the second day, the crew and I were so depressed, we had to walk away, sit down and think. Imagine: it isn’t sand that you’re walking on, it’s particle plastic in colors of blues, greens, and reds.We all started recycling like mad.

  The Midway Atoll, one of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, was horrifying, although it’s a protected wildlife reserve, the biggest marine reserve in the world. Here we found the biggest breeding ground in the world for the Laysan albatross. They’re devoted parents that mate for life and groom each other so tenderly that you can’t help relate to them. We watched them fly and were awed by how majestic they are in flight, but on the ground, they’re pretty useless and have a very silly walk. These birds mistake colorful plastic bits floating on the sea as squid—their main food.They fly 1,000 miles out on an average hunting trip, swoop down, intake this plastic, and fly back to their chicks to unwittingly feed them this deadly meal. A turtle choked to death in front of us, plastic stuck all down his throat. We saw monk seals, called “dog that runs in rough water” by the Hawaiians, with their heads jammed into plastic tubs and plastic binding that was washing about.These endangered seals have such bad scarring from plastic that wildlife officials now identify each individual by their scars! Watching spinner dolphins play in the surf with plastic bags, thinking they were seaweed, was like watching a small child playing with a plastic bag and realizing how dangerous it was for them. Sometimes they get the bag wrapped around their blowhole and can’t breathe, or they swallow it.

  When I got home to the UK, I happened to go snorkeling one day and I was horrified at what I saw. There was plastic bag after plastic bag on the ocean floor here too! I kept diving down, picking up bags, sticking them in my bikini, and then holding more of them. When I came out of the water, I looked like the monster of the deep with all these plastic bits hanging off me. Everyone walking past stared! That afternoon, I was in a queue and noticed that no matter how tiny a purchase someone was making, the cashier would say,“Carrier bag?” and they’d say, “Yes, please!”

  When I showed the film to my friend Adam, who runs a deli in the village, he was quite shocked. He said, “I don’t want to stock plastic bags any more.” Then another friend, Sue, who runs an art gallery, watched it. She was shocked as well. That’s when I heard myself asking, “Could I show the film in your gallery?” When I saw her writing down a day, ten days away, in her gallery diary, I knew I had to get the job done: I wanted every trader in Modbury to see it and I wanted Modbury to be plastic bag free. There are forty-three shopkeepers in the village, and I got a list of all of them from the Chamber of Trade. I didn’t pressure them. I simply went around, with a smile, saying, “Would you come and watch my film, please. There’ll be wine and food. And I’m going to ask everyone to consider making Modbury the first town in Britain to be plastic bag free.”

  The night of the showing, I gave the first talk of my life, offered the facts and figures, and showed my film. People were appalled, especially when they saw the albatrosses’ plight. At the end, we had a discussion. The smaller merchants were worried about the supermarkets and I had to reassure them that the supermarkets would look very bad if the small shops changed and the supermarkets, who always talked about how “green” they were, didn’t. No other town in Britain had gone plastic bag free, but I’d found a wonderful Australian group called Planet Ark Foundation whose founder had provided me with all the information I needed to help people make the switch. His magic words were, “It can be done!” So, I explained the alternatives, like cornstarch bags and organic cloth bags. Then I called for a show of hands. To my amazement, they all raised their hands! I was taken aback. “Within a month, that’s our challenge!” I said.

  So, that’s how Modbury became the first town in the UK to be plastic bag free (though I’m happy to say other towns are now following suit). My friend Adam used to give out 200 plastic bags a day; in the first week, he sold four cornstarch bags. The big supermarket gave away 1,000 plastic bags a day; in the first week, they sold 250 cornstarch bags. People now bring their own bags to the shops and everyone wins, including the oceans and wildlife. If anyone wishes to do the same thing, and I hope they will, I have put all the instructions on my Web site.

  Hawaiian culture is incredibly respectful of the natural environment, and penalties for despoiling nature and wildlife
were written into native law.What the West has done to despoil these once-pristine islands by “importing” its plastic waste via the ocean currents is absolutely awful. Hawaiians have a wonderful ethos called “Kuleana,” which means that privilege—in this case, enjoyment of all that is beautiful in the natural world— comes with the responsibility—in this case of protecting it. To me, this term is something we should all work toward and try to achieve no matter where in the world we live.

  ROBIN KEVAN (AKA ROB THE RUBBISH)

  No Point in Grumbling!

  Since his retirement a few years ago, Robin Kevan, a keen walker who loves being outdoors, is thoroughly enjoying his new “hobby.” In fact, it not only gives him something constructive to do with part of his day, it has changed the face of the little Welsh town, Llanwrtyd Wells, where he lives with his wife Tina.What is it? Well, Rob has developed a keen interest in . . . garbage! Picking it up, that is. And he does it without a grumble. I relate to Rob, apart from the grumbling bit, because every weekend when I am at home, you can find me cleaning up after the construction workers who park their trucks along the road.As I scoop up the umpteenth empty liquor bottle, I have to wonder how the fourteen-story building they have erected doesn’t wobble, for some of the workers couldn’t have been that steady on their feet by day’s end. Rob is a mega-version of me, someone who wants the world not only to be a beautiful place, but also to be a beautiful place to look at. Starting in Wales, he has now been as far afield as Mount Everest in pursuit of rubbish. The story of his litter-picker evolution perfectly illustrates how helping clean up even one patch of ground around us can make everyone’s experience more enjoyable.