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Fix Our Waste, Heal Our World

What if the looming calamities of climate change, plastic pollution, the energy crisis and our whole environmental doom-scroll are symptoms of just one disease we really can fix?

That’s right, our world has a single arch villain behind it all: Waste.

We live in the most wasteful civilization in history—and I’m talking about much more than what we roll to the curb on trash day. It’s rooted in what we eat and drink and how we cook. It’s the main thing you pay for in your utility bills and at the gas pump. Waste is so deeply embedded in our economy, products and daily lives that we see it as normal, when we see it at all.

But there’s something bigger happening: solutions. For my new book, Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our How Waste and Heal Our World, I found the game changers and ordinary people right in our neighborhoods tackling waste and the environmental catastrophes it drives— and more often than not, they’re actually saving, and even making, money by doing it.

Helpful Links

• For teachers and students check out the Total Garbage Classroom Discussion Guide.

• For book clubs, here’s the Total Garbage Readers Discussion Guide.

• For interviews and events, please contact Lillian Ball at Avery Books, a Penguin Random House imprint.

• Preorder Total Garbage from your favorite bookseller.

• Read my Op-Ed In the Los Angeles Times.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the book and how you are tackling waste in your own home or community. And please join the conversation at my Garbology Facebook Page. That’s where we talk trash in a good way!

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, was my previous investigation into what we throw away, and has been adopted as a campus and community read at universities and cities across the nation. Now Total Garbage takes the story beyond the trash can to explore waste in all its many forms — and how we fix it.

How this happened and why—and what’s being done to fix it—is just one mystery I unravel in Total Garbage. There’s the crazy fact that two-thirds of our national energy supply is wasted, which means when you pay your monthly electric bill, you're mostly paying for waste. It gets worse: $4 out of every $5 you pay at the gas pump is…. waste. From our trash cans to our tail pipes, our soda bottles to our stoves, from our power plants to what we plant, we are the most wasteful civilization in history.

In Total Garbage, you’ll find the story of game changers and ordinary people doing extraordinary things to tackle waste and all the health, environmental and economic costs it drives. And they’re showing the rest of us how.

You’ll meet residents of a community where people rarely use their gas-powered cars, because they have something better, cheaper, less wasteful, more convenient… and way more fun (and no, this is not about simply swapping gas tanks for batteries).

Then there's the farm town in front Minnesota that has partnered with the local university to go all-in on renewables, making wind and sun one their most important cash crops. They even power the local liquor store with solar (“We chill your beer with the sun!”).

You’ll meet the restaurant chefs in Pennsylvania and California who are championing a more efficient, healthy, less wasteful way to cook, and the former financier in Los Angeles who wants to turn your water-wasting lawn into an urban microfarm. And you’ll also meet the single mom in Maine who has taken on multinational beverage and snack food giants to reinvent our broken recycling system and force producers of plastic pollution to clean up their mess instead of making taxpayers foot the bill. And she’s just getting started.

Their collective message: We can do this. We can fix this. It’s not about giving up thing things we love. It’s about upgrading to things we’ll love more. And all it starts with being less trashy.

About Edward Humes

I’m a Southern California journalist and author of 16 nonfiction books, with the latest, The Forever Witness, coming Nov. 29, 2022. My work has earned a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN Award, among other honors.

As a narrative nonfiction writer I spend months, sometimes years, immersed in the lives and worlds of my characters. I gravitate most often toward human stories about the justice system, science, nature and sustainability.

Sometimes these subjects intersect in the same book. The Forever Witness is about the disappearance and murder of a young couple, a 32-year-old cold-case investigation, and the emergence of a revolutionary new crime-fighting science, genetic genealogy.

Right now I’m deep into a follow-up book to my campus-read favorite, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, a story about how wasteful Americans are without knowing it. Garbology has been a “One Book” community read at 30 campuses, cities and towns across the country.

Meanwhile, my bestselling Mississippi Mud, a true-crime murder mystery set in a historic Gulf Coast city steeped in corruption, is being developed as a series by Immersive Pictures.

No Matter How Loud I Shout takes readers inside the secretive world of juvenile justice and the lives of young people trapped in a dysfunctional system. Shout received a PEN Award for research nonfiction and the Investigative Editors and Reporters book prize. After publication, I was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate and the California Legislature about my year of immersion in the juvenile system, which included teaching a writing class to teenagers on the high-risk offender unit at Central Juvenile Hall. A poem by one boy inspired the book’s title—and won a city-wide writing contest.

Often the stories continue after publication. My book Burned, about flawed forensic science that sent a Los Angeles woman to prison, helped lead to her release, and took readers inside the world of the California Innocence Project. Here’s are some previously untold stories and new happy endings from some of my books.

Some background: For the past few years I’ve divided my time between Seattle and our long-time home in Southern California.

I grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

I had no pets growing up but have made up for that shortcoming by having a family home filled with a variety of critters, including rescued greyhounds.

I volunteer with the Greysave rescue group, and during the pandemic, my family fostered seven dogs coming off the racetrack. The latest additions to my office staff are Valiant and Dottie, the two greyhounds pictured above.

Contact

I love to hear from readers and welcome comments, ideas and thoughts about your daily door to door experiences.

You'll find me on Twitter @edwardhumes and on Facebook at my author page and Garbology page, too. Or use the handy form to the right to drop a note. 

Please subscribe to my occasional newsletter using the form below.

Other Contacts:

For media inquiries about The Forever Witness, contact Emily Canders at Penguin Random House Publicity. For media inquiries about my other work, please use the form at the right.

To book a speaking engagement, or to arrange a campus or community read of The Forever Witness, Garbology, or any of my other books, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

For literary agent inquiries, contact Susan Ginsburg, sginsburg (AT) writershouse.com
 

Contact Edward Humes

The Forever Witness

In this brilliantly told, addictively readable book, Edward Humes reminds us that the term “cold case” is misleading, that unsolved murders simmer for decades with angry life, grief and the long shadow of justice denied. And he also reminds us to hope that the answers to our most stubborn mysteries can yet be found if we simply refuse to give up on them.
— Deborah Blum, NYT bestselling author of The Poisoner's Handbook

Engrossing…. Humes' writing is suspenseful yet also journalistic, providing fascinating details about the case, technological advances in police work, and genetic genealogy. A winner for any fan of true crime.
— Booklist Starred Review

 
In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines.

In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime sat waiting, as Detective Jim Scharf poured over old case files looking for clues his predecessors missed. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in California, CeCe Moore began her lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy, a powerful forensic tool that emerged not from the crime lab, but through the wildly popular home DNA ancestry tests purchased by more than 40 million Americans. When Scharf decided to send the cold case’s decades-old DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, he hoped he would finally bring closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families. He didn’t know that he and Moore would make history.

Genetic genealogy, long the province of family tree hobbyists and adoptees seeking birth families, has become a cold case solution machine, exposing the darkest secrets of seemingly upstanding citizens. In the hands of a tenacious detective like Scharf, it has solved one baffling killing after another. But its sheer power has sparked a national debate: Can we use DNA to catch the murderers among us, yet still protect our last shred of privacy in the digital age—the right to the very blueprint of who we are? (continued...)

Purchase The Forever Witness

What People Are Saying About The Forever Witness

To schedule an interview or event, or request a media review copy,
please contact Emily Canders at Penguin Random House Books

Common read favorite, Garbology

We are the world's trashiest people. 

Waste is America's leading product and largest export. Each of us is on track to toss 102 tons of trash in life—7.1 pounds a day, every day. The epic waste embedded in our daily lives not only leads the world, it drives many of the era's greatest crises—in energy, climate, pollution, security and the economy. 

The good news? Garbology is also the story of families discovering the joys of zero waste. Artists producing masterpieces at the dump. Businesses being less trashy to serve both profit and planet. It turns out waste is the one big problem each of us can do something about—if we remove our blinders and take some simple steps to lead less wasteful lives.

I have found these issues resonate deeply with many, especially young people. Over the past year I have visited schools from coast to coast, meeting students and innovators of all ages who are coming up with fresh ways to turn trash into treasure. 

"Fascinating… Zestful in his curiosity and irrepressible in his vivid chronicling."
           — Booklist (Starred Review)

More Reviews

Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

Read More, including Garbology Tips & Readers Guides

Monstrous killer or innocent mother?

INTRODUCING BURNED

Read this book now. Not only because ‘Burned’ is one of the most important critiques of forensic 'science' ever written but because it will shock, move and enlighten you. Explosive but sobering, ‘Burned’ plows through decades of received myth and junk science to reveal the sometimes tragic mistakes in our criminal justice system. Humes, as always, is humane and provocative. Reporting like this is a big reason our republic is still mostly in one piece.

— T. Jefferson Parker, bestselling author of “Swift
Vengeance” and “The Room of White Fire”

On an April night in 1989, three small children perished in a Los Angeles apartment fire. Their twenty-three-year-old mother, Jo Ann Parks, escaped unharmed, the sole survivor and only eyewitness. Though they at first believed the fire had been a tragic accident, arson investigators soon decided that Parks had sabotaged wiring, set several fires herself, and even barricaded her four-year-old son inside a closet to make sure he could not escape the flames.

Authorities  pronounced Parks one of the most monstrous killers in Los Angeles history, motivated by a desire to be free of parental responsibilities and eager to cash in by suing her landlords. Convicted through the power of forensic fire science, Parks remains in prison to this day, sentenced to life without possibility of parole. 

More than a quarter century later, however, there has been a revolution in the science of fire. Much of what was thought to be gospel in 1989 has been revealed to be myth and guesswork disguised as science. Now the Parks case has been reopened and re-investigated, the subject of an intense legal battle stretching over ten months of  hearings in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Lawyers at the California Innocence Project are trying to prove that false assumptions, tunnel vision and outright bias infected the Parks case from day one.

They argue this not only led to the wrongful conviction of an innocent mother, but also turned a terrible accident into a triple homicide case —condemning Parks to life in prison for a crime that never happened.

Will Jo Ann Parks be exonerated? Should she be? Is she “Patient Zero” in an epidemic of wrongful arson convictions waiting to be overturned? Or can prosecutors come up with enough evidence from the ashes to make sure she dies in prison?

No matter how it turns out, someone will be left burned. 

Read an excerpt of Burned.

Read original Burned case-file documents.

About Edwards Humes, including links to articles and reviews

”An instant true-crime classic
that reads like a thriller.”
— Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

“This sobering, enlightening read is true crime at its best, with the right blend of justice and intrigue that will leave readers searching for truth in the criminal justice system.”
— Starred review, Library Journal

"Eye-opening, suspenseful tale of murder and secrets."
— Entertainment Weekly, 20 New Books to Read in January 2019

“A powerful true crime tale that questions the authority of forensic science.”
— Starred review, Shelf Awareness

One of the best new crime non-fiction books.
— CrimeReads

“Riveting… Fascinating.”
— Booklist

”Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Humes once again exposes a flawed American criminal justice system, this time with a new twist."
— Kirkus Reviews

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