Why a Gen Zer Picking Up Trash in a Park Went Viral
Edgar McGregor started cleaning up Eaton Canyon near Los Angeles in May 2019, and he didn’t stop until it was spotless nearly two years later. We talked to McGregor about how to stay motivated to take care of the earth.
Twenty-year-old climate activist Edgar McGregor says he’s always been a collector. He has piles of old coins, shards of sea glass, and a bunch of model wooden boats. He likes the process of finding neglected things. So, he says, it kind of makes sense that he became the trash-pickup guy. It’s just another kind of collecting.
In May 2019, as a high school student, McGregor started visiting Eaton Canyon, in Southern California’s Angeles National Forest, to pull empty bottles and discarded wrappers from the bushes every day and grab cigarette butts from the dirt. He’s done this every day since, even when he can only squeeze in a few minutes after long shifts at his job at a warehouse, even when the Santa Ana winds rip up the canyon, and even when the Bobcat Fire crept within miles of the park. Earth Day marked his 637th day in a row. On the 589th day, which fell on March 5, he declared it “clean,” but he’s still going back to make sure no new trash has appeared, and now he’s starting to clean other local parks, too, because he knows addressing pollution is a long game..
McGregor is not yet old enough to drink alcohol, but he’s been a climate activist for years—he was recognized for his amateur climatology work at 17—and he’s headed to San Jose State to study meteorology and climate science in the fall. He’s dubbed this latest project #EarthCleanUp and is documenting it on his exceedingly charming Twitter page. (His March announcement that Eaton Canyon was “completely free of municipal waste” garnered over 100,000 likes.) It is the best way he knows to address environmental degradation and human damage: start doing something, and just don’t stop, then see where it takes you. We could all probably learn a little from his mission. We spoke to McGregor recently on a break from picking up trash.
On Getting Started: “When I was 18, I started striking every week as part of the school strikes for the climate crisis, in front of California’s Pasadena city hall, with a sign that showed the change in average temperature in Pasadena, where I live. I wanted my local politicians to see how much it could impact my local area. And striking was nice, but I couldn’t really feel any kind of difference, so I started cleaning up trash in the park after my strike every week. Trash would show back up in an area I’d cleaned faster than I could pick it up every week, so I started going every day.”
Read the full story at https://www.outsideonline.com/2422380/do-you-love-exercise-and-environment#close