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Master Speaker Chad Pregracke.
Photo by Sierra Club Collection

by Timothy Lesle
Chad Pregracke, Master Speaker

In 1997, when Chad Pregracke was in his early twenties and looking for ways to fund his clean-up of the Mississippi River, he experienced an epiphany while watching television. His college roommates were NASCAR fans, and whenever a driver was on screen, he was covered with sponsor insignias and patches. He thought, “I could wear patches.”

The patches never materialized, but he did call up Alcoa, headquartered nearby in Davenport, Iowa, and convinced the company to give him an $8,400 grant. Working on the river, on his own, he began to pick up the trash that jutted out of the water and covered its banks like scales on a fish.

Pregracke grew up on the Upper Mississippi in the Illinois Quad Cities area, and it has been central to his life. For six summers, starting in high school, he worked as a commercial shell diver, breathing through a jury-rigged apparatus for more than eight hours a day in the pitch darkness of the river bottom, pulling up 120 pounds of clams at a time. He also worked as a fisherman and barge hand. During his time on the river, he noticed massive amounts of garbage. And there were all kinds of trash: tires of every size, Styrofoam, 55-gallon drums, trucks, vans, mattresses, televisions, refrigerators, tractors. He was pained to see the neglect of such an important and legendary river. So he started to call Illinois legislators and the governor, to no avail. That’s when he turned to the private sector.

When he got that first grant and was cleaning up the river, fisherman, hunters, and birdwatchers would often spot him and lend a hand. They called the Quad-City Times, who put him on the front page: “Love Affair with the River.” The AP picked up on the story, then ABC, then CNN. (Pregracke recalls telling famous reporters, “OK, I”ll pick you up at the airport and we’ll go out and get some garbage.”)

At times, Pregracke ran out of money and took out personal loans to finance his river cleanups. Starting with six friends, over the years he has scraped together barges, boats, and other equipment to operate effectively. His organization, Living Lands and Waters, now works nine months each year with 10 employees and a $700,000 budget. They cooperate with 125 different groups and thousands of volunteers to organize community river clean-ups that restore hundreds of miles of the Mississippi, Illinois, Ohio, and other rivers. They operate educational workshops to residents, professionals, and schoolchildren and have begun a program to replant native trees on the Mississippie's riverbanks and islands. He’s also worked on East Coast rivers, like the Hudson and the Potomac—which he was inspired to help clean when he spotted trash clogging the waterway from his plane as he landed in Washington, D.C., to accept the Jefferson Award for Public Service.

Pregracke says that community members who participate come away happy with their experience. They’re glad they got to “take back the rivers.” But this year, his organization won’t be taking part in the International Coastal Cleanup, which is on September 17. They recently unloaded their garbage barges for the summer and have filled them with building supplies, which they’ll float down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

-- 09/10/2005 Sat
10am