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If today’s Earth Day is getting you pumped about helping the planet, we following up on Green Deets 017 with some more inspiration: a really great little news feature package on Chad Pregracke and Living Lands & Waters from a CBS morning show airing on Sundays — you know, that time when people are supposed to be asleep rather than waking up to what Al Gore recently framed as the great environmental challenge that is our generational mission. Well, welcome to internet video where we unearth clips at will and serve ‘em up to you! So that you can as do as Mr. Gore suggests and “approach this challenge with a profound sense of joy and gratitude.”

That’s certainly how my fellow Illinoisan Chad Pregracke has chosen to proceed as revealed through the stories told in this segment. With plain old good horse sense Pregracke sets out to clean up many of America’s grand rivers ONE PIECE OF GARBAGE AT A TIME. Pure simplicity of vision matched with the metal to succeed wrapped around a core of truly human generosity befitting our species at its best comes through in this seven-minute piece; not from fancy editing, nor shots of mountainous recovered refuse, nor from a treacly stock music bed — it emerges because Pregracke the man shines through.

We especially like the bits we’ve included in our one-minute excerpt:

:: Touring in detail the staggering amounts of recovered trash
:: Chad’s reaction to what appear to be human bones amongst the barge booty
:: Chad’s closing statement

The earth is not destroyed as a whole…it’s piece by piece, and that’s the same way it needs to be fixed.

WATCH >> Full 7-minute CBS News Video The Rivers’ Garbage Man As a teen, Chad Pregracke started picking up trash from the Mississippi River. Over a decade, his non-profit has pulled over 4 million tons of garbage from America’s rivers. Mark Strassmann reports.