Duty+JM

“A Reporter At Large: Duty of Care” - //The New Yorker// - June 28th, 1993

The title itself doesn’t suggest what the article may be about. Luckily, thanks to the //New Yorker// and its amusing drawn pictures that are related to the topic, the picture of hundreds of junk tires gave me one idea: it’s about tires. Then the subtitle summarized it: “What do you do with two hundred and fifty million old tires?” Yes, what do you do with them? Then what I did (and I’m sure everyone does this as well) was skimmed through the pages to see how long it was. A little over eight pages. Wait, eight pages? On tires? What could possibly be said about tires that would take up eight pages? Well, a lot. And a lot of information that would never have occurred to you before reading this article. There is a lot to be said about junk tires. Basically, the article is about the billions (yes, billions) of tires that are disposed of. The junk tires are causing health and environmental hazards because of the lack of disposal methods, but “visionary tire people” are creating ways to solve the problem.

Right off the bat McPhee takes you on the journey to one particular pile of scrap tires in California. He tells you that if you’re on Interstate 5, which is in Stanislaus County, the pile is not visible. First you have to follow the highway through Modesto and Merced, which takes you to the western edge of Great Central Valley, which you will then see unpopulated hills. The pile is hidden by those hills. If you were three miles from the San Joaquin County line and walked one mile southwest, you would find the pile of scrap tires. These would be excellent directions for a Californian native, but for anyone else the description is a visionary aide. There is a ton of descriptive detail like this throughout the article, but somehow McPhee does this without being tedious. The everyday person would never get too complex about a tire, which is possibly why anyone who read this may have been a little surprised (if not a lot) about all there is to know about tires.

We know John McPhee is mainly a journalist, so he reports on topics. You can always pick out a journalist writing an article from a novelist writing a novel – they’re two completely different styles of writing. John McPhee, on the other hand, mixes the two. Even though we know we’re reading an article that McPhee is reporting and a topic that he has done extensive research on, we can still get the sense that we’re also reading a short story. McPhee can maintain a personal relationship with his readers, which is useful for any type of writer. I’m sure he gets the sense that not all of his articles are going to be interesting topics (because you can’t please everyone), so he tries to find a way to express himself in his writing as he would if he were talking to you face-to-face. By him using first-person narrative especially helps with this.

The research that McPhee does before writing an article is amazing to me. It’s obvious that he tries to leave nothing out (even when it could be left out and still serve its purpose), but what he does put in is always relevant to the issue. It’s like he doesn’t want to short-change his audience.

The article covers everything you could ever think about an article covering when it’s about tires. Junk tire piles that carries millions of tires just in California alone, and how it all began by one tire jockey who collected abandoned tires to make money. These are tires that we’ve all contributed to – no one is innocent. Tires are on the surface, they are underground, they are on the beds of rivers, and they don’t decay. They are one per cent (1993 stats) of all municipal solid waste, and each tire is more than two and a half gallons of recoverable petroleum. You can’t burn tires to dispose of them because they decompose into carbon black, gas and oil, which then would contaminate our Earth. Different tire jockey’s were interviewed to get their input as to what they think should happen with tires. Tires can be used to make numerous things: crash barriers, dock bumpers, fences, playground tunnels and swings, silent stairs, airplane shock absorbers, footwear, hockey pucks, carpet padding, and running tracks to name a few. Recycle tires is the message. Or, as one man does, shred them. One important aspect should be to adopt England’s rule: a law called Duty of Care. This law says you need a waste-management license where you have to know exactly what happens to your waste. A law that at that time was not in place in the United States.

The variety of articles John McPhee writes about is large. While the topic of tires attached to a lengthy article may seem boring, it is a part of an environmental issue and it’s interesting to know the inside-and-out of tires.

-- Jody McIntyre