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Flick. One cigarette butt leaves the car by way of the window and lands at the side of the road. Nobody gives it a second thought until later, when observing the news, there’s a report of a severe fire that destroyed acres of woodland, assorted buildings and threatened the lives of both persons and animals.
Yes, it happens, and far too often. A cigarette butt that isn’t in the right manner extinguished, even when dropped on the ground as we walk, may cause unbelievable damage. They’ve been known to blow into front-gardens where they’ve settled by a flammable object, and within a few minutes a butt dropped without thought has damaged an innocent person’s property. They’ve rolled beneath cars where they’ve ignited oil leaks and blown into the faces of little children. Improperly extinguished cigarette butts have a lot to answer for.
But extinguished or not, cigarette butts are still one of the major pollutants of our time.
Wherever persons tend to gather, there are always an increased number of cigarette butts to be seen. I think most will agree that they’re ugly, but aesthetics aside, it’s the toxins in the collected butts that are the real problem.
During storms and heavy rainfalls, the accrued butts are likely to find their way into drains where they are carried to rivers and/or the sea. Within each butt is a collection of dangerous toxins that were never meant to enter our bodies. That’s why the filters are there, they’re designed to catch and gather those toxins. Smoking tobacco –Nicotiana tabacum — is a fellow member of the nightshade group of plants and holds deadly poisons. In fact, nicotine, in it is pure form, is the deadliest of all plant productions known to man.
A expended cigarette butt holds a high concentration of nicotine which, once wet, leaks out into our rivers and seas along with 165 other substances, including arsenic, lead, benzene, butane and formaldehyde. Don’t you think it’s strange that lead’s been banned from use in paint and yet is utterly legal in cigarettes?
Since it’s become more and more popular to ban smoking inside buildings, more and more butts are finding their way into the environment. They’re the most mutual form of litter international and, unbelievably, make up almost half of all litter found outdoors. That’s a lot of dog-ends!
Another problem is the time that the plastic wrapping and the filters themselves stay in the environment. Contrary to ordinary belief, cigarette butts aren’t biodegradable. They’re made of 95% cellulose acetete, a form of plastic that takes up to 25 years to decompose. Maybe one little cigarette butt isn’t going to make a big divergence to the environment, but when assorted trillion of them are thrown away annually, they pose a very definitive threat to our collective well being.
The Solution
If you’re a smoker, consider using a portable ashtray. You don’t need to buy one that’s in particular designed for the job, any foil wrapping (such as that found around mints and a good deal of other types of sweets/candy) will do.
If you manage a public building where humans congregate in numbers, install ashtrays where smokers are likely to gather. You may feel that by doing so you’re advancing smoking, but the truth is, smokers will smoke disregarding of whether there’s an ashtray available; they just won’t pollute rather as much.
Organise a local clean up. While not a single soul likes to clean up after others, it’s a better substitute than leaving the butts to pollute our environment.
Conclusion
You may think that your few butts won’t make any divergence as long as others carry on to pollute, but you’d be wrong. Changes may only come when it comes to when a good deal of go forward as good examples for others to follow.
And if a child in your neighbourhood becomes seriously ill through ingesting a cigarette butt (s)he found on the street (yes, it happens), at least you’ll know it wasn’t your butt.
Wet Cigarette
An exquisite, blistering debut novel.
Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family galore times.
Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging altogether to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the unfathomed alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this finelooking novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.
Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are in the long run propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.
ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: We The Animals, Justin Torres’s sparse debut novel, is brimming with delicate stories of family, of growing up, of facing reality, and of delaying it. Narrated by the youngest son of a Puerto Rican father and white mother from Brooklyn raising their three young sons in upstate New York, the novel is comprised of vignettes detailing moments expended in the eye of the ferocious bubble of home. Torres paints a huge picture through diminutive strokes, evoking jealousy for the couple’s passion and fear for just how without apparent effort that passion turns to rage. The brothers wrestle, fight, cry, and laugh as their family is torn and repaired over and over again. Torres’s prose is fierce, grabbing hold of the reader and permitting him inside the wrenching, whirlwind of a life lived intensely. –Alexandra Foster
Review”We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read. We must all be thankful for Justin Torres, a brilliant, ferocious new voice.” —Michael Cunningham “The best book you’ll read this fall…WE THE ANIMALS, a slim novel – just 144 pages — in regards to three brothers, half white, half Puerto Rican, scrambling their way through a dysfunctional childhood, is the kind of book that makes a career….Torres’s sentences are gymnastic, leaping and twirling, but never imagination for the sake of fancy, always justified by the ferocity and heartbreak and hunger and slap-happy euphoria of these three boys. It’s a coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York that rumbles with lyric dynamite. It’s a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape. Torres is a savage new talent.” – Esquire “First-time novelist Justin Torres unleashes We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart.” – Vanity Fair
“a novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt. Written in the voice of the youngest of three boys, this partly autobiographical tale evokes the cacophony of a messy childhood – flying trash-bag kites, ransacking vegetable gardens, and smashing tomatoes until pulp runs down the kitchen walls. But in spite of the din the brothers create, the novel belongs to their mother, who alternates amongst gruff and matter-of-fact – ‘loving huge boys is dissimilar from loving little boys – you’ve got to meet tough with tough.’ In stark prose, Torres shows us how one family grapples with a dangerous and chaotic love for each other, as well as what it means to become a man.” – O, the Oprah Magazine “Some books quicken your pulse. Some slow it. Some burn you inside and send you tearing off to find the author to see who made this thing that may so burn you and quicken you and slow you all at the same time. A miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again, and know precisely what I mean.” —Dorothy Allison “In language brilliant, poised and pure, We the Animals tells regarding family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too a lot of other necessitated things, when it comes to how cherished it becomes in these extremes, with regards to the terrible sense of loss when it fails under duress, and the joy and dread of realizing that there in truth is no end to it.” —Marilynne Robinson
“We the Animals snatches the reader by the scruff of the heart, tight as teeth, and shakes back and forth—between the humane and the animal, the housed and the feral, love and violence, mercy and wrath—and leaves him in the wilderness, ravished by it is beauty. It is an indelible and necessary work of art.” —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers
“We the Animals marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in American Literature. In an intense coming-of-age story that brings to mind the early work of Jeffrey Eugenides and Sandra Cisneros, Torres’s concentrated prose goes down hot like strong liquor. His beautifully flawed characters worked their way into my heart on the very introductory page and have been there ever since.” —Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow
“We the Animals is a gorgeous, deeply humane book. Every page sings, and each scene startles. I think we’ll all be reading Justin Torres for years to come.” —Daniel Alarcon, author of Lost City Radio and War by Candlelight
About the Author JUSTIN TORRES was raised in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among some other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a originative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
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Most helpful client reviews
43 of 46 persons found the following review helpful.
 Was on Its Way to the Year’s Best
By Richard A. Mitchell
This book was well on it is way to one of my year’s best. It is a stirring and touching essay novella of a family not so uncommon. The parents entered parenthood as teenagers. She gave birth at ages 14, 15 and 17. The mother works the graveyard shift at a brewery and the father works when he can. This is a saga of kids (ages 7, 9 and 10) growing up in poverty with parents who were probably never ready to be parents. The story has all the manic swings of emotion that comes with such a family. Mr. Torres captures the love, the fear and the violence in all their permutations in a distinguishable and terrific style. The accounts of the family may be breath-taking, for good and for bad.
But then of a sudden in the last 15 pages the gears shift to the adulthood of the youngest child. The shift is incongruous and does not fit. It seemed self-indulgent on the part of the author after he had held an interesting distance as an adult writing in regards to a seven year old. The ending was terribly disappointing to me. I went from loving this book and rushing to the next page while wishing it to go on for much longer to vast disappointment.
The initial 90% of the book is so great that it overcomes the ending, so I still commend it. I am rather sure that there will be galore who will love the ending. For me, though, it just did not fit and detracted.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
 Language Blast for the Reader
By Joanne M. Friedman
It’s rare that I read a book without at times skipping a page or two of long-winded description. It’s even more rare that I am capable to finish a book–read it cover to cover–in a noisy waiting area while little children scream regarding ice cream and machinery whines in the background. We the Animals is the book that broke my mold.
This is not a light little romp, in spite of it is brevity, so be prepared for a raging ride through a mess of a childhood. The three “animals” and their dysfunctional, impaired parents are not your intermediate kids. But, then, Justin Torres is not your intermediate writer. There is something in his words that digs into the reader’s spirit, twists around and spits out a direct link to the mind of a child in bizarre circumstances. I felt the childlike mind at the other end of the words, and it was an aweinspiring experience. Autobiographies and memoirs try their best to accomplish, many times in much longer strings of words, this feat, and most fail. There is something magical in the construction of this little book, and one may only hope that Torres has more like it growing on his hard drive. Painful, beautiful, touching, and funny, We the Animals deserves reading and Torres deserves fandom.
26 of 32 persons found the following review helpful.
 The Boys of Mango Street
By Ken C.
Reading Justin Torres’s WE THE ANIMALS, I couldn’t aid but think of Sandra Cisneros’s THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. In fact, my hunch is that this is Torres’s version of that book moved to Brooklyn and written from the point of view of a boy. From vignette to vignette, you piece together the picture, until finally, at 125 slim pages, your editors consider it sufficient to be coined a “novel.” No, Torres does not surpass his mentor, but he has his poetic moments. Sometimes these moments fail and become “workshop” moments, wherein you sense the lineage (in this case, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, amidst others) of the author and how it makes the words smell of the writing workshop copying machine, but other times the writing actually comes alive.
In the beginning we are introduced to a dysfunctional family (de rigueur these days) consisting of a wife-beating Puerto Rican dad (“Paps”), an unpredictable white mother (“Ma”) and the Three Musketeers (the boys — at the book’s beginning, ages 7 to 10). The ages are not insignificant. As the tone and voice of this book is often times wise and clever, one begins to wonder how the young narrators manage it. I realize that writers ofttimes assert it is the “voice of wisdom looking back,” but the dialog portions were a bit advanced, too, and — in the “narrative dream” — what was said then was said then.
Early on, Torres utilizes the first-person plural “we” point of view, accenting just how close these brothers are and how they behave (well, for the most part misbehave) closely as a single entity. They witness their parents engaging in activenesses and violence that most of us do not, then show the effects in their own behaviors, all as you’d expect. This is Torres’s slant and what gives the book it is charm.
Later in the book, however, the author shifts to a first-person point of view, written from the voice of the youngest son. This boy, in the last few vignettes, undergoes a dramatic alter that actually turns the whole novel upside down. Now rather of a garden variety, coming-of-age-in-a-violent family, we have another type of coming of age tale which, I guess, would be a spoiler to reveal. Suffice it to say that Torres waited too late into the book to spring it on us and must have written possibly 50 further and added pages permitting for a more logical transition. As it is, it seems out of the blue, dumped on the reader, and the conduct of the family seems even more bizarre than it is admittedly low standards would lead us to expect. Meaning? I didn’t buy it. It was too much and too abrupt, jolting me out of the narrative dream as expeditiously as a pothole.
That said, you may emphasize the book’s attempts along the way and get enjoyment from it for those moments where the narration sings. Torres is adept at anaphora (repeated beginnings of sentences) and cascading participial phrases, making his well-punctuated sentences dance in originative ways at times (much like Paps who, in one vignette, tries to instruct the boys how to mambo like a real Puerto Rican). All in all, a mixed bag and, in the end, a missed opportunity. Still, one could do worse than to have Sandra Cisneros as a role model. In this case, the student shows that work remains to be done — in future books.
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