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October 18, 2007
Chris Jordan's Visuals at the POPTech 2007 Conference
Chris Jordan is using the medium of photographic arts to show us the sheer scale and magnitude of waste from consumerism. I just saw a photo of what two million plastic bottles (used in the U.S. every five minutes) looks like. The reason he uses photography to convey his message about the impact of human waste on our world is to try and move people emotionally, instead of just intellectually. It's working.
Chris' current exhibit, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, is about the impact American consumerism and greed have on our culture and our planet: “Collectively we have given in to greed and made the gaining of wealth our cultural priority. This comes at the expense of what some people hold most sacred: our connectedness to ourselves, to each other, and to our planet.
What strikes me is that we have 300 million people in the U.S., and an export of a consumerism philosophy that is spreading around the planet. As I look at his images, I realize that the waste being depicted is but a fraction of what the world produces. For example, China and India have 3 billion people adopting our American way of life; they alone represent half of the planet. These countries want American prosperity too, and the impact of consumerism from these populations hasn't even begun to be felt yet.
He asks us to consider how many of these millions of plastic bottles are for... water, which we Americans can get out of our tap that is better quality than what has been flown/shipped by airplane from other places in plastic bottles. Did you know that "Dasani" water is bottled by the Coca Cola company, with much of it sourced from the Detroit River? When you drink Dasani, you're getting tap water from Detroit.
Why not buy something like a Nalgene bottle, and fill it/reuse it with water from home?
Posted by Mike at October 18, 2007 2:46 PM
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