In the centre of the Northern Pacific Ocean the ocean currents create a slow moving vortex. The waste products of our consumer society are collected by these spiraling waters, creating what has been named the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, or the “Trash Vortex”. As many of the plastics used today are slow to degrade, the debris of capitalism will continue to choke the oceans for many years to come.
“The trash vortex is an area the size of Texas in the North Pacific in which an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton, along with other slow degrading garbage, swirls slowly around like a clock, choked with dead fish, marine mammals, and birds who get snared. Some plastics in the gyre will not break down in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of the people who threw them away.” – Greenpeace
Read more: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/
Image by Greenpeace, items collected from the Pacific “Trash Vortex”.
Images from: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/
This floating rubbish dump does not only pollute the ocean, it also takes the lives of sea birds who mistake the toxic flotsam for food. This phenomenon is the subject of a series of very powerful photographs by Chris Jordan titled Midway: Message from the Gyre. The photographs were taken on Midway Atoll, a small group of islands in the northern Pacific Ocean.
“On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.” – Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2006 – ongoing, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000911%2010×13
“For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.” – Chris Jordan
These images expose a powerful truth about the wasteful nature of consumerist culture and Jordan’s starkly honest photographs present viewers with the direct consequences of the actions of our society. As the title suggests, these birds have brought a message from the poisoned ocean. By documenting the deaths of these birds Jordan’s photographs aid in spreading this message.
Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2006 – ongoing, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000911%2010×13
Michelle Gearon
all art is quite useful 