Our actions have unintended consequences on a collective level.
When 300 million people do the same unconscious behavior it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wanted and nobody intended. Each of us makes daily decisions about what we buy as consumers. We try to envision the world view of our environmental footprint. As we try to decipher the social impact of our daily decisions, the information we have to work with is statistics in the millions, billions and even trillions. There is no meaning in these enormous statistics. What Chris Jordan tries to depict is the one piece of the collective that we are in charge of – our own behavior.
“Intolerable Beauty” examines the immense scale of the our consumption, “a slow-motion apocalypse in progress”: bales of recycled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of cell phones, circuit boards, crushed cars and the like.
“Running the Numbers,” examines the statistics of US consumption. Each image represents a statistic, making them more meaningful than the statistic alone. Toothpicks, for examples, depicts one hundred million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail. The number is a vast ocean that stretches beyond our horizon.
“As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It’s each one of us.” ~ Chris Jordan on Bill Moyers Journal
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Scary and amazing…
Scary for the cigarettes, waste and breast augmentations (yeah, sorry, the young men spoke)
I mean, we in Europe must do nearly as bad as you, but… that’s staggering. I have no words right now to describe what I feel about that.
I always knew we waste a looot of stuff everyday, but to this extent. Frightful, that’s the word I was looking for.
Great post as usual Daryl and as usual, stumbled it !
Enjoy your week !
Edouard, It’s amazing to see these vast numbers portrayed in pictures. I appreciate the efforts of the artist to open our eyes to our unconscious actions that add up to staggering amounts of waste. Thanks for the Stumble too! ~ Daryl