Plenty of people estimate the extent of our castoffs -- the numbers of plastic bottles, the tons of catalogs, on and on -- but it's tough to grasp what all that means. What do those kinds of numbers look like?
Artist Chris Jordan has a vivid answer. With help from computer manipulation, he's produced large-scale photos of specific quantities of stuff: 15 million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use in the U.S.); 106,000 aluminum cans (30 seconds of can consumption), 100 million toothpicks (the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail), or 38,000 shipping containers (the number of containers processed through American ports every 12 hours).
Jordan says he's trying to “raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”
His traveling exhibition, titled "Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers," is on display at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through March 5. The college is at 370 Lancaster Avenue in Haverford. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m.
There's also a book version, with 60 color photographs.
More information is available here.
Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being--every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture--is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit. It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your "footprint" will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use)--like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole--and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever "footprint" remains. So long as you still have some "footprint," further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt.— John_Galt
GreenSpace - her column about how to reduce your carbon footprint in everyday life - appears every other Monday in Health & Science.
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