“10/20/2009, 11:18am EST”
Chris Jordan has taken some seriously disturbing but essential emblematic photos: baby albatross carcasses decaying around the non-biodegradable plastic that killed them from the inside out.
From Chris’ site:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
The Pacific Ocean has indeed been turned into a huge human garbage dump this century. Two years ago, the San Francisco Gate described the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as “a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas.”
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii…
The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s…
This is a massive tragedy, and the right path forward is to use way fewer resources in general and stop using plastics in particular (check out Klean Kanteen as a replacement for bottled water). Maybe we can still make it out of this mess with our balls and ovaries intact.
