While the Western World Fiddles With C02, Nature Burns.
The magic of C02. Apart from being a nicely branded, repackaging of wealth redistribution schemes, it's a handy deflection away from real, deadly pollution. You know, the kind that actually kills living things.
Chris Jordan's "Midway: Message from the Gyre" documents a ghastly event involving baby Albatrosses being fed from islands of floating, toxic trash in the Pacific Ocean by their mothers:
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.
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.
More of Chris's photo essay, here.
