Chris Jordan’s photographic gallery, Running the Numbers, shows in startling detail what American consumerism looks like. From Jordan’s site:

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

These photographs are mind-blowing for several reasons…

• The sheer waste is staggering. Two million plastic bottles every five minutes? Just in America? Really?
• Going deeper into the plastic bottle issue, why do we use so many? I take care not to use them, but still end up with a couple a week. What needs to change on the personal level and also on the societal level to eliminate this source of waste?
• Extrapolating even further, many sources (such as Natural Capitalism and The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard) claim that 95% of what goes into any consumer product manufacturing chain ends up as waste—for instance it takes 50 tons of stuff to make a 1 ton car. The other 49 tons end up in a landfill, the air, or the water. So these two million bottles and the drinks that came in them potentially caused 100 million bottles’ worth of stuff to end up in the waste stream. So for every plastic bottle I don’t buy, I’m keeping 50 plastic bottles’ worth of stuff from being wasted. That is some serious motivation to keep me from buying any.
• Thinking about our democracy challenge, I am wondering how I can share some of these photos with my congressional representative, whose environmental staffer I am meeting on Friday. Have our politicians seen these images? And can they be moved at all, or has the political machine already made mincemeat of their ability to connect emotionally with the challenges facing us? I guess there’s only one way to find out—I will bring my laptop to the meeting and hope for a wireless connection.

These images are daunting, but I find them exciting too. Imagine how much better we can do!

(image by procsilas via flickr)