Waste, American-Style

Chris Jordan knows a little bit about waste and decadence.

Seems like everywhere the poor guy looks, he sees the effects of our causal, flippant throw-away society, as well as our inability to sense the true scale of our collective footprint. In his 'Running the Numbers' series of images, painstakingly assembled from large quantities of smaller images, he hopes to set the scale and perhaps finally aggrandize our perception of the issues of our consumptive demeanor. We consume almost everything in vast and staggering volumes. From the artist, a point:

"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 426,000 cell phones retired every day."

Humanity suffers from a catastrophic near-sightedness combined with a deific sense of self-importance, the results of which clog our waterways, render our air unfit and have hastened a holocaust of epic proportions toward endemic, and environmentally important, species. Perhaps, by showing the statistics the way they really should be seen, visual, tangible, one man can truly begin to make a difference by setting a perspective shift in motion.

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait