Art & Our Environment
My brother Reay sent me a link to some very interesting art by Chris Jordan of Seattle. Jordan describes it thus:
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…
The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
The pictures might take a while to load, but they’re worth it. I would love to see these in person.
On a related note, I recently watched 11th Hour. As I watched the opening scenes - a bunch of quick flashes of extreme weather, disaster, and so on - I thought “Oh god, another environmental shock pitch. I can’t bear it.” But thankfully, it shifted from that into really interesting interviews. No, they weren’t all sunny, but they did give me some hope.
Take for instance Ray Anderson, who is on “Mission Zero” for his company to have nil impact on the environment by 2020. For a company that produces carpet, that’s quite a mission. For instance he’s working with local municipalities to fuel his factories using methane from local landfills. (I’ve seen him before, in The Corporation I think it was, and I tell you, I could listen to him all day. What a lovely speaking voice and nice energy on-screen.)
There were varying, interesting perspectives on the roots of the environmental crisis: spiritual (more interest in consumption of the earth than protection of it), legal (waters, ecosystems have no rights), etc.
I also watched Manufactured Landscapes recently, so all of this has me thinking a lot about my choices and purpose. I sometimes struggle with fatalistic ideas, like “what’s the point of worrying much about my own little impact when there are so many worse crimes against the environment, every day, around the world. What’s the point?” On the other hand, watching these images of rural Chinese families making their living by hammering bits of metal out of our computers’ wasted parts, or young men wading in the crude oil left in beached freighter ships they are dismantling… It was a very visceral connection for me. Those things I buy from far off lands require oil to transport them across the oceans. Many of the new electronics we all covet, with their built-in obsolescence, are shipped back over the oceans to pollute the homes of others.
In short, our choices do matter, and if you’re struggling to remember that as I was, you could do worse than see these works of art.
P.S. I’d love to hear what you think…
Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Activism, Art, Culture Consumed.
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