I just returned from a trip to Mexico, and it got me thinking about the environment and photography. My trip was to San Carlos. It’s on the Sea Of Cortez. I drove from my home in Colorado with my girlfriend Shauna and our friend Paul who anchors his sailboat there. I’ve traveled to Mexico before, but never to San Carlos, and never to sail. I’m not a sailor, and honestly do not even spend much time at the beach.

I want to share some of the thoughts I developed while on this trip about the role of photography in environmentalism. I was just plain awe-struck by the amount of trash on the beaches. Especially the plastic bottles.

Keep in mind these are not your typical lay around in the sand with a hundred other people beaches. These are remote cove beaches totally uninhabited, many without any land access. So the trash I was seeing is not from the land. It washes up from the ocean and there is no one to pick it up.

It sparked a conversation amongst us about the use of plastic in our society, and what becomes of it. We began to talk about the dumping of trash in the ocean and trash that gets washed out to sea from our inhabited areas. What we were seeing on the beaches in Mexico is only a small fraction of the garbage out there.

So this is not just a Mexican problem, this is a world problem. There is a tremendous amount of trash in the ocean. It came from all of us, on the land. It gets into the sea, and some of it find’s it’s way back to shore.

A lot does not. It’s been called the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch“, or the “Trash Vortex“. It’s a 1,500 mile swathe of garbage circulating in the Pacific Ocean. According to the Greenpeace site,

“The trash vortex is an area the size of Texas in the North Pacific in which an estimated 6 kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton, along with other slow degrading garbage swirls slowly around like a clock, choked with dead fish, marine mammals, and birds who get snared”. See an animation of the Trash Vortex here.

I had heard about this, but actually seeing plastic bottles on the beaches and floating around in the ocean really made me stop and think about it. Actually seeing something has a much greater impact than just hearing about it. Visual images have impact. Photography has impact.

It seems that large numbers are especially are hard to visualize. Numbers associated with a concept are sometimes so big they can’t be comprehended. The amount of trash in the ocean is like this for me. I mean, if you have never been to Texas, how can you really know how big that is? Yet a photograph can help us get it. This is one of photography’s great powers. Especially still photographs. Photos can make a number or concept personal and manageable, something we can relate to.

I think it is important to use photography to help us, the world inhabitants, really understand our environmental issues. Especially those so big they become un-relate able. Like how much plastic to we actually consume, and then have to dispose of.

One of the most powerful examples of using photography to help us comprehend large numbers and understand the environmental issues facing us I have seen lately is the work by photographer Chris Jordan. Two of his bodies of work, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait and Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption take some of our environmental issues and their large numbers and visually represent them in a photo.

Chris’s work can be seen here on his web site and as You Tube videos below.

You can see a video story of Chris Jordan at work here on Bill Moyers Journal