I’ll give it to you again, a message so “big” it must be repeated.  Earlier, Matt did a piece on Chris Jordan and his works on mass consumption.  To reveal this issue more, because I think it is so appalling how much we throw away accumulated, watch this enlightening 11 minute video (below) on more of his ideology and intentions in depth.  Some excerpts:

“…It’s the behaviors that we’re in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness.”

“We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled; they just don’t do that in that industry.  Now that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee.”

“There’s this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We’ve lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what’s going on in our culture right now, what’s going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world.”

Video via TED

Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation presents some truly horrifying facts and pictures of plastic that litters the oceans, contributing to a world problem as currents can carry the trash straight across the Pacific.  More than looking disgusting, it directly affects marine life in an extreme way.  Some excerpts from his 7 minute talk and the video below:

“A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. It’s diddly point squat. That’s the percentage we recycle”

“Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish like cigarette lighters … but, mostly bottle caps.”

“We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach.”

Video via TED

Capt. Moore states, “The solution is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean.”  The question is how?  Do we have to eliminate the apathy that numbs our society first or is that impossible?  Big universal steps or little personal ones?  What kind of drastic or indirect action is necessary to progress the world into a conscious body of sustainable culture?  It’s definitely too big for one person, even one nation to handle that’s for sure.

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