What the Garbage Patch Looks Like

Recently, the artist Chris Jordan flew to the Midway Islands to take photographs of dead albatrosses. Why travel so far to take pictures of such a small thing? Jordan wanted to make a point.

The photos he took reminded me of others you might recall. Remember how photos of baby seals were everywhere a few years back? Those furry white pups with glistening eyes didn’t just sell a lot of calendars. They catalyzed a public outcry that resulted in less seals being clubbed to death. Similarly, photos of the  1984-85 famine in Ethiopia led to a huge outpouring of aid.

Jordan specializes in helping his viewers make sense of waste. Everyone has thrown away a plastic bottle. So what? I reconsidered my throwaway habits when I saw this piece by Jordan called “Plastic Bottles,” excerpted here:

And now Jordan has turned his camera on dead albatross chicks.

These pictures explain the Garbage Patch with heartrending simplicity. The Garbage Patch, in case you don’t know, is a giant area of floating litter in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I know from personal experience that the Garbage Patch is difficult to explain.

It’s hard to get alarmed about the Garbage Patch because it’s hard to see.

The plastic doesn’t all bob together on the surface, like an oil slick. Instead it’s trillions of pieces spread over thousands of miles, only some of it on the surface. One can’t spot it from a satellite or a plane or a fast-moving ship.

So plastic doesn’t photograph well on the ocean, but it does from the belly of a baby albatross. Albatross parents fly for hundreds of miles to pluck food from the ocean to bring back to their young. These days, their baby food consists of lots of plastic, because the bright pieces of broken trash resemble food. These pieces of plastic block the youngsters’ guts and kill them while still on land.

Others have photographed these ex-albatrosses, but somehow Jordan is the first to capture the full pathos.

Pass these photos on, and help create a movement. See the whole photo series here.