Laying Waste To Our Environment -- Peering Through The Lense Of Chris Jordan

It's often easy to forget how much we consume (food, objects and resources) because most of the time, we're not even thinking about it.

However, week in and week out, we tend to be on a fast track to some sort of store in order to replenish or stockpile goods that we don't even necessarily need.

All we know is that it is what we do, whether to fulfill legitimate needs or to serve as a form of entertainment that satisfies our ever-growing list of wants.

Artist Chris Jordan has explored this cultural phenomenon for years in his large scale photographic works which focus most commonly on the things that we use up and spit out.

Using just one toothbrush every four months before throwing it out may not seem like a big deal, but once you remember that there are households all over the world doing the same thing as you, it suddenly makes a lot of sense why birds in the middle of the Pacific ocean are making our cast away plastic a main part of their meal time.

His latest effort, entitled Lightbulbs, demonstrates that inefficiency (or lack of eco-responsibility) in US households leads to 320,000 wasted kilowatt hours each minute...not day, or week or month...MINUTE.

In all of Jordan's works (depicted throughout this post), he shows that we consume on a far more massive scale than we can even comprehend and it is the endless cycle of buying and disposing that has laid waste to our natural environment.

How do his images affect you? Do they make you feel the slightest bit guilty about your role in our culture's endless cycle of consumerism? Are you inclined to take recycling even more seriously than you already do?