Photo: from "After Midway: Message From The Gyre," Photographs By Chris Jordan, September 2009.
KJ strongly recommends checking out his many other amazing photo series at chrisjordan.com
Caption by Lauren Deutsch:
What’s for dinner, mom? Few albatross mothers (or any mom in the food chain) can refuse her chicks’ cries for More! But when it’s dinner time and you’re stuck out in the boonies, say near the Midway Atoll, 2000 miles from the nearest continent, what are your choices? Just do a fly-by to the Great Pacific Gyre and take-out from the food court, a continent-size vortex-driven collection of human waste (what else can we call it?)
The ultimate junk food diet — exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris — is killing tens of thousands of sea-loving creatures through starvation, toxicity, and choking, as Chris Jordan’s moving images reveal. Ninety percent of the Gyre’s flotsam is plastic.
According to a 2006 UN report, "Over 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of ocean today. In the Central Pacific, there are up to 6 pounds of marine litter to every pound of plankton." (See tinyurl.com/UNEP-IUCN)
Another UN report estimates that a million birds and 100,000 mammals die annually from plastics.
Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. His first book of poetry is Riverfall and his second, due this winter, is Bloom, both from Ireland’s Salmon Poetry.
www.SimmonsBuntin.com
