I guess like most people who have their heads down with work deadlines there is the tendancy to sometimes just ‘miss’ things, when something really important just happens to slip past your radar.

And when you eventually stop and take it in, and actually ‘get it’ you wonder how on earth you had hadn’t known about it sooner? Maybe you missed the News that night, TV coverage or Tweet…or maybe you watched it, but in a blur of media channel hopping one night – it didn’t stick?

The ‘Pacific Garbage Patch is one of those things for me. I had heard of it, I had googled it, watched a few you tube clips, and thought to myself something really really must be done about this huge amount of garbage floating around the North Pacific. This especially, as I had spent almost a month in Hawaii a few years ago and couldn’t reconcile plastic with the remoteness and beauty of the Hawaiian Islands.

Then I guess like can happen to most of us, it slowly slipped off my agenda as I got busy again. That was until I randomly came across this article on the Environmental News Network entitled: Birds and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Enter the work of photographer Chris Jordan & his team at Midway.

Copyright Chris Jordan - Midway: Message from the Gyre

I followed up by researching some of Chris Jordan’s photographic work on the Midway Atoll and have to admit being deeply impacted on what I saw and read on the links below. I implore you to take 5 minutes read the text, look at the images and watch the movie clips. Hopefully it will impact you in the same way.

“On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.
For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.”
From Chris Jordan’s Website http://www.chrisjordan.com

See the Photographs: Message from the Gyre

Copyright Chris Jordan - Midway: Message from the Gyre

Copyright Chris Jordan - Midway: Message from the Gyre

Copyright Chris Jordan - Midway: Message from the Gyre

Chris’ short movie trailer that must be watched can be viewed here:Midway

MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

“In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.

There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the world’s oceans. Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.

To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremely powerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, from filtering invertebrates to marine mammals are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.

Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also the plankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.

But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day. No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.

The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.”
From Manuel Maqueda.(Used with permission from this link: http://vimeo.com/8177268 )

I am left wondering; How on earth, can the world at large let this continue?

We need to be affected and moved to do something about this.

Having asked friends from Cape Town, London and New York if they had even heard about this, the response was unfortunately the same. NO.
So apart from the obvious action, to create awareness…blog, tweet, email, etc…to get the word out. We just have to stop buying and using disposable plastic.

(To quote Manuel in an email response to me): ‘Plastic pollution needs to be stopped at source, by refusing single use and disposable plastics.’

To make a small impact to an enormous problem, please visit and support the links below:

Chris Jordan’s website and contact info: www.ChrisJordan.com
Midway Project blog, team details, photos, videos: www.MidwayJourney.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Midway-Journey/117981432917
Donate: www.razoo.com/story/MidwayJourney

*Images and text are used with permission.

And finally for the sceptics…it’s not setup: http://vimeo.com/6640042