Randy, who is an artist, passed along a link to a series of photographs by Seattle photographer Chris Jordan called Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait. In Jordan’s own words, the photographs portray “contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics.”
Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (which Jordan says is “five minutes of paper use”); 106,000 aluminum cans (”thirty seconds of can consumption,” according to Jordan) and so on. The image at left, for example, is a piece of Jordan’s image of 426,000 cell phones, which he says is “equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.”
A post about these images also appeared in New Scientist yesterday under the title Consumption Made Beautiful. Environment editor Gaia Vince wrote:
A picture paints a thousand words, so I won’t waste mine - suffice to say that Chris Jordan has taken the ugly truth of our planet-destroying over-consumption and produced beautiful, simple images.
But, commenting on Vince’s post, “Anonymous” wrote:
Um, am I supposed to feel guilty about this or ashamed? The creator of these images obviously chose consumption subject matter he believes to be bad or wrong. I see no real problem with the numbers associated with the images in terms of “consumption” as presented in a nation of 300 million people.
What do you think? Is it art? Is it meaningful? Should we be talking about American consumption?
Wow. It’s incredible to see these statistics in such a visual way. 60,000 plastic bags per five seconds is a crazy number, but seeing 60,000 plastic bags is even crazier. It must be very impressive to see these in person.
Amazing — numbers are so mind boggling huge that we loose track of their meaning. The photos help give a sense of perspective.
This discussion of American consumerism reminds my of the BBC series, Century of the Self, which describes how consumer culture was masterminded by PR firms and corporations, creating the Consumer as the post-war replacement to the Citizen. It is really worth watching.
The irony is that these photographs are all beautiful. Even the handguns.
Eimster, yes, even the handguns are beautiful.
It was an interesting realization to me - standing on a rooftop in Lima, Peru, where I had gone to view Halley’s Comet - that human creations are just as beautiful as natural creations. But now I see that’s because humans are linked to nature.
Deborah
Not only should we be talking about American consumption, we should be screaming about it in the streets.
i belive these landfills or middens will be of enormous value when we are gone and in a few million years the cephelopods that take our place will learn a great deal from us.
First off, I’m not saying that we don’t consume a heck of a lot and waste a heck of a lot. But let’s be honest about it. Specifically, I think we need to question the math here.
426,000 phones/day x 365 days/year = 155,490,000 phones per year.
Since 426,000 phones trashed per day equals 155,490,000 per year, that means that (at a population of 300M) just under a phone every two years is trashed per person. That’s every man, woman and child in the States apparently doing Verizon’s New Every Two religiously. Factor out the percentage of kids under cell phone age and the numbers get even more ridiculous. In short, I’m not buying it.
212,000 cans/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/day = 305,280,000 cans per day.
Similarly, his can count of 212,000 per minute translates to just over one can per person per day for a population of 300M. Again, that one soda can for every man, woman and child in the country per day. Again, hard to believe, given the prevalence of plastic bottles these days. Is plastic consumption any “better” than cans? I don’t know, but that’s not my point. My point is that the numbers provided by Jordan don’t seem honest or correct.
3M sheets/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/day = 4,320,000,000 sheets per day.
But the most ridiculous number is the 3M sheets of office paper per minute. This one translates to roughly 4.3B sheets of office paper per day, or 14.4 sheets per man, woman and child per day. Including government holidays. Gotta challenge that one, too.
Perhaps someone could ask Jordan how he came up with his numbers?
Wow, Jim. I don’t find these numbers hard to believe at all. The biggest mountain in town is the dump. More garbage than dirt around here…
Phones: I know that in the 6 years I’ve had cell phone service, never once has any of my phones lasted a single, full year, much less two, but maybe I’m hard on them. Lets look at some numbers from the first page of Google results. New U.S. cell phone sales were 143 million in 2006 according to the NPD group, so I guess Jordan was off by a whopping 8%, unless he was maybe looking at all North America, which would imply by his number that not one person in Mexico bought a phone and that Canadians buy less than half as many phones per person per year as Americans. Looks like he underestimated North American phone consumption to me.
Soda: I don’t drink that much soda, but I’ve been to a grocery store before, and there’s more retail space in every single one dedicated to canned sodas than water, juice, meat, and dairy combined. According to the ABA, as of 2004, consumption of soft drinks is well over 600 12-ounce servings (12 oz.) per person per year, (not counting other products in cans) and (also courtesy ABA) 51 billion recycled soda cans per year is 51% of those produced - so in 2004, there were 275 Million soda cans disposed per day (that’s about 1 per person per day by 2004’s U.S. population). So that makes the 1 per person per day count accurate 3 years ago, and the ABA says that new, non-soda canned drinks are the number one increasing type of drink in increased popularity since then. So, not counting the new most popular drink to replace water that’s also in cans, it looks like the numbers here are pretty accurate (if not underestimated) again.
Paper: Well, OK, my being too lazy (or concerned about the electricity wasted serving up all this info on my laptop - take your pick) to look past the first page of Google results has got me stumped on this one - you might have to go to Jordan. I get the impression you’ll find he’s done his homework, though. Anyone else out there have any numbers for this one? After looking those last two up, I’d love to see some more stats showing how heinously wasteful we are… and how much potential we have to improve…
All very interesting points. Yes, our consumption numbers are huge but we are a product-driven, materialistic society. Yes, the pictures are odd collections of our “things” but are still very artful in their own way. And more importantly, our human history will no doubt be told thru our remaining landfills.
yes,as a math nerd those particular numbers DO NOT compute
however this arrogant,greedy, obese society here in USA is in serious need of an eye opening to the rest of this small planet
especial,ly in the fish biz!
thanks for your site,blogs and your program which I am able to enjoy in El Salvador w/ streaming audio
Peace
Michael, hi! Just answered you on another post.
I’m glad you like this art project by Chris Jordan.
I think it is, indeed, eye-opening.
Many thanks,
Deborah
Hi guys, great to see all of your comments. I thought I’d check in on the “sources” question because that comes up a lot in connection with my work. I know that some of these numbers are hard to believe–they are for me too, but they are exhaustively researched and verified, and in most cases are based on data that is a couple of years old, which means that today’s figures would be even higher. If you take some time to search the web for information on any of these items (”office paper consumption,” for example) you will find lots of websites that refer to studies and databases containing these figures. The only extrapolations I do are to divide up the yearly figures into smaller quanta–the amount used per minute or per hour or whatever.
If you still find the numbers unbelievable, you might consider looking at your motivation to debunk my work– for example, perhaps a desire to avoid the reality of our mass culture? This is hard stuff to swallow, I realize, but that’s the point of these images– to face up to something. They are supposed to provoke; so, be provoked and see where that goes, instead of taking the easy way out (e.g., writing off the project as being inaccurate), because the numbers are, sadly enough, correct.