By Marke B.
Where your Smart Water bottles go? All photos by Chris Jordan
We here at the Guardian have been keeping a close eye on the Pacific Gyre — a giant formation made entirely from discarded trash, most of it plastic, swirling toiletwise a few hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii. I think of it everytime I’m in the Trader Joe’s mummified vegetable section or contemplating a thickly pre-tubbed Whole Foods purchase. Who says organic can’t be harmful in other ways?
Via Boing Boing, here’s an amazing stomach-churning photo essay by Chris Jordan that brings the devastation home. Jordan documented the horrifying aftermath of albatross chicks being fed plastic debris from the gyre by their parents, who mistook the colorful flotsam for food. Per Jordan:
These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent…. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
I don’t know if there’s anything to be done at this point to reverse the damage, other than unleash some sort of plastic eating bacteria which could potentially bring down our entire plastic-based civilization in an ironic blaze of sci-fi moralist glory. But, you know, let’s use less.
