garbage
sastyk | August 1, 2011The Riot for Austerity came about this way. In 2007, after the release of the IPCC report, and a number of books drawing attention to climate change, a friend of mine and I were discussing our frustration that no political organization was considering any kind of emissions cuts that even resembled those necessary to limit the damage from climate change. In fact whenever we discussed the 90+% emissions cuts required to give us the best chance of a reasonable stable climate, the immediate reaction was "that's not going to happen!"
Stealing a great line from George Monbiot's wonderful book…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2009tags: North Pacific Gyre, plastics, pollution, Pacific Ocean, streaming video
The center of the North Pacific Gyre is a relatively stationary region of the Pacific Ocean (the area it occupies is often referred to as the horse latitudes). The circular rotation around it draws waste material in and has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, disintegrating in the ocean into smaller and smaller pieces. These…
bcohen | June 10, 2009A slow June at the Fair (see here for an explanation), but I'm popping in to share what constitutes a different sort of landscape image(s) below. Here's the first:
The Citarum River in Indonesia.
Here we have landscapes of garbage, scenes of environments overwhelmed with waste, with excess, with disposed and disposable items. The images are jarring to me, especially when defined as landscapes -- that these are visions of the terrain in which we live. Nobody would confuse these for wilderness pictures. In this case, the human contrivance is too obvious to warrant comment, though In prior…