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Running the Numbers II
Portraits of global mass culture

Chris Jordan is back with more incredible photographic art. It’s again a pleasure for Eco-Sys Action and Boopy to introduce such a clever way to understand where our planet is going if no action is taken by every one of us.

Here are a few words from Chris Jordan. More at www.chrisjordan.com.

This new series looks at mass phenomena that occur on a global scale. Similarly to the first Running the Numbers series, each image portrays a specific quantity of something: the number of tuna fished from the world's oceans every fifteen minutes, for example.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places—many of them remote to us geographically and culturally. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses. We cannot personally witness the 27 million people in the world today who live as slaves; the 1.2 billion who lack access to safe drinking water; the 100 million sharks that are killed each year for their fins; and so on.

The first two pieces below depict statistics about the overfishing of sharks and tuna, two apex predators that are crucial to the world's marine ecosystems. New images on other issues will be coming soon, so please stay tuned, and thank you for visiting.

A quick message from Boopy:
“If you don’t want sharks to disappear from our ocean, don’t eat shark fin soup and join the campaign to help regulate its trade. If you don’t want the sea to be empty of fish, check carefully which species are endangered and don't eat them at all. If you want to take one single action to conserve our marine resources, then organize a beach, river or stream cleanup with adult supervision! It will also teach adults that young people want a clean planet”.

Share Chris Jordan's artwork with your friends! Click here to download a file they can check out and learn from. (1.19 MB)

Shark teeth, 2008

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Depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins.

Tuna, 2008
Made from nineteen original watercolor paintings by Sarah Waller

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Depicts 20,500 tuna, the average number of tuna fished from the world's oceans every fifteen minutes.



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