Today, we take a trip to the other side of the Gulf oil spill: the other side of the world, and the other end of oil’s life cycle. I’m speaking of the Pacific Gyre “garbage patch,” a floating mass of plastic bits two times the area of Texas.

In the PopTech video below, photographer and artist Chris Jordan unpacks his previous expectations about the garbage patch, and why things are much different, and much worse, than he anticipated.

His artwork is stunning – a reproduction of “The Great Wave” by Katsushika Hokusai made from 2.4 million tiny pieces of plastic collected from the Pacific. Wonder turns to unease when he reveals that an estimated 2.4 million pounds of plastic enter the world’s oceans every hour.

He then shares photos from his trip to Midway Atoll – over 2,000 miles from the nearest continent – where he documented dozens of young Albatross as they decompose to reveal stomachs full of bottle caps and bits of plastic.

We can be upset about the BP oil spill because it’s occurring in one place, we know who is responsible, and we can measure our progress.  We tend to ignore a thousand other types of pollution like the Pacific garbage patch because they are endemic, we are all responsible, and we have no concrete sense of control.

I’ll go ahead and ask: which is the greater environmental catastrophe?

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