“It’s not just the image of an albatross killed by plastic pollution,” Chris Jordan tells me, visibly moved. “This bird is us. This bird is a messenger.” The photos he has taken over the years have become a universal symbol. Dozens of chicks decomposing, their stomachs open and displaying the inventory of our era: cigarette lighters, bottle caps, fragments of toothbrushes, pieces of toys. For Chris, this is an unerring metaphor, a social portrait of the state of humanity. “They died of starvation, with a false sensation of satiation, full of stuff that does not nourish them.”
He took the photos on Midway, a lost island in the north Pacific. “Midway”, Chris reminds me, means “halfway”. This is not a coincidence. It’s right where we are: halfway on the road between awareness and collapse.
Midway was a US military base during the Second World War. Today, there’s no permanent human settlement there, but it is a sanctuary for thousands of albatross. In this planetary confine – as scarce as the airplanes which land there at most once a month – the Pacific currents wash up the remains of our consumption, an invisible plastic soup that floats and accumulates. Birds mistake the plastic for food. And die. The parents regurgitating the waste into the mouths of their chicks without any notion of the sacrifice it represents. The metaphor is powerful and could have many subtexts.
Chris, photographer, artist and “activist of the soul “– as he describes himself – went to Midway in search of more than just images. He wanted to portray the emotional scale of the disaster. “When we measure the problem in tons of plastic, we convert it into an abstraction,” he says. “But when we see a living thing dying as a result, it becomes something more personal.”
And this he has achieved. His photos have been displayed in museums and galleries all over the world. They’ve become iconic images of the Anthropocene era, in which the human footprint has changed the Earth irreversibly. But more than a denunciation, Chris wants it to act as a “mirror.”
“You can’t act through hope,” he tells me, “because hope represents a certain passiveness. It’s like hoping things will improve by themselves. It’s important to act with love, not forgetting the pain. Activism from the heart.” His language resonates like his photos. Hope is sometimes a form of waiting, an amiable excuse for doing nothing while believing that someone else will sort it out. Love, on the other hand, is commitment. It hurts. It involves feeling part of what’s dying. And this is the connection that Chris seeks to resurrect.
The albatross is one of the most majestic birds on the planet, able to fly thousands of miles without beating its wings, planing on the ocean’s winds. Its crossing is like a thread that links the continents, an aerial witness to global interconnection. So, to see an albatross that has been killed by our waste is a prophetic moment. As if nature is responding to us, codifying its message in a body.
Chris told me that there are thousands of nests on Midway and among them the same scenario is repeated time and again: dead chicks, stomachs replete with brilliant colors. Red, blue, green plastic. “At times, it resembles a mosaic,” he says, with sadness. But there is nothing beautiful about such a composition.
When I asked him if he felt desperate, he responded without hesitation: “No. I feel sad, and from this sadness is born something sacred. Pain, as a bridge to compassion.”
His photographs do not seek to blame, but to awake empathy. The activism of the heart that is not measured in protests or statistics, but a capacity to look without fleeing, to hold the gaze on the unbearable in order to ask what part of ourselves does the image contain.
Midway does not have any human inhabitants, but it does have our footprint. Bottles that have crossed half the planet, cigarette lighters by known brands, soda tops. Waste that someone in Tokyo or Los Angeles threw away without thinking. What separates us from this albatross is not distance, but conscience.
“Sometimes I ask myself if the oceans have become the circulatory system of our unconsciousness. They take and return what we cast away, like a current in the memory,” says Chris. Every plastic fragment in the sea is a microscopic record of our collective macro disconnect.
“Midway” could also be a metaphor for the human soul: that intermediate point between forgetting and awakening. Between the comfort of not seeing and the discomfort of assuming responsibility. Maybe the true battle is not in cleaning up the oceans – although we need to do it – but in cleaning up our relationship with them.
The message of Chris Jordan transcends ecology. It is a spiritual invitation. “We don’t need more information,” he says, “we need to feel.” And he is right. We know all too well what is happening. The statistics are somber: millions of tons of plastic that enter the ocean each year, an island of floating waste the size of Europe, microplastics in human blood, and much, much more. But statistics alone change nothing. Emotion does.
What moves us transforms us. The activism of the heart that Chris talks about is that inner disposition to look at pain without denying it. To allow the injured beauty of the world to hurt us. Because pain can give birth to a more lucid love, a deeper sense of belonging. He calls it “tragic love”, a love that does not seek consolation without understanding. And perhaps that is the most mature form of hope: active, conscious hope, free of ingenuousness. One that recognizes the magnitude of the harm and, because of that, protects.
The albatross is a bird which can pass years in the air, sleeping on the currents, always returning to the same point in the ocean to nest. Its flight is a lesson in perseverance. For us, it is a warning.
It is not just a dead bird on a distant beach on an even more remote island. It is a message that comes from the biggest horizon we have: the planet itself speaking to us through the space between the sky and the Earth.
Chris said something to me that I will never forget: “It’s not about saving nature. It’s about remembering that we are nature.” And maybe this is the true meaning of Midway: not a place on a map, but an inner frontier. Halfway on the path between harm and redemption, fear and love. The end result of this equation depends on us and the route our conscience takes.