Polluting Our Oceans and Waterways Dramatically Illustrated with A Tidal Wave of Garbage and Pollutants.

A tidal wave of garbage and other pollutants in our oceans is illustrated with this dramatic photo to help bring societies attention to important global environmental and ecological concerns and challenges. This picture that combines the beauty of the ocean with the jetsam and flotsam of our consumer-driven society can help bring the importance of global custodianship of our fragile planet to the attention of concern citizens across the globe. There is a giant island of plastic waste the size of Rhode Island out in the oceans, but we can't see it so it does not affect us. Here I have tried to give such disasters a face, a visual that we can lock on to and utilize to move closer to solutions for both ocean based pollution and land based pollutants as well. To move our society in a healthier direction it helps to have visual elements that we can rally around.

Landfill, Waste Management, Pollutants and discarded plastic

This visual of a wave of garbage is not so far-fetched. The amount of pollution we dump into our oceans and waterways each year is staggering. Much of it is plastic which will not degrade for thousands of years. If we don't stop and clean up our act, take responsibility for the well-being of earth, then our oceans really will begin to look like this ocean of waste. Landfills are over-used and reaching capacity, waterways are being polluted and the air succumbing to carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. Hopefully by creating images that can dramatize such events we can help turn things around before it is too late.

Pictures of Garbage and Waves Composited To illustrate the dangers of Poor Waste Management

To create this tidal wave of garbage I photographed piles of garbage as the garbage trucks dumped their loads at the county landfill. I photographed the ocean from near the Cliff House in San Francisco, then used Photoshop to composite the elements together creating this hopefully compelling environmental statement. This is one of a series of such images that range from a mountain peak of garbage, to a huge mound of waste, to a giant water-less wave of garbage sweeping powerfully forward. This is a collection of environmental images that I will be adding to over time, a personal project that also crosses into the realm of stock photography. The more the images are utilized and seen the closer we will be to solving our ecological and environmental problems.