Running the Numbers looks at contemporary western culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: two million plastic bottles (five minutes of bottle consumption in the U.S.), 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of our can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of the profoundly important phenomena they represent.

Finding meaning in these mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. 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.

Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these issues through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions nowadays. Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emitionally paralyzed.

I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, rage, anxiety, and other feelings that this process can entail. Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on difficult questions in the absence of easy answers, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these images can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It mya not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.