And up from the ground come a bubblin' crude...

Oil that is, black gold, Texas Tea.

Lately I've had the occasion to be stuck in a few stock-still traffic jams on The Capital of Texas Highway aka Hwy 360. I've been largely silent about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but it's not that I haven't been thinking about it. On a daily basis. My "Alex is absolutely fucking livid again" tag doesn't even come close to how I feel about this spill, which in its present scope and scale alone, is beyond Biblical proportions. The spill is a symptom of a much larger problem - which I don't have the time or room or energy to go into right now.

So, I'm sitting in these traffic jams thinking about how much oil is spewing from that hole in the flesh of our Mother Earth. Wondering how to quantify it in terms that I (and hopefully others) can get my head around. I came up with trying to figure out how many miles of roadway that crude oil would cover.

Cover in a thin film. Like throw a gallon pail of crude oil on the concrete or asphalt. I'm assuming it would cover about 100 square feet, about a 10 foot by 10 foot area - as if you threw a can of paint out of its can. I realize crude oil is more globby/yucky and wouldn't likely spread like thin paint, but this is simply an order-of-magnitude estimate on my part.

So, I better wrap this up before I lose you. I won't delve too deeply into the math. Simple math really.

First, in this exercise I'm looking at total U.S. "Crude Oil" consumption (not just gasoline) per day :: 19,498,000 barrels per day @ 42 gallons per barrel = 818,916,000 gallons per day.

The Interstate Highway System of these United States of America is 46,876 miles long in total (as of 2006). That's almost twice around the Earth - the circumference of the Earth is plus or minus 24k miles at the equator.

So here it is:

The total U.S. crude oil consumption would cover the entire Intestate Highway System (46,876 miles) with a thin film of crude oil.

Not just once.

But four and a half (4.5) times. Both sides of the highway.

Four and half times. Every day. Three hundred and sixty five days a year.

Year after year.

Estimates put the daily rate of the BP Oil Spill at 30,000 barrels per day.

That amount would cover roughly 314 miles of Interstate Highway every day. That's about a third of the way across Texas on I-10.

And up from the ground come a bubblin' crude.

E pluribus unum

Out of many, one. This Latin phrase is the unofficial motto of The United States of America. Originally it was based on the thirteen colonies becoming one country. Now it seems to mean the many peoples of the U.S., of the entire world really, all coming together as one. The melting pot theory. "Can't we all just get along?" kinda thing.

This post stems from a recurring memory over the past several months - perhaps even a year. A recurring memory of something forgotten. Someone forgotten. Not so much a memory but a nagging "the damn thing keeps popping into my head and I keep trying to remember but to no avail" kinda thing. All the while, it was right here buried in the archives of this blog - posted almost two years ago in June of 2008.

Yesterday, I Googled for almost an hour - "photographer who illustrates large quantities" ... "photographs that conceptualize large values" ... and many variations ... illustrative ... photograph/s/er/y ... "how much in a millon/billion/trillion?".

I was beginning to get frustrated, drawing upon nothing, not getting big numbers, not getting any meaningful returns in my searches. I almost gave up. (I wish I could remember the successful search string, but I can't now.)

I found the post from before a few minutes ago - on whim entering his name to search my blog. And there it was. Chris Jordan.

Chris Jordan. A UT [University of Texas] alum - UT, right here in Austin. Small world.

So Chris is an activist artist. Or activist photographer. Or activist/artist/photographer. He lets the image tell the story. He lets the viewer begin to get their head around the numbers that his images represent. The numbers they represent, and the world issue that they represent.

In this case, his 2009 work titled "E Pluribus Unum" is a five story high (I would say 4 stories) 45 foot x 45 foot mandala. That's 13.7 meters x 13.7 meters. The lines of the mandala are actually the names of 1,000,000 [one million] "organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture". In 10 point font.

If you were able to cut out all the names and lay them end to end, they would stretch 27 miles, or 142,560 feet or 43km. In 10 point font.

Lots of organizations - the total number is unknown. Jordan's work is based on Paul Hawken's estimation [in his book "Blessed Unrest" on the "movement movement"] that there are between one million and two million such organizations. Paul Hawken is named as a collaborator on the piece.

Chris Jordan is prolific. The TED talk I posted two years ago in 2008 was titled "Picturing Excess", and is based, I think, on his project "Running the Numbers :: An American Self-Portrait".

He came out with "Running the Numbers II :: Portraits of Global Mass Culture" in 2009. He has one from 2005 on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath titled "In Katrina's Wake :: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster". And "Intolerable Beauty :: Portraits of American Mass Consumption 2003-2005".

They are all on his website at www.chrisjordan.com. I would have given the individual links to each work, but his website is not set up that way. You'll have to go clicking and reading and viewing on your own.

The post I did before was on his TED Talk - the "Picturing Excess" one. I included this quote which I lifted from the lecture:

"I have this fear that we aren't feeling enough in our culture today . There is this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger, and our grief about what is going on in our culture right now, what is going on in our country, the atrocities that are going on in our names around the world....they've gone missing, these feelings have gone missing..." [Chris Jordan]

Here it is - from February of 2008:






Be sure to check out his website and look at the all of the "Running the Numbers" works.

Here is the E Pluribus Unum work:


























E pluribus unum. We are many, but we are one. Many peoples. Many nations. Many beliefs. Many forms of governance. We are one with the earth, and we have only one earth.

Until we start acting like it, acting like we have to take care of this planet we all live on - until we do that - we're in trouble. Once we do that, well, that's when the hard work begins.

Have a great Sunday y'all.

Sunday Morning :: Big Tobacco Tax

I'm sitting here watching CNN before the CBS Sunday Morning Show starts and there's a bit about the new sixty-two cent per pack tax on cigarettes. I haven't done any looking into it, as far as the logic behind the tax and where the money is intended to go. The key word here is "intended". Theoretically, it would go to cover the skewed medical costs for tobacco users. We all know how our governments don't work as intended. It wouldn't surprise me if the tax actually goes back to the tobacco growers (through the Department of Agriculture) for research into how to grow healthier, more pest and drought resistant tobacco plants. I know, that's a stretch, but you get my drift.

The reporter said tobacco kills 400,000 people in the U.S. a year. I looked it up once and was surprised to find that one in four smoke. So that's seventy-five million [75,000,000] current, living smokers. So it kills 400k every year - lung cancer, throat cancer, mouth cancer, tongue cancer, lip cancer, arteriosclerosis, emphysema, hypertension, myocardial infarction, and on and on. 400k a year dead, I would guess five times that number of smokers who are seriously sickened in some way by it - perhaps 2,000,000 each year. Just call it 2,500,000 each year - which seems way too low based on 75 million smokers.

So let's do the math. Let's say at least $100k each for the 400k who permanently quit smoking. I think my dad's final bill was around $300k. That's $40,000,000,000 into the health care system for them. For the other 2.1 million folks, let's say ten grand for each of them. That's another twenty billion. $60 bil total. I'm guessing that's a low estimate. Let's round up to $100bil.

75mil smokers at a pack a day - three hundred sixty five days a year - that's twenty-seven billion, three hundred seventy-five million packs of cigarettes a year.

Divide $100bil in health care costs to the system each year by 23,375,000,000 packs a year and you get $3.65 per pack for the smoker to cover his or her own health care costs. Looks to me like we need to increase that tax by three bucks a pack. And that little quick and dirty math doesn't take into account the adverse health effects for all those subjected to second hand smoke.

The addictive product in a capitalist system. It might be the perfect product if it didn't kill the consumer in the end. But with twenty or thirty years of addiction, big tobacco is still doing pretty well on the balance sheet. Very well.

One parting thought - this doesn't take into account the rest of the world, where perhaps 50% or more of the population smokes. This is going to sound extreme, but I think I've just convinced myself we need tobacco as a population controller. I may actually be against increased taxation of tobacco. Hmmm. I didn't expect that.