Dawn Stover reports that this image depicts eight million toothpicks. According to Seattle artist Chris Jordan, that’s how many trees are harvested in the U.S. each month to make paper for mail-order catalogs. The images are part of Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, a series depicting the excesses and inequities of contemporary American culture. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something, such as the number of American children without health insurance, or the number of disposable batteries produced every 15 minutes. Many of the images are mosaics of common objects.
“My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone,” Jordan writes. “Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day.” We can’t vouch for all of Jordan’s statistics, but his pictures certainly help put them in perspective. Although the images can be viewed on Jordan’s website, they are best experienced in person, where their sheer size helps to convey the enormous quantities represented.
Any time you see large numbers, the math often doesn’t work out. But reading your post, I was curious about how much wood is used to produce 8 million toothpicks.
The answer comes from the Wisconsin Paper Council. http://www.wipapercouncil.org/paperfacts.htm
You get about 7,500,000 toothpicks from a cord of wood. A cord of wood is a pile of wood 4×4x8 and you can buy it for about $75.
You can also use that same cord of wood for 460,000 personal checks or 2700 daily newspapers.
It takes 20 cords of wood for the average house.
Just some other fun facts from the Forrest Services. 2.6 million acres of trees are planted in the US every year. That’s equal to the State of Connecticut. Nurseries also ship 1.6 billion trees for planting in forrests.
Big numbers do make a muddy picture. Big numbers are planted every year, big numbers are cut down, big numbers wasted, big numbers recycled.