On the face of it, selecting photographer Chris Jordan as the keynote speaker for the Greener Gadgets Conference may seem like an odd choice...until you get a look at his work. He's best known in the green world for his collection Running the Numbers, which attempts to show the results of our country's addiction to mass consumption.

"You can't go see the total amount of garbage we generate every day because it's divided out all over the country," Jordan told the sellout crowd of 400+ at the Greener Gadgets Conference. "I've devoted the last five years of my life documenting the detritus of our consumer culture and mass consumption".

Jordan combines photography with some deft Photoshop work to build up giant images showing the number of items Americans use in a certain period of time. Some of the images he's put together include the:

• 410,000 paper cups used every 15 minutes
• 2,000,000 plastic beverage bottles used every 15 minutes
• 11,000 commercial flights every 8 hours
• 426,000 cell phones "retired" every day
• 1,140,000 brown paper supermarket bags used every hour
• 106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds
• 60,000 plastic bags used every five seconds
• 15,000,000 sheets of office paper every five minutes
• 38,000 shipping containers, the number processed through American ports every 12 hours

Chris thinks that the green movement is happening, but is stalling out. He used the analogy of the finish of a bike race - everyone is waiting for the other person to make the first move toward the finish line. He also believes that the green movement is hampered by the lack of cool. Michael Jordan changed the face of basketball fashion overnight when he showed up to the game wearing baggy shorts. Although people like Al Gore and Paul Hawkin are necessary to the environmental movement, they lack the cool factor of a green Michael Jordan.

Chris called upon all the conference attendees to find the passion for changing the world and to bring it back to their day-to-day lives and jobs. He definitely brings that passion to his work and I encourage you all to check out his site to learn more.

You may not yet have noticed this, but EcoGeek has some new brethren. EnviroWonk.com is a new blog under the EcoGeek umbrella that will (finally) be bringing the blogosphere informed and interesting environmental analysis of U.S. and International politics.

Of course, right now, it's hard not to focus on the U.S. primaries (though there have already been stories ranging from funding cuts for sequestration to endangered species legislation.) But the primaries are what this little story is about.

Above is a listing of five people. One of them, in a very short period of time, will be the president of the United States of America. So it's time we started thinking about their environmental pros and cons. So far, the choice is pretty clean cut for Republicans, McCain being the only one who seems to recognize that there, in fact, is an environment.

But for us Dems the choice is a little less clear. We hope this guide is helpful for those of us who'll be rushing the polls in the biggest Super Tuesday in American history. It will be a historic day, let's hope the environment is at least somewhere in public's mind.

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<a href="http://www.envirowonk.com/"> <img border="0" src="http://envirowonk.com/images/stories/envirowonkprimaryguide.jpg" alt="EnviroWonk.com Green Candidate Guide" /> </a>