Environmental artist Tim Gaudreau spent a whole year documenting every single item he threw away with a photo. Then he did it again, this time including every aspect of his life that added to his carbon footprint. The task was monumental, as Gaudreau quickly discovered. The year left him with over 28,000 photos and the realization that every minute detail of his routine contributed to his impact on the earth.

Gaudreau's installation, “365 Days of Considered Consumption” is separate from his earlier project, “Self Portrait as Revealed by Trash: 365 days of photographing everything I threw out,” but it's an extension of the same idea. The first project considered only one aspect of his environmental footprint, and came to inform his consumption decisions in order to reduce his waste. By the time he started his second year of photographing, this time including everything from vehicle emissions to television viewing, he'd already made some notable changes in his trash-generating habits. He'd adjusted how he purchased food to avoid items with unnecessary packaging, he'd started growing his own food to eliminate packaging completely and circumvent food transportation emissions, and he'd started composting. Still, nothing could have prepared him for the task of documenting every single component of one year's worth of his carbon footprint.

“When I started the project, I didn't realize how deep it would go,” says Gaudreau. “I found that the easiest way to document my impact was through a photo-diary. Once I started photographing everything, I realized how many layers there are to my carbon footprint, and that really everything I do contributes to it.”

Collecting that much data was no small feat. “To say the work was all-consuming is an understatement,” says Gaudreau. “It was really an obsessive project, and I'm not an obsessive person by nature, so it was definitely a challenge to function that way.”

The rigor of Gaudreau's documentation is evidenced by the toll it took on his camera—in fact, he went through six different cameras over the course of the project. “The easiest way to document everything was to have a point-and-shoot in my pocket all the time, a camera that could be an extension of my hand. But those cameras just aren't made to take so many pictures.”

Gaudreau needed a lot more data than just the 28,000 pictures to understand the full meaning of what he'd amassed. He spent hours researching the impact of each individual activity and product to come up with his personal carbon footprint for the year—18.95 tons. “When I finished the year I had all those images and I didn't know what to do with them,” says Gaudreau. “It took me a long time to decipher what it all means. It took a lot of research to calculate my impact from the information I'd collected.”

Even for a committed environmentalist like Gaudreau, the project held some surprises. “One of the biggest surprises was how much of my personal footprint comes from traveling,” Gaudreau notes. “One single flight from Manchester to San Francisco made up the largest part of my footprint for the entire year. I travel a lot less than I used to because of that.”

Tim Gaudreau's installation will be on display as part of Brookline's second annual Climate Week, beginning this Saturday. Gaudreau's work, along with that of seven other artists, can be viewed at 10 Brookline Place until Feb. 21. Due to the immense proportions of Gaudreau's project, this installation will incorporate photos and data from only one day per month that he documented. “It's going to take a long time to digest all this information,” admits Gaudreau. “This installation is a work-in-progress, as is my actual CO2 footprint. Both will undoubtedly evolve as I dig deeper.”

In the meantime, Gaudreau is sharing what he has learned with the local community, from business people to elementary students. Leading up to Climate Week, Gaudreau has been teaching classes in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges, and Climate Week itself will present lots of opportunities to share his experience with a wide range of people. “I use art as an access point to talk to other people about what I've learned,” he says. “I've gained an incredible amount of knowledge from this project, and my role as an artist is to go out and share that knowledge.”

Tim Gaudreau already lives an exceptionally green lifestyle. His home and studio use solar hot water and solar electric systems, his cars run on soybean-based biodiesel, he grows his own food, and he uses cloth diapers for his daughter, just to name a few highlights. But the mark of a true environmentalist is the drive to continue improving the sustainability of his habits. This commitment is exactly what Gaudreau's new installation is all about. The full and intimate awareness of one person's environmental impact is both exciting and startling; exciting, because fully grasping the size and make-up of your carbon footprint can allow enormous strides toward a truly green lifestyle, and startling, because there's always so much further to go. Still, Gaudreau would be the last person to tell you to give up.

“We are not talking about theoretical things happening way off into some intangible future in a foreign land anymore,” he says. “We are talking about serious things that my own daughter will bear witness to firsthand. As uncomfortable as it is, we need to collectively and individually look into our own lives to see how we can reduce our impact on the earth.”