A dead baby albatross is a tough act to follow.

Nike’s Lorrie Vogel took the stage at Poptech this week to talk about the company’s sustainable product design efforts.

Immediately preceding her was an devastating presentation from photographer Chris Jordan, who shared a series of photographs from Midway Atoll of baby albatrosses who had died from ingesting plastic from the massive Pacific Garbage Patch.

Conference organizer Andrew Zolli, visibly moved, asked for a moment of silence and then Vogel took the stage to talk about her efforts as general manager of Nike’s Considered team.

She was frank about the challenges that Nike and other manufacturers face, especially the company’s reliance on petroleum-based polyester and resource-heavy cotton. It takes about 700 gallons of water and 1,100 square feet of land to produce the cotton for one Nike T-shirt.

Interviewed two days later, she said the albatross moment spurred her biggest takeaway from the conference:

Have you ever seen 500 people stunned into a complete and devastated silence?

Photographer Chris Jordan shared a sobering tale of his journey to Midway Atoll with the Poptech conference on Thursday, where he captured horrifying images of baby birds killed by plastic from the Pacific Trash Gyre. The crowd, which had been listening to a day of Big Ideas, was dumbstruck.

If you’ve never heard of the Gyre — also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex — odds are you will hear a lot more soon. It is an oceanic trash pile in the north Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas, trapped in a remote, circular current. (Check out this explainer from Good)

As Jordan explained, it’s not a floating garbage dump as you might imagine it. Most of the debris is made up of tiny pieces of plastic and other litter which is floating in a suspension beneath the surface of the water. Some researchers have found that water in the Gyre holds six times more plastic molecules than phytoplankton, the single-celled organisms at the bottom rung of the marine food chain.

Jordan traveled to Midway Island, near the site of the pivotal World War Two naval battle, to document the death of baby albatrosses on the island’s nature reserve. The birds scoop the plastic out of the water and feed it to their babies.

It’s difficult to look at Jordan’s pictures of the birds, with the ingested plastic outlasting their decomposing bodies, without wondering: “Could that have been my bottlecap?”

From Jordan’s website:

Can’t get enough of behavioral economist Dan Ariely? That certainly seems to be a common condition at the Poptech conference in Camden, ME this week.

Ariely gave a mind-bending talk about the counter-intuitive notion that paying people more can actually make them perform more poorly — at almost the exact moment that Obama’s pay czar was unveiling plans to slash the bonuses of top banking and automotive executives by about 90 percent.

Here’s more from Ariely, on everything from the unforeseen consequences of the pay restrictions to the difficulty of measuring human happiness.

Video # 1: “We have a group of people who have been very successful at playing a lot of shenanigans on us.”

Video #2: “If you can be really funny for 10 minutes, I’ll give you $10,000.”

UPDATE: Watch a Reuters video interview with Ariely.

What do turn of the century lab rats, clutch NBA players like Michael Jordan, and Wall Street’s highest-paid executives have in common? Dan Ariely has some ideas.

“We study the irrationality of people and markets. 2008 was a very good year for us,” the behavioral economist noted wryly at the Poptech conference on Thursday.

As pay czar Kenneth Feinberg prepares his plan to slash bonuses at bailed-out banks and automakers, perhaps it’s time to question one of the central assumptions of the exec comp status quo: Does more compensation always make people more motivated and better at their jobs?

Ariely’s research suggests that past a certain level, it can have the exact opposite effect. “People have the tendency to villainize Wall Street,” Ariely said, “but the real enemy is human nature.”

Rewind the clock to 1909, when economists Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson put some rats in a maze. Parts of it were electrified. The question: Would higher levels of electricity (and hence pain, avoidance of which is a powerful incentive) make the rats learn the maze any faster?

The answer was yes, to a point. But past a certain level, the electricity became more of a stress than a motivator, and performance declined.

Reuters will be covering the PopTech conference, dedicated to “world-changing people, projects and ideas,” from Oct 21-25, including interviews with food writer Michael Pollan, Nike sustainability expert Lorrie Vogel, and many more.

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