On Lord Howe Island—a remote volcanic outpost with fewer than 500 residents—tens of thousands of seabirds are filling up with plastic.
  • huppakee@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    This is one of the most depressing stories I read about the state of our planet in a while, especially because this is happening in a remote place.

    If anyone needs an uplifting story you could visit https://theoceancleanup.com/, they’ve been doing great work and doing more and more every year. Also if you have some left over money please check it out.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    0·
    29 days ago

    In April, Lavers and her team broke a disturbing record: 778 pieces of plastic were found inside a single 80-day-old chick. “I’m sad to say just yesterday we blew [the record] out of the water,” she said. “In one of the most pristine corners of our planet.”

    That plastic load made up nearly a fifth of the chick’s body weight.

    Earth is cooked.

    EDIT: Fuck, the video is hard to watch. But you should. Everybody should. The sound is awful. Sorry for the Instagram link, but as best as I can tell, it’s the original source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ3fhlVTy1O/

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us. There was about a billion years when the whole thing was just a snowball. People don’t even really know how microbial life that was adapted for the surface survived, although the theory is that its little lifeboats were melted pools of water near volcanic hotspots, some sort of liquid water that incredibly enough was able to randomly stay around the whole time through. It only takes a very small number of survivors to repopulate everything once it turns okay again. The earth has been through oceans at the poles and total freezes and meteor strike apocalypses and everything in between, some of where we came from was the engine of creation in the wake of one of those disasters, the end of the dinosaurs.

      The paradise place we call home, though, is cooked and done for forever, on any kind of human timeline. There is 0 chance that what we call a livable biosphere, the kind of green grass nice summer day paradise we were born into, will still be around in a hundred years. It’s gone. We’re the last generation.

      There’s still a lot we can do to choose less apocalyptic options. The sheer massive scale of the disaster means that every fraction of a percent could save millions of lives, or significantly reduce the chance of total extinction. But bottom line, the planet itself and the web of life that lives on it will persist. Whether we will, certainly whether our civilization will, is uncertain, it will be determined by this generation and the next.

      • huppakee@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        I agree, but this argument only hold up in the big picture. Nature today, animals especially are hurting now. So are we. I think we have an obligation to future generations in terms of doing our best to keep the planet habitable and to all current lifeforms to stop making this planet such a shitty place to be (talking about both domestic animals that are factory farmed into food and wild animals such as these birds that starve to death because their filled stomach doesn’t have any nutritional value and also can’t leave their body).

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      I mean … there are, I think, organisms that can process plastic. Not talking about biodegradable plastics, but about all that garbage.

      At the same time humans got rid of lead paint and lead everywhere. And uranium glass is more rarely used today.

      Everything changes, so maybe we will rotate to something instead of plastics, and the future generations will be nostalgic over good old days of that vintage non-woke solid serious plastic world.

      • Uranium 🟩@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        We already have a people being ‘nostalgic’ for plastic straws… It’s depressing that so many people are so willfully selfish that the slightest change or inconvenience to their life is met with such backlash.

        On a related note, Uranium glass isn’t dangerous at all, it’s production was phased out for nuclear weapons and reactor research, not because of any threat or harm from the glass.

        Nowadays you can even get virgin uranium glass again.

        Vitrifying (turning to/encasing in glass) nuclear waste is one of the better ways of storing it as no chance of leaking, etc.

  • jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    I’ve never been anyplace where you can just touch a wild bird, let alone determine they make a crunching sound when touched!