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🐦‍⬛ On plastic birds, tropical forests and fallen leaves

while we could be creating bags from a new material

Author

Gaia Solaris
May 26, 2025

Dear friends becoming fighters,

It’s getting harder to write these updates without a sense of quiet dread. Not because we’ve lost hope — far from it — but because each week, the urgency sharpens. The signals are everywhere, not just by nature, but by the systems that were meant to protect them.

This week's climate news reads like a dispatch from the frontlines of a world already burning. From Greece bracing for wildfires, to Congo’s endangered gorillas under siege by conflict and exploitation, to Brazil’s rainforest being signed away. We are witnessing, in real time, the consequences of delay.

And yet, amidst it all, we act!

Maybe you’ve felt it too: that moment when concern becomes something else. When you stop scrolling and start showing up. When the headlines aren’t just stories, but signals. Maybe you’ve signed petitions. Shared articles. Showed up to rallies. Had difficult conversations. Voted with climate in mind. Maybe you’re just getting started.

Whatever it looks like, it matters. Every act of resistance is a step toward rewriting the ending.

So take a breath. Then dive into this week’s stories: the hard ones, the hopeful ones, the ones that remind us why we care and how much we still have to fight for.

Helena Constela, Head of Content

🗞️ In Climate News

📈 Cool Trends

♾️ eco-story

On a remote, crescent-shaped island surrounded by crystal-clear ocean live some of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the world. They have bellies so full of fragments, they crunch when touched.

Lord Howe Island — a speck of land about 370 miles off mainland Australia, home to just a few hundred people — is the breeding ground for tens of thousands of sable shearwaters: dark brown-colored, long-winged ocean birds with strong hooked bills.

Scientists from the ocean research group Adrift Lab have been visiting for nearly two decades to monitor these birds’ exposure to plastic pollution. Every year they find more contamination, but this year was shocking, said Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist and coordinator of Adrift Lab, who recently returned from the island.

Shearwaters were found with levels of plastic far exceeding anything the scientists had seen before. They discovered an extraordinary 778 pieces of plastic inside one chick alone, smashing the previous record of 403 pieces.

It “left us all speechless,” Lavers said. The scientists are now trying to solve the mystery of why this year was so bad. Plastic pollution is on the rise but “does that explain a doubling in 12 months? Absolutely not,” she told CNN. “So there’s something else going on.”

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: The Story of Plastic