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And that’s basically it!
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.
Entire article is just a repost of the original from ABC news, with less information. I recommend the original:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-15/birds-crunch-full-plastic-losing-war-waste/105221266
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/
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.
The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us.
People say this a lot, but what are we calling 'fine'?
Supporting life is what makes Earth special; if that's snuffed out and Earth becomes just another dead rock floating through space, I'd argue it isn't fine at all, in the same sense that you or I wouldn't be fine if we suddenly died, even though our physical corpse would remain for much longer.
And we're WAY far away from life being completely extinguished, but even in its current state with life relatively abundant, Earth is running a high fever, so I'd say it's already crossed the 'not fine' line.
We've discovered hundreds of billions of planets, and so far we're only aware of life existing on a single one of them: life is an incredibly rare, incredibly fragile, statistically insignificant fluke in our universe. It may literally be the single best example of "it's the exception, not the rule".
So, why are people always so certain that it'll persist? Life in general will certainly persist well beyond humans, but even the most resilient of extremophiles have their limits. The whole "Life, uh, finds a way" is great and all, until it doesn't.
The damage we're doing to our planet directly is pretty small on a universal scale, but we're playing with forces we don't understand - some of those forces are feedback loops, so our involvement may be the first tiny domino that sets off a cascade of increasingly large dominos until our planet is molten all the way to its core.
Or, we die off and feedback loops stop, the environment stabalizes, and Earth lives on happily ever after. Or anything in between: the point is we have no idea, and no basis to make and real predictions good or bad.
Hopefully Earth will be fine.
...sorry that was so wordy. I ramble when I'm tired.
If the heartbreak I feel didn't come through about the destruction of our home and everything that makes survival on it easy, the possibility of our total extinction and the certainty of massive scale suffering of every living thing on the planet, then let me make it clear: Yes, that's a bad thing.
You're absolutely right. People insist on making this ridiculous point every time a topic like this comes up. It's like, holy shit, just let the destruction of all life on Earth be the point of the conversation instead of some stupid tangent about a lifeless rock in space.
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).
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.
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.
Where I live plastic straws are still everywhere.
Nickname checks out ; I think I've read it can be dangerous if you ingest it in specific situations, but mostly not.
Agreed.
Limits to growth called this. Chapter 4. Pollution ends up becoming the limiting factor far sooner than any other constraint in most of their model runs.
https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n129/mode/2up
I thought it was resource depletion?
I mean you can revisit the chapter. Its mostly them fiddling about with assumptions to prevent pollution from going completely exponential, * then * it becomes resource limited.
I'm not even sure how well the assumptions of their modeling approach would hold up these days. Its an interesting example of expert systems analysis but its pretty dated.
Ah, I'm thinking of the 30-year update they did on the model:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-05-20/limits-to-growth-was-right-about-collapse/
Macro plastics 😞
My dogs would love one of these!
No, but seriously, this sucks.
Those plastic dog toys are kinda part of the problem. They don't last long before they're off to the dump, and a lot of small bits that break off get swallowed by the pooch.
My dogs (rip) always loved bones, dry pigs ears, goat horns - natural items. We don't need the consumerist plastic crap they push on us.
Every 100th bird has a squeaker inside!
I’ve never been anyplace where you can just touch a wild bird, let alone determine they make a crunching sound when touched!
I have a pecker you can touch.
Suicidal nihilism is a common side effect of your body literally being full of plastic