The turtle I have never met. How our everyday choices drift further than we think

It is perhaps one of the greatest contradictions of the modern world. We can make an object that serves us for a moment and then remains in the environment for centuries. A plastic straw, a carrier bag or a single-use bottle is, to us, ordinary rubbish. To a turtle, it can look like food, or become a lethal trap.

What puzzles me most, though, is something else. Most of us have no intention of harming nature. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, today I will pollute the ocean. We simply live fast. We buy, we use, we throw away, and we rarely stop to wonder what happens to our waste once it disappears from view. Yet the bin is not a magical place where rubbish ceases to exist, and the sea is not an infinite warehouse for our mistakes.

The problem does not end with large pieces of plastic. Over time they break down into ever smaller fragments, becoming microplastics. These enter the water, the seabed sediments and marine organisms, working their way into the entire ecosystem. This is no longer a problem for turtles and fish alone. It is our problem too, because nature does not separate the human world from the animal one. Everything is connected.

Someone will say: surely one straw or one carrier bag changes nothing. Perhaps one really does not. The trouble is that there are millions of such ones every single day. It is precisely from seemingly trivial decisions that the problems arise which we then spend decades trying to fix.

I will not save all the turtles. Neither, most likely, will you. But we can do something far simpler - not add another piece of plastic to the ocean. Sort our waste, cut back on single-use packaging, reach for reusable things, and sometimes think twice before throwing something away. For a person, it is a small effort. For nature, it can make an enormous difference.

We often assume that responsibility for the environment rests solely with governments, scientists or environmental organisations. Yet every great change begins with the small decisions of ordinary people.

The greatest harm we do to nature is not when we set out to hurt it, but when we are indifferent. And indifference always begins with the belief that just this once will change nothing.