It's been an arty week for me. After the polar bear sculptures in the US, an outdoor art group in Devon - Trail Recycled Art in Landscape (Trail) - has made a trawler boat out of 5,000 plastic bags and named it Rainbow Worrier after our legendary ship the Rainbow Warrior. They even filled it up with plastic fish in fishing nets to highlight how plastic is destroying marine ecosystems.

Plastic waste isn't just what you see on beaches and coast lines. A plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean as large as Texas is constantly swirling in a massive gyre that is referred to as the 'trash vortex'. Other unflattering names include Asian trash trail and the Eastern Garbage Patch where six kilos of plastic swirls for every kilo of plankton.

In a word, yes. A marine ecologist in New Zealand has won a top award by showing how deforestation has affected marine ecosystems such as cutting down of the once intact rainforest in the country's South Island. As this latest research shows, not only do forests regulate the climate but also provide for plant and animal species in the water as well as on land.