The 450 residents of the tiny Portuguese island think turning off their streetlights to save the Cory's shearwater makes them environmental heroes. But coddling a bird that refuses to adapt to modern infrastructure is an insult to those of us doing the real work of attending corporate sustainability luncheons.
I am writing this from the first-class departure lounge at Geneva airport, exhausted. I have just concluded my fourth international climate summit this quarter, and upon opening my phone, I find my feed clogged with people praising the residents of Corvo Island. Every autumn, the 450 inhabitants of this tiny Portuguese outcrop in the Azores turn off their public street lighting for five nights. The goal, allegedly, is to prevent fledgling Cory’s shearwaters from getting confused by artificial glare as they attempt to navigate to the ocean guided by the stars. It is a quaint, deeply photogenic initiative. It is also, quite frankly, an insulting display of greenwashing.
Let that sink in. Four hundred and fifty people are patting themselves on the back for plunging a single municipality into darkness for less than a week, while completely ignoring the structural realities of global energy markets. I suppose it is easy to feel like an environmental hero when your entire geopolitical footprint is roughly the size of a regional airport.
While these islanders are playing hide-and-seek with seabirds, the adults in the room are trying to secure meaningful, non-binding memorandums of understanding at COP. I spent three grueling hours at a catered luncheon yesterday trying to convince a Chevron vice president that keeping a single mangrove swamp on a corporate brochure counts as environmental stewardship. That is the trenches. Turning off a streetlamp outside a village bakery is a vacation.
We must address the shearwater in the room. We are told these birds have been dying in large numbers since 1991 because they mistake artificial streetlights for the night sky. If a species has had three entire decades to adapt to basic municipal infrastructure and still has not figured out that a halogen bulb is not the constellation Orion, we need to ask hard questions about avian resilience.
By coddling the Cory's shearwater, Corvo Island is effectively subsidizing a stranded asset. We are artificially propping up a bird that lacks the market agility to survive in a modern, illuminated economy.
If a fledgling seabird cannot parse the difference between a celestial navigation point and the neon open sign of a local pharmacy, that is an evolutionary skill issue, not a public policy failure.
Sterling is absolutely right. What happens when these over-protected fledglings finally reach the mainland? Are we going to turn off Lisbon? Are we going to plunge the entire Iberian Peninsula into a medieval dark age just because a flock of birds refuses to update their internal GPS? The sheer entitlement of expecting the entire Northern Hemisphere to dim its infrastructure so a shearwater can find the ocean without getting a concussion is staggering.
Furthermore, the media completely ignores the very real human suffering of the 450 Corvo residents. For five nights, these people are forced to stumble around their own hometown in the pitch black. How many dropped keys have been lost to the darkness? How many residents have bruised their shins on patio furniture while attempting to take out the recycling? We are prioritizing the aesthetic journey of a seabird over the fundamental right of a Portuguese taxpayer to walk to their car without a flashlight.
If Corvo Island actually cared about the environment, they would abandon this performative blackout and embrace market-based solutions. Rather than turning off the lights, the municipality should be securing venture capital for a series of offshore, aggressively branded LED waypoints to gently guide the birds to the water. A public-private partnership with a major logistics company could provide the shearwaters with a monetizable flight path. That creates jobs. That creates deliverables. That is how you write a defensible ESG report.
I have spent my entire career fighting for pragmatic, corporate-friendly sustainability. I have the canvas tote bags and the platinum airline status to prove it. It deeply offends me to see the discourse hijacked by a handful of villagers flipping a breaker switch. It makes a mockery of the complex, heavily funded, entirely theoretical corporate frameworks my colleagues and I have spent decades building.
The next time autumn rolls around, I suggest the people of Corvo Island leave the lights on. It is time the Cory's shearwater learned that the future is going to be uncomfortable for everyone, and the stars will not always be there to guide you. Sometimes, you just have to fly directly into the glass.