ALL of us will hope that the signals detected in the Indian Ocean prove to be from the black box of the Malaysian airliner missing with its 239 passengers and crew. If the discovery leads to the solving of the plane’s disappearance it will be a triumph for the international investigation into the mystery.

But the month-long search for the plane has been bedevilled by a problem of our own making – rubbish.Time after time items spotted in the sea and thought possibly to be from the plane have turned out to have no connection with it. And this is in an ocean which, as the news reports frequently remind us, is one of the remotest and most hostile in the world, generally avoided by shipping.

Covering 80 per cent of the globe, the world’s seas are a swill tub of trash. The latest survey of Britain’s shores by the Marine Conservation Society recently recorded the highest-ever level of rubbish on our beaches.

On average, every kilometre of coastline yielded 2,390 items of junk. A spokeswoman commented: “It’s disheartening that after 20 years of campaigning we are seeing more litter than ever.”

Fighting litter for even longer – since the 1950s – the Keep Britain Tidy group would no doubt say the same. A woman who collects litter around Helmsley finds discarded pizza boxes even in remote Bransdale, without a through road and 23 miles from the nearest takeaway. On Teesside, volunteers recently collected 23 bags of rubbish in two hours along a beckside. The leader remarked ruefully: “This is supposed to be the beautiful part of Middlesbrough.”

Truth is we are coming close to choking on our own litter. That might be our fate.

Much litter is plastic. In the sea it doesn’t disappear but merely breaks down into smaller particles. The sea becomes a plastic soup, ingested by fish and, ultimately, us. Serves us right. The disappearance of flight MH370 is a bigger immediate issue. But whatever lessons it might hold for future air travel, it would also serve a useful purpose if it taught us to clean up our act.

PRINCESS ANNE would prefer badgers to be gassed rather than shot. To most of us, the slaughter is repugnant either way.

The evidence that badgers infect cattle might be damning, but in a recent book, Badgerlands (Granta, £18.99), the author, Patrick Barkham, quotes the opinion of a group of vets reported in The Veterinary Times.

They are convinced the root cause of tuberculosis (TB) in cattle is low immunity caused by decades of over-breeding. Unfortunately, the solution would require “a completely new kind of agricultural ministry and unprecedented intervention in the free market,” making food more expensive.

That’s not going to happen. But the TB is not the badger’s fault.

AND so to barn owls. An excellent new little booklet by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust shows an illustration of a barn owlfriendly landscape – abundant hedges with old trees, natural grassland, barns – alongside one that makes it clear why barn owls are struggling – large chemical-treated fields, few big trees and the barn now a house. It’s unfair to blame farmers, who are bound to farm in a modern way. But what the NFU’s North-East director, Richard Pearson, claimed on this page to be “huge” efforts to reverse the decline, do not look like coming close to meeting the challenge.