endogenous_chemicals
Male infertility crisis in US has experts baffled.
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
Hagai Levine doesn’t scare easily. The Hebrew University public health researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.”
That’s something you may not be used to hearing. It may take a man and a woman—or at least a sperm and an egg—to form new life, but it is women who bear the medical and psychological burden of trying to get—and stay—pregnant. It is women whose lifestyle choices are endlessly dissected for their supposed impact on fertility, and women who hear the ominous tick of the biological clock. Women are bombarded with countless fertility diets, special fertility-boosting yoga practices and all the fertility apps they can fit on their phone. They are the targets of a fertility industry expected to be valued at more than $21 billion globally by 2020. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fixates on women, tracking infertility in the U.S. by tallying the number of supposedly infertile women. “It is as if the entire medical realm is shaped to cater to women’s infertility and women’s bodies,” says Liberty Barnes, a sociologist and the author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. “For men, there’s just nothing there.”
That absence might be understandable if women were solely responsible for the success or failure of a pregnancy. But they’re not. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the male partner is either the sole or contributing cause in about 40 percent of cases of infertility. Past infections, medical conditions, hormonal imbalances and more can all cause what is known as male factor infertility. Men even have their own version of a biological clock. Beginning around their mid-30s, male fertility gradually degrades, and while most men produce sperm to their dying day, those past 40 who help conceive have a greater risk of passing on genetic abnormalities to their children, including autism. “Men are a huge part of this problem,” says Barbara Collura, the president and CEO of Resolve: the National Infertility Association.
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Startling new evidence suggests male infertility may be much worse than it appears. According to Levine and Swan’s work, sperm levels—the most important measurement of male fertility—are declining throughout much of the world, including the U.S. The report, published in late July, reviewed thousands of studies and concluded that sperm concentration had fallen by 59.3 percent among men in Western countries between 1973 and 2011. Four decades ago, the average Western man had a sperm concentration of 99 million per milliliter. By 2011, that had fallen to 47.1 million. The plummet is alarming because sperm concentrations below 40 million per milliliter are considered below normal and can impair fertility. (The researchers found no significant declines for non-Western men, in part because of a lack of quality data, though other studies have found major drops in countries like China and Japan.) And the decline has grown steeper in recent years, which means that the crisis is deepening. “This is pretty scary,” says Swan, who has long studied reproductive health. “I think we should be very concerned about this trend.”
Although there have reports of declining sperm counts before, they were easy to ignore. Research on sperm levels has been spotty, using different methodologies and drawing from varying groups, making it difficult to know that the declines some scientists observed were real, and not a function of miscounting. Skeptics of the latest conclusions countered that the new report was a study of many studies—it could only be as good as the work from which it drew. And even if the conclusions of the meta-analysis are accurate, the average sperm count still leaves most men on the normal side of fertile. Just barely.Yet fertility rates—the number of live births per woman—have drastically declined in the same countries with falling sperm counts. That includes the U.S., where fertility rates hit a record low this year, and where women are no longer bearing enough children to replace the existing population. Women need to average roughly 2.1 children—enough to replace themselves and their partner, with a spare bit to offset kids who don’t survive to reproductive age—to keep a country’s population stable through birth alone. The U.S. is at 1.8 and dependent on continued immigration to keep the population growing. Sociological and economic factors play a role in the changing size of the American family. Fertility rates were above the replacement level until the 2007 recession, then they plunged. And despite a years-long economic recovery and low unemployment, they’re still falling. Pair that with studies showing that nearly one in six couples in the U.S. trying to get pregnant can’t do so over the course of a year of unprotected sex—the medical definition of infertility—and it’s clear that something beyond economic insecurity is preventing Americans from having as many babies as they want. “When I see birth rates going down, I worry as a fertility doctor that men’s sperm counts are declining,” says Harry Fisch, a urologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
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This would seem to be the moment for the medical world to throw everything it can at understanding what is happening to male fertility. Yet researchers on male reproduction are forced to rely on less-than-perfect data because the kind of comprehensive, longitudinal studies that might conclusively tell us what is happening to sperm counts have never been done. The irony is that the medical establishment has been accused—with reason—of ignoring the particular needs of women over the years, yet in reproduction it is men whose problems are poorly studied and often misunderstood. Some experts even wonder whether an unconscious desire to ignore threats to male fertility may be tied up in fears over the future of masculinity itself. “Here is direct evidence that that function of reproduction is failing,” says Michael Eisenberg, a urologist and an associate professor at Stanford University, referring to the latest sperm-level research. “We should try to figure out why that is.”What we do know about declining sperm counts tells us a great deal about not only reproduction but also the overall health of men—and what it tells us isn’t good. Young men may think themselves invincible, but the male reproductive system is a surprisingly temperamental machine. Obesity, inactivity, smoking—your basic poor modern lifestyle choices—can dramatically reduce sperm counts, as can exposure to some environmental toxins. Low sperm counts may presage a premature death, even among men in the prime of their lives who might seem otherwise healthy. “Sperm count decline is the canary in the coal mine,” says Levine. “There is something very wrong in the environment.” Which means there may be something very wrong with men.
Why Johnny Can’t BreedThe study of sperm has always been murky. In 1677, the Dutch draper and amateur scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek collected his semen immediately after having sex with his wife, examined it under a microscope of his own creation and saw millions of wriggling, tiny “animalcules” swimming in the seminal fluid. The Dutchman was the first person to observe human sperm cells, though he insisted that the sperm alone made an embryo that was merely nourished by the female egg and ovaries. Van Leeuwenhoek was simply following the example of classical thinkers like Aristotle, who believed female partners at most provided a fertile bed of soil in which the seed provided by a man could germinate and flower into a child. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that the true roles of the sperm and the egg were finally sorted out.All those wriggling “swimmers” van Leeuwenhoek saw are what you would see if you magnified the sample of a healthy fertile man. A sperm cell is built for one thing: motion. Its torpedo-like head is a nugget of DNA containing the 23 chromosomes the male partner contributes to his future child, connected to a long tail or flagellum that propels the sperm to the egg, all running on the cellular rocket fuel of fructose, which is in the semen. Most sperm will never come close to an egg—while a fertile man ejaculates 20 million to 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen, only a few dozen might reach their destination, and only one can drill through the egg’s membrane and achieve conception. The chemical makeup of the vagina is actively hostile to sperm, which can only survive because semen contains alkaline substances that offset the acidic environment. That’s the paradox of sperm counts—although one healthy sperm is enough to make a baby, it takes tens of millions of sperm to beat the odds, which means that significant declines in sperm counts will eventually degrade overall male fertility. Notes Swan: “Even a relatively small change in the mean sperm count has a big impact on the percentage of men who will be classified as infertile or subfertile”—meaning a reduced level of fertility that makes it harder to conceive.
The fears about male infertility go beyond the stuff of dry science. “It’s the virility and fertility dilemma,” says Sharon Covington, an infertility therapist in Maryland. “How a man sees himself, and how the world sees him as a man, is often tied to his ability to impregnate a woman.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that the argument over how much sperm counts are declining—if they are declining—has been less a courteous scientific debate than a ferocious battle that has gone on for more than two decades.
This war began in Denmark, in 1990, when Danish pediatric endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek began looking into male reproductive health. For years, he had been troubled by the rise in testicular cancer, as well as an increase in the number of boys with malformed testes. He thought assessing sperm quality and quantity might give him a clue to what was happening to his patients.
In 1992, Skakkebaek and colleagues reviewed all the published studies of sperm counts from around the world. (Sperm counts are done by tallying the number of sperm cells in one microliter of semen and then multiplying by 10,000 to estimate the total sperm in a milliliter—not dissimilar from the way police try to estimate the size of a large crowd from a geographic sample.) They calculated that the average sperm count in 1940 was about 113 million per milliliter of semen, and that by 1990 it had fallen to 66 million. In addition, they saw a threefold increase in the number of men with a sperm count below 20 million, the point at which infertility becomes a serious risk.Skakkebaek’s 1992 paper raised concern about the ability of the human species to continue reproducing itself, but skeptics immediately attacked, questioning the reliability of the original sperm studies the analysis was based on. The studies drew from very different groups of men of varying age and fertility. (Sperm count tends to decline with age, and men who gave a semen sample in a visit to a fertility clinic can reasonably be expected to have a lower count than, say, healthy men selected as donors for a sperm bank.) Some scientists believe older and less precise techniques for sperm counting may have artificially inflated the sperm levels of our fathers and grandfathers, which would make the drop to current counts appear steeper than it is.That’s why the new meta-analysis is so important. Swan, Levine and their international colleagues carefully sorted through more than 7,500 peer-reviewed papers before narrowing their search to 185 papers involving 43,000 men from around the world. By excluding studies before 1973, they cut out some of the less reliable older measurements, and they discarded any studies of men with known fertility complications or who were smokers, since smoking lowers sperm count. It’s not perfect—no meta-analysis is—but this evidence is the best we currently have, and the conclusions are disturbing. “The community is coming around on this,” says Eisenberg. “There have been some good counterarguments about sperm-level decline, but this paper really puts a lot of those arguments to bed.”Environmental CastrationProving that sperm levels are dropping has been difficult enough, and teasing out the cause is even tougher. Obesity, which has risen dramatically in Western countries while sperm counts have supposedly dropped, is linked to poor semen quality, as is physical inactivity. A 2013 study of American college students found that men who exercised more than 15 hours a week had sperm counts 73 percent higher than men who exercised less than five hours a week. And men who watched 20 or more hours of TV a week had much lower sperm counts than those who watched little to no TV. Stress is also a risk factor, as is alcohol use, which is on an upswing in the U.S., and drug use, which is increasing thanks to the opioid epidemic. Some scientists have theorized that electromagnetic fields from devices like cellphones could degrade semen quality, leading to weak and immobile sperm. Even heat can play a role. We know for certain that high temperatures can kill sperm, which is why the testicles are outside the body, keeping them up to 5.4 degrees cooler. Researchers know that birth rates decline nine months after a heat wave, leading some infertility experts to believe that climate change may actually be a factor in sperm count decline.Age also matters. In a recent study, Laura Dodge of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at thousands of attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed in the Boston area and tried to gauge the impact of both male and female age on success. Female age remained the dominant factor, but male age factored in as well—women under the age of 30 with a male partner between 40 and 42 were significantly less likely to give birth than those whose male partner was between 30 and 35. That dovetails with other research showing that as men age, their sperm suffers increasing numbers of mutations, which in turn can make it slightly more likely that their children will be born with disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Older mothers may get the blame for infertility, but a new study found that new fathers in the U.S. are on average nearly four years older than they were in 1972, while almost 9 percent of new American fathers are over 40, double the percentage from 45 years ago. “We tell men that age is not an issue, but now we know that the male biological clock is real,” says Fisch.So is it simply modern life itself—obesity, inactivity, stress, cellphones, even older parenthood—that’s driving down sperm levels? It’s the beginning of an answer, but not the full one. Tobacco use definitely hurts sperm counts, yet smoking has fallen significantly in the U.S. That’s one reason a growing band of researchers have come to suspect the influence of toxins in the environment—specifically, endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in compounds like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.The theory is straightforward enough: These chemicals mimic the effect of the feminizing hormone estrogen and can interfere with masculinizing hormones like testosterone. The chemicals, which are found in many plastics throughout the environment, may be rewiring the sensitive male reproductive system, eroding sperm quality and quantity and even contributing to the sort of testicular disorders that first alarmed Skakkebaek years ago. The production of sperm is tightly regulated by the body’s hormones, and so any interference with those hormones—say, through exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals—could make itself felt first through damage to sperm quantity or quality. “You could still have sperm, but [levels] might be significantly lower than your father’s,” says Germaine Louis, the director and senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.Most of the evidence for how these chemicals affect sperm comes from animal studies. A 2011 study found that mice who received daily BPA injections had lower sperm counts and testosterone levels than mice who received saline injections. A startling study from 2016 of fish in U.S. wildlife refuges in the Northeast found that 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass studied had eggs growing in their testes—a startling feminization—which researchers linked to endocrine disrupters in the waters. Other studies have shown that phthalates appear to disrupt the masculinization of young lab rats. Animal models aren’t perfect, but as University of Texas toxicologist Andrea Gore notes, “the biology of reproduction is incredibly similar in all mammals. We are all vertebrates, and we have the same reproductive organs and processes that develop similarly with the same hormones.”Scientists can’t expose humans to endocrine disrupters in a controlled experiment, but some recent research has found associations between exposure to BPA and phthalates in the world, and declining sperm counts and male infertility in adults. A 2010 study of Chinese factory workers by De-Kun Li at Kaiser Permanente found that increasing levels of BPA in urine were significantly linked with decreased sperm count and quality, even among men who were exposed to levels of BPA comparable to men in the general American population. Another study from 2014 followed about 500 couples trying to conceive and found that phthalate exposure among men was tied to reduced fertility. These findings are all associations, which means that while exposure to endocrine disrupters is more likely to be found in men suffering from reduced fertility, it doesn’t mean that the chemicals themselves are definitively the cause. But the studies are stacking up. “For some of the endocrine disrupters like phthalates, the basic evidence is strong that they affect reproductive health,” says Louis, who carried out the phthalates study.Even more concerning, but harder to prove, is the damage endocrine disrupters may be doing in utero. As a fetus develops in a mother’s uterus, it is barraged by hormones and other chemicals that sculpt development. That includes the male reproductive system—testicles are formed in the womb, and although sperm levels can be altered in adulthood, they seem to be largely set before a boy is born. That means we could see sperm levels continue to decline for years, as boys who were exposed to endocrine disrupters before birth reach reproductive age and run into problems trying to have children of their own. “This trend hasn’t turned around, and it’s not going to turn around on its own,” says Swan, who has been studying the effects of endocrine disrupters for decades. “We don’t have a lot of time to lose.”The Baby Un-BoomIf this is a crisis, why is the medical establishment still arguing over the accuracy of statistical methods that approximate sperm levels from a variety pack of studies? Trying to figure out what is happening to sperm levels isn’t like trying to create an HIV vaccine. Researchers could follow a cohort of representative men from early adulthood through their reproductive years, taking regular semen samples under the same conditions and tracking lifestyle and environmental factors, including exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Such long-term studies aren’t easy or cheap, but somehow we’ve managed to pull them off for certain illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The future of the human race—whether it has one—would seem to qualify as an important topic to explore in depth. “Why are we messing about with this?” says professor Allan Pacey, a male fertility expert at the University of Sheffield. “Let’s just answer the question.”A major, comprehensive study of semen quality has never been funded, however. Doctors are reluctant to even ask men for semen samples, and most men seem reluctant to give one—even though, as Eisenberg wryly notes, “it’s a lot more pleasant for the patient than a blood draw.”
“Male infertility has been ignored for 30 years,” says Christopher Barratt, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland. “What we understand can be written on a postage stamp.”The average man knows much, much less. Few men could even name the medical specialty that covers male reproductive health—it’s urology—and fewer still have ever seen a urologist, given that there are fewer than 12,000 of them in the U.S., about one-third the number of OB-GYNs in the country. Aside from a few online forums, there are no real support systems for men with infertility issues. Many men lack basic knowledge about risk factors for infertility. A 2016 Canadian study found that men could identify only about 50 percent of the potential risks to sperm production, largely missing out on known threats like obesity and frequent bicycling. “Most men just assume that when they want to have children they’ll be able to,” says Phyllis Zelkowitz, the director of research at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and the lead author on the study. “But that isn’t the case for a certain number of people.”The continued ignorance of male infertility is, in its way, another form of male privilege. Pretending that pregnancy is almost entirely a female responsibility means that women are forced to carry the burden and the blame when it goes wrong, while men, who are just as vital to healthy conception, rarely worry about how their lifestyles impact their own fertility or their possible children. “Women will often be sent to invasive, expensive procedures for fertility before a sperm test is ever done,” says Resolve’s Collura.So men are getting off free while their female partners put themselves through painful and expensive fertility treatments. Well, not exactly. The constant production of new sperm cells makes semen highly sensitive to toxins and disease, making it an ideal surrogate for male health—“like blood pressure,” as Louis puts it—beyond what it might signal for fertility. Poor sperm levels and infertility are a clear sign that men’s health is failing. One 2015 study found that men diagnosed with infertility have a higher risk of developing health issues like heart disease, diabetes and alcohol abuse, while another connected infertility to cancer. “Semen quality isn’t just about a couple getting pregnant,” says Louis. “There is increasing evidence at the population level that men with diminished semen quality die earlier and have more chronic diseases. This is as important to health as any disease state.”That male reproductive health goes mostly ignored in the face of those concerns is a striking example of what Cynthia Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers University and the author of Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction , calls the “paradox of male privilege.” A society that values men over women would presumably pour money and resources into determining exactly what is happening to sperm counts and reproductive health. But that would risk confirming that men, who are socially conditioned to think of themselves as indestructible, are in fact vulnerable—and vulnerable in that part of themselves most vital to manhood. At a moment when other talismans of masculinity, like the ability to financially support a family, are under assault, acknowledging the risk to reproduction may feel even more threatening to men. “Recognizing the male reproductive health problem unravels the notion of who men are and how they achieve masculinity,” says Daniels. “It seems to be more important to protect our norms of masculinity and traditional gender relations than it is to address the real health needs of men.”
One way to accomplish that goal is to enable men to take responsibility for their reproductive health. That’s what Greg Sommer, the chief scientific officer of Sandstone Diagnostics, is trying to do with Trak, a kit men can use to evaluate their sperm levels. It’s one of several similar do-it-yourself sperm testing services that offer men the chance to assess their own fertility without stepping inside a doctor’s office. That approach is more than a mere convenience because men are significantly less likely to go to the doctor than women, especially men in their prime reproductive years, when their health is otherwise likely to be good.Real, substantive change is needed from the medical and funding communities to address the male infertility crisis. It may be true, as skeptics countered after the publication of Swan and Levine’s meta-analysis, that we’re a long way from declining sperm counts heralding the end of the human race, at least as portrayed in works of pop art like The Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale . Millions of men and women are having children every day—even if an increasing number need artificial help like IVF. Yet more and more countries find themselves unable to raise their fertility rates above the level needed to replace their population, leading one prominent demographer to prophesy that the world has already reached “peak child.”It’s difficult not to wonder and worry about what will come next. “It’s an inconvenient message, but the species is under threat, and that should be a wake-up call to all of us,” says Skakkebaek. “If this doesn’t change in a generation, it is going to be an enormously different society for our grandchildren and their children.”Assuming, of course, they can have them.
In jab at Trump, Schwarzenegger and Macron team up to ‘make the planet great again.’
To strike the latest blow in his Twitter war with President Trump, Schwarzenegger has recruited French President Emmanuel Macron.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has never hesitated to call in backup.
In “Terminator 2,” the Arnold got an assist from the plucky, potty-mouthed kid who played John Connor as he tried to stave off the end of the world.
In 1987, to take on the “Predator,” Schwarzenegger joined forces with Carl Weathers — and Weathers's biceps, during the most testosterone-laden movie handshake ever recorded.
But now Schwarzenegger's nemesis is a billionaire who commands America's military and has round-the-clock access to nuclear weapons.
So to strike the latest blow in his Twitter war with President Trump, Schwarzenegger has recruited, well, French President Emmanuel Macron.
I was truly honored to meet with President @EmmanuelMacron about how we can work together for a clean energy future. He's a great leader. pic.twitter.com/MSoxjIruup
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) June 23, 2017
For those who've missed the previous installments, Trump and Schwarzenegger have been involved in a months-long social media battle.
Schwarzenegger blasted Trump over his rhetoric as president and seeming divisiveness on the campaign trail. And Trump struck back where it hurt: He lampooned Schwarzenegger's ratings on “The Apprentice.”
Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got "swamped" (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Schwarzenegger took to Twitter Trump said he was withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The move set back the worldwide effort to address global warming.
Afterward, in a nearly three-minute message on Twitter, Schwarzenegger said Trump was derelict in his duties as president.
“One man cannot destroy our progress,” said the movie star who became governor of California. “One man can’t stop our clean energy revolution. And one man can’t go back in time. Only I can do that.”
[Sean Spicer may be done with press briefings. Here are his greatest hits.]
Schwarzenegger's latest salvo came on Friday afternoon. It's unclear where he and Macron are standing, although Schwarzenegger says the two are “talking about environmental issues and a green future.”
Then he pivots the camera for a Macron cameo.
“And now we will deliver together to make the planet great again,” Macron says.
Macron's English is a little off, but the burn is on-target for anyone familiar with Trump's campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
It's not really surprising that Macron would end up on #TeamArnold.
As The Post's James McAuley wrote, “Macron has become the anointed darling and principal spokesman of political moderates around the world, a fierce advocate of 'radical centrism,' globalization and — following President Trump’s watershed decision to remove the United States from the Paris accord — curbing climate change.”
In June, after Trump withdrew the United States from the climate accord, France's Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs altered a Trump administration video that justified the action into one that criticized it.
And Macron himself recorded a video critique.
“I do think it's an actual mistake, both for the U.S. and for the planet,” Macron said, according to The Post's Peter W. Stevenson. “To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland. I call on them: Come here and work with us.”
So Macron and Schwarzenegger share similar views on the environment, and both have shown no hesitation at taking a public swipe at President Trump — a collaboration doesn't seem all that far-fetched.
Or perhaps Schwarzenegger just likes Macron's impersonation of Carl Weathers's handshake.
Scientist at work: Tracking muskoxen in a warming Arctic.
Cold-adapted species have figured out how to survive across thousands of generations. To dampen climatic challenges, we humans need to modify our behavior in a far shorter time frame.
Our Earth has unimaginable diversity, from seascapes 8,000 meters below the ocean’s surface to landscapes 8,000 meters above it. Its physical beauty comes in inconceivable living varieties. Some mammals lay eggs; some lizards are legless. Bats catch fish. Birds catch bats. Wood frogs in Alaska survive through winter even as two-thirds of their body tissues turn to ice.
But as climate alters habitats to which animals have spent thousands of years adapting, snow disappears more quickly now in some places and deepens in others. Receding sea ice strands polar bears on land and reduces the length of their hunting season. As permafrost at the bottom of Siberian lakes cracks, water drains into the ground; fish die.
My research focuses on conserving large species adapted to life in cold places, including the Northern Rockies, Central Asia, and on permafrost in both Asia and Alaska. This winter, for the 11th straight year, I am returning to the Arctic. I want to understand how changing temperatures may be impacting muskoxen – animals that once roamed with extinct woolly mammoths.
To address this issue, I need to discern population trends and possible stressors, and to gain insights into these animals’ physiology, reproduction, predators and food sources. The overarching umbrella is a story of ice, snow and temperature.
A vulnerable Arctic
Earlier this year scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a sobering finding: According to independent studies by both agencies, 2016 was the third year in a row to set a new record for global average surface temperatures. Warming patterns are most extreme in the polar regions, particularly in the Arctic.
NASA animation of warming trends shows that polar regions are warming faster than lower latitudes.
One of the most striking trends we are observing in the Arctic is an increasing occurrence of winter days when temperatures never drop below freezing. Precipitation falls as rain, melting snow on the ground. This can be more serious than it sounds. In 2002 a winter rain-on-snow event on Canada’s Banks Island encased the ground in ice and prevented muskoxen from reaching their food supply. Some 20,000 animals died.
Cold-adapted species are feeling the heat. Moose experience more ticks, caribou more pathogens from the south. As northern vegetation grows more profuse, some species lose habitat. Red foxes displace Arctic foxes.
We know of the enormous changes in polar environments because of creative interdisciplinary collaborative studies by teams of scientists from dozens of countries. But at fine-scale levels, we know less about how these changes are affecting individuals, or how much flexibility many species have to adapt.
Research on American ice
Logistics related to traveling in the Arctic are significant year-round, and especially complex in winter. In Alaska I work with two assistants and we travel light. Typically, it is just Fred Goodhope Jr. (a Native Alaskan whose ancestors survived here for 12,000 years), a bio-technician, and me. Fred knows these lands like the back of his hands, whether he is fixing the throttle of a snowmachine with dental floss at 10 degrees below zero or navigating ground blizzards without GPS.
Muskoxen occur in tightly knit herds, at times 50 kilometers apart. We navigate the tricky ice and tundra between the groups and gather data. For years my colleagues and I used helicopters to pursue, tranquilize and radio-collar muskoxen. This was a very useful way to garner biological insights, but I abandoned it five years ago because about 5 percent of the animals that we radio-collared failed to reconnect with their herds when the drugs wore off. Instead they sheltered alone in snow-holes for safety for up to two months.
I wanted more compassionate ways to collect data, so I continue to gather and analyze frozen poop sans radio-collaring. It contains iced hormones that we can assess to infer stress levels (gluco-corticosteroids) and pregnancy rates (progestagens). We know from these data that isolated females experienced stress levels three to six times greater than their companions back in the herd. The change to gentler tactics has been well worth it.
Female muskox shelters in a snow hole. Marci Johnson, Author provided
We also use a method called photogrammetry, or making measurements from photos. When muskoxen perceive a threat, they stand clumped together in defensive formations rather than fleeing. Working with animals the size of a Volkswagen has benefits: They stand out in the vast Arctic. We can approach them when they group up this way and photograph them at known distances and angles, then use these shots to develop algorithms and estimate their sizes.
By comparing our estimates with data on the growth and size of captive animals, we can explore how factors like winter and summer temperatures, availability and health of vegetation, and rain-on-snow events affect wild muskoxen’s growth and size.
Poorly fed or otherwise stressed juveniles from many species tend grow slower, achieve puberty later in life and have reduced survival. I want to learn about these parameters in muskoxen. For example, during rain-on-snow events, pregnant females cannot eat because their food is locked under impenetrable ice. My colleagues and I expect that their growing fetuses deplete the resources that are available to them in utero, and that these stores are not replenished because food is unavailable to the mothers. We are now developing our first estimates of how warming temperatures may be affecting this little-studied species.
Research on Asian ice
In both Greenland and the High Canadian Arctic there have been limited reports of polar bears eating muskoxen, but we do not know whether they are feeding on dead animals or hunting live ones. We know that polar bears are foraging more frequently on land as the Arctic warms, melting the sea ice where they normally hunt, rest and breed. To determine whether polar bears are a threat to muskoxen, we need to know whether they are feeding on animals that have died from other causes such as disease, or are attacking live muskoxen.
I use a common experimental technique: simulations, which requires a fake polar bear and, as a control, a fake caribou. I take these two costumes, fashioned from cloth and Styrofoam, into the field and do approaches to muskoxen to see how they will react. This research follows in the footsteps of Nobel Laureates Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who were interested in animal behavior and manipulated the perceptual worlds of gulls and geese.
Now such field deployments are more common. Recently they have been used in the gas fields of Wyoming to assess how sage-grouse react to increased noise generated by fracking. I have also used acoustic and olfactory models in Alaska and the Yellowstone region to sort out how naïve prey like moose respond to reintroduced wolves and recolonizing grizzly bears.
On Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, my apprehension heightens as I approach muskoxen herds on all fours. There is always a possibility of being gored, yet for my protection I can’t carry a gun, and it’s too cold to pepper spray when they charge. But I can leap from the ground onto my feet, which confuses them and halts any charges.
A polar bear turns human. Joel Berger, Author provided
At the edge
Across Earth’s vastness, humans have done a marvelous job of erasing or threatening the living magnificence that has come before. Field research gives me opportunities to look at the world through the eyes of animals, and to work with many other scientists to configure plans to do better for all living beings who rely on our planet’s life support systems.
Cold-adapted species have figured out how to survive across thousands of generations. To dampen climatic challenges, we humans need to modify our behavior in a far shorter time frame.
Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: Oceans poisoned by plastic.
As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a trash-strewn, cancerous stew. This is not just gross. It’s an existential threat.
Here in this fishing village, on the island of Java, the surf teems with kaleidoscopic color. Each wave is littered with garish bibs and bobs.
The water is speckled with synthetic hues: Coca-Cola red, day-glo green and every other color in the crayon box. There are monochromes as well: buoyant white blobs that, at a distance, look like 1,000 invading jellyfish.
It’s all plastic trash, of course.
Here floats the detritus of 21st-century consumption: soda bottles, Pampers and, since this is Indonesia, lots of instant noodle wrappers.
Those jellyfish? Plastic shopping bags. You can go five kilometers into the sea, the village fishermen say, and never stop seeing those lousy plastic bags.
“It’s infuriating,” says Alec, a 39-year-old mussel catcher. He’s hunched over his boat’s outboard motor with a wrench, face streaked with motor oil. The engine is all gunked up with plastic.
“This happens almost every day,” he says. “We can barely work. No matter where you go, the sea is covered in plastic.”
Like so many other coastal villages around the world, plastic junk has brought ruin to this place. Called Muara Angke, it’s a settlement in the shadow of Jakarta, a megacity generating mountains of trash each day.
These shores were once among the world’s most coveted. For more than a millennium, waves of outsiders — from Hindu conquerors to rapacious Dutch colonists — lusted after the paradisiacal beauty of Java. But today, any seafarer arriving on this beach will find a saltwater garbage dump.
Credit:
Kuang Keng Kuek Ser / PRI
How terrifying. Not just for this village but for every human on the planet.
Westerners too often regard pollution in Asia as a far-flung curiosity — a tragedy to be pitied from a safe distance.
But when someone throws a dirty plastic spoon into the Java Sea, it doesn’t just float in place. Currents can carry it around the world and back in just 25 years.
All the while, it’s disintegrating into toxic crumbs. The ocean and its creatures are now awash in chemicals oozed by plastic — and it’s seeping into human bodies from Bali to Boston.
So ignore the floating spoon at your own peril. Its molecules, hiding in a bite of salmon, may someday swim through your bloodstream.
“We’re all infected with plastic,” says Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. “Molecules from some kid’s plastic bottle, dropped into the ocean in Asia, are winding up in the food Americans eat.”
Ebbesmeyer is best known for coining the phrase “gyres” — those massive whirlpools of trash swirling in the ocean. Five vortexes of filth now cover a whopping one-quarter of the planet’s surface. They get bigger every year.
As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a trash-strewn, cancerous stew. At this rate, by 2050, the seas will actually contain more plastic than fish.
This is not just gross. It’s an existential threat. All that seaborne plastic leaks chemicals that, when ingested, can weaken human sperm, potentially threatening our ability to reproduce.
“This is death by a million cuts,” Ebbesmeyer says. “It makes global warming look like child’s play.”
No country is immune. But the island of Java — a place with too many people and too few garbage trucks — just happens to be an excellent place to watch this crisis in motion.
Because if countries like Indonesia can’t turn off the spigot of plastic trash then, well, we’re all screwed.
*****
One of the countless luxuries Westerners enjoy is the illusion that plastic just vanishes.
It doesn’t. The lid to the Starbucks cappuccino you bought in 2007 is out there somewhere. So is every toothbrush you used in high school. So is every plastic water bottle you finished off in 45 seconds — and then tossed into a black bag that was also made from plastic.
Do you recycle? Great. So perhaps your sophomore-year toothbrush was transformed into a toy in Taiwan or a Turkish kid’s sippy cup.
But this probably didn’t happen. Less than 10 percent of America’s plastic is recycled — and much of the plastic placed in recycling bins actually ends up in a landfill.
But we’ll stay optimistic. Assume your toothbrush evaded the local dump. Odds are very high that it wound up in China, the primary recycler of America’s plastic waste. There, it may have been reincarnated as a drinking straw in Shanghai.
PET recycling China
Piles of plastic bottles are seen at Asia's largest PET plastic recycling factory, INCOM Resources Recovery in Beijing, on May 7, 2013. According to government figures, reported in local media, about 4.67 million tons of recyclable waste was collected in Beijing in 2010. In the same year, 6.35 million tons of trash ended up in landfill in the city.
Credit:
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Still, at some point, that straw was thrown away — and less than half of China’s trash ends up in landfills.
A lot of it actually ends up in the ocean.
Imagine a globe with a circle drawn around China and Southeast Asia. More than half of the plastic pouring into the ocean comes from within this circle, according to extensive research published in the journal Science.
Herein lie five big offenders: Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Add Sri Lanka, to the west, and you’ve got the top six plastic polluters on Earth.
What do all of these places have in common? Long shorelines. Populations that have boomed, and economies that have boomed, too. At least enough to turn millions of farmers, once nurtured solely from the land, into folks who can afford Pepsi and mobile phones.
When it comes to plastic consumption, people living in Asia are nowhere near as gluttonous as Americans, who throw out more than 45,000 plastic bottles per minute.
But in America (as in much of the West) waste chucked into a bin tends to end up in a mountainous dump, not the sea. Of all the plastic spewed into the ocean, the US contributes 1 percent. China is responsible for one-third.
So that Shanghai drinking straw, created from the polypropylene essence of your old toothbrush, is quite possibly bobbing in the Pacific.
Let’s hope it’s not gagging some poor tuna.
Dead fish farm
A child examines dead farmed fish floating in Lake Maninjau, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, on Feb. 20, 2016. Fishery officials said up to 30 tons of farmed fish died due to high winds on the lake.
Credit:
Iggoy el Fitra/Antara Foto via Reuters
*****
Plastic is so omnipresent that it’s easy to forget what it actually is.
Plastic is mostly made from crude oil. This black goop, hundreds of millions of years in the making, is first sucked from the ground. Then it’s refined, blasted in furnaces and mixed with additives
The resulting material — plastic — can be molded into everything from spaceship parts to Mardi Gras beads.
Plastic is cheap and strong. It’s so durable, in fact, that it never really dies. A plastic soda bottle in the ocean may retain its shape for 400 years but, even after that, it breaks apart and lives on as poisonous confetti.
Just 100 years ago, everyday people barely used plastic. Now, thanks to multinational conglomerates, it’s the lifeblood of a disposable consumer culture spanning the globe. Plastic is enmeshed in the lives of billionaires and peasants alike.
But when it’s time to toss it away, a wealth divide emerges.
In America — or any place with a well-functioning waste disposal system — garbage trucks whisk away junk at least once a week.
At that point, plastic bottles, spoons and wrappers seem to disappear forever. But there are 3.5 billion people on Earth who know better.
No agency, public or private, comes to collect the plastic junk thrown out by roughly half of humanity. It often piles up at their feet.
*****
Aena, a tween girl from Muara Angke, is one of these people.
Her little Javanese village is a maze of houses assembled from tin sheeting and cheap plywood, some of it salvaged from the beach. The air smells of sea salt, mussels and rotting vegetables.
This settlement is drowning in plastic trash. “Trash bins? We don’t have many of those,” says Aena, 12, wearing flip-flops and Doraemon pajamas. “The only place to throw trash is on the ground or in the sea.”
Aena, 12, in her village (Muara Angke) by Jakarta. Shoreline is smothered by plastic filth. This is what your backyard can look like if you're one of the 3.5 billion humans who don't receive trash pick-up services. #Indonesia
A photo posted by @bkkapologist on Oct 3, 2016 at 12:33am PDT
Sometimes, village grandmas will rake all that plastic into a pile and set it aflame. It’s mostly crude oil, after all, so it lights up quick.
But trying to burn away all the garbage is almost futile. In this village, plastic junk litters every footpath and every patch of sand. When Aena and her friends scamper around the beach, you hear plastic crunching under little feet.
Much of this mess is churned out by Western multinationals: Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, Nestle and Coca-Cola. Some of the beach rubbish bears brand names, like Pantene or Cerelac, that would look familiar to a Wal-Mart shopper.
But on this side of the world, there are fewer jumbo-sized plastic containers. In Southeast Asia, Western corporations sell products in little packets — cheap portions that the poor can afford. They call the appeal of these mini-portions “masstige”: prestige for the masses.
That’s great for Aena. She may live in a shack made of scavenged planks. But she can wash her shoulder-length hair with “ICE COOL MENTHOL” shampoo made by Unilever. One small dollop sells for less than 10 cents.
It’s not so great for the sea. From Java to Vietnam, the waves glitter with thousands of little plastic packets. Once used, they’re worthless and practically impossible to recycle.
Aena says that, if she could wish away all this garbage, she would. “But honestly, we don’t think about it much. It’s looked like this my entire life,” she says. “Like our whole village is a trash bin.”
A few of Aena’s friends, gathered near the shore, giggle in agreement. One drains the last drop of sweet tea out of a plastic bottle and then chucks it over her shoulder. And why not? Littering has lost any sense of taboo. Even if she placed it in a trash bag, no one would come to haul it away.
*****
From Brazil to Vietnam, countless villages like this dot the world’s shorelines. If their inhabitants were the only people dumping plastic into the sea, our oceans would be in far better shape.
Unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper — and the island of Java helps explain why.
Java is one of the world’s most densely peopled islands: 141 million are squeezed onto a patch of land smaller than Louisiana. Many live by the shore. But many more live further inland in cities built up beside rivers.
In the latter half of the 20th century, when Asia went industrial, this island’s population skyrocketed. But Indonesia’s government — a young and quasi-dysfunctional democracy — has not kept up. The country offers regular trash services to only about half of its citizens.
So many families, deprived of dumpsters and garbage trucks, treat the local river as a trash chute.
Tossing trash into waterways is a fairly common practice from Latin America to the Indian sub-continent. River currents act as a conveyer belt, sweeping junk over the horizon and out of sight.
But these days, in Java, rivers can grow so clogged with trash that the water is barely visible.
Take the Cikapundung River. For millennia, the river has bathed and nourished the people of Java. Its coffee-colored water snakes around volcanoes before emptying into the Java Sea.
Now, on a bad day, it is an undulating ribbon of wet garbage. And the rest of Java’s dozen or so rivers aren’t faring much better.
Ciliwung River trash 2014
A volunteer clears rubbish from the Ciliwung River in the Jatinegara district of Jakarta, on Dec. 3, 2014. More than 1,000 soldiers and volunteers cleared 80 tons of garbage after flooding hit parts of the capital.
Credit:
Beawiharta/Reuters
In recent years, these rivers have suffered the equivalent of coronary ruptures. Like blood clots, all that junk can block riverine arteries until — SPLOOSH! — the water gushes on shore.
These man-made floods send soggy styrofoam washing into people’s living rooms. This isn’t merely disgusting. Turning neighborhoods into sewers is potentially deadly. Water-borne infections prey on children and grandparents. And disease, carried by mosquitoes and panicked rats, can prove fatal.
*****
Late last year, Java’s rivers were so plugged up that the government proclaimed a garbage “state of emergency.”
It was a rallying cry for cities to crack down on littering — often in the form of heavy fines totaling around $40 per violation. For the many Indonesians who eke by on $2 per day, that’s a life-ruining sum.
“Before, when we were caught, the cops would just give you a lecture. Or maybe make you do six push-ups,” says Agus Ahmad, 50, the ex-headman of a district in Bandung. The city of roughly 2.5 million is infamous for its polluted waterways.
“Now people are more afraid to throw plastic in the river,” Agus says. “Or at least they’re afraid to get caught.”
Ingrained habits explain part of Indonesia’s trash epidemic, says Yayat Supriatna, an urban planning scholar who has advised the government. “People don’t understand how dangerous plastic can be.”
But so far, he says, the government’s strategy is emphasizing scare tactics over actually hauling away more junk. Only about 40 percent of Javanese homes get “good trash service,” he says, and the population never stops growing.
“What’s the point of fining people? You’re punishing them but you’re not holding up your end of the deal by picking up their trash,” Yayat says. “That’s an injustice.”
So people continue to rebel.
“Adults still throw stuff in the river. They’re just doing it at night,” says Muhammad Randika, an 11-year-old in Bandung. His little neighborhood is called Braga, a labyrinth of stone pathways designed by Dutch colonists.
He lives above a soupy canal. For Muhammad and his pals, this fetid tributary doubles as a swimming hole. They have come to know it as a place where grown-ups try to make stuff disappear: bags stuffed with diapers, intestines from sacrificed cows, even homicide victims.
“Not that long ago, we swam across a floating dead man with a slashed throat,” says Muhammad, flanked by a gaggle of boys in flip-flops. “His face was as white as yours.”
The throng of kids nod along. “That won’t stop us from swimming here though,” Muhammad says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
Jakarta trash canal
A man collects plastic for recycling from a polluted river in a Jakarta slum, Oct. 1, 2010.
Credit:
Beawiharta/Reuters
*****
“Have you checked your son’s sperm count lately?”
That’s how Ebbesmeyer, the oceanographer, will sometimes greet audience members who come to hear his lectures on ocean debris.
“If you want to see how fast you can stop a conversation, try talking about sperm counts,” he says. “That’ll do it.”
Awkward, perhaps, but not nearly as unpleasant as the fall of humanity.
Studies indicate that, in the last 50 to 70 years, human sperm has grown less potent. One of the more comprehensive studies, conducted in France, shows sperm counts plummeting by 30 percent in less than two decades — and it’s continuing to drop.
Why is this happening? Scientists aren’t sure. Potential causes range from pollution to obesity to drinking from aluminum cans. But the fact that sperm counts are falling so fast, according to leading fertility researcher Richard Sharpe, suggests the causes “must be lifestyle and environmental.”
Mounting evidence suggests the culprit could be estrogen. Not the naturally occurring hormone, but its evil cousins — chemicals in consumer goods that mimic estrogen’s effects.
There are roughly 5,000 of these chemicals lurking in our everyday products. Plastic is most often their Trojan horse. In fact, research shows “almost all” plastics ooze estrogen imitators.
*****
The most notorious of these estrogen imitators is Bisphenol A, or BPA.
This substance is already on the radar for many consumers, who seek out BPA-free plastics. But BPA (and BPS, its equally worrisome sibling) is almost impossible to avoid. It’s in everything from canned goods to Tupperware.
You probably have traces of this stuff in your blood. More than 90 percent of Americans do. And you don’t want more than a trace.
A large body of experts, after reviewing hundreds of studies, declared that the amount of BPA already found in “the typical human living in a developed country” could potentially bring on maladies from weak sperm to cancer.
But don’t worry, says the $374 billion plastics industry. Its lobbyists and sponsored studies contend that small amounts of BPA won’t hurt humans. Corporate advocacy groups, such as Facts About BPA, concede that the substance is “weakly estrogenic” but say it is harmlessly peed out by consumers.
Indeed, the World Health Organization notes the “potential toxic and hormonal properties of BPA” but notes no adverse effects from small doses.
For now, the FDA, which has relied in part on industry-funded studies, is on the manufacturers’ side.
Let’s hope they’re right. Because just look at what this stuff can do to animals.
It can reverse a rat’s gender and alter its genitals. It causes pregnant monkeys to birth deformed babies.
It can even lurk in an animal’s cells to sabotage future generations.
A fish tainted with BPA may have babies with no problems. But its children — and even grandchildren — will become less fertile. According to a University of Missouri study, the chemical could have similar “adverse reproductive effects” on humans.
A biological scientist and well-known BPA critic named Frederick vom Saal, speaking to Mother Jones magazine, puts it succinctly: “A poison kills you. A chemical like BPA reprograms your cells and ends up causing a disease in your grandchild that kills him.”
Just as BPA swims around in our blood, it’s saturating our plastic-strewn seas. When researchers took seawater samples from 200 sites across the US and Asia, they found “significant” levels of BPA in every single one.
All this research has brought Ebbesmeyer, an elder statesman of sea pollution research, to a grim conclusion.
Plastics in the ocean, he says, may threaten existence as we know it.
“Mother Nature is getting rid of us by our own sword,” he says. “Of all the potential nastiness out there, humanity’s inability to reproduce is at the top. But no one wants to talk about it.”
In Ebbesmeyer’s view, this end-of-days scenario could outpace the ravages of climate change. To hear him tell it, our extinction could look like a mash-up between “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Children of Men,” the 2006 thriller in which infertility plunges the world into chaos.
“Humanity is pretty good at avoiding the important questions,” Ebbesmeyer says. “I think the evidence here is pretty conclusive.”
*****
Perhaps this extinction-by-estrogen scenario is overly apocalyptic.
In the meantime, this is what we know for sure.
Humans are disgorging 8 million tons of plastic into the sea each year. Before we know it, those whirlpools of junk in the ocean could soon cover half the planet’s surface.
This junk is killing off millions of creatures. Plastic-infected fish are turning up on our dinner plates. In some parts of the sea, there’s six times more plastic in the water than plankton.
This nightmare begs a number of questions. Among them:
Can humans clean up all this mess?
There are 5.2 trillion bits of plastic in the sea, according to the 5 Gyres Institute.
That’s 52 times the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way.
The answer is probably no.
Can we at least stop leaking plastic into the sea?
Perhaps. But it’ll be expensive.
In the leakiest plastic-pollution zone on the planet — China plus Southeast Asia — waste disposal systems are underfunded, opaque and often corrupt, according to the non-profit Ocean Conservancy.
The group has tried to calculate the cost of overhauling this region’s waste systems to keep plastic out of the sea.
Their figure: $4.5 billion per year, sustained throughout a decade.
That’s a lot, sure, but it’s not an inconceivably high sum. The US hands that much money to the militaries of Egypt and Israel each year — all in the name of protecting American interests.
But at the moment, overhauling Asia’s trash crisis is an environmentalist fantasy. There’s no indication such an effort will be funded by anyone — not countries in Asia, nor the United Nations, nor billionaire donors.
Counting on the United States government to lead the fight against this scourge seems particularly futile. The White House, under incoming President Donald Trump, won’t even concede that climate change is a massive threat. The odds of a fringe issue like plastic pollution appearing on his agenda appear close to nil.
There are flickers of hope, however. China has banned the thinnest plastic bags, which are difficult to recycle and prone to tangle up with just about anything floating by. So has a busy district in Manila, the Philippines capital.
Yangtze river garbage
Workers clear floating plants and garbage off the surface of the Yangtze River in Chongqing municipality, China, July 22, 2015.
Credit:
China Daily via Reuters
In Jakarta, the local government is deploying 4,000 people — paid $60 per week — to dredge plastic junk out of rivers before its hits the ocean. Locally, this endeavor is enormously popular.
But even if this approach were replicated from Lagos to Buenos Aires, armies of trash scroungers can’t save the seas. Any trash that plops into a river is likely to reach the ocean. Cities and towns generate far too much pollution for people to collect by hand.
What are plastics corporations doing to help?
Not enough. Especially in countries such as Indonesia, where regulatory agencies are comparatively weak.
“The corporations may offer a bit of charity here and there,” Yayat says. “But they don’t really help. They’ll say the environment is the government’s responsibility.”
Even the US won’t rein in its plastics industry. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, lobbyists are working overtime to keep plastics “unregulated or under-regulated.”
This scientists’ union also accuses the American Chemistry Council, a powerful pro-plastic trade association, of “following a pattern modeled by the tobacco industry: deny the science, bring in its own experts to counter the evidence” and pressure lawmakers to maintain the status quo.
Neither of the plastics industry’s top BPA lobbies, Facts About BPA and BPA Coalition, responded to PRI’s questions about the chemical's contamination of the sea.
*****
So, what’s the solution?
“If you produce plastic, it’s assured that it will eventually end up in the sea,” Ebbesmeyer says. “So we have to stop producing plastic.”
This is a fairly radical notion. Even hardcore environmentalists struggle to rid their lives of plastic.
Humans worldwide use roughly one million plastic bags per minute. Americans — among the world’s most unrepentant plastic junkies — toss 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour.
Trash collector Java
A trash collecter drops a plastic bag into a basket on the island of Java.
Credit:
Arfiansyah
Killing off disposable plastics would end our way of life. It would slaughter convenience on the altar of ecology. We’re addicted to plastic. It’s literally in our blood.
Maybe we could revert back to glass. Or we could transition to bio-plastics, made from plants such as corn or soy. But as it stands, bio-plastics are more expensive to produce and amount to a tiny portion of the overall plastics market.
As with global warming, humanity might be too myopic to alter its behavior before the oceans are ruined. But what many Western environmentalists often fail to see is that their domestic efforts — like banning plastic bags in Portland — will never be good enough.
Even if the US federal government embraces the most enlightened anti-plastics policy possible, a fanciful notion at best, that wouldn’t spare the ocean from catastrophe. Any potential solution must be executed globally.
As long as Java and places like it gush tons of plastic into the ocean — all while corporations in Europe and the US profit — our bodies will steadily soak up more and more plastic residue.
Perhaps you are among the wealthy minority of humans who have great control over what you eat for dinner. Fearful of estrogenic chemicals, you can quit eating ocean-caught fish. (You’ll also want to swear off other main contributors of BPA to human blood: canned drinks and chemical-laced paper receipts.)
But even if you succeed, that won’t spare the billions of less fortunate people who rely on fish as a primary protein. Nor will it spare the fish themselves. At this rate, in a few decades, there will be more plastic swishing about the ocean than fish.
The full implications of this crisis remain unknown. Many environmentalists portend doom. Conglomerates tell us not to fret.
As for Ebbesmeyer, he’s betting on disaster.
“These endless shenanigans are driving us toward mass extinction,” he says. “We’re one of the many animals that will become extinct — ironically by our own intelligence.”
