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Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment leveled at noted scientist.
Years ago, two women allege, their team leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica. Now they are taking action.
A COLD CASE Years ago, two women allege, their team
leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica.
Now they are taking action
In 1999 at Pivot Peak in Antarctica, Jane Willenbring (right) was the only woman on a four-person team including David Marchant (center) and his brother (left).
ADAM LEWIS
Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at noted scientist
By Meredith WadmanOct. 6, 2017 , 12:45 PM
Editor’s note: This article includes crude language and disturbing details.
Boston University (BU) is investigating sexual harassment complaints made against a prominent Antarctic geologist by two of his former graduate students. The women allege that David Marchant, then an assistant professor, harassed them during different research expeditions starting 2 decades ago, while they were isolated in small groups in the Antarctic. In supporting documents and interviews, several other women report similar treatment from Marchant in that period.
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.
The second complainant, Deborah Doe (a pseudonym), who was in Antarctica for two austral summers during this era, reports that Marchant called her a “c--t” and a “bitch” repeatedly. She alleges that he promised to block her access to research funding should she earn a Ph.D. She abandoned her career dreams and left academe.
A third woman, Hillary Tulley, a Skokie, Illinois, high school teacher, describes her experience in a supporting letter filed with BU investigators. “His taunts, degrading comments about my body, brain, and general inadequacies never ended,” she writes. She claims Marchant tried to exhaust her into leaving Antarctica. “Every day was terrifying,” she says in an interview with Science.
Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.
“This is one of the only real regrets I have in my whole life,” says Adam Lewis, who as a graduate student was in Antarctica with Willenbring and Tulley. “I had the chance to stand up for people. And I didn’t.”
David Marchant has led dozens of field expeditions to Antarctica’s Dry Valleys.
COURTESY NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Science is unaware of any additional formal complaints from more recent students. Marchant supervised two women who earned Ph.D.s in 2009 and 2016. Both women, contacted repeatedly by Science, declined to comment on their experiences with him.
Marchant, 55, now a department chair at BU, declined by email to be interviewed or to provide his written rebuttal to Willenbring’s complaint. Other documents related to the investigation suggest that he denies the allegations. He was scheduled to be honored as a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) at the society’s meeting in Seattle, Washington, this month, but last week his name was removed from the GSA website listing of new fellows.
Some other women who have worked with Marchant at BU and in the field stoutly defend his character. Emily Jacesko, who as a 21-year-old undergraduate worked with Marchant and others in Antarctica in 2002, says she never witnessed or experienced sexual harassment from him. “I … sincere[ly] support … him as an upstanding and professional individual,” says Jacesko, a senior staff geologist at a consulting firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. She has filed a letter of support for Marchant with BU.
The allegations come at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in science. Scientists are also becoming more attuned to the potential dangers women face in isolated field camps, where they may depend on senior men for food, water, and shelter. In one online survey published in PLOS ONE and covered by Science in 2014, 71% of 512 female respondents reported being sexually harassed during fieldwork; 84% of them were trainees.
He said, ‘I noticed someone hasn’t cried today.’
Jane Willenbring, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The allegations against Marchant raise the question of whether women can successfully press complaints many years after allegedly abusive incidents. “I have seen claims up to 4 years after the last incident had happened. But I haven’t seen anything with quite that amount of time,” says Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an attorney with Hopkins Way in Phoenix who specializes in gender discrimination.
Tracy-Ramirez, who read Willenbring’s complaint at Science’s request, says the case likely “will be a fairly important part of a larger conversation schools are having about ‘What are we required to do?’ and ‘What is the right thing to do?’”
Two portraits of a man
Those who know Marchant describe him as often charming and charismatic, a very good scientist, and an excellent teacher. He made his name documenting landscape evolution in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, and he is known as an experienced field geologist, making more than 30 research trips to the frigid continent.
Jennifer Berglund, 33, a science communicator based in Somerville, Massachusetts, who was a field assistant for Marchant in 2012, recalls her first, windy night in Antarctica, when she and her tentmate had set up their tent with only small rocks holding down the guy lines. “In the middle of the night, we heard some rustling around outside of the tent. It was Dave lugging and placing giant boulders atop our small, scrawny ones, and tightening the guy lines.”
Marchant also made his mark on the BU campus, winning two teaching awards including, in 2004, one of the university’s highest teaching prizes. In 2014 he was named a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); his $1 million, 5-year award is part of a program to improve science teaching. Marchant was “an excellent professor,” says Rachel Watsky, now a law student at BU. She took a class with Marchant, who was also her undergraduate academic adviser, and she worked for him as a lab assistant on campus in 2011–12. She told Science he was a “great boss … eager for my input.”
Jane Willenbring (in Antarctica in 2008) switched her Ph.D. thesis research to the Arctic after working with Marchant.
ADAM LEWIS
The allegations against Marchant in the complaints and supporting documents paint a different picture, and read like a riveting survival novel unfurling in unforgiving, isolated terrain. In her complaint, Willenbring, now 40, describes her first Antarctic field season as a master’s student starting in December 1999, when she was 22.
Marchant, Willenbring, Lewis (then a graduate student at the University of Maine, Orono), and Marchant’s brother Jeffrey, who was working as an assistant, lived and worked in the arid, boulder-strewn Beacon Valley and in the shadow of 2470-meter Pivot Peak. They slept in unheated tents in temperatures as low as –40°C, walked long distances in rugged terrain, and dug deep holes to find ancient ice and volcanic ash. Dropped by helicopter with supplies, for weeks the four had only radio contact with the main base at McMurdo Station.
Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.
One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.
“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.
As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.
In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.
Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.
Lewis had also been in Antarctica with Marchant the previous season, when Tulley was there with a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic. Tulley writes in a letter supporting Willenbring’s complaint that she had not yet cleared the rotors of the helicopter that dropped them at their field site when “I was aggressively grabbed by Marchant and wheeled around, while he yelled and called me a ‘dumbass, lazy c--t … who did not know that we had to set up camp immediately.”
She alleges in her letter that Marchant failed to teach her or include her, the only woman present, in the research. “Talk during [group] meals … always included relentless, snickering mentions of my advanced age (I was 43), my small breasts, and other failings, always initiated by Marchant. All my attempts to steer the conversation to science were shut down.”
The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.
Jacquelyn Hams, Los Angeles Valley College
Lewis’s letter supports much of Tulley’s account. He writes that Marchant repeatedly said to the other men that an older woman in the field “will slow us down.” He adds in his letter: “On multiple occasions while walking without Tulley, Marchant made grotesque sexual comments about her body.” At other times, Lewis writes, Marchant “clearly stated that he did not believe women should be field geologists.”
Andrew Lorrey, then a student at the University of Maine, Orono, was also in the field that season and was interviewed by BU investigators last year. Contacted by Science, Lorrey says he also remembers Marchant’s mealtime disparagement of Tulley and her body. Marchant’s relationship with Tulley was “not positive,” says Lorrey, now a climate scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Auckland, New Zealand. However, he says: “I did not necessarily attribute [this] to her being a woman as much as … an outsider.”
Doe, a third woman, alleges that she was harassed by Marchant in field seasons in the late 1990s, in a supporting letter for Willenbring that she later converted into a formal complaint on her own behalf. (She authenticated this letter in an email to Science, and requested anonymity.)
When she was a student at BU, she writes, Marchant told her “less than two weeks into my graduate career, that I was lazy, less than intelligent, and incapable of meeting even the basest expectations.” She adds in the letter that, “My every action or social interaction was scrutinized and remarked upon, usually with a belittling comment, followed by … that blinding smile that he deployed to make it seem as if he hadn’t just cut you to the core. … I began to believe the things he told me.”
Once in Antarctica, the abuse escalated, Doe writes. “He repeatedly called me a ‘c--t,’ among many other insults … (bitch being the most common) that were invoked on a daily basis or more. … He would crow that he could say absolutely anything he wanted to because we were ‘in his domain.’”
Marchant told her that if she completed her Ph.D., he and another scientist would ensure she never got NSF funding, Doe alleges. (NSF is the major source of funding for Antarctic field research.)
“I distinctly remember standing there, aghast, in my red down jacket and black wind pants, watching my career and life plans dissolve as Dr. Marchant smiled triumphantly at me,” she writes.
Four women who all worked in the Antarctic with Marchant at different times report him saying close variations of the same words: “I’m going to break you down and build you up in my image.”
Keeping quiet
Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”
Simpson, who has since retired, wrote in an email that she could not comment on the ongoing investigation. She wrote that she would have “dealt quickly and decisively” with allegations “approaching the seriousness indicated” in Doe’s letter.
Doe writes that “it took years, literally, to overcome the damage to my self-worth. I slowly … rebuilt a career grounded in scientific inquiry” outside academe. She writes in her complaint: “For [many] years I have carried the weight of knowing” that she stayed quiet “rather than speaking up and saving those who would follow me from the torment and anguish I had experienced.”
Tulley writes that she contacted one of the directors of NSF’s polar program for teachers upon her return, and was promised “a private, confidential meeting with an administrator.” The meeting did not materialize, and she did not pursue her complaint, she tells Science, because Marchant’s alleged treatment had “knocked me for a loop psychologically.…I wimped out.” When she spoke to other teachers on NSF’s behalf, she relayed only the positive aspects of her experience.
Back at BU, Willenbring, too, did not speak up. She writes in her complaint that, “I believe that I would not be where I am today if I had said something” at the time.
In 2002, as Willenbring finished her master’s degree with Marchant, another professor asked her to write a letter of evaluation for Marchant’s tenure and promotion file. She alleges that Marchant threatened to ruin her career if she did not write a positive letter. She wrote one. “I kept it to the science because he is a very good scientist,” she tells Science.
To avoid Marchant, Willenbring switched her Ph.D. research to the Arctic and moved to another university. She promised herself that when she got tenure, she would speak out.
Speaking out
In July 2016, Scripps hired Willenbring as a tenured associate professor. She filed a Title IX complaint with BU in October 2016. Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex at universities that receive federal funding. Institutions can lose federal funds if they do not comply with the law. (Willenbring also filed complaints with NSF and NASA, which fund Marchant’s research, in December 2016. However, Title IX complaints against individuals are typically handled first by the institutions where the alleged harassment occurred.) Schools are unlikely to dismiss a years-old complaint out of hand, says Tracy-Ramirez, the Title IX lawyer, “but rather to ask ‘Did a hostile environment occur at that time?’ and ‘Is there reason to suspect there is a hostile environment happening now?’”
BU’s Equal Opportunity Office has interviewed numerous people, elicited a 200-page rebuttal from Marchant, and received at least four letters in his support plus at least five letters supporting Willenbring. It has also begun investigating Doe’s complaint, which was filed 7 months later, in May. BU told Willenbring last month that it expects to finish its report soon. The university declined to discuss the investigation with Science, citing privacy concerns.
Willenbring had also sent her complaint to GSA in December, because Marchant edits a GSA publication. The society declined to comment, or to say why Marchant’s name was removed as a GSA fellow.
Marchant, contacted repeatedly by Science, wrote in an email: “Boston University’s investigation into these allegations is ongoing. I have cooperated fully in that investigation. I do not wish to compromise the integrity of that investigation by making any comments before the investigation has been completed.”
Marchant’s defenders tell Science they do not recognize the man described in the complaints. “I find the allegations against Dave of physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment beyond comprehension given my field experiences with him in Antarctica as a female” in 2008 and 2012, Jacquelyn Hams, chairperson of the earth science department at Los Angeles Valley College in California, wrote in an email. “The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.”
Others praised his character. Marchant is “a person completely absent the stain of misogyny or unchecked anger,” wrote Berglund, who in addition to working with Marchant in Antarctica, administers the HHMI-supported BU science education program that he leads. Shivani Ehrenfeucht, 26, a second-year Ph.D. student in Marchant’s lab who has not been to Antarctica, says she was “completely shocked” by the allegations. “Nothing that I have heard lines up with the man that I know.” She calls Marchant “kind and genuine.”
Some scientists note that extreme isolation and the absence of institutional support at remote camps create conditions where abuse can flourish. “On campus, I can go speak to a trusted faculty member, the department chair, the ombudsperson,” says Meredith Hastings, an atmospheric chemist at Brown University and co-principal investigator on a $1.1 million NSF grant aimed at curbing sexual harassment in the geosciences. “Who do you go talk to when you are in the field?”
Lewis, who earned his Ph.D. with Marchant, noted in his letter: “In the office and classroom setting, Marchant’s behavior toward women was much less outrageous … he was careful and measured in his tone when others were present.” He adds that he never again saw from Marchant “the extreme behavior” of those early seasons, and says Marchant’s “attitude shifted to simply being distrustful” of women.
What is an institution’s responsibility when confronted with decades-old sexual harassment complaints? “The evidence is that the people who perpetrate this kind of behavior, it’s a pattern,” Hastings says.
Billie Dziech, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and an expert on sexual harassment on college campuses, argues that even if an abuser has changed over time, they are not absolved of responsibility for acts committed decades ago. “I have a moral responsibility to the young people I teach,” she says. “I don’t care if I did damage 10, 20 years ago: What I do today and what I did yesterday matters.”
In concluding her complaint against Marchant, Willenbring writes that her goal is to prevent “another young, female student bearing the brunt of his misogyny.” She added, in an interview with Science: “I just don’t want it to happen again.”
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Hate group targets enviro journalists.
The anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has announced plans to protest next week at educational institutions in Pittsburgh and at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference Downtown.
Westboro Baptist Church plans pickets in Pittsburgh, Pine-Richland HS next week
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PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
3:32 PM SEP 29, 2017
The anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has announced plans to protest next week at various educational institutions in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, at Pine-Richland High School and at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference Downtown.
A picket schedule listed on the group’s website indicates plans to protest Thursday afternoon at Carnegie Mellon University, Central Catholic High School, Oakland Catholic High School, the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University, all between 1:30 p.m. and 3:45 p.m.
Plans call for a 30-minute protest Friday at 8:30 a.m. at Pine-Richland High School, which has attracted controversy and national attention over policies pertaining to transgender students’ use of bathrooms, and then later that morning at the journalism conference at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh.
As a result of Westboro Baptist’s plans, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh has instituted an 11:30 a.m. dismissal Thursday for students at the two high schools.
The Rev. Nicholas Vaskov said the decision was made out of an “abundance of caution.”
“The time of the protest coincides with the normal dismissal time, and so the principals thought it was best to just have an early dismissal that day,” Father Vaskov said Friday. “Westboro Baptist protests, while hateful, tend to be peaceful, but you just never know what counter-protests, what kind of things might be going on.”
Bishop David Zubik, in a statement, called Westboro Baptist “a tiny, insular organization that preaches hatred of everyone who upholds the God-given dignity of every human being. Its teachings do not represent the Christian faith, and have been denounced by virtually all religious leaders, denominations and organizations.”
Pine-Richland notified parents of the picketing plans, which the school said would occur “on public property on Warrendale Road at the edge of the high school campus.” Classes will stay on a normal schedule but will remain inside during the protest, the school said, and local police would be on hand.
The Campus School, a day care center at Carlow University, announced plans to close Thursday “in the interest of safety.”
Pittsburgh police were notified earlier this month of Westboro Baptist’s plans. Timothy McNulty, spokesman for Mayor Bill Peduto, said the protesters do not need a permit.
“They expect to be sending only four or five people. As long as they are on public rights of way and keep them clear as much as possible they don’t need to,” Mr. McNulty said this week. “We counsel people just to completely ignore them...Oftentimes they say they’re coming and then they don’t, so it might be that this doesn’t even happen.”
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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
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The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
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Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
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Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
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We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
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The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
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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.
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These tiny beads are designed to soak up the sunblock chemical that's killing coral.
Your sunscreen might protect you, but it's killing coral. These algae and lobster-shell beads could help protect our reefs.
A tiny amount of oxybenzone, a UV-blocking chemical that’s commonly found in sunscreen, can stunt and deform the growth of coral reefs, sometimes killing the coral. In Hawaii, lawmakers are attempting to ban the sunscreens that contain the chemical so snorkelers don’t unwittingly destroy the reefs they visit.
But until that happens–and until people stop washing other oxybenzone-containing products, like some shampoos and dish detergents, down drains that lead to the ocean–researchers suggest that something else could help: tiny beads designed to suck the offending chemical out of the water.
The beads are made primarily from a biodegradable mix of an algae product and chitosan, a material produced from shrimp and lobster shells after fishing. They also include iron nanoparticles, making them magnetic enough to easily be pulled out of the water with a magnet after they’ve absorbed the oxybenzone. The structure of the beads is designed to soak up the chemical.
“You can modify the surface of the nanoparticles to target specific pollutants,” says Felix Roman, a chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico whose lab researches environmentally friendly ways to clean contaminated water. In the past, the lab has focused mostly on drinking water, but one of the graduate students there, Victor Fernandez, suggested using the technology to address one of the issues facing coral reefs.
Though the tiny beads–each approximately three millimeters wide, expanding to five millimeters in the water–couldn’t be practically used to clean a large volume of water, they could help in smaller critical areas.
“After a long day of people going to the beach, in the area of the coral reefs that you want to protect, you could have these beads dumped or dragged around with a boat,” says Roman. The beads could either be contained in a net or poured in the water and pulled back out with magnets.
While some of the other pressures facing coral reefs, like rising ocean temperatures, are difficult to address–some amount of warming is likely to continue even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped now–chemical pollution could be tackled more readily.
“We need to do something, and this may be a start,” says Roman. “It would take some time to do something to stop global warming. But if this contamination is also contributing significantly–we know that very small amounts are toxic to coral reefs–maybe we need to start doing things that we can do right now.”
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Freeze-dried dung gives clue to Asian elephant stress.
"Collecting fresh faecal samples is not as easy as it may sound," says researcher Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel.
"Collecting fresh faecal samples is not as easy as it may sound," says researcher Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel.
But her efforts have helped scientists in India devise a unique, non-invasive way to monitor the physiological health of wild elephants.
The key has been freeze-drying dung in the field to preserve the elephant's hormones.
As a result, scientists found stress levels in females were more conspicuous than in male elephants.
Over five years, Sanjeeta and her colleagues collected more than 300 samples from 261 elephants in the biodiversity-rich Western Ghats area.
She explained her technique: "I used to hide and observe till the elephant defecated and moved away."
She told the BBC: "These samples mean a lot to me."
Ethical approach
The aim of the research was to evaluate the influence of the elephants' body condition on glucocorticoid metabolites.
Animals such as elephants are subjected to various stressors in their lives, with factors including threats from predators, food shortages, drought and illness.
Whenever any animal faces stressful events, their body secretes hormones known as glucocorticoids.
These hormones are released into the circulatory system which eventually breaks them down into metabolites that are excreted through urine or faeces.
The researchers say that collecting blood samples to assess stress levels is neither ethical nor feasible, since immobilising the animals will cause additional stress, thus biasing the study.
"So glucocorticoid was measured using faecal or dung samples," said Sanjeeta.
The team found the glucocorticoid metabolites in the dung remained relatively stable up to six hours after defecation, though collecting samples as fresh as possible was preferred.
After six hours the dung starts to degrade through microbial activity. To prevent this, the collected samples were freeze-dried in the field and stored at -20 degrees Celsius for further analysis.
Ecological challenges
Stress levels for all elephants peaked during the dry season, when resources were low.
Senior researcher Prof Raman Sukumar said: "In a natural environment, large and long-ranging herbivorous mammals such as elephants may have to face various ecological challenges or stressful conditions.
"One such challenge that might impact their health is forage resource limitation, either in terms of quality or quantity."
Higher amounts of glucocorticoids generally indicated that the animal was more stressed, he said.
"Stress levels in female elephants were more conspicuous than in male elephants."
All mammalian systems would show a similar trend, the researchers say.
Dr Sukumar and his team claim that their study is the "first to examine the relationship between body condition, seasonality and stress in wild Asian elephants using large-scale faecal sample collection for assaying glucocorticoid metabolites".
The study also focused on finding possible answers to how elephant populations react to chronic stress and if superior nutrition from feeding on cultivated crops could help them reduce their physiological stress levels that may otherwise be enhanced through harassment by farmers trying to protect their fields.
They also examined the idea that body condition alone could act as an indicator of physiological health and fitness of an animal.
In the study, the animal's body condition was scored on a scale from one to five, with one indicating the animal was in a very poor state and five indicating the animal was obese.
The study conclusively found that the stress levels in the Asian elephants peaked during the dry season when resources were low. They also concluded that very poor or poor body condition was a good visual indicator of stress.
The research has been published in the Oxford Journal Conservation Physiology.
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Melting ice sheets are releasing pollutants in our water — bacteria could take some of that out of play.
Windborne microbes shifting in the snows of the great ice sheet of Greenland may be able to neutralize some of the industrial contaminants oozing out of the melting ice.
NEWS
Melting Ice Sheets Are Releasing Toxins in Our Water — Bacteria Could Take Some of That Out of Play
BY CYNTHIA WALLENTINE YESTERDAY 4:17 PM
Windborne microbes shifting in the snows of the great ice sheet of Greenland may be able to neutralize some of the industrial contaminants oozing out of the melting ice.
Greenland is a long way off, and we tend to dismiss what happens there as not impacting us here — out of sight, out of mind, as they say. But the problem — and the possibility of microbial help — has significance for anyone on the planet.
Situated in the Arctic, the Greenland ice sheet is the biggest span of ice on the planet, outside of Antarctica. With a size approaching the state of Alaska, the sheet is about 660,000 square miles in area, and close to two miles thick at its highest point. According to NASA, the ice sheet covering Greenland is warming up twice as fast as other places on the globe.
While melting glaciers and ice sheets conjure visions of large chunks of ice breaking off and roaring into the ocean, a large problem with the Greenland ice sheet is surface ice melt. Rivers of water flow over and through the sheet and out into the ocean, as shown below in a video taken by a UCLA research term during the massive Greenland ice sheet melt of 2012.
With its enormous size, the melt of the Greenland ice sheet alone could raise ocean levels around the world by a predicted 20–24 feet. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets hold about 99% of the freshwater available on the planet. Since the start of the 20th century, the sea level has risen eight inches from ice sheet melt, and two inches in just the last 20 years. The loss of ice pack in this area of the Arctic began in the 1990s and continues to accelerate.
Loss of the ice sheets has big environmental impacts. Water levels of some seaboards will rise more than others. The movement of freshwater into salty seawater has profound and complex implications for the entire planet — from enormous climate shifts to unseen and unpredictable swings in the marine environments that cover most of this planet.
A recent study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters discusses something that the Greenland ice sheet has stored along with water — pollution.
In addition to water, the Greenland ice sheet is also home to contaminants from locations around the world — stored in the "cryosphere." The cryosphere is the habitat of frozen water, snow, and ice, that cover many parts of the planet. The composition and life in and around the cryosphere depends on where it is formed and resides. Part of the life in the cryosphere of the Greenland ice sheet is microbial, and it is called " cryoconite."
The word "cryo" means cold and icy. Cryoconite is sand, dust, soot, and particulate that is usually darker than snow. You can see it in the UCLA video above. Wherever it lands, it absorbs more radiation and melts the area around it. Many types of microorganisms call that space home, including bacteria, algae, tardigrades, and more.
Don't Miss: Tardigrades Are the Earth's Toughest & Almost-Immortal Animals
As a wind-deposited dumping ground, the ice sheet holds pollution from European factories in the 1850s muddied up in the ice along with ash and soot from wildfires, and other toxins from around the world. Researchers have sampled toxic compounds from the ice, including mercury, lead, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (better known as DDT), and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). The toxic tide of human pollutants finds itself partly written in the ice sheets of Greenland, and seems to be mixing it up with its foxhole partners, the icy microbes that live there.
Cryoconite holes in ice.
Image by erectus/123RF
The cryoconite holes where pollution and debris have landed and melted into the ice are playing an increasingly complicated role on the Greenland ice sheet, and elsewhere. As microbial life grows in the bottom of the cryoconite holes, it spreads and darkens — contributing to more melting. Algae growing at the edges of the ice sheet creates "dark ice," that melts more rapidly, and releasing the contaminants stored there.
In the new study, researchers from the University of Greenland collected samples from five locations on the Greenland ice sheet between May and September 2013. By using DNA extraction, researchers analyzed the microbial samples and categorized into clusters. In the paper, study authors write: "To the best of our knowledge this is the largest shotgun metagenomic dataset of cryoconite to date and the first investigation that puts focus on the Greenland ice sheet surface as a contaminated habitat."
The team was able to categorize 29 genomes within the samples, including species from bacterial groups that include Chloroflexi, Cyanobacterium, Acidobacteria, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes. These bacteria and their relatives could be useful for bioremediation of the pollutants around them. Partial research findings include:
Some microbes already identified from contaminated environments in other regions of the world are related to organisms found in these samples. The ice sheet bacteria might be able to degrade iron and manganese, plus take some heavy metal contaminants out of play.
Other bacteria located in the ice sheet samples are related to microbes less sensitive to lead, arsenic, and possibly copper.
Still another set of microbes is related to organisms that tolerate copper and chlorophenol-contaminated groundwater (think pesticides).
Members of the Acidiphilium cryptum group that the team located in the sample have relatives found in an acidic coal mine lake in Germany that could reduce iron contaminants.
For the study authors, these findings show remarkable ability of the cryoconite microbes to "survive and utilize the presence of long-distance transported contaminants."
The study found that microbial communities from all the sampling sites in the Greenland ice sheet showed some ability to resist, or remediate, contamination melting out of the ice.
Melting ice sheet and icebergs on the Greenland ice sheet.
Image by Christine Zenino/Flickr
Researchers suggest further studies to determine if these newly identified microbial communities could be used to track and identify pollutants coming into the Arctic food chain from climate change-driven ice melt. Previous research has shown that the melting cryosphere — ice sheets — are releasing previously stored contaminants into "downstream ecosystems," in this case, global waters.
With the identification of contaminants historically deposited in the ice, researchers write, "the Greenland ice sheet should not be considered a pristine environment, and more attention should be paid to the potential release of anthropogenic contaminants to this fast-changing environment."
Translation? Heads-up people, human contamination that was locked in the ice is quickly making its way to an ocean near you. Let's hope the microbes get to it first.
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