Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  From animals to us, fertility is dropping not by choice, but by exposure to molecules that never existed before. The term we’ve invented to describe them, gender-benders, is precisely accurate, but unfortunately too snappy to be taken as seriously as it truly is. This is a tragedy—and it is also nature rejecting an unnatural act, making life inhospitable for the actors.

  ii. The Chemistry Set

  It’s too early to know how seriously toxic our environment already is, because we are all part of the experiment to find out. Although every embryo on Earth—all species, not just our own—is now exposed to pervasive gender-bending molecules, thus far not every child is born autistic or gonadally challenged. If we stop depending on organochlorides, organochlorines, organophosphates, and the like, with luck we can purge them from our system—although this may be the definitive case of an evil genie escaping the bottle, as many appear indestructible. But there are other, simpler ways that nature will halt our unimpeded growth if we don’t take the reins ourselves. The most basic is the world’s oldest: cutting off our sustenance. The bottom line of the twenty-first century is that we will have less food—not more as we did, only briefly, during the Green Revolution.

  That is what an odds maker would bet on: We will not be able to grow, hunt, or harvest enough for the 7 billion we already are, let alone the 10.9 billion we’re racing toward. With weather now nearly impossible to predict, crop disasters are annual events on at least one continent per year. Hopes that a warmer world would actually enhance harvests are dashed by the reality of thresholds—averages of 84°F for corn; 86°F for soybeans—beyond which yields drop, as farmers from the United States to India are learning only too well.

  Likewise, cheerful assurances that farming would expand poleward, turning northern Canada and Siberia into breadbaskets, failed to consider that acidic, conifer-covered taiga soils would take many millennia to adapt to the loamy demands of grains. Our remaining topsoils—those not scoured away by winds and floods or turned to dust by drought—are overworked, overfertilized, overfumigated, and no longer yield what they did fifty years ago.

  Further predictions that, in lieu of exhausted land, we’ll reap limitless tons of algae from the seas, which we’ll fashion into acceptable simulacra of foods we favor, smack of extreme technofix fantasies. As anyone who loves sushi knows, seaweed has many tasty, nutritious uses, and doubtless there are more to discover. However, the logistics of growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing enough to provide mainstay nourishment for billions defy reality, beginning with energy costs—let alone retraining 10.9 billion palates to accept seaweed-based food substitutes. And the same acidification dissolving the shells of oyster larvae will disrupt the chemistry that until now has allowed wakame, nori, kelp, agar-agar, et al., to thrive along our shores.

  An animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, once offered a million dollars to whoever could invent and bring artificial meat to market. Although the award was a publicity spoof, scientists at both Oxford and Amsterdam University, among others, are dutifully trying. The idea of in vitro steak may appall some but appeal to others, if no animals are harmed and no forests are felled. But before firing up our barbecues, it’s best to recall that lab-grown nutrients won’t be conjured from thin air: even synthetic food requires a feedstock. The Oxford group hopes to grow muscle tissue from Cyanobacteria hydrolysate, a primitive algae; their Dutch counterparts, with substantial government backing, are trying pig stem cells—and Japanese researchers claim to have alchemized meat from proteins in human waste. Ick factors aside, producing ground beef artificially anytime soon would cost thousands of dollars a pound, and food scientists suspect that commercial production is at least three decades away.

  By then, assuming no catastrophes, we’ll be well past 9 billion, headed to 10 billion and more. Despite the reassurance of agro-biotechnology giant Monsanto—whose genetic modifications are already being outsmarted by microbes’ and insects’ evolutionary talents—being able to feed that many Homo sapiens is highly unlikely. We can’t feed the 7 billion we already are: a billion of us are chronically malnourished, and 16,000 of our children starve to death daily. Whether we could feed everyone if only we distributed food equitably, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and others insist, is moot in a world where food is mostly produced to profit from people, not to nourish them.

  Even granting markets their commodities, protest vegetarians, every human would have plenty of food if only the photosynthesis responsible for everything we eat (except salt) were not diverted into wasteful production of meat. Seventy percent of the grain grown in the United States, they claim, and 98 percent of the soy meal, goes to feed livestock,2 not people (as do 80 percent of the antibiotics sold). Nearly one-third of the planet’s ice-free landmass is used for either grazing or for growing animal feed. It takes about six pounds of grain (and roughly 2,400 gallons of water) to produce one pound of beef.3 Pork is a bit better, as pigs have only one stomach chamber versus cattle’s inefficient four. Their conversion rate of grain to edible flesh is 4:1; poultry conversion is half that.

  Factoring in energy costs and fertilizer, producing animal protein burns about eight times as much fuel as plant protein. But meat’s climatic contribution doesn’t stop there, or even with bovine belching and farting. An exhaustively comprehensive 2009 study by World Bank environmental specialists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang measured feed, flatulence, forest-to-field loss, packaging, cooking temperature, waste production, fluorocarbons used in meat refrigeration, carbon-intensive medical treatment of livestock and of meat eaters who suffer from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, and strokes, and even the cumulative CO2 exhaled by the world’s 19 billion chickens, 1.6 billion cattle and water buffalo, 1 billion pigs, and 2 billion sheep and goats.

  Their conclusion was that livestock and their by-products account for at least 51 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse emissions.

  Yet the vexation of vegan crusaders who in one stroke would cut global warming in half and eliminate world hunger by feeding grain directly to people is that most people aren’t interested. Beef demand continues to rise even faster than population, because as more people move to cities, they seek the satisfactions of modern life, including the beef-laden Western diet. By a maddening, market-driven paradox, if rich nations did choose to eat less meat, the price of meat will fall and poor nations would probably eat even more.

  A 2011 study published in Environmental Research Letters concluded that the Brazilian Amazon had 79 million head of cattle. “Fifteen years ago,” noted Kansas State University geographer and coauthor Marcellus Caldas, “it had less than 10 million.” In the previous five years alone, the portion of Brazil converted to soybean production to feed them nearly equaled the size of Switzerland. The warming of the climate abetted by all that hamburger is dramatically shrinking Andean and African glaciers that water crops in some of the world’s most populous regions. Himalayan glaciers, frozen as solid as the mountains they cover, will take longer to melt, but as global temperatures rise 2°C beyond the twentieth-century average, and keep going toward 5° and 6°C, meltwater flows to the Ganges and the Indus will increase over the next two decades—and then peak. Before 2100, at a time when Pakistan’s population is projected to top half a billion, the Indus could be going dry—two facts in stark contradiction with each other. Either millions of Pakistanis will die, or they will be at war with their neighbors India, Afghanistan, and Iran, which will be suffering similar disasters.

  Australia has no glaciers, and has fewer than 23 million people in an area roughly the size of the contiguous lower forty-eight of the United States, which hold 315 million. Yet it has grown so desiccated that it is locked in national debate over whether to cap its population by halting immigration. Even the notion of banning beef, practically a national sacrilege, has been broached. In the meantime, Australian coastal cities are investing US$13 billion in desalinization plants that will require enormous amounts of
fuel to work around the clock. To economize, Australia almost certainly will use its own plentiful resource, black coal, further exacerbating climbing temperatures and altered climate that Australians no longer doubt.

  During the parched Texas summer, the third biggest U.S. city, Houston, is already mostly drinking effluent from Dallas and Fort Worth, whose wastewater discharges constitute nearly the entire downstream flow of the Trinity River, Houston’s principal source. The American West’s main artery, the Colorado River, hasn’t reached its delta since 1984. After two decades of reduced snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers report, there is an even chance that by 2017 levels in Lake Mead, the Colorado’s main reservoir, will no longer cover the Hoover Dam’s turbines. By 2021, the lake could essentially be gone, outflows having fatally exceeded the inflows that replenish it. In 2010, Lake Mead was already 100 feet lower than in 2000, nearly down to where one of two intakes supplies water to Las Vegas. With the second intake not far below, Las Vegas began racing to dig a 20-foot-high tunnel three miles under the lake, in order to install a third intake 140 feet lower, lest it go dry.

  But that may only buy the city—America’s fastest growing until the 2008 real estate collapse—another decade or less, especially since Las Vegas is only one of eight cities over a million that depend on Colorado River water.4 If levels get so low that 25 million downstream voters in California demand what little Colorado River water remains, “The nation would have to seriously discuss a stair-step exchange,” said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in 2009. In that scenario, Nevada would take Denver’s Colorado River allotment, because Denver, in turn, would take Nebraska and Kansas’s share of the Platte River, because those states could recharge their depleted Ogallala Aquifer by siphoning water from the Mississippi, and so on ever eastward.

  It should come as no shock that this grand scheme is probably doomed, if not from astronomically prohibitive engineering expenses, then by the fact that states bordering the Great Lakes, also now at historic low levels, have already passed laws forbidding any other drainage basin from trying to stick straws into Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, et al. In 2008, the state of Georgia was so desperate for water that it contemplated resurrecting a 150-year-old survey dispute that would have pushed its northwestern corner a mile farther north, to the banks of the Tennessee River. The state of Tennessee was not amused, nor charitably inclined.

  The upshot is that in the twenty-first century, our species will be subjected to global water torture: alternately raising unaffordable dikes to hold it back, then desperately trying to coax it from any possible source. But like topsoil, there is no practical way to create more fresh water. Removing salt from seawater—the result of millions of years of rain and runoff dissolving rocks en route to the sea—is undercut by the cost of the energy required, and defeated by the distance that separates most arable land from the oceans. Desalination may be the most literal example of how the technological species that we’ve become stands in defiance of nature: As University of California–Santa Cruz Director of Integrated Water Research Brent Haddad told the Santa Cruz Sentinel after a seven-year study of the economic and ecological effects of desalination, “We are reversing the water cycle that has flowed in one direction since the beginning of Earth.”

  Among the many tricks we will try to keep fitting ourselves onto this planet, there is one that we already know. The technology is cheaper than all the others by many orders of magnitude. It is reducing the numbers of bodies to feed by managing our reproduction, before nature steps in to do that for us.

  It is not perfect technology: for a small percentage of women, the chemistry of contraception causes migraines or depression, although the copper-T IUD is a benign alternative, easily reversible as long as a trained medical practitioner is handy. Those chemical effects are not confined solely to women’s bodies, because while nearly half of estrogen is metabolized, the rest is excreted. Flushed away, a portion is removed in sewage treatment, but the rest finds its way into the ecosystem.

  Some of the gender-bending estrogens feminizing not just minnows but trout, bass, and perch in lakes and rivers worldwide are identical to the ones in oral contraceptives. In every big river of North America except the Yukon, female egg cells are now common in two-thirds or more of male largemouth and smallmouth bass. In several studies in the United States, Canada, and England, however, research indicates that, compared to industrial and agrochemical sources, female contraceptives are a minuscule part of the artificial hormonal assault on the environment.

  That doesn’t mean that current technology needn’t be improved; however we can minimize chemical exposure to women and to the ecosystem, the better. Among the most promising options is to counter conception through a far simpler pathway: by short-circuiting male sperm delivery.

  Two possibilities are male versions of the Pill, which, unlike their female counterparts, don’t manipulate hormones. One, already tested at Kansas State University on rats, rabbits, and monkeys, uses a compound called H2-gamendazole that stops sperm from forming in men’s semen without reducing their sex drive, and is reversible within weeks. The other oral treatment uses a compound developed in the Bradner Laboratory at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute called JQ1, which targets a testis-specific protein to lower sperm numbers and retard their swimming capability. Again, test mice show no lowered libidos, and regain fertility when they stop taking it.

  Two of the most imaginative approaches aren’t chemical, but mechanical interventions. Risug—reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance—is already offered in several cities in India, and as of 2012 was in FDA trials in the United States. It involves a fifteen-minute outpatient operation using local anesthetic via a tiny incision in the scrotum to reach the vas deferens tube, into which the doctor injects an inexpensive polymer gel. Within three days, the gel forms a lining that allows semen to pass normally, but electrolytically destroys sperm. The spermicidal effect lasts for ten years, but can be reversed by injecting a baking soda solution. The same Indian developer has been testing another method at the University of North Carolina that uses ultrasound to heat testes for fifteen minutes, resulting in six months of sterility in test animals.

  Each of these techniques portends to be cheaper and safer both for humans and the environment than female chemical contraception. For a woman in a steady relationship with a willing partner, it could shift the stress of birth control from her uterus, conserving that organ for the sole use that nature intended. Reliance on male contraception would also, however, mean relinquishing control over her own reproduction, inserting a new test of trust into intergender dynamics. For men, it could mean liberation from the interruptive frustration of using condoms—although, outside of monogamy, there would be a loss of protection from sexually transmitted disease. As long as one epidemic that threatens human existence, HIV, is spread through seminal fluids, protection and contraception must remain related but separate issues.

  For the world, simple, nontoxic male contraception would mean a powerful form of population restraint, one which would far more equitably share responsibility for planning families. The politicization of contraception, born of gender wars waged by extremist Catholic and evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and ultra-Orthodox Jews, may be befuddled should anyone try prohibiting men from choosing whether to use it. Male pills and instantly reversible vasectomies will be interesting, welcome new elements in the complex mix of managing our future, even as we consummate our desires.

  iii. Whither Termination

  In 1971, Dr. Malcolm Potts traveled from London to California to meet an ex-convict named Harvey Karman. Potts, a Cambridge don, was an obstetrician and a PhD in embryology. Karman was an abortionist.

  The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the United States as a fundamental right was still two years away, although in some states such as California, abortions were permitted in cases of
rape, or if the health of the mother was at stake. Since he was not a medical doctor, Karman could not legally perform those, but he was well known to California doctors who did. In the mid-1950s, while researching emotional aspects of therapeutic abortion as a psychology graduate student at UCLA, Karman learned that a fellow student had died from a botched illegal abortion. Another, finding herself pregnant, committed suicide. He began an underground service, taking women to Mexico for clandestine abortions. Dismayed by unhygienic conditions there and exorbitant fees, he began performing them himself in motel rooms, for which he eventually spent two and a half years in state prison.

  Undaunted, he became a repeat offender and advocate, openly campaigning for abortion rights. He also invented something revolutionary: a manual syringe to conduct abortions by vacuum aspiration. Although machine-powered vacuum aspiration was already becoming preferred to scraping a woman’s uterine lining, Karman’s invention had prominent advantages. Being manual, it was so silent that a woman often wasn’t even aware that the procedure was taking place. Also, it required no costly electric pump, just a cheap reusable fifty-milliliter vacuum syringe. Most important, Karman had designed an attachment made of soft plastic tubing that replaced the conventional rigid metal curette. This flexible cannula, so thin that it avoided the need for dilation, was far more comfortable and far less traumatic, and minimized the chance of a perforated uterus.

  By the time Roe v. Wade passed, Karman had trained doctors from throughout America in its use, as well as international physicians such as Malcolm Potts. Like Karman, Dr. Potts had become interested in abortion as a grad student during the 1950s. While doing twenty-four-hour obstetric duty at a Cambridge hospital, nearly every night he would be roused to perform a D&C. He wondered how many were spontaneous miscarriages, and how many were bungled induced abortions.