by Naomi Klein
And yet when clusters of infertility and infant illness arise, they very often are the first warning signs of a broader health crisis. For instance, for years it seemed that while there were certainly water and air safety issues associated with fracking, there was no clear evidence that the practice was seriously impacting human health. But in April 2014, researchers with the Colorado School of Public Health and Brown University published a peer-reviewed study looking at birth outcomes in rural Colorado, where a lot of fracking is under way. It found that mothers living in the areas with the most natural gas development were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects than those who lived in areas with no gas wells near their homes. They also found some evidence that high levels of maternal exposure to gas extraction increased the risks of neurological defects.8
At around the same time, academics at Princeton, Columbia, and MIT gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, where they presented preliminary findings of a still unpublished study based on Pennsylvania birth records from 2004 to 2011. As Mark Whitehouse of Bloomberg View reported (he was one of the few journalists who saw their talk), “They found that proximity to fracking increased the likelihood of low birth weight by more than half, from about 5.6 percent to more than 9 percent. The chances of a low Apgar score, a summary measure of the health of newborn children, roughly doubled.”9
These kinds of infant health impacts—and much worse—are all too familiar in communities that live in closest proximity to the dirtiest parts of our fossil fuel economy. For instance, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, which is located just south of the industrial city of Sarnia in southern Ontario, has been the subject of intense scientific scrutiny because of its “lost boys.” Up until 1993, the number of boys and girls born to the small Indigenous community was pretty much in keeping with the national average, with slightly more boys than girls. But as people continued living near the petrochemical plants, which had earned the region the nickname “Chemical Valley,” that changed. By 2003, the day care was filled with girls and just a handful of boys, and there were years when the community could barely scrape together enough boys to form a baseball or hockey team. Sure enough, a study of birth records confirmed that by the end of the period between 1993 and 2003, twice as many girls as boys had been born on the reserve. Between 1999 and 2003, just 35 percent of Aamjiwnaang’s births were boys—“one of the steepest declines ever reported in the ratio of boys to girls,” as Men’s Health magazine revealed in a 2009 exposé. Studies also found that 39 percent of Aamjiwnaang’s women had had miscarriages, compared with roughly 20 percent in the general female population. Research published in 2013 showed that hormone-disrupting chemicals may be to blame, since women and children in the area had higher-than-average levels of PCBs in their bodies.10
I heard similar fertility horror stories in Mossville, Lousiana, a historic African-American town near Lake Charles. More than half of its two thousand families have left in recent years, fleeing the relentless pollution from their uninvited next-door neighbors: a network of massive industrial plants that convert the oil and gas pumped out of the Gulf into petroleum, plastics, and chemicals. Mossville is a textbook case of environmental racism: founded by freed slaves, it was once a safe haven for its residents, who enjoyed comfortable lives thanks in part to the rich hunting and fishing grounds in the surrounding wetlands. But beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, state politicians aggressively courted petrochemical and other industries with lavish tax breaks, and one giant plant after another set up shop on Mossville’s doorstep, some just a few hundred feet from the clapboard homes. Today, fourteen chemical plants and refineries surround the town, including the largest concentration of vinyl production facilities in the U.S. Many of the hulking structures appear to be made entirely of metal pipes; spires in menacing chemical cathedrals. Roaring machinery spews emissions twenty-four hours a day, while floodlights and flares ignite the night sky.11
Accidental leaks are commonplace and explosions are frequent. But even when factories are running smoothly, they spew approximately four million pounds of toxic chemicals into the surrounding soil, air, and groundwater each year.12 Before arriving in Mossville, I had heard about cancer and respiratory illnesses, and I knew that some residents have dioxin levels three times the national average. What I was unprepared for were the stories of miscarriages, hysterectomies, and birth defects.
Debra Ramirez, who after years of struggle was finally forced to abandon her home and move to Lake Charles, described Mossville to me as “a woman’s womb of chemicals. And we’re dying in that womb.” Having just left BP’s aquatic miscarriage, I found the idea of a toxic womb particularly chilling. It became more so after Ramirez shared part of her own family’s health history. She had undergone a hysterectomy three decades earlier. So had all three of her sisters and her daughter. “It was just repeating from generation to generation,” she said. Five hysterectomies in one family might have been bad genetic luck. But then Ramirez showed me footage from a town hall special that CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta had hosted on this “toxic town.” On camera, Ramirez told the visiting correspondent that she had had a total hysterectomy, “like most young women do in this area.” Taken aback, Gupta asked the rest of the women in the room whether they had had hysterectomies—multiple women answered yes, nodding silently. And yet despite the many studies that have sought to document the impact of toxins on human health in Mossville, not one has looked closely at their impact on fertility.13
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. As a culture, we do a very poor job of protecting, valuing, or even noticing fertility—not just among humans but across life’s spectrum. Indeed vast amounts of money and cutting-edge technology are devoted to practices that actively interfere with the life cycle. We have a global agricultural model that has succeeded in making it illegal for farmers to engage in the age-old practice of saving seeds, the building blocks of life, so that new seeds have to be repurchased each year. And we have a global energy model that values fossil fuels over water, where all life begins and without which no life can survive.
Our economic system, meanwhile, does not value women’s reproductive labor, pays caregivers miserably, teachers almost as badly, and we generally hear about female reproduction only when men are trying to regulate it.
BP’s Legacy and a “Handful of Nothing”
If we tend to neglect the impact our industrial activities are having on human reproduction, the more vulnerable nonhumans fare significantly worse. A case in point is the risk assessment report that BP produced ahead of the Gulf Coast disaster. Before securing approval to drill in such deep water, the company had to produce a credible plan assessing what would happen to the ecosystem in the event of a spill, and what the company would do to respond. With the risk minimization that is one of the industry’s hallmarks, the company confidently predicted that many adult fish and shellfish would be able to survive a spill whether by swimming away or by “metaboliz[ing] hydrocarbons,” while marine mammals like dolphins might experience some “stress.”14 Conspicuously absent from the report are the words “eggs,” “larvae,” “fetus,” and “juvenile.” In other words, the working assumption, once again, was that we live in a world where all creatures are already fully grown.
That, unsurprisingly, proved to be a tragic assumption. Just as was feared in the early days of the spill, one of the most lasting legacies of the BP disaster may well be an aquatic infertility crisis, one that in some parts of the Gulf could reverberate for decades if not longer. Two years after the spill, Donny Waters, a large-scale fisherman in Pensacola, Florida, who primarily catches red snapper and grouper, reported, “We don’t see any significant numbers of small fish”—a reference to the young fish that would have been in their larval stage at the peak of the disaster. That had not yet impacted the commercial catch since small fish are released anyway. But Waters, who holds one of the largest individual fishing quotas in the Pensacola area, worried that when 2
016 or 2017 rolls around—when those small fish would normally be reaching maturity—he and his colleagues will be hauling in their lines only to “come up with a handful of nothing.”15
One year after the spill, shrimpers, crabbers, and oystermen working in some of the most affected parts of Louisiana and Mississippi also began to report sharply reduced catches—and in some areas, that female crabs were relatively scarce, and that many of those caught during spawning season didn’t have any eggs. (Some shellfish catches in these areas have shown improvement, but reports of missing or egg-less female crabs have persisted; similar signs of reproductive impairment have been observed in the shrimp and oyster fisheries.)16
The precise contribution of the spill to these fertility problems remains unclear as much of the research is still incomplete—but a growing body of scientific data adds weight to anecdotal reports from of fishing crews. In one study, for instance, researchers sampled oysters after the spill and found alarmingly elevated concentrations of three heavy metals contained in petroleum—with 89 percent of the oysters also displaying a form of metaplasia, or stress-related tissue abnormality that is known to interfere with reproduction. Another study, this one by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, tested the impact of BP oil mixed with Corexit on rotifers—microscopic animals at the bottom of the food web—which “provide food for baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.” It found that even tiny amounts of the mixture “inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent.”17
Perhaps most worrying are the findings of Andrew Whitehead, a biology professor at the University of California, Davis, who has conducted a series of studies with colleagues on the impact of BP’s oil on one of the most abundant fish in the Gulf marshes, the minnow-sized killifish. He found that when killifish embryos were exposed to sediments contaminated with BP oil (including sediment samples collected over a year after the spill), “these embryos are getting whacked. . . . They’re not growing, developing properly, they’re not hatching out properly. They’ve got cardiovascular system developmental problems, their hearts aren’t forming properly.”18
Missing fish don’t tend to make the news; for one thing, there are no pictures, just a “handful of nothing,” as Waters feared. But that is decidedly not the case when baby dolphins start dying en masse, which is what happened in early 2011. In the month of February alone, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service reported that thirty-five dead baby dolphins had been collected on Gulf Coast beaches and in marshes—an eighteen-fold increase from the usual number (only two dead baby dolphins are found in a typical February). By the end of April 2014, 235 baby bottlenose dolphins had been discovered along the Gulf Coast, a staggering figure since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the “true death toll”; the rest are never found.19
After examining the dolphins, NOAA scientists discovered that some of the calves had been stillborn, while others died days after birth. “Something has happened that these animals are now either aborting or the animals are not fit enough to survive,” said Moby Solangi, the executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies (IMMS) in Gulfport, Mississippi, and one of the scientists investigating the incidents.I20
The deaths took place during the first birthing season for bottlenose dolphins since the BP disaster. That means that for much of their twelve-month gestation period, these calves were developing inside mothers who very likely swam in waters polluted with oil and chemical dispersant and who may well have inhaled toxic fumes when they surfaced to breathe. Metabolizing hydrocarbons is hard work and could have made the dolphins significantly more vulnerable to bacteria and diseases. Which might explain why, when NOAA-led scientists examined twenty-nine dolphins off the Louisiana coast, they found high levels of lung disease, as well as strikingly low levels of cortisol, an indication of adrenal insufficiency and a severely compromised ability to respond to stress. They also found one dolphin that was pregnant with a five-month-old “nonviable” fetus—an extremely rare occurrence in dolphins, indeed one undocumented in the scientific literature up until this incident. “I’ve never seen such a high prevalence of very sick animals—and with unusual conditions such as the adrenal hormone abnormalities,” said Lori Schwacke, lead author of a paper on these findings that was published in late 2013. Commenting on the study, NOAA warned that the dolphins would “likely” face “reduced survival and ability to reproduce.”21
The spill wasn’t the only added stress these animals faced in this fateful period. The winter of 2010–2011 saw an abnormally heavy snowfall in the region, a phenomenon scientists have linked to climate change. When the huge snowpack melted, it sent torrents of freshwater into the Gulf of Mexico, where it not only dangerously lowered salinity and temperature levels for mammals accustomed to warm saltwater, but likely combined with the oil and dispersant to create an even more dangerous mess for dolphins and other cetaceans. As Ruth Carmichael, senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, explains, “These freight trains of cold fresh water may have assaulted [the dolphins], essentially kicking them when they were already down.”22
This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere. And catastrophic when these two forces combine in one ecosystem, as they did that winter on the Gulf Coast.
Disappearing Babies in a Warming World
In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines. Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.
For sea turtles—an ancient species that managed to survive the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs—the problem is that the sand in which females bury their eggs is becoming too hot. In some cases, eggs are reaching lethal temperatures and many eggs aren’t hatching at all, or else they are hatching but mostly as females. At least one species of coral is poised for a similar climate-related reproductive crisis: when water temperature reaches above 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit), egg fertilization stops. Meanwhile, high temperatures can make reef-building coral so hungry that they reabsorb their own eggs and sperm.23
For oysters along the Pacific Coast of Oregon and Washington State, the problem in recent years is that the water is acidifying with such alarming rapidity that larvae are unable to form their tiny shells in the earliest days of life, leading to mass die-offs. Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that before the die-offs began, “What we knew at the time was that many organisms as adults are sensitive to acidification. What we did not know is that the larval stages of those organisms are much more sensitive.” By 2014, the same problem was leading to a collapse of scallops off British Columbia. One of the largest scallop farming operations on the coast reported that some ten million mollusks had died in its operation alone.24
On land, climate change is also hitting the very young first and worst. In West Greenland, for instance, there has been a dramatic decrease in birth and survival rates of caribou calves. It seems that rising temperatures have changed the growing patterns of plants that are the source of critical energy for caribou calves, as well as for their mothers during reproduction and lactation. Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early. In Maine, Arctic tern chicks are starving to death for similar reasons: they rely on small fish that have fled for colder waters. Meanwhile, there are reports that around Canada’s Hudson Bay, birth dens of polar bears are collapsing in the thawing permafrost, which leaves tiny cubs dangerously exposed.25
As I
delved into the impacts of climate change on reproduction and youth, I came across many more such examples of bottom-up threats, endangering the youngest members of species ranging from wolverine cubs (whose parents are having trouble storing food in ice) to peregrine falcon chicks (which are catching hypothermia and drowning in unusual downpours) to Arctic ring seal pups (whose snowy birthing dens, like those of polar bears, are threatened).26 Once this pattern is recognized, it seems obvious: of course the very young are much more vulnerable than adults; of course even the most subtle environmental changes will hurt them more; and of course fertility is one of the first functions to erode when animals are under stress. And yet what struck me most in this research was the frequency with which all this came as a surprise, even to the experts in the field.
In a way, these various oversights make sense. We are used to thinking about extinction as a process that affects a species or cluster of species of every age group—the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs, or the way that our ancestors hunted a range of animals until they were all gone. And we still extinguish species that way, of course. But in the age of fossil fuels, we can render the earth less alive by far more stealthy means: by interfering with the capacity of adults to reproduce in the first place, and by making the first days of life simply too difficult to survive. No corpses, just an absence—more handfuls of nothing.
Fallow Time
A few months after I stopped going to the fertility clinic, a friend recommended that I see a naturopathic doctor who had helped several people she knew to get pregnant. This practitioner had her own theories about why so many women without an obvious medical reason were having trouble conceiving, and they were radically different from the ones I had come across so far.