Embracing Earth Day

April 22, 2018April 4, 2018 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

In January 1969, off the shores of Santa Barbara, California, on oil rig received a waiver to use a protective casing 61 feet shorter than Federal regulation allowed. The rig exploded with such force the sea floor cracked in 5 places. Three million gallons of crude left a 35-mile oil slick on California’s shores, and television brought images of ruined beaches and dying, oil-soaked animals into every home.

It was the flashpoint of the modern environmental movement.

So horrified were people that politicians banded together to pass the Environmental Protection Act (1970), the Clean Air and Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973) as they realized the impact pollution was having on the country. And spearheading that, as a result of that oil spill, Earth Day was born on April 22, 1970, to raise awareness and bring people together to discuss environmental issues.

The Troubling Truth

Earth in 1970 was a very sorry place. We knew we were in trouble since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought toxic issues to the forefront in 1962, but we did little. Air pollution killed scores of people through respiratory disease (a 1952 smog inversion killed 12,000 people in London. A 1966 attack in New York City killed 168 people in just 3 days. Smog.) Factories, farms, and mines dumped waste everywhere. Love Canal was killing children with 30-year old toxic waste. The Bald Eagle, symbol of our country, was hovering at less than 500 nesting pairs remaining, and (by 1987) the California Condor would drop to 27 remaining individuals, due to DDT (which made eggs fragile) and lead poisoning. The dropping rates of biodiversity were becoming obvious.

Environmental Victories

And with all the discussion and science, changes began to happen. DDT was banned in 1972. Leaded gasoline was phased out in 1973. Lead-based household paint was banned in 1978. Flame retardants were phased out of infant clothing (because babies have such capacity to spontaneously combust after sunset). Pesticides were examined, and many were quickly banned from use. And amazingly, the Earth began to recover. Today the Bald Eagle is off the endangered species list, with more than 5,000 nesting pairs noted – I almost drove off the highway when I saw one sitting on a light post in the Catskills. A living, wild, Bald Eagle. A few California Condors have been re-released into the wild, with more than 400 individuals now living wild or in captivity. New trucks and buses have 99% fewer emissions than those in 1970. The Hudson River now has fish again.

A Long Way Still to Go

While Earth Day and a commitment to protecting our environment – and thus ourselves – has spread around the world, the world remains a very, very polluted place. Toxins from the 70’s still lurk in the oceans. Oil spills remain in beach sand and marshes. The US boasts more than 1300 Superfund sites for government clean-up – 26 in Connecticut, and a former one here in Cheshire. Around the world, developing countries lack regulations and power to deal with toxic waste – China’s air quality is deadly due to coal-fired factories belching out pollution. Africa is poisoned by heavy metal mining. India suffers from toxic manufacturing chemicals. Lake Karachay in Russia is the most polluted place on Earth: an old dumping ground for nuclear waste, standing on the shores of the lake will kill a human in no more than an hour – far more deadly than the radioactive Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters, which will haunt us for thousands of years to come. Microbeads are choking animal life. Pesticides believed to be linked to some forms of autism still hide in lakes, and toys, furniture, and clothing manufactured in Asia can still contain lead and chemicals long-banned elsewhere.

The Importance of Individuals

While we may blow off our green recycling bins and never return our bottles, those little things, combined, make a big impact. Recycling aluminum cans saves 95% of the energy needed to produce new ones from ore. One ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees, lessening the greenhouse effect. One ton of recycled plastic saves 16 barrels of oil – $1,000 per ton. Multiply that by all the people in your town, your state, your region – and think how that snowballs. So celebrate your cleaner environment on April 22. Plant a tree. Pick up garbage on the side of the road. Recycle your bottles. Take a walk and look at all the diversity of trees and flowers and birds around you, and breathe deep of air that doesn’t burn your nose and eyes and make you cough (does anyone else remember the stink of the Uniroyal plant when the wind would shift in 1970’s summers?) Marvel at the sight of fish in the Naugatuck River, where nothing survived before. A clean planet is in our grasp. Give a hoot, don’t pollute, and save paper by checking these books out from the library!

Cloning Around

June 19, 2017July 17, 2017 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Cloning seems new, but it’s technically been around longer than man – identical twins can be considered clones, splitting a single fertilized egg into two or even four genetically identical individuals from that one egg. Modern cloning, wherein cells are taken from a living donor and a primitive cell is induced to become an organism traces back to just 1996, when Dolly the Sheep was cloned from a mammary cell of another sheep, the first time a body cell was used instead of a sex cell – an egg or sperm.

The success of Dolly induced a rush to clone everything. Companies still offer to clone your pet, so that when it dies you can have an exact replica. Zoos and conservationists tried vainly to clone endangered species. And, due to the discovery of some well preserved remains of extinct creatures such as the mammoth and Otzi, the ancient hunter, biologists, paleoarchaeologists, and dreamers leaped at the chance to resurrect ancient animals, or possibly even a Neanderthal (if you believe they are truly extinct. It’s been found that modern people of European descent may have as much as 5% Neanderthal DNA .

Is this even possible? Jurassic Park resurrected the dinosaurs, and outside of making a tidy sum for their producers (four films have brought in more than 3.6 billion dollars. Billion with a B, not counting book sales), we understand the havoc that created, substituting frog DNA for missing strands of dinosaur.

Two recent books discuss this possibility in thoughtful detail.

Resurrection Science, by M.R. O’Connor, is philosophical and easy to read. She discusses reasonable ethics regarding several endangered species, but leaves the questions open for the reader to decide. Should millions of people be denied electricity because a mere handful of frogs live only in six square feet of mist of one waterfall deep in the jungle? Should we be captive-breeding the Florida panther, only to release them into a concrete jungle so they can be hit by cars and shot by people freaking out when they see them? Species have been going extinct for millions of years; should we be trying to save them if we’ve destroyed the very environment that made them what they are? And by the time you artificially recreate animals, hand-rear them (because the parents are extinct), and then set four of them free – are they really the animal you were trying to save? Because they were artificially created, they don’t know what to do, how to attract mates, what or how to forage and eat, and can starve to death.

How to Clone a Mammoth, by biologist Beth Shapiro, is still easy to read, but contains a chapter on the hard-core dynamics involved in splicing and replicating DNA material. While Shapiro is among those who would love to see mammoths cloned, she’s deep in the know and admits it’s not feasible. Not only has not a single complete strand of viable DNA been recovered, no study takes into account the near impossibility of actually making the goal: in trying to resurrect the recently extinct Bucardo (a type of Spanish Ibex), using frozen cells taken from a then-living animal (not a 20,000 year old dried out one), 780 cells were transplanted to eggs, but only 407 developed into embryos. Two hundred eight were implanted into hosts, of which only seven became pregnancies (an efficacy rate of 3%). Of these, just ONE made it to term (0.4%). That one animal had a lung defect so severe it lived less than ten minutes. Cloning, depending on specie, has a terrible rate of success, with animals frequently dying of defects or cancers. Shapiro discusses the ethical concerns of what to do with a mammoth if you do create one – no one knows its behaviors. The MAMMOTH won’t even know how to act like a mammoth. Are they solitary or social? Will it pine in loneliness? What does it eat? Does that diet still exist? Where will you keep it? We’re bringing alive an animal we have no data on whatsoever. Is this fair to the animal? If not a mammoth, should we try to resurrect something else recently extinct whose absence IS having a deleterious effect on the environment? Shapiro paints a harsher ethical – and realistic – picture.

Technology is closer than ever to reaching de-extinction goals, and with increasing earth temperatures melting permafrost and releasing better-preserved specimens every year, the chance of finding usable DNA grows ever closer. Both of these books present a balanced side to the argument. Of course we WANT to bring back mammoths. The question remains: should we?

Six Picks – Great Environmental Reads

February 2, 2014February 1, 2014 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Debating global climate change is as useful as debating whether a tomato is a fruit. The climate has changed before, without man’s help, and it is definitely showing signs of a bad mood swing again. The question we need to think on is how will we survive that change, and what can we do to calm the changes as quickly as possible. Here are six excellent books on a variety of ecological issues currently plaguing us. You may not agree with all of them, but they are food for thought and quite worthy of debate.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson The grandmama of them all, Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 epic of how chemicals were destroying the planet. Her work led to a banning of DDT, which had nearly wiped out dozens of bird species such as the American Bald Eagle, by making eggs so brittle chicks could not survive. This is the book that started ecology, Earth Day, and so many other great causes. It was required reading in my high school; if you haven’t read it, it’s high time you did.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner The American West has been settled for barely 150 years. It was desert then, and with massive amounts of finite water diverted from rivers and aquifers, we’ve pared back tiny portions to create oases like Phoenix, Reno, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Despite trillions of dollars to build dams, drill wells, and pump water thousands of miles in pipes, the west still remains one of the driest places on Earth.

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel Plastic. It’s everywhere. Not only around us, but inside us as well. Freinkel shows us not only the impact plastic has on our daily lives , but how all that pervasive plastic affects us in ways we don’t realize – such as the soft plastics that leach out of IV lines. Some plastics are more toxic than others: generally the softer the plastic, the more toxic it is. And every time you heat your food in a plastic dish in the microwave, you put yourself at risk. No plastic ever degrades, it just crumbles, which creates hazards of its own. Plastics have their uses, yes, but at what cost to our health and environment?

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas In 1816, the climate change from the eruption of Mount Tambora was estimated at seven degrees. For 18 months, global weather patterns were upended, resulting in relentless heat in the wrong areas, extreme drought in others, monumental flooding, and snow and freezing temperatures twelve months out of the year as far south as Georgia. In Six Degrees, Lynas walks the reader through the changes the world can expect to experience with each degree of increase of average daily temperature. The picture is not pretty. If man has difficulty adapting to such major swings in such short times, how can we possibly expect plants and animals to adapt?

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett. Bad drinking water, misuse of antibiotics, deforestation, wars, refugees, poverty, and unsanitary living conditions all factor to create superbugs. The diseases have always been with us, but it’s the close proximity to carrier animals that allows the diseases to pass to man. Garrett outlines the path these diseases take, and how it’s not too late to prevent another devastating global plague. This book will scare you in all the right ways.

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. Ignore the dayglo movie. The Lorax, first published in 1971, is a wonderful way to introduce ecology and respect for nature to children. When the Trufula forests are in danger of extinction from overuse, it brings out the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” The Lorax is a fable about caring for nature, sustainability, and never taking more than we need.