This Changes Everything (70 page)

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 2016 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.
^I
20

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.

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.

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.

Carrying a baby is one of the hardest physical tasks we can ask of ourselves, she pointed out, and if our
bodies decline the task, it is often a sign that they are facing too many other demands—high-stress work that keeps us in a near constant state of “fight or flight,” perhaps, or the physical stress of having to metabolize toxins or allergens, or just the stresses of modern life (or some combination of all of the above). With the body in overdrive fending off these real and perceived threats, it
can start sending signals that it does not have the excess energy necessary to build and nourish a whole new life.

Most fertility clinics use drugs and technology to override this bodily resistance, and they work for a lot of people. But if they do not (and they often do not) women are frequently left even more stressed, with their hormones more out of whack, than when they began the process.
The naturopath proposed an approach that was in every way the mirror opposite: try to figure out what might be overtaxing my system and then remove those things, and hope that a healthier, more balanced endocrine system will start sending some more welcoming signals to babies-to-be.

After a series of tests, I was diagnosed with a whole mess of allergies I didn’t know I had, as well as with adrenal
insufficiency and low cortisol levels (the same diagnosis, weirdly, that the NOAA scientists made for the Gulf Coast dolphins). The doctor asked me a lot of questions about my lifestyle, including how many hours I had spent in the air over the past year. “Why,” I asked warily, knowing that the answer was going to be ugly. “Because of the radiation. There have been some studies done with flight
attendants that show it might not be good for fertility.” Great. Turns out flying was not just poisoning the atmosphere, it may have been poisoning me too.
²⁷

I admit that I was far from convinced that this new approach would result in a pregnancy, or even that the science behind it was wholly sound. And I was keenly aware that attributing infertility to female stress has an extensive and inglorious
history. “Just relax,” women who cannot conceive have long been told (in other words: it’s all in your head/all your fault). Then again, the doctors at the fertility factory had clearly been engaged in their own version of highly lucrative guesswork, and after that experience, this doctor was a tonic.
^II
28
Finally someone was trying to figure out
why
my infertility was happening, instead of trying
to force my body to do something it clearly was rejecting. As for the downsides, they reminded me of a popular cartoon about global warming: A man stands up at a climate summit and asks, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” If all this adrenal stuff turned out to be a big hoax, the worst thing that could happen is that I’d end up healthier and less stressed out.

So I did it all. The yoga, the meditation, the dietary changes (the usual wars on wheat, gluten, dairy, and sugar—as well as various more esoteric odds and ends). I went to acupuncture and drank bitter Chinese herbs, and my kitchen counter became a gallery of powders and supplements. I also left my urban home in Toronto and moved to rural British Columbia, a ferry ride from the nearest city and a
twenty-minute drive to the nearest hardware store. This is the part of the world where my parents live, where my grandparents are buried, and where I have always gone to write and rest. I would see what it was like to live there full-time.