Important Events in Slow-Motion

While we obsess over the “blame game” with the disastrous disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, the fate of our species hangs in the balance. Got your attention? Good. Ok, so maybe it doesn’t really hang on this, but perhaps we could find the energy to multi-task and start having some national discussion about long-term reproductive health hazards. Over the past several years, members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community in Sarnia, Ontario have reported fewer births of male children. This community is in proximity to a heavily industrialized area, including several large petrochemical, polymer, and chemical industrial plants. Investigators have confirmed these observations of declining sex ratios (ratio of male to female births), and have recommended that potential exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals be investigated further.

Our narrative-driven, 24/7 news cycle simply doesn’t address slow-motion, and in this case, intergenerational issues. Along with the exposure assessments, epidemiology and risk assessment of the potential chemical exposures, we should be initiating research and public dialog on the issues of long-term effects from declining sex ratios. Maybe this isn’t a real problem, with regard to fertility or genetic variability (genetic variability being something very useful for a species to respond to environmental changes; something we will understand less about over time as education in evolutionary biology is suppressed in this country); or maybe it’s a critical problem that should be addressed with the environmental health equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Also, what kinds of explorations should be made into the long-term societal changes resulting from declining sex ratios; is the experience with the Chinese (population control laws limiting couples to one child combined with a preference for male offspring have distorted the sex ratio) useful in this regard? What about the experiences of countries that lost millions of males in wars (for example, European countries and Russia in World Wars I and II)?