This Changes Everything (69 page)

After about a week of monitoring, the pregnancy was diagnosed as ectopic, which
means that the embryo had implanted itself outside the uterus, most likely in a fallopian tube. I was rushed from the doctor’s office to the emergency room. Ectopics are a leading cause of maternal death, particularly in the developing world: if undiagnosed, the embryo keeps growing in its impossible location, causing a rupture and massive internal hemorrhaging. If caught in time, the somewhat creepy
treatment is one or more injections of methotrexate, a powerful drug used in chemotherapy to arrest cell development (and carrying many of the same side effects). Once fetal development has stopped, the pregnancy miscarries on its own, but it can take weeks.

It was a tough, drawn-out loss for my husband and me. But it was also a relief to learn that the miscarriage had nothing to do with anything
that had happened in the Gulf. Knowing that did make me think a little differently about my time covering the spill, however. As I waited for the pregnancy to “resolve,” I thought in particular about a long day spent on the
Flounder Pounder
, a sport fishing boat that a group of us had chartered as we went looking for evidence that the oil had entered the marshlands.

Our guide was Jonathan Henderson,
an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, a heroic local organization devoted to repairing the damage done to the wetlands by the oil and gas industry. As we navigated through the narrow bayous of the Mississippi River Delta, Henderson kept leaning far over the side of the boat to get a better look at the bright green grass. What concerned him most was not what we were all seeing—fish
jumping in fouled water, Roseau cane coated in reddish brown oil—but something much harder to detect, at least without a microscope and sample jars. Spring is the beginning of spawning season on the Gulf Coast and Henderson knew that these marshes were teeming with nearly invisible zooplankton and tiny juveniles that would develop into adult shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fin fish. In these fragile
weeks and months, the marsh grass acts as an aquatic incubator, providing nutrients and protection from predators. “Ev
erything is born in these wetlands,” he said.
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Unless, of course, something interferes with the process.

When fish are in their egg and larval phases, they have none of the defensive tools available to more mature animals. These tiny creatures travel where the tides carry them,
unable to avoid whatever poison crosses their path. And at this early stage of development, exquisitely fragile membranes offer no protection from toxins; even negligible doses can cause death or mutation.

As far as Henderson was concerned, the prospects for these microscopic creatures did not look good. Each wave brought in more oil and dispersants, sending levels of carcinogenic polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) soaring. And this was all happening at the absolute worst possible moment on the biological calendar: not only shellfish, but also bluefin tuna, grouper, snapper, mackerel, swordfish, and marlin were all spawning during these same key months. Out in the open water, floating clouds of translucent proto-life were just waiting for one of the countless slicks of oil and dispersants
to pass through them like an angel of death. As John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, put it: “Any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn’t have a chance.”
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Unlike the oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, which were being featured on the covers of the world’s newspapers that week, these deaths would attract no media attention, just
as they would go uncounted in the official assessments of the spill’s damage. Indeed, if a certain species of larva was in the process of being snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years—until those embryonic life-forms would have normally reached maturity. And then, rather than some camera-ready mass die-off, there would just be . . . nothing. An absence. A hole in the life cycle.

That’s what happened to the herring after the
Exxon Valdez
disaster. For three years after the spill, herring stocks were robust. But in the fourth, populations suddenly plummeted by roughly three quarters. The next year, there were so few, and they were so sick, that the herring fishery in Prince William Sound was closed. The math made sense: the herring that were in their egg and larval stages
at the peak of the disaster would have been reaching maturity right about then.
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This was the kind of delayed disaster that Henderson was worried about as he peered into the marsh grass. When we reached Redfish Bay, usually a sport-fishing paradise, we cut the engine on the
Flounder Pounder
and drifted for a while in silence, taking video of the oily sheen that covered the water’s surface.

As our boat rocked in that terrible place—the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets—I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage. When I learned that I too was in the early stages of creating an ill-fated embryo, I started to think of that time in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage.

It was then that I let go of the idea that infertility made me some sort of exile from nature, and began to feel what I can only describe as a kinship of the infertile. It suddenly dawned on me that I was indeed part of a vast biotic community, and it was a place where a great many of us—humans and nonhuman alike—found ourselves engaged in an uphill battle to create new living beings.

For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn, our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life. When drugs and chemicals are approved for safe use and exposure, risk assessments most often focus on the effects on adults. As biologist Sandra Steingraber has observed, “Entire regulatory systems
are premised on the assumption that all members of the population basically act, biologically, like middle-aged men. . . . Until 1990, for example, the reference dose for radiation exposure was based on a hypothetical 5'7” tall white man who weighed 157 pounds.” More than three quarters of the mass-produced chemicals in the United States have never been tested for their impacts on fetuses or children.
That means they are being released in the environment with no consideration for how they will impact those who weigh, say, twenty pounds, like your average one-year-old girl, let alone a half-pound, like a nineteen-week fetus.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 aban
don 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.

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.