OUR STOLEN FUTURE:
Chemicals in Long Island Waters Disrupt Life’s Normal Hormones
By Karl Grossman
A dozen years ago, Theo Colborn, senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, along with fellow scientist John Peterson Myers and environmental journalist Dianne Dumanoski, published Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival?—A Scientific Detective Story.
The groundbreaking book was about how synthetic chemicals that mimic natural hormones have thrown a monkey wrench into nature. Normal reproductive and development processes—in a variety of life including people—were being disrupted. They were causing sexual abnormalities, birth defects and reproductive failures. Male sperm counts had dropped precipitously. “By threatening the ability to reproduce, these chemicals may be invisibly undermining the human future,” maintained the book.
Its foreword is by then Vice President Al Gore who wrote that “Our Stolen Future takes up where” Rachel Carson in her Silent Spring “left off” providing a “vivid” account of “emerging scientific research about how a wide range of manmade chemicals disrupt delicate hormone systems.”
If you think global warming is scary, consider this other inconvenient truth. And, although The New York Times in its review of Our Stolen Future said “its subject is so important and its story so powerful that it deserves to be read by the widest possible audience,” I suspect most people are still unfamiliar with it.
Dr. Anne McElroy, formerly director of New York Sea Grant and now a professor in Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, gave a presentation last month on how these chemicals were impacting on fish.
Speaking at Stony Brook Southampton on “the feminization of fish,” Dr. McElroy listed many of the bad chemical actors involved—including PCBs, components of many pesticides, plasticizers, de-greasers, flame retardants, ingredients in detergents—and “a lot of things we take into our body” such as steroids and birth control pills. Much of this, through sewage treatment plants and run-off, “ends up in marine waters.
These constitute endocrine disruptors—imitating life’s normal hormones. Hormones serve as “messengers” that “control most of the major processes” in living organisms. They have to be emitted “in the right amount at the right place and the right time,” she explained. And “anything that can alter hormone levels or function” can be highly destructive.
The onslaught of these chemicals on life today has become very destructive—as reflected in fish. Dr. McElroy spoke of her research that used Shinnecock Bay in Southampton Town as a control and examined flounders in Jamaica Bay—impacted by a sewage treatment plant and other sources of pollution in Brooklyn and Queens including Kennedy Airport (de-icers used on planes are endocrine disruptors).
Compared to Shinnecock Bay where male and female flounders were being reproduced in equal amounts, in Jamaica Bay the research was showing 12 females to each male—and in the males, female characteristics.
She spoke of a test in Canada in which there was the controlled introduction of “low levels” of an endocrine disruptor—not much is needed—directed at minnows in a lake. In three years, there was a “population crash” of minnows. “Reproduction had shut down.”
Research by a graduate student in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Studies (Dr. McElroy is director of its graduate program) has been examining the impact of endocrine disruptors on Atlantic silversides at 12 Long Island sites. From the far west in New York City to Peconic Bay and as far east at Orient, a “statistically significant” picture—impacts on the fish in the west and less and then none going east—has been shown.
I remember as a boy fishing with my father on a rowboat in Jamaica Bay in the 1950s—and catching flounder. The biologically awesome changes detailed by Dr. McElroy and in Our Stolen Future have come in a relative flash.
We must become fully aware of what’s happening—and demand strong and comprehensive action. The authors of Our Stolen Future have continued their work through a superb website, www.ourstolenfuture.org. And, Dr. McElroy will be continuing her research.
As the www.ourstolenfuture.org website declares: “The simple truth is that the way we allow chemicals to be used in society today means we are performing a vast experiment, not in the lab, but in the real world, not just on wildlife but on people.”
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, hosts the nationally-aired television program Enviro Close-Up, and is the author of books on the environment and energy including COVER UP: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power.
