Читать книгу 50 Ways to F**k the Planet - David Glick - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAGENDA
* Dole out the contraceptive pill
* Turn sealife female
* De-fertilize fish
* Trout off the menu
Maybe the world will not end with a bang after all, but with a whimper. Instead of Armageddon and its attendant boiling seas and titanic ructions, maybe we’ll just finish up trapped in a unisex world, wondering where the next generation will come from. Already, Mother Nature has started the ball rolling. The feminization of wildlife is well underway amid welcome warnings that this could dismantle an evolutionary process which has taken 3.5 billion years to perfect.
You must aid the process. The experiment will start with fish and your plan is to transform all male freshwater fish into females, a move that will prove to be a less than progressive step for the future of the fish population. Although tests on fish breeding patterns are relatively rare, consensus and common sense dictate that making any species all female will have a profound effect on reproductive patterns. The sexual emancipation of the human female has handed you the perfect weapon. Millions claim that the contraceptive pill is a blessing. Not many expected it to prompt an environmental crisis.
The bitterest pill
Just above the West Yorkshire town of Castleford, close to the banks of the slow-moving River Aire, protrudes a pipe. Passers-by spare barely a second glance for yet another sewage outfall. They should take more notice. Or at least the blokes should. They are witnessing the cusp of the new sexual revolution. Within these brackish waters something odd is happening to fishing tackle, and we’re not talking rods and floats. The Aire’s male fish are turning into women, with tests indicating that 100 per cent of male fish show evidence of feminization.
The nondescript pipe above Castleford is dispensing, quite literally, the waste of humanity. In West Yorkshire, like in most places, quite a few women take precautions, and so their urine contains the female hormone oestrogen. It seems the fish here have been force-fed the female contraceptive pill. Over time, the males have begun to grow female reproductive tissues and organs. Parts of the testes turn into ovary tissue or, if they are really unlucky, development of the fish’s manhood is merely retarded. In lowland parts of the river, the government’s Environment Agency noticed up to half of the male fish developing eggs. Tests around the world reveal that even the tiniest traces of synthetic female hormone are sufficient to corrupt wild fish populations. Some scientists even suggest that the concentrations sufficient to make fish unisex are below detection limits in place for drinking water.
Your task is to give aquatic males the world over a helping hand in their quest to become women, albeit against their wishes. For this you will require supplies of the synthetic oestrogens widely used in the Pill. The obvious choice is etinyloestradiol, one of the most common components of the contraceptive and up to a hundred times more powerful than any naturally occurring oestrogen. Its potency is enormously reassuring. Medical advice for male-to-female transsexuals dictates that the stuff offers not only a long ‘half-life and high potency’ but, more importantly, gives ‘excellent feminizing effects’. Traces of the Pill have been found in waterways at dosages of one part per billion. If you can only double that, you will be assured of success in your aquatic sexualization experiment. Etinyloestradiol is made in industrial quantities and at face value costs less than 8 pence for a month’s supply. Several large UK companies manufacture etinyloestradiol in their laboratories. Around £10,000 should buy you enough to emulate the effects of 43,000 women taking the Pill, but for one day only. More than 3.5 million women take it every day in the UK, with 100 million worldwide. Clearly, you alone cannot afford to mimic the entire population of British women but, as a start, it will do. Be warned, though: you may have to justify your excessively large etinyloestradiol order by pretending that you are an NHS supplier.
U-bender
The next step is to target the stuff where it will have the most effect. And that, as the West Yorkshire pipe amply reveals, is perhaps the easy part. Just flush it down the loo. Then, contact like-minded ecocide sympathizers, pass on details of where to obtain the chemical and soon you will command a small network of UK volunteers stationed by their lavs in the pursuit of aqua gender-bending. It might be prudent to dissolve the pills in warm body-temperature water before flushing, in order to guarantee that they safely navigate the antiquities of Britain’s sewage system. Thankfully, the effects of etinyloestradiol will not be diluted. Conventional sewage treatment does not eradicate the hormone, and synthetic oestrogen is not broken down in the wild, a factor that grants it better weighting on the value-for-money scale. The effects will be reassuringly quick.
Scientists in Canada added oestrogen at levels found in sewage to a remote lake in Ontario. After just a year they started to observe a creeping feminization. Even the male fathead minnow (and one wonders in disbelief how this creature could ever hope to pass itself off as a lady) turned sex. Inevitably, delightfully, ‘reproductive failure’ followed and fathead numbers began to crash. They never recovered, according to the results of the Canadian tests.
Other inspiring reports abound. There are the male tadpoles in Sweden who morphed into females after being fed oestrogen. In one experiment, tadpole dudes who were fed heavy dosages of the hormone became 100 per cent dudess. An Environment Agency report tells of roach who, after feasting on oestrogen, experienced deformities in their sexual organs and began producing eggs rather than sperm. Results of tests on zebra fish at Cardiff University using etinyloestradiol were so pronounced that researchers expressed unease at observing ‘large-scale effects at such low levels of concentration’. But the best news arrived with reports that a male hornyhead turbot had been transformed into a lady. The development must have caused groans in rivers from Leeds to Lagos. If the macho hornyhead could be tamed, scaly chaps everywhere must have thought, what hope for them? The game was up.
Chemical cocktail
Of course, there are other ways to turn man to woman, and it would be unwise, even reckless, to overlook the old ‘gender benders’, or ‘endocrine disruptors’, as the scientific community would rather these chemical lovelies be known. Synthetics found in plastics, shampoos and food packaging mimic oestrogen when ingested. Such useful material gets everywhere and is particularly effective when ingested in cocktail form over the years. Plenty of these ‘endocrine disruptors’ appear to be travelling north on the moist air currents that blow from Europe to the Arctic. When confronted with the frosty, Arctic air, these chemicals condense and fall. They are perhaps most revered for creating the famously pseudo-hermaphrodite polar bears with penis-like stumps, a result which to this day remains one of the most celebrated achievements in the world of chemical scalps. And clearly there is no merit in trying to better such a masterpiece.
Despite a forensic EU review of chemical legislation, a decent number (up to five hundred) of potential endocrine disruptors remain in use, and, thankfully, these hormone-disrupting chemicals are still allowed to be sold even though safer alternatives are available. The next review of legislation is not due until 2012, giving you a reasonable window of opportunity to shrink the man bear a little more. By then, who knows what else will have shrunk, changed or grown?
Let’s hear it for the clam
When scientists chose an estuarine site in the West Country to examine clams, which they had naively hand-picked in the hope that they would be free of chemicals, they experienced a bit of a shock. The clams were transsexual, their Devonian testes containing both sperm and eggs. 60 per cent were like this. For you, it offers a thrilling possibility: initial evidence that oestrogen can potentially survive in seawater, battling the salty tides to turn aquamarine life female. Here, quantities of the female hormone had messed around with clams at the bottom of the food chain. Could, you dare dream, the entire sea one day be declared girls only? Embarrassing speedos would become a thing of the past.
Little surprise that those studying the feminization of fish describe the West Country clam as the aquatic equivalent of the miner’s canary, the bird which chirps an alarm long before men are aware of impending doom. With the mines now mostly closed, instead there’s something in the water. The sexual revolution has proved to be intensely liberating for humanity. Now it is the turn of the misunderstood bloke fish who only ever wanted to be a woman. Once we start adding the Pill to the rivers of the world, there is no reset button. The new sexual revolution is underway.
WHAT’S THE DAMAGE?
* Government makes over-the-counter pill more widely available. Certainty.
* Male pill goes on general sale. Female carp duly start growing penises. Unlikely.
* Etinyloestradiol leak reported from factory into river system. Male fish in the area seen wearing matching bra and knickers. Scientists say this could be evidence of feminization. Unlikely.
* Male bull whale gives birth after growing ovaries. Never.
* Overhaul of the disposal of the contraceptive pill announced by government. From 2011 it has to be disposed of in special council bins and safely stored in landfill sites. Possible.
Likelihood of majority of male fish turning female by 2015: 23%
