My dream is coming true, and I'll tell you how.
In the recent "Frontline" documentary "Poisoned Waters" (view it on its Web site) the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, along with Puget Sound, were profiled. Watching this two-hour documentary is life-altering because it stretches for good your awareness of sinister happenings beneath the surface of our waters. Let's just say that in 20 years there will be nothing to look at on your whale-watching tour.
For a number of years researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have been studying fish kills and mutations in the Virginia headwaters of the Potomac River. "In addition to finding frogs with six legs and other mutations," said the show's Web site, "the researchers have found male amphibians with ovaries and female frogs with male genitalia. Scientists tell "Frontline" that the mutations are likely caused by exposure to "endocrine disrupters," chemical compounds that mimic the body's natural hormones.
Allow me to break this down. It looks as though our fancy detergents, shampoos, lotions, house-cleaning concoctions, fertilizers, et al; have made chemical soup where our drinking waters originate. These researchers have also found small-mouth bass that are intersexed - male fish that cannot reproduce because they have too many female hormones.
In Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Cat's Cradle" a substance called ice-nine would, when it touched any body of water, turn it immediately to ice. A global catastrophe involving freezing the Earth's oceans by contact with ice-nine is used as a plot device. We have created our own ice-nine by screwing up the very waters we need to live. How totally sci-fi!
"The endocrine system of fish is very similar to the endocrine system of humans," USGS fish pathologist Vicki Blazer said on "Frontline's" site "They pretty much have all the same hormone systems as humans, which is why we use them as sort of indicator species. ... We can't help but make that jump to ask the question, 'How are these things influencing people?'"
This is where my dream comes true: We have created birth control in the water! The comedian Adam Carolla once said that he wished we could put birth control in corn dogs. But I have longed for birth control in the water. This way the burdened organism we call Earth can catch a break; we will cut back on the billions of people who are going to come along and use strawberry shampoo, medicines, soaps and weed killers that will run right into the Sound or the Potomac or wherever.
Interviewed for the documentary, Gov. Christine Gregoire said, "We thought all the way along that [Puget Sound] was like a toilet: What you put in, you flush out." She noted that about 150,000 pounds of untreated toxins find their way into Puget Sound each day: "We [now] know that's not true. It's like a bathtub: What you put in stays there."
Now that male reproductive health is in danger, our environmental problems should turn around at warp speed![[In-content Ad]]
