Coming Problems

In continuing with troubling problems deals with a short study that I read today:

http://www.ispub.com/ostia/index.php?xmlFilePath=journals/iju/vol2n1/sperm.xml

This is among the most terrifying things that I have read in recent memory. And mind you, I just wrote about the increasing influence of a for profit mercenary army in the most powerful armed force on the planet. And at first blush, this seems fairly random. In the past 50 years, sperm count in industrialized nations have dropped dramatically. Very dramatically:


This is from a study done in Edinburgh. Similar trends have been seen in the United States. This drop is much too dramatic for genetics to be the cause. The most likely cause is environmental changes. And the implications hit upon the very survival of the human race. For as people, our most valuable resource lies not in the mountains or water, but with our DNA and it's ability to create copies of itself within ourselves and other organisms via reproduction. If there is no reproduction, then the human race has no future in generation. And if male fertility continues to drop at this rate, then we will be looking at infertility becoming an increasing problem as more and more men will have rapidly decreasing sperm counts. This may seem a weird problem given that we are often concerned about overpopulation and problems associated with high populations, such as pollution and degradation of the environment. Perhaps less people would be a good thing? It is important to look at the proposed causes of this trend.

Given the scope of the problem, it is unlikely that a single, simple cause is responsible. However, one of the main hypothesis has to do with the industrialized world's staggering and sometimes indiscriminate use of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics in pest control. Consider agriculture. Most agricultural practices in the United States are mass production efforts that make heavy use of pesticides to kill off insects, antibiotics to control diseases that run rampant in agricultural efforts that grow only a single crop or product and hormones to stimulate quicker, larger plants and animals. Unfortunately, these toxic compounds get into the food we eat, the water we drink, the oceans we play in (and get fish from), the soil we grow our food in, and often the air we breath. It gets everywhere. And these tend to be quick persistent and quite toxic even at low concentrations. Especially hormones. Hormones' purpose is to control large changes in an organism, such as when a child goes through puberty. These are not the kind of products you want floating around in your food indiscriminately.

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. The biggest problem is that there is a considerable "lag time" between the increasing concentration of these products in our environment and their most powerful effects. It is easy to overlook the changes at this time, but these effects tend to snowball. Once the effects are visible, we will have so poisoned our environment that we will be powerless to protect ourselves. This is not a problem of a meteor hitting the earth, this amounts to the progressive stripping away of our ability to create a next generation and live in a clean, safe environment. Once we have lost our home and our future, we have nothing.