population decline 00.pop.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Trace amounts of natural and synthetic estrogens released into the environment by wastewater-treatment plants are known to cause reproductive abnormalities in fish. Researchers have now found an even more dramatic consequence of exposure to the synthetic estrogen used in birth control pills—the near extinction of a fish population.

Women taking birth control pills excrete the synthetic estrogen 17alpha-ethynylestradiol along with natural estrogens. Male fish exposed to estrogens at concentrations of only a few parts per trillion (ppt) can become intersexual, displaying male and female tissues in their gonads (SN: 3/10/07, p. 152).

"A big question remained," says Karen A. Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. "Can these males still successfully reproduce, or are fish populations at risk?"

In 1999, Kidd, then at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Manitoba, and her colleagues began a study at the Experimental Lakes Area, a facility in northwestern Ontario set aside for whole-lake experiments. For 2 years, the team gathered data on species in one study lake and in two reference lakes. During the summers of 2001 through 2003, the researchers added 17alpha-ethynylestradiol to the study lake three times per week, maintaining a concentration of 5 to 6 ppt.

The researchers focused on a common species of fish, the fathead minnow, which they collected from the lakes at regular intervals from 1999 through 2005. They examined changes to its reproductive system and monitored its population.

By the spring of 2002, the scientists observed delayed sexual development of all the males collected. A year later, some males also had early-stage eggs in their testes. "These are all the responses we expect to see, based on what's been found in other studies," says Kidd.

But beyond those effects, as the researchers report in the May 22 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the number of fathead minnows in the lake plummeted. The estimated fish population dropped by a factor of a thousand from 1999 to 2005. "By the end of the seventh year, only a handful of fathead minnow were left," says Kidd. http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US

Aquatic ecotoxicologist Susan Jobling of Brunel University in Uxbridge, England says that to be clearly environmentally relevant, the study's estrogen concentration would have to be "a little bit lower." Recent studies pin the concentration of 17alpha-ethynylestradiol in the environment to less than 1 ppt, she says, but "that doesn't take away from the importance of the study, that population level effects have been demonstrated."http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US

David L. Sedlak, an environmental chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that it's an "elegant and useful study," even though the estrogen concentration was on the high side. For waterways that receive most of their flow from sewage-treatment plants, improvements in technology would help. "This is a problem that can be solved with treatment," he says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

brick 999.bri.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Excavators of a 3,700-year-old Egyptian town have delivered a surprising find�a painted brick that was one of a pair once used to support a woman's feet while she squatted during childbirth. Until now known only from ancient Egyptian writing, so-called birth bricks were used in childbirth rituals that called on gods to secure the health of newborns. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

The newly discovered mud birth brick was identified by the scene on it depicting a mother with her newborn baby, attended by several women and Hathor, a cow goddess associated with birth and motherhood.http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/

Archaeologist Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the dig director, suspects that a princess named Renseneb used the brick. It turned up in a residential wing for females in a mayor's mansion (SN: 8/28/99, p. 139). Inscribed clay-seal impressions found near the brick refer to Renseneb, who may have married one of the town's powerful mayors, Wegner says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

china 9992.chi.1110003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The United States is always held up as the leading polluter of carbon dioxide—the most important greenhouse gas. Well, no more, according to researchers at the University of California. Their calculations indicate China’s releases began exceeding ours more than a year ago—or 14 years earlier than many scientists had initially predicted.

Projections of China’s likely greenhouse-gas emissions have tended to start with data from around the 1990s. Then computer modelers applied some escalator factors to account for the expected growth in incomes and smokestack industries since the ‘90s. A growing economy would be expected to drive a fairly predictable increase in CO2 pollution, especially in a fossil-fuel-based economy like China’s.


The problem: China’s economic development has skyrocketed. The growth in personal and industrial incomes has far exceeded the roughly 5 percent per year that had once seemed reasonable, report Maximilian Auffhammer of UC Berkeley and Richard T. Carson of UC San Diego. Indeed, the growth since 2000 in China’s gross domestic product has been closer to 11 percent, they point out in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.


China’s “abandonment of energy efficiency programs in favor of economic growth has resulted in an unprecedented increase in emissions of local air pollutants and correspondingly greenhouse-gas emissions,” they report.

The UC researchers modeled China’s releases based on province-level data that is annually updated and publicly available. They argue that “This feature is a main advantage over forecasts using infrequently updated sources of data.”


However, one “concern” in using such official statistics from developing countries, such as China, Auffhammer and Carson acknowledge, “is that chronic underfunding of data collection agencies may lead to fabricated data.” The UC team attempted to evaluate the likelihood that it was relying on particularly skewed data by communicating directly with Chinese officials. Those officials had been reporting releases of a composite pollutant described only as “waste gas emissions.” The UC researchers found out how the officials calculated these, and then used this value, which is based on fuel use, as a “proxy for CO2 at the province level.”

Westerners might have predicted that the biggest emissions would trace to activities in Beijing. Not according to the new analysis. Based on projections from 2004 waste gas emissions, the top greenhouse-gas polluting provinces were Inner Mongolia, followed by, in order, Shanghai, Shanxi, Ningxia, Hebei, Liaoning, Tianjin, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangxi.

Of course, it’s misguided to lay all of the blame for China’s skyrocketing greenhouse-gas emissions on China. After all, consider who has been buying the goods that China’s burgeoning manufacturing industry has been churning out? Can U.S. consumers even lay their hands on a new kitchen appliance, television, pair of sneakers, or lamp from anywhere but China, these days? http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/

America, in a sense, has shifted the pollution associated with its consumption patterns from smokestacks at home to smokestacks overseas. Sure, China’s growing middle and upper classes will soon put plenty of pressure on the production of these goods for their own use. But we gave them a good head start.


As with so many things, pollution has a multinational cause in addition to a global effect. It’s time we all evaluated how much we need and whether there are relatively low-resource options to meeting those needs. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Libraries 883.lib.1009 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In what has to be one of the most wrong-headed approaches to cost-cutting, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to close many of its libraries and curtail hours and holdings at others. That these facilities were sometimes the only publicly accessible repository of important gray-literature filings and reports on environmental issues and data made ludicrous the agency’s claim that its library shutdowns wouldn’t affect research by its employees or the public.

Not surprisingly, outside public-interest groups—notably, the DC-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility—and internal agency scientists began decrying the proposal almost as soon as word of this planned cost-cutting emerged, two years ago. But EPA began boxing up its publications and shuttering the libraries anyway.

There was a promise to digitize all important holdings, so that they could become instantaneously available to users in the future. But we all know how well such digitizing efforts go. They’re slow, expensive, and take lots of work to correct frequent mistakes by digital page scanners and readers. So in practice, much of the material would be in limbo for a long while, if not forever.

Last year, Congress took an interest in the issue and earmarked $1 million for EPA to open those libraries again. As of now, three of EPA’s 10 regional libraries are closed—those in Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City (Kansas)—as well as the agency’s headquarters and chemical libraries in Washington, DC. Bending to pressure, EPA has agreed to begin reopening the shuttered facilities.

Two months ago, the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog organization, chastised EPA for the way it had set about altering its library system and recommended that the agency halt further efforts to shut down or alter the network "until it takes corrective actions to . . . justify its decision to reorganize the network" and improve outreach to users and oversight of the reorganization.http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

In a report to Congress, about a month later, EPA vowed to re-open its facilities “on or before Sept. 30.” However, the libraries may be in new locations, it said, and the two DC libraries will be consolidated at one site. Hours may vary, but EPA has pledged to “provide access for EPA staff and public patrons at least four days per week on a walk-in basis or by appointment during core business hours.” http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

Of course, these libraries cost just a few million dollars per year to maintain. The agency’s budget? Only a projected $8 billion, this coming year. Clearly, mothballing all of its libraries would remove just a drop from the bucket of spending by this, one of the administration’s smaller agencies.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire