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What a sting
Enthralled with its immutable sense of progress, humanity seems to have forgotten that sometimes it’s the little things that matter most. Don’t make the same mistake. While you must be prepared to battle against Greenpeace and outperform Hugh Hefner, make sure you don’t forget that little Don Juan, the bee. At the start of the twenty-first century, civilization finds itself dependent on this single insect. One in every three tablespoons of food derives directly from the pollinating prowess of the humble honeybee, with supermarkets gleefully cashing £50 billion worth of produce a year. So long as it’s flogged by the kilo, chances are that the honeybee’s enviable powers of fertilization have played a part. Shop shelves would look very different in a world devoid of the services of Apis mellifera. Hundreds of vital crops and cereals would wither. Fruit and veg staples would fade away. There’ll be no more worrying about getting your five a day then! At last, gherkin-free burgers!
Entomologists (insect nerds) warn that society has become way too reliant on the honeybee. Behind the sophisticated production lines of the world’s great supermarkets, the truth is that the security of the food supply lies squarely on the honeybee’s busy shoulders. Surely then, all you need do is shoulder the bees out of existence and hey presto, you’ve delivered a deadly sting to humanity. But surely these valuable creatures are under constant MI5 protection? Don’t be ridiculous!
Oh Mighty One
As yet you can only dream about Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious ailment that has performed such a sterling job vanquishing America’s bee population. It is a strange and abrupt disease that persuades millions of bees to abandon their queen and fly off to certain suicide. Your real money-shot enlists the services of a parasite no larger than a full stop. The size of the varroa mite belies a voracious appetite. Once its jaws are clamped to a bee’s stomach, it gorges upon the blood until the host’s immune system can take no more. Predictions suggest that the varroa mite is able to cause a complete species ‘die-out’ in as little as a decade. Ostensibly, it is the Aids equivalent for bees. Honeybees are drained in hours. Hives collapse in days. With this little buddy, your job is done in a matter of weeks. Thankfully there’s no bee equivalent to the condom. No Red Cross setting up clinics in the meadows. The way ahead is clear. Facilitate varroa’s global spread and you’ve found the fastest route to being bee-free. In theory, nothing should stop every colony succumbing to these marauding blighters. In time, earth’s long-term food supply will be jeopardized, plunging the planet into civic strife and conflict.
Fight or flight
At the start of 2008, the softly-spoken types of the British Beekeepers Association decided they could take no more. Barely able to hide their hysteria, its leaders warned ministers that Britain risked ‘calamitous’ economic and environmental hardship if the honeybee disappeared. They were not alone in their squawking. Supermarket executives agitated privately over the future fate of this bumbling insect. Apparently, safeguarding a tiny creature vital for global cereal and fruit production falls far beyond their wiles. With one of the core underpinning elements of their business at risk, they wait nervously for the first complaints to trickle in – inadequate pollination produces the misshapen, shrivelled food that so horrifies their customers.
When varroa began ravaging Britain’s hives during the Nineties, the pesticide pyrethoid was promptly administered to halt the destruction. Its use came with a strict health warning over effectiveness: ministers were told the measures would triumph for a finite period only. As it transpired, only a handful of years. After that varroa mites would become immune to man-made chemicals. And so, funding was granted to develop a biological defence that would safeguard food supplies in the future.
Dr Brenda Ball, the world’s foremost expert on varroa, led a team of scientists at the Rothamsted Research Institution in Hertfordshire. There was a troubling period when it seemed that, finally, a cure for varroa might be on the horizon. Significant progress was underway when, in the spring of 2006, the government withdrew financial support. Ball’s team became redundant. Her pioneering work to protect nature’s pollinator remains incomplete to this day. Within months of funding being terminated, the minister for sustainable farming and food hailed an ‘environmentally-friendly’ initiative to encourage more British-produced fruit and vegetables. No reference was made to the fact that without the honeybee this would prove largely impossible. His omission provides a salutary, but inspirational lesson to those bent on environmental Armageddon: you can often do a lot worse than put your faith in the elected few.
The government has handed out yet another ‘proceed to go’ card on your journey towards bee obliteration. The bee inspection service, conceived to monitor early signs of infection in hives, suddenly found its funding halved. Research on protecting the honeybee currently stands at around £200,000, a fiftieth of their pollinating value to the economy. Matters came to a head during a fraught meeting in November 2007 between beekeepers and government officials, when the farming minister Lord Rooker confessed that he too knew the bleeding obvious. ‘If we do not do anything, the chances are in ten years’ time we will not have any honeybees,’ he said. Despite this, the British Beekeepers Association claims that funding continues to be denied. It seems bees are a victim of classic British stoicism. Admitting there is a problem remains a far cry from actually doing anything about it.
Every other international attempt to quash varroa has yet to yield an answer. Every new pesticide leads only to a new resistance. The parasite is always one step ahead. And so, its spread continues apace. In London, the first round of colony inspections during 2008 found all of the bees were dead. Few are the places left untouched by its blood-thirsty proboscis. China has submitted. The Americas have been penetrated. Australia is exhausted. Europe has its knickers round its ankles. Recently the invasion of southern Africa began. Hawaii is rapidly becoming unique in offering concrete assurances it is a ‘varroa-free’ locale. We’ll see.
A sticky situation
Seemingly limitless in its vision of global conquest, there appears to be little requirement to encourage the worldwide operations of the varroa mite. At the moment, it is simply a case of kicking back and watching its worldwide domination unfold. Soon, experts predict, the entire planet will be contaminated by an epidemic immune to the chemicals concocted to kill it. A virulent new strain may explain why hundreds of millions of honeybees vanished in almost half of America’s states in weeks, threatening £8 billion of crops. Perhaps Colony Collapse Disorder isn’t such a pipe-dream after all…
Wild honeybees, the quintessence of British rurality and heralded by everyone from William Shakespeare to Jill Archer, are on the way out. Those little buggers you see bouncing from flower to flower are invariably imported from Europe or Australia or from colonies reared by man. While you must put up with the fact that, temporarily, sufficient quality crops can still be grown in Britain, both you and the ever-growing British varroa empire can thank the government for opening the door to foreign infestations.
The demise of the honeybee has coincided with a 30 per cent increase in fertilizer use. It is no coincidence. Supermarkets, after all, must somehow compensate for a loss in natural fertility. This can only accelerate the extinction of the honeybee; the wax in beehives doubling as a peculiarly potent sink for airborne toxins. The chemicals, as well as poisoning the bees, also kill off the flowers that provide the honeybees’ food. Beyond the farmers’ fields the meadows are starting to look depressingly sterile. Research confirms that wildflowers like the clover and dandelion are dying in tandem with bees, their mutual dependency dragging one another to the grave. Valentines will be a cheap affair this year.
Oh Be-hive!
As long as governments pontificate on taking varroa seriously, there is only one winner. According to the Cardiff-based International Bee Research Unit, the one hope involves the genetic breeding of a new generation of honeybees, with jaws strong enough to yank the mites off their bodies. ‘With what funding?’ you may snigger. Evolution is all out of time.
There was a time when the distant hum of the honeybee was as sure a signal of summer’s onset as traffic jams on the M5. These days you can enjoy your picnics and beer gardens free from their monotonous droning. While you sup your Guinness, varroa does the dirty work. Once, their sting was a childhood rite of passage, but now you can save yourself the trip to the pharmacy.
WHAT’S THE DAMAGE?
* Mysterious disease suddenly eradicates varroa parasite. Honeybee saved at the final hour. Unlikely.
* Miracle cure for varroa discovered by maverick oddball scientist. Slim possibility.
* Pioneering breakthrough discovers natural alternative to the wild honeybee’s pollinating prowess. Yeah, right.
* The value of the honeybee is belatedly recognized by the government. Generous funding to protect the species is immediate. Unforeseeable.
* Varroa runs riot. Hawaii finally succumbs in late 2012. Three years later, remaining bee farms inside high-security sealed factories are infiltrated. Anticipated.
Likelihood that wild honeybee is extinct by 2020: 72%
2 A hard halibut to break (#ulink_6039cb07-9af9-5f57-bb43-cdb12c1b14e4)
Fins ain’t what they used to be
AGENDA
* Upset the natural order of the seas
* Stake out the salmon
* Free the finned-ones
* Interbreed and weaken the species
When it comes to wanton ecocide, it’s sometimes good just to lay a marker, to show the world who’s boss. And there are few better species with which to demonstrate your superiority in all matters ecocidal than one so finely developed as the wild salmon. Until now, these marvels of evolution have always allowed instinct to guide them thousands of miles across open waters in a current-defying voyage to their spawning grounds. But survival of the fittest? Pah! At last, man has perfected the means to subvert the natural order.
Breeding frenzy
The first step was to fish wild Atlantic salmon practically to the point of exhaustion; the second to begin farming replacement fish. And therein lay the evil genius of the plan, the ‘extinction vortex’. The new man-reared specimens were inferior in all ways but one – they had what it took to destroy their wild friends. Covertly released with the excuse of having ‘escaped’ from farms, their mission was twofold: to breed with their genetically superior wild cousins, and then to infect them with disease. Talk about eliminating the competition. The torpedo-like physique of wild salmon – in some ways the SAS of the aquamarine world – became weakened by intermingling with the flabby farmed types, the genetic equivalent of a couch potato with fins, and the salmon’s instinctive ability to survive in the wild was shot. No longer could it make its trans-Atlantic migration back home. It was fin-ished.
Born to be wild
Under cover of darkness, the men bobbed towards the vast sea cages. As their dinghy pulled alongside the expanse of steel mesh, the balaclava-wearing figures on board grimaced at the writhing coil of bodies. At a silent signal, they began to hack at the cages with steel-cutters. That September night, 15,000 halibut were liberated from their underwater prison at Kames Marine Fish Farm, Oban, off the west coast of Scotland. It was a textbook ‘release’. Police were left floundering with but a single clue: the letters ALF daubed on a nearby wall. No one was ever caught.
In many respects, the Animal Liberation Front represent everything you probably can’t be bothered with. Their abiding philosophy is, after all, to draw attention to and to condemn ‘speciesism’, an assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals. Yet these are emancipated times; tribal loyalties and prejudices have no place in the quest to deliver environmental catastrophe. To satisfy such lofty ambitions, you must adopt the same methods, if under quite a different agenda. The guiding principles of the ALF are to ‘liberate animals from places of abuse’, such as fish farms, and to ‘inflict economic sabotage’ on those who profit from caging creatures. These two tenets fit nicely with your task to mass-release farmed salmon into the oceans of the world.
Establishing contact with militant wings of the ALF is challenging, but surmountable so long as you do not make the mistake of explaining that your real motive is to rid the seas of wild salmon, dress head to toe in khaki, and take out a subscription to the Socialist Worker. The actual act of liberation is no doubt a more important concern to animal activists than the genetic carnage they unleash upon the world in setting free caged animals. Despite this, it is best to err on the safe side and keep the master plan secret for as long as possible.
The ALF is a loose network of autonomous cells and in order to meet like-minded members you will need to join demonstrations against animal-research centres, trawl internet message boards or subscribe to its newsletter. But rest assured, the ALF are out there, with the organization describing its members as including ‘PTA parents, church volunteers, your spouse, your neighbour or your mayor’. High-profile members are usually under police surveillance and officers typically video demonstrators at protests. A new face might attract unwanted attention. Also, do be prepared for the possibility that even ALF sympathizers may refuse to sabotage fish farms. If this is the case, don’t just give up. Seek out the Animal Rights Militia (ARM) or the Justice Department, who believe that direct action is the way to go. If these two underground over-the-top movements prove too elusive, try the Lobster Liberation Front, which has already attacked fishing interests with varying success and might be persuaded to broaden its target base. Certainly, there should be enough activists around who possess the necessary zeal and wile to successfully liberate fish. After all, past attacks have proved that activists have the determination to navigate freezing waters at night, the strength to cut through heavy netting and the guile to evade security.
Let’s go fishing
Enticing possible recruits will rely on propagating several set arguments. Make sure you encourage rumours that farmed salmon are being obscenely crammed into cages and force-fed processed proteins by machine. Don’t forget to mention the colourings and antibiotics which are prophylactically tipped into cages. Refer to caged fish as ‘the battery chickens of the sea’. Animal activists will be unable to resist such bait. If more persuasion is required, refer to a past Scottish Executive salmon report which reveals that farmed salmon are recognizable from their small heads, deformed bodies, and diseased gill covers. If this fails, concoct a story about how they are electrocuted with prods if they don’t finish their tea.
Once you have netted recruits to your new splinter cell, Operation Bite Back IV can get underway. Farms holding halibut and cod are all well and good, but the best objective is to disable the eighteen vast salmon farms dotted along the Irish and Scottish coasts. Further afield, the ALF’s international network can concentrate on targeting the massive fish farms of Norway, home to the world’s biggest salmon-farming industry. This is where the blueprint for large-scale salmon releases was written. Among a series of triumphant attacks on fish farms was the release of a hundred thousand salmon from a major facility in northern Norway, in the course of which activists slashed seventy thick nylon ropes. Comfortingly, some Norwegian streams are already populated entirely by descendants of farmed fish, fragile creatures whose presence is sustained only by the continual release of domesticated specimens. If you are forced to operate domestically, bear in mind that farmed salmon released from a Scottish fish farm can make the journey for you, swimming the distance and unleashing widespread genetic havoc in Norway itself. Most second-generation hybrids die in the first few weeks as a result of genetic incompatibilities, but researchers have found Scottish escapees flapping their fat forms all the way to Scandinavia.
See ya, Salmon
If you are to fully achieve your objectives, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. First, ensure that the salmon you release are sexually mature and capable of breeding with other fish. The last thing you need is millions of frustrated farmed smelts flabbing out and admiring their trim wild types from afar, but unable to do owt about it. Secondly, time co-ordinated attacks on the sea farms to fall between September and November when the local wild salmon are spawning. Farmed fish might carry a few extra pounds, but this at least can equip them to bully young pure-bred salmon out of the best spawning spots of rivers. Job done, they then head out to sea, never to return.
With a good wind behind you, Operation Bite Back IV will be recorded in history as achieving the biggest ever release of man’s salmon progeny. The potential is staggering. Already, between 2005 and 2007, 70 million smelts were squeezed into sea cages around Britain. Up to two million farmed salmon are estimated to have been released so far this century due to accidents and the battery of rough seas. And up to 90 per cent of salmon returning to rivers in Ireland, Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Canada are already believed to be fugitives of farmed origin.
WHAT’S THE DAMAGE?
* Security measures at fish farms stepped up on police advice after series of attacks cause a few modest releases. Certainty.
* New virulent disease destroys farmed-salmon populations across the world. Bad news turns to good when mystery parasite then begins assailing wild populations. Likely.
* Farming of salmon declines in favour of farmed cod. Again, grim tidings lead to joy when move leads to resumption of wild-salmon fishing. Plausible.
* Animal activists fail to significantly disrupt fish farms because of new policing powers and tougher legislation to deter such activities. Probable.
* Despite lack of successful militant action, continued number of escapees from fish farms blamed for denuding wild-salmon numbers. Population falls to ‘critical’ levels within ten years. Strong possibility.
Likelihood of wild Atlantic salmon being extinct by 2015: 61%
3 Space invaders (#ulink_7dfacd70-b021-5e8a-9e78-5f15f96570d6)
The root of all problems
AGENDA
* Savage gardens
* Put down monstrous roots
* Rupture the infrastructure
The aliens landed some time ago. For a while they kept themselves to themselves and even seemed relatively well behaved. But, in truth, they were biding their time, waiting for the moment when world domination could begin. Naturally, being aliens, they would first have to morph into something terrible. And so they became a Triffid-type monstrosity, a rapacious superweed replete with superpowers. They became indestructible.
Knotted up
The Japanese knotweed, brought back to Victorian Britain from the Orient as an ornamental delight, is probably your favourite plant. A splendid-looking piéce de résistance with the armoury, faculties and, most of all, ambition to subvert Europe’s existing ecosystems. Knotweed is unstoppable. Labelled ‘unbelievably strong’ by the government’s admiring Environment Agency, it can burst through concrete pavements and tarmac and topple brick walls. Floorboards have been ruptured. Roads have been split. And now, the knotweed has set its sights on the rape of Europa. More dangerous, according to Britain’s leading scientists, than anything they have created with genetically modified organisms, knotweed is the second gravest threat to Europe’s plants (beaten only, and marginally, by reinforced concrete). She – the invaders hail from a single female ancestor – is a fabulous, wily specimen, capable of reproducing effortlessly on her own. And she is in a hurry, with each clone capable of growing a metre a week. Horticulturists, almost hysterical with shock, claim to have actually seen her grow.
Out in the wild, knotweed has no natural enemies. Only man stands in her way and, quite frankly, he just doesn’t cut it. Despite desperate and repeated efforts, nothing has been found to tame the knotweed. Trips to Japan to find a solution have yielded little. Hopes that voracious aphids and fungal rust may work crumbled long ago. Even supposedly impermeable mats laid on land have been, literally, punctured. The government is panicking. This problem plant costs nothing to spread but millions to defend against. Officials have spent more than £1.6 billion, 170 times the amount allocated to their biodiversity plan, but have got nowhere near the root of this knotty problem. Specialists can charge £40,000 to clear 5 square metres of the weed. Such is the concern that the government has recently started treating it on a par with nuclear waste. The removal of a solitary plant resembles a military operation. The Environment Agency, petrified of this ingenious nemesis, has produced a 37-page knotweed manual, which recommends digging away an area 7 metres around each plant and 3 metres deep: almost 600 cubic metres. The specimen should be removed and incarcerated 5 metres deep at a licensed landfill site. This is the only way to kill her for sure, but it has become so expensive and time-consuming that no one can be bothered. Call it natural selection, call it botanical genocide, call it what you will: the day of the Triffids is getting closer. You will hasten that day, helping this nefarious weed to overrun Europe, and sending indigenous species fleeing for cover.
Rooted in the land
Good day, Earthlings. Another Monday morning in 2017, the start of another working week under the occupation. The traffic bulletin offers a round-up of the usual pandemonium. Gridlock again on the M25 due to a weed burrowing beneath the fast lane. Near Doncaster a derailed train lies on its side after subsidence caused by a rampant plant. In the streets, commuters trudge to work in the shadow of towering stems that have pushed up through the pavement. Everywhere, the city’s streets are avenues of solid, swaying greenery. In this twilight world, cars flash past with headlamps on at midday. The news brings little respite. A school in Wales has been crushed by a falling wall, pushed over by an untamed tendril. Knotweed has burst into the House of Commons, this time directly through the speaker’s chair. The Queen is reportedly throwing a hissy fit because the Buckingham Palace herbaceous borders – the most heavily defended flowerbeds in the UK – have, again, been overrun.
Spreading the knotweed is child’s play, but the plant’s destructive tendencies ensure ultimate satisfaction. All you need do is ferry some cuttings about the continent and scatter them liberally whenever and wherever the mood takes you. Unarguably, this is one of the most straightforward means of defacing the planet. The challenge lies in blanketing an entire landmass in her shade, the creation of the first monocultural continent. This is the true meaning of going green.
Evidence indicates that Europe’s entire collection of indigenous fauna and wildlife could not survive a knotweed kingdom. When the plant wrested control of a Cornish valley in 2007, choking the landscape with a 7-mile bank of weed, naturalists recorded a mass exodus: dippers, grey wagtails, Daubenton bats, bluebells, and thrift all scarpered. Even the yellow flag surrendered without having time to change hue. Species have a choice; they either fight or flee. And the recent past shows that the former is futile.
Back to the roots
To get Europe knotted you will first need to locate the weed. This won’t be too problematic. Already she has spread from Land’s End to the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, her striking good looks immediately noticeable; a touch of bamboo bristling with fluffy white flowers and orangey-yellow roots, quite fetching on every level. Only the Orkneys have escaped so far. Scour rubbish tips or derelict land; deserted places where you won’t be disturbed. If you are, merely pretend to be a good citizen cutting down the ubiquitous weed (cutting or mowing encourages its spread, but you will conveniently forget to mention that bit). Knotweed spreads using its rhizomes – its roots – and a fragment as light as 0.08 grams – fingertip size – is all that is required to grow another plant. With her labyrinthine roots encompassing an area the size and depth of a subterranean swimming pool there is no shortage of incendiary material.
Fill several dozen bin bags with rhizomes and place in the back of a truck with blacked-out windows. Inside the truck, start shredding the roots into pea-sized pieces, a tedious process offset by the knowledge that each tiny shred is sufficient to start a fresh colony in a location of your choosing. As you leave, be sure to drive over the dig site; scraps of knotweed stuck to tyres have, in the past, facilitated cross-country transfer with triumphant results.
Sow the seed
Now for the fun bit. The list of attack sites is innumerable. Some are fairly obvious but, really, it’s up to you. Go crazy. National Parks are particularly fair game as, clearly, is any site considered naturally exquisite. Thrill-seekers might want to share their cargo with the grounds of Balmoral or Buckingham Palace. Prince Charles’s organic estate at Highgrove exerts a certain pull, as does the prime minister’s country residence at Chequers. Catapults armed with pellets of knotweed rhizomes and weighed down with pebbles seem an obvious tactic for penetrating such hallowed grounds. Maybe consider a remote-controlled plane with remotely activated fuselage doors to release knotweed bombs. Target the gardens of folk like Alan Titchmarsh, whose penchant for televised botany more than justifies such actions. The world-famous Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The Royal Horticultural Society’s showcase at Wisley. The list is endless. Scatter knotweed roots into the Thames to float downstream and impregnate the banks. They might even drift out to sea and contaminate some faraway land. Risk her remains on the playing fields of major sports stadia – Anfield, Aintree or central court at Wimbledon. London’s 2012 Olympic site would have been another indisputable target, but a welcome infestation has already swamped 10 acres of it, amid reassuring reports that it may even delay the games. Hire a hot-air balloon and float above the countryside with several kilos of chopped knotweed for company. Elevate to several hundred metres and release 37,000 snippets of rhizomes at five-minute intervals. Why not head abroad? Enough firearms and drugs are smuggled into Britain every year for you to be certain that a few sprigs of weed root will get through. Sniffer dogs aren’t trained to search out knotweed. Once on the mainland, you know what to do. Incidentally, the precise technique for dispersal is not really an issue. Either hurl into the air and let the weed herself decide where she lays her roots or place firmly into soil. Any soil will do; even the most wretched quality is sufficient for this hardy little sprig.
A word of warning: it is illegal to propagate or even transport knotweed. Although we don’t want to encourage law-breaking, sometimes the ultimate goal – that of completely f**king over the environment – must take precedence. Anyway, the sentence is soft in light of the potential rewards. On the slim chance that you get caught – and as yet no cases have come to light – you will face a maximum two-year sentence. With characteristically good behaviour, you’ll be out in a few months, just in time to witness the first shoots of your labour, before being caught hang-gliding with a sack of knotweed cuttings above the Blue Peter garden.
WHAT’S THE DAMAGE?
* Invasive species with predilection for eating knotweed is introduced by government, eradicating the weed within two years. Never.
* Japanese knotweed replaces rose and thistle as official emblems of England and Scotland. The EU adopts it as a symbol of unity. Unlikely.
* Council sued for manslaughter after child disappears down hole in playground caused by knotweed. Lawyers argue that officials displayed sufficient negligence by not heeding warnings. Knotweed control becomes pivotal issue during 2012 UK elections. Possible.
* Knotweed arrives on Orkney in summer of 2010. Arrival is traced back to climate-change charity walker relaxing after traipsing to John o’Groats on tedious walk to raise awareness. Credible.
* New superhybrid of Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed and the dreaded Russian vine is discovered. Tabloids dub it ‘Invasion of the Killer Knotweed II’. Bring it on.
Likelihood of knotweed colonizing most of Europe by 2020: 78%
4 Chemical reaction (#ulink_846b3617-e936-544f-bac0-7305c87a37d9)
Hormone treatment for all!
AGENDA
* 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?
