Nature is a language, can't you read?

The Smiths

In contemplating the damage wrought by the southern California wildfires, few media commentators have resisted the urge to politicise the developing tragedy.   Some on the right, including President elect Trump, focus on the alleged ineptitude of the Democrat governor of California. Others point to the ineffectiveness of fire hydrants or impact of DEI policies on the gender balance of fire-fighting personnel.   They blame the homeless or arsonists and accuse those on the left of politicising the tragedy by drawing links to climate change.

Meanwhile, the series of fires that began on January 7 in the San Bernadino and Los Angeles areas of California have as of January 16th, claimed 25 lives, displaced 170,000 residents, and destroyed thousands of structures.  So far, flames have destroyed an area the size of San Francisco, or Brussels in Belgium or Cardiff in Wales. And still the fires are raging.

The calamity did not come as a bolt from the blue.  As early as January 3, the Storm Prediction Centre had forecast an ‘extremely critical risk’ arising from a combination of factors including arid conditions and predicted high winds. 

More sober commentators acknowledge the contribution of a multitude of factors to the worse conflagration of its kind in Southern Californian history.  But they point to the central role of climate change in giving rise to the arid conditions that required only a spark and near simultaneous windy conditions to set this tragedy off.

Whatever the part played by the condition of reservoirs or government officials - these remain, just as the opportunistic looters posing as firefighters to salvage valuables from hastily abandoned homes - merely aggravating factors.

Away from the print and TV media, recent online chat, watercooler exchanges and pre meeting pleasantries on Zoom show that more people are considering that our environment may be responding to the way we live.  Informed individuals can view the events in California in the context of the report published by the Meteorological Office recently that 2024 was the warmest year since records began in the 1850s.  They recall that the 2015 Paris Agreement advised that unless we kept global temperatures below 1.5 degrees since pre-industrial levels, that we might trigger environmental calamities such as we are witnessing in California right now.

But environmental activists should be cautioned against hoping for a silver lining in the shape of increased awareness that might translate into governments succumbing to pressure to amend aspects of our economy and way of life.     

Human beings tend to become agitated by dangers they can witness.  But there are environmental hazards that will have at least as much catastrophic impact as the wildfires we are witnessing, that are not as dramatically apparent to the naked eye. There are environmental distress signals that have been much more difficult to read.

While we observe how our C02 and methane emissions heat up the planet, the plastic food storage materials, lubricants, cosmetics and industrial solvents that have become features of modern, daily lives are helping to reduce our number sufficiently to make the consumer base that our economies depend upon greatly diminished.   

The impact of widespread use of contraception on falling birth rates, is well known. So is the tendency of women to have children relatively later in life. But the influence of endocrine disrupting chemicals that restrict the capacity of even those who want to have children, is only recently coming to light.  

In 2021, Dr Shanna Swann and Stacey Colino published “Count Down: How our Modern World is Threatening Sperm counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperilling the Future of the Human Race.”    One of revelations of their work was that sperm counts among men in the western world had fallen by 50% over the past forty years. Testosterone levels have also plummeted.   In respect of impacts of the modern world on women, Jeremy Grantham, in his work, ‘Chemical Toxicity and the Baby Bust’ cites studies from Harvard and Mass General in 2015 and 2017.   They show that levels of pesticides on fruits and vegetables were correlated with a 40% reduction in live births from top quartile to bottom.

Fertility rates in modern economies have tumbled.   In Spain, Greece, Japan and South Korea, they have fallen well below replacement levels defined as the number of offspring a woman needs to have to ensure a nation’s population size is maintained over time. The replacement number is calculated at 2.1 children per woman and in France it stands at 1.8; in the United Kingdom the level is 1.6  and the United States 1.6.   The latter three countries have relatively high historic immigration to thank for not being suffering fertility rates closer to Spain’s or Japan. 

The prospect of smaller population sizes might appeal to some environmentalists, but this development comes with near term threats to social cohesion.  In our consumption-based economies, most economic activity is driven by consumer spending on goods and services. If our consumer base becomes significantly eroded because we experience the kind of population imbalance of lower spending retirees compared to high spending 25-45 year old workers, our economies will cease to function in the way to which we’ve become accustomed.  Our tax base will become too thin to support the health and housing needs of our growing number of retirees.

Even if by some miracle a cultural change leads to women desiring to have more children, the growing impact of toxicity’ will restrict their ability to respond. And this toxicity will have worked in as silent and invisible a way as carbon monoxide poisoning to halve sperm counts over the next 25 years.   

In Japan and South Korea, the impact of low fertility rates on the workforce and consumer base has been masked by numbers of 60-80 years olds continuing in the workforce past the formal retirement age.  

Here in the West, the oncoming catastrophe may be apparent only to scientists alive to the rising impacts of toxicity manifest in increasing incidence of low sperm counts, sexual dysfunction and low testosterone behaviours.  Then quite suddenly the ground would have shifted underneath us, and we will have to adapt to a new economic reality.