by Naomi Klein
Looking out at an ocean bay on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, a place teeming with life, I would suddenly picture it barren—the eagles, herons, seals, and otters, all gone. It got markedly worse after I covered the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico: for two years after, I couldn’t look at any body of water without imagining it covered in oil. Sunsets were particularly difficult; the pink glow on the waves looked too much like petroleum sheen. And once, while grilling a beautiful piece of fresh sockeye salmon, I caught myself imagining how, as a wizened old woman, I would describe this extraordinary fish—its electric color, its jeweled texture—to a child living in a world where these wild creatures had disappeared.
I called my morbid habit “pre-loss,” a variation on the “pre-crimes” committed in the movie Minority Report. And I know I’m not the only one afflicted. A few years ago, The Nation magazine, where I am a columnist, hosted a one-week cruise to Alaska. The full-page ad that ran in the magazine carried the tag line: “Come see the glaciers before they melt.” I called my editor in a fury: How could we joke about melting glaciers while promoting a carbon-spewing holiday? Are we saying that global warming is funny? That we have no role to play in trying to stop it? The ad was pulled, but I realized then that, poor taste aside, this is how a great many of us are consuming wilderness these days—as a kind of nihilistic, final farewell. Gobble it all up before it’s gone.
This ecological despair was a big part of why I resisted having kids until my late thirties. For years I joked about giving birth to a Mad Maxian climate warrior, battling alongside her friends for food and fuel. And I was also fully aware that if we were to avoid that future, we would all have to cut down on the number of super-consumers we were producing. It was around the time that I began work on this book that my attitude started to shift. Some of it, no doubt, was standard-issue denial (what does one more kid matter . . . ). But part of it was also that immersing myself in the international climate justice movement had helped me imagine various futures that were decidedly less bleak than the post-apocalyptic cli-fi pastiche that had become my unconscious default. Maybe, just maybe, there was a future where replacing our own presence on earth could once again be part of a cycle of creation, not destruction.
And I was lucky: pregnant the first month we started trying. But then, just as fast, my luck ran out. A miscarriage. An ovarian tumor. A cancer scare. Surgery. Month after month of disappointing single pink lines on home pregnancy tests. Another miscarriage.
Then I stepped into the vortex I came to call the fertility factory (“do you have to call it that?” my patient husband pleaded). In its labyrinth of rooms in a downtown office building, drugs, hormones, and day surgeries were dispensed as liberally as toothbrushes at a dentist’s office. The working assumption was that any woman who steps through the door will do whatever it takes to land a newborn in her arms, even if that means having three (or five) newborns instead of one. And even if that means seriously compromising her own health with risky drugs and poorly regulated medical procedures in the process.
I did try to be a good patient for a while, but it didn’t work. The last straw was a doctor telling me, after my first (and only) round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that I probably had “egg quality issues” and I should consider an egg donor. Feeling like a supermarket chicken past its best-before date, and with more than a few questions about how much these doctors were driven by a desire to improve their own “live birth” success rates, I stopped going. I tossed the pills, safely disposed of the syringes, and moved on.
Informing friends and family that I had given up on a technological fix to my apparent inability to conceive was surprisingly difficult. People often felt the need to tell me stories about friends and acquaintances who had become parents despite incredible odds. Usually these stories involved people who got pregnant using one of the technologies that I had decided not to try (with the guilt-inducing implication that, by drawing the line where I did, I was clearly not committed enough to procreation). Quite a few were about women who had used every technology available—nine rounds of IVF, egg donors, surrogacy—and then gotten pregnant as soon as they stopped. Common to all these stories was the unquestioned assumption that the body’s No never really means no, that there is always a workaround. And, moreover, that there is something wrong with choosing not to push up against biological barriers if the technology is available.
On some level this faith is perfectly understandable. The female reproductive system is amazingly resilient—two ovaries and fallopian tubes when one would do; hundreds of thousands of eggs when all that is really needed are a few dozen good ones; and a generous window of opportunity to conceive spanning ages twelve to fifty (more or less). Yet what I felt my body telling me was that, even with all this ingenious built-in resilience, there is still a wall that can be hit, a place beyond which we cannot push. I felt that wall as a real structure inside my body and slamming against it had left me bruised. I didn’t want to keep bashing away.
My resistance to further intervention did not come from some fixed idea about how babies should be conceived “naturally” or not at all. I know that for men and women with clear infertility diagnoses, these technologies are a joyous miracle, and that for gay, lesbian, and trans couples, some form of assisted reproduction is the only route to biological parenthood. And I believe that everyone who wants to become a parent should have the option, regardless of their marital status, sexual orientation, or income (in my view, these procedures should be covered by public health insurance, rather than restricted to those who can afford the astronomical fees).
What made me uneasy at the clinic were, oddly, many of the same things that made me wary of the geoengineers: a failure to address fundamental questions about underlying causes, as well as the fact that we seem to be turning to high-risk technologies not just when no other options are available, but at the first sign of trouble—even as a convenient shortcut (“tick tock,” women of a certain age are told). Where I live, for instance, the system makes it significantly less complex to find an egg donor or a surrogate than to adopt a baby.
And then there is the matter of unacknowledged risks. Despite the casual attitude of many practitioners in this more than $10 billion global industry, the risks are real. A Dutch study, for instance, showed that women who had undergone in vitro fertilization were twice as likely to develop “ovarian malignancies”; an Israeli one found that women who had taken the widely prescribed fertility drug clomiphene citrate (which I was on) were at “significantly higher” risk for breast cancer; and Swedish researchers showed that IVF patients in the early stages of pregnancy were seven times more likely to develop a life-threatening blood clot in the lung. Other studies showed various kinds of risks to the children born of these methods.3
I did not know about this research when I was going to the clinic; my concerns stemmed from a generalized fear that by taking drugs that dramatically increased the number of eggs available for fertilization each month, I was overriding one of my body’s safety mechanisms, forcing something that was better not forced. But there was little space for expressing these doubts at the clinic: conversations with the doctors were as brief as speed dates and questions seemed to be regarded as signs of weakness. Just look at all those joyous birth announcements from grateful couples papering every available surface in the examination rooms and hallways—what could be more important than that?
So why share these experiences and observations in a book about climate change? Partly in the spirit of transparency. The five years it took to research and write this book were the same years that my personal life was occupied with failed pharmaceutical and technological interventions, and ultimately, pregnancy and new motherhood. I tried, at first, to keep these parallel journeys segregated, but it didn’t always work. Inevitably, one would escape its respective box to interrupt the other. What I was learning about the ecological crisis informed the responses to my own fertility crisis; and what I learned about fertility began to
leave its mark on how I saw the ecological crisis.
Some of the ways in which these two streams in my life intersected were simply painful. For instance, if I was going through a particularly difficult infertility episode, just showing up to a gathering of environmentalists could be an emotional minefield. The worst part were the ceaseless invocations of our responsibilities to “our children” and “our grandchildren.” I knew these expressions of intergenerational duty were heartfelt and in no way meant to be exclusionary—and yet I couldn’t help feeling shut out. If caring about the future was primarily a function of love for one’s descendants, where did that leave those of us who did not, or could not, have children? Was it even possible to be a real environmentalist if you didn’t have kids?
And then there was the whole Earth Mother/Mother Earth thing: the idea that women, by right of our biological ability to carry children, enjoy a special connection to that fertile and bountiful matriarch that is the earth herself. I have no doubt that some women experience that bond with nature as a powerful creative force. But it’s equally true that some of the most wildly creative and nurturing women (and men) that I know are childless by choice. And where did the equation of motherhood with the earth leave women like me, who wanted to conceive but were not able to? Were we exiles from nature? In my bleaker moments, I battled the conviction that the connection between my body and the cycle of creation had been unnaturally severed, like a dead telephone line.
But along the way, that feeling changed. It’s not that I got in touch with my inner Earth Mother; it’s that I started to notice that if the earth is indeed our mother, then far from the bountiful goddess of mythology, she is a mother facing a great many fertility challenges of her own. Indeed one of the most distressing impacts of the way in which our industrial activities affect the natural world is that they are interfering with systems at the heart of the earth’s fertility cycles, from soil to precipitation. I also began to notice that a great many species besides ours are bashing up against their own infertility walls, finding it harder and harder to successfully reproduce and harder still to protect their young from the harsh new stresses of a changing climate.
On a much more optimistic note, I started to learn that protecting and valuing the earth’s ingenious systems of reproducing life and the fertility of all of its inhabitants, may lie at the center of the shift in worldview that must take place if we are to move beyond extractivism. A worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and depletion.
An Aquatic Miscarriage
Since I had already quit the clinic, I had no idea that I was pregnant when I went to Louisiana to cover the BP spill. A few days after I got home, though, I could tell something was off and did a home pregnancy test. Two lines this time, but the second one was strangely faint. “You can’t be just a little bit pregnant,” the saying goes. And yet that is what I seemed to be. After going in for more tests, my family doctor called to tell me (in the hope-dampening tone with which I had become familiar) that while I was pregnant my hormone levels were much too low and I would likely miscarry, for the third time.
Instantly my mind raced back to the Gulf. While covering the spill, I had breathed in toxic fumes for days and, at one point, waded up to my waist in contaminated water to get to a secluded beach covered in oil. I searched on the chemicals BP was using in huge quantities, and found reams of online chatter linking them to miscarriages. Whatever was happening, I had no doubt that it was my doing.
After about a week of monitoring, the pregnancy was diagnosed as ectopic, which means that the embryo had implanted itself outside the uterus, most likely in a fallopian tube. I was rushed from the doctor’s office to the emergency room. Ectopics are a leading cause of maternal death, particularly in the developing world: if undiagnosed, the embryo keeps growing in its impossible location, causing a rupture and massive internal hemorrhaging. If caught in time, the somewhat creepy treatment is one or more injections of methotrexate, a powerful drug used in chemotherapy to arrest cell development (and carrying many of the same side effects). Once fetal development has stopped, the pregnancy miscarries on its own, but it can take weeks.
It was a tough, drawn-out loss for my husband and me. But it was also a relief to learn that the miscarriage had nothing to do with anything that had happened in the Gulf. Knowing that did make me think a little differently about my time covering the spill, however. As I waited for the pregnancy to “resolve,” I thought in particular about a long day spent on the Flounder Pounder, a sport fishing boat that a group of us had chartered as we went looking for evidence that the oil had entered the marshlands.
Our guide was Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, a heroic local organization devoted to repairing the damage done to the wetlands by the oil and gas industry. As we navigated through the narrow bayous of the Mississippi River Delta, Henderson kept leaning far over the side of the boat to get a better look at the bright green grass. What concerned him most was not what we were all seeing—fish jumping in fouled water, Roseau cane coated in reddish brown oil—but something much harder to detect, at least without a microscope and sample jars. Spring is the beginning of spawning season on the Gulf Coast and Henderson knew that these marshes were teeming with nearly invisible zooplankton and tiny juveniles that would develop into adult shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fin fish. In these fragile weeks and months, the marsh grass acts as an aquatic incubator, providing nutrients and protection from predators. “Everything is born in these wetlands,” he said.4 Unless, of course, something interferes with the process.
When fish are in their egg and larval phases, they have none of the defensive tools available to more mature animals. These tiny creatures travel where the tides carry them, unable to avoid whatever poison crosses their path. And at this early stage of development, exquisitely fragile membranes offer no protection from toxins; even negligible doses can cause death or mutation.
As far as Henderson was concerned, the prospects for these microscopic creatures did not look good. Each wave brought in more oil and dispersants, sending levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) soaring. And this was all happening at the absolute worst possible moment on the biological calendar: not only shellfish, but also bluefin tuna, grouper, snapper, mackerel, swordfish, and marlin were all spawning during these same key months. Out in the open water, floating clouds of translucent proto-life were just waiting for one of the countless slicks of oil and dispersants to pass through them like an angel of death. As John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, put it: “Any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn’t have a chance.”5
Unlike the oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, which were being featured on the covers of the world’s newspapers that week, these deaths would attract no media attention, just as they would go uncounted in the official assessments of the spill’s damage. Indeed, if a certain species of larva was in the process of being snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years—until those embryonic life-forms would have normally reached maturity. And then, rather than some camera-ready mass die-off, there would just be . . . nothing. An absence. A hole in the life cycle.
That’s what happened to the herring after the Exxon Valdez disaster. For three years after the spill, herring stocks were robust. But in the fourth, populations suddenly plummeted by roughly three quarters. The next year, there were so few, and they were so sick, that the herring fishery in Prince William Sound was closed. The math made sense: the herring that were in their egg and larval stages at the peak of the disaster would have been reaching maturity right about then.6
This was the kind of delayed disaster that Henderson was worried about as he peered into the marsh grass. When we reached Redfish Bay, usually a sport-fishing paradise, we cut the engine on the Flounder Pounder and drifted for a while in silence, taking video of the oily sheen that covered the water’s surface.
As our b
oat rocked in that terrible place—the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets—I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage. When I learned that I too was in the early stages of creating an ill-fated embryo, I started to think of that time in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage.
It was then that I let go of the idea that infertility made me some sort of exile from nature, and began to feel what I can only describe as a kinship of the infertile. It suddenly dawned on me that I was indeed part of a vast biotic community, and it was a place where a great many of us—humans and nonhuman alike—found ourselves engaged in an uphill battle to create new living beings.
A Country for Old Men
For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn, our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life. When drugs and chemicals are approved for safe use and exposure, risk assessments most often focus on the effects on adults. As biologist Sandra Steingraber has observed, “Entire regulatory systems are premised on the assumption that all members of the population basically act, biologically, like middle-aged men. . . . Until 1990, for example, the reference dose for radiation exposure was based on a hypothetical 5'7” tall white man who weighed 157 pounds.” More than three quarters of the mass-produced chemicals in the United States have never been tested for their impacts on fetuses or children. That means they are being released in the environment with no consideration for how they will impact those who weigh, say, twenty pounds, like your average one-year-old girl, let alone a half-pound, like a nineteen-week fetus.7
