When April’s here and meadows wide

Once more with spring’s sweet growths are pied

I close each book, drop each pursuit,

And past the brook, no longer mute,

I joyous roam the countryside.  (Jessie Redmon Fauset)

[Are there deformed frogs in the brook?]

Today’s roamed countryside was the Kiplinger Natural Area on Kanner Highway in Stuart, a bundle of habitat diversity tucked into a small package—weedy meadow, brook with baby gator, mangrove swamp, river bank, low pine woods, and marsh.   The usually modest Gallberry was having its 15 minutes of fame with millions of white flowers abuzz with happy bees.  White Pinebarren Aster (Oclemena reticulata) and Elliott’s Milkpea (Galactia elliottii) splashed more white into nature’s garden.  Rabbit Bells (Crotalaria rotundifolia) were at their yellow best, and Smilax reached out with tender new tendrils and its yellow-green “lily” blossoms.

Galactia elliottii (All photos today by John Bradford)

We’ll zoom in (again) on Smilax as an example of plants able to make compounds, phytoestrogens,  that mimic or interfere with mammalian estrogen hormones and related functions.  A lot of natural and unnatural chemicals do that. The “Silent Spring of the 90s,” increasing public awareness of environmental estrogens, was “Our Stolen Future,” 1997 by Theo Colborn and collaborators.

Smilax

There are things to worry about in the estrogen endocrine-disrupting realm.

Thing 1:  Natural botanical “phytoestrogens” can impact animals, including humans for better or worse, an observation not lost on diet- and herbal-conscious writers.   When we talk of artificial estrogens, we’re not merely talking about potentially feminized males (although possible, as in the famous “teenie weenies” on Lake Apopka gators),  but also fundamental developmental disruption and cancers, especially breast cancers.  Hormonal  activity and the altered gene control of cancers are no doubt intertwined.  As two examples of dietary plant-derived phytoestrogenic booboos, A) multiple post-menopausal women have suffered uterine ailments apparently from high consumption of soy products (legumes can be high in phytoestrogens).   And B) a man developed breast cancer after six years of herbal remedies rich in phytoestrogens.

Some observers suspect that traditional plant medicines for reproductive complaints often tend to involve phytoestrogens or similar endocrine-active compounds.  After all, the first birth control pills came indirectly from yams.   And that brings us back to Smilax.

Smilax is a popular trail nibble and as a genus serves worldwide in traditional medicines including several hormonally related problems, including menstrual  complaints, perimenopausal symptoms (for which it is promoted), impotence, prostate enlargement, childbirth, and psoriasis, which has a hormonal connection.   Smilax is a much-touted source of hormonally active compounds..

(Disclaimers:  I am using the term “phytoestrogen” broadly to include compounds that mimic estrogens, or that impact directly or indirectly regulation of the mammalian estrogen-related system.  Also, Smilax has traditional non-reproductive uses too, and of course human history is loaded with attempts to alleviate reproductive ailments.)

Moving on to additional worrisome things:

Thing 2.  My colleague Maura Merkal last week shared a  report on pesticides in South Florida waters:  “Ambient Pesticide Monitoring Network:  1992-2007” (linked below).  Here is a fun fact from the report:  The chlorinated agricultural and lawn-grass herbicide Atrazine turned up at every sampling location.   Did I mention, every sampling location in our general area.   1517 detections.

Crummy, but how does it tie to Smilax?   We’re getting there.  A recent issue of the New Yorker Magazine (Feb. 10 2014)  recounted an epic battle between  University of California researcher Dr. Tyrone Hayes and the manufacturer of Atrazine.   The rub grew out of Dr. Haye’s research conclusions that a profitable herbicide is an estrogen-related source of developmental deformities in amphibians, or let’s call them canaries in the water.

To comfort ourselves we may say, sure there’s Atrazine in all the water, but optimists and vested interests claim the effects are not proven, and the concentrations are low.  (It was not “proven” that cigarettes cause lung cancer.)  There’s been a loud  “Hayes is nuts”  reaction to his research, including assertions that the results can’t be replicated and that his alarm is debunked.  But there are also independent indications that Hayes is not nuts, and there is evidence of human damage from Atrazine in the water.  It would be an understatement to call this dispute controversial.   Interested persons can conduct their own Google research on this remarkable dustup.   (Readers interested in a broad history of inconvenient research in relation to economic interests might enjoy David Michaels’s “Doubt is Their Product.”)

Thing 3.  Now let’s worry that no matter how hormonally pernicious Atrazine may or may not be, there are a lot of additional estrogen-interfering chemicals in the air and water.  Addiitonal estrogen-related compounds haunt the Ambient Pesticide study.  And even if Atrazine is in “low” concentrations now, we’re adding more and more, and what about combined effects of mixed estrogen mimics?  That brings us to worrisome thing #4.

Thing 4:  According to Our Stolen Future and other sources, hormonally-related chemicals can work in astoundingly low concentrations exponentially below what we tend to talk about in terms of toxicity thresholds, such as killing water-fleas.  (“Didn’t kill the fleas, so I guess we’re safe” does not comfort me.)   Hormones and their mimics seem to have chronic effects at levels of parts per billion, or, yikes, even parts per trillion.  But admittedly all very general and murky.

To  return to native plants, why would a natural organic plant be so crass as to make hormonally -interfering compounds?   Plants able to sabotage their herbivores’ baby-making don’t get gobbled.  Human case in point:  Cottonseed oil, containing phytoestrogens, is touted as a potential male oral contraceptive.  Turns out couples in regions heavy on dietary cottonseed oil have trouble making babies.

Are Dr. Hayes and his supporters correct?   As the detractors say, there is no “proof,”  but the fear of Dollarweed in my lawn ranks below my fear of impaired aquatic ecosystems, deformed babies, and adolescent cancers.

Notes:

Ambient Pesticide report

More on Dr. Hayes, Atrazine,  and the New  Yorker article

More on Atrazine and people:

Digest this before scarfing down herbal remedies 

Interesting blog on phytoestrogens

New  Yorker article

Nature-bugs like me avidly bemoan nature-deficit-disorder, the concept that today’s children grow up in a nature vacuum sucked dry by video games, sterile air conditioned gated communities, and overly structured  upbringings.  

All true of course, but thinking back to my own childhood in industrial Wheeling, West Virginia followed by Detroit, I don’t recall childhood companions terrifically fascinated with spiders and warblers.    I do recall adult concerns about kids getting too soft and indoorsy, but then again in my recent readings of 1920s nature writings,  they worried back then too about the kids losing their grip on nature.    That worry must go back all the way to the transition from a land of farmers to the Industrial Revolution, and I kinda suspect 19^th Century farm kids were more interested in the attractions of the big city than in wildflowers and butterflies.  The hippies talked about “back to nature” in the 60s, but that was mostly some silly affectation with no substance.  Were the ancient Romans interested in nature?

But even if it is long-standing human nature to ignore Mother Nature, things seem extra screwy to me when I teach a botany class with students afraid to touch a flower because it might house a bug.   When the Boy Scouts seem more concerned with silly exclusive policies than in bringing kids outside.   When lightning bugs and salamanders decline and nobody notices.   When “outdoor activity” becomes golf and soccer.   When fishing became more expensive than leisurely.  When to see butterflies I go to “Butterfly World.”  And when a college can’t teach ecology without flying everyone to Costa Rica.

Something has even happened to gardening.    Forever, hasn’t gardening been more about beauty, flowers, soil, fresh air, exercise, wind, and worms?   A personal experience, or a family experience, often multigenerational.   It was for everybody.  So when did gardening become “landscaping”?  When did ostentation loom large?  When did ego creep in?  Who in the world ever thought there’d be “garden celebrities.”  Oh come on!   Let’s dig the dirt and plant some flowers.

I don’t think it is as simple as, “when I was a kid we played outside in the hills and meadows, and now we don’t.”   (Although that may often be quite true.)    What worries me more is a slightly different shift in values, a lost ability to enjoy basic simple pleasures, nature or whatever it may be.   Life has gotten so fast, so specialized, so complex, so competitive, and so driven by some sort of new values coming at us electronically.

Enviornmentalists are fond of explaining attitudes about nature in terms of World View.   Seems to me that collectively our big World View has homogenized around an unnatural core through the electronic media bath in which we live:  giant TVs, WWW,  cable news 24/7,  pundits, gurus,  satellite radio, political polarization,  stock reports,  sports fixation.   Reminds me of my college days ca. 1970 when Marshall McLuhan with the “medium is the message” was hot classroom fodder.    I just looked him up on Wikipedia and found a comment that seems to say so much:  “Key to McLuhan’s argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual’s and, by extension, a society’s self-conception and realization.”

It isn’t that our “self-conception and realization” is anti-nature, but rather merely a narcissistic cyber-world ever-evolving away from the small tangible pleasures, individual pursuits, and the values they engender.    Even our conversational social lives meld into Facebook, texting, and Twitter.  Celebrities tell us what to value.   Nature is not in the back yard—it is on the Discovery Channel.

And here I sit on a beautiful Florida summer afternoon with my face buried in a laptop computer.