Drink to your Health?

Put down that Nalgene bottle, health and environmentally concious consumer! That's right, i'm talking to you; tree-hugging backpackers and fit-crazy athletes - it turns out that your hydration habit may not be as good for your health as you think.

Wait? What? Resuable water bottles can't be bad for us, they save tons of fossil fuels and space in the dump by replacing disposable plastic water bottles. They keep us hydrated, which we know is healthier than drinking sodas or sports drinks. It's even financially efficient, for those of us lucky enough to live in countries like the US where we've got safe, clean, free tapwater available.

So we Nalgene addicts thought we were doing something right. Sure, it's a status symbol too, why else does everyone have a water bottle that looks exactly the same, give or take a few faded stickers from cool foriegn countries or hip bands. But, undoubtedly, our intentions were in the right place. So, now it just hurts to find out that our nalgene habit may be seriously hurting our reproductive health.

Bisphenol A is a chemical compund that is used in plastics, like food containers and water bottles. It's been shown to interefere with cellular signalling pathways important to ferility and reproduction, according to materials from Alaska Community Action on Toxics. The potential negative impacts of the popular chemical additives has generated big news, even starring in an article in Vanity Fair last month about protecting one's fertility from the complex, chemical environment we've created for ourselves.

Currently being studied by government funded research, Bisphenol A remains in many of our day to day plastics. Reports indicate that it volitalizes when heated, so that hot water and microwaving can mobilize the chemical into our food and water more rapidly.

Right now, for many of those nalgene carrying young women, fertility is the farthest thing from our minds, except of course for temporary "anti-fertility." But, it's dangerous to believe that our reproductive health isn't something we need to worry about until we are ready to reproduce. 12% of all US reproductive aged couples report problems concieving or carrying a pregancy to term, and it could very well be linked to the unprecended and unstudied chemical exposures in our day to day lives.

So, what's a thristy, environmental, health concious young woman supposed to do now? Luckily, plenty of marketing has caught on to the Bisphenol A contraversy, and there's a fresh new line of aluminum and other non-plastic water bottles hitting the market that are chemical-plastic free. And, as the newest thing, they might end up hip too. Now is your chance to be on the cutting edge in water-bottle technology! So, while one more sip from that old nalgene certainly won't kill you, when you manage to lose this one or just feel ready for a change: make the small switch to a re-usable bottle that might make a big step toward protecting your health.

Campfire in Kongiganak

So, I've decided to use the blog for several purposes, I guess. Primarily, as a place to practice and publish my writing, but also to occasionally keep family and friends up to date on my adventures and whatnot. If you're just here for the science, skip these ones.


I spent last week in a little village of about 350 people on the central-western coast of Alaska named Kongiganak. I was there to help out the campfire program, which is a sort of "fly-in" summer camp program that takes a few counselors and several boxes of supplies to remote villages to teach swimming, water safety and do fun camp stuff. It was a really cool community, everyone was really warm and friendly, and the kids were really sweet. Everyone's first language was Yupik, but the school-aged kids and the adults all spoke english as well. However, talking to the village elders and the young children was basically just a lot of smiling and hardly any verbal understanding.

Unfortunately, I brought bad weather with me from Anchorage, so we didn't get to do much swimming (which was a bummer, that was really why I went) but we did hike on the tundra (wet and squishy- flat like Kansas and full of ponds) and pick the tiny blueberries that covered the ground. We made lots of friendship bracelets, played tag and basketball, and had 75 kids, ages 5-17 at our "camp-in" which we held in the school gym. That's 3 of us against 75 of them. Eeek! But they were pretty good, I managed the s'more making station. Didn't get much sleep, but that's the way it goes I guess.

I had the oppurtunity to listen in on a community meeting with a fish and wildlife officer, which was unfortunately held because someone shot a cow moose and two calves before the season opened, and an anonymous community member called the FWS. Anyways, the town exploded in outrage, defending their subsistence rights and community solidarity, and it was a really interesting dialogue to listen to, even though lots of it was in Yupik.

So, it was a pretty interesting week, really warm people and fun kids, and I learned a lot about how parts of the US can feel like foriegn travel. Especially in the tiny little old planes on the muddy, flooding gravel runways. So it was a good little adventure- something I'm considering as a full time occupation for next summer prehaps.....

A cause in need of a better name....

Activists of every breed know that intrinsic value of having the right terminology. It’s hard to argue against being “Pro-life” or fight for support of female genital mutilation, but when you discuss being “anti-abortion” or the cultural value of circumcision traditions, it changes the shape of the debate. The power to set the tone for the debate is in the terminology. From this word-power perspective, the global movement to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas pollution that is increasing the earth’s insulation and raising temperature is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

They started with “global warming” but that became political incorrect when many people refused to believe the evidence. Now, the evidence has been accepted as “Unequivocal” by the IPCC, and we’re all using the politically correct “Climate Change.” Although it was chosen to emphasize that greenhouse gases will do more damage to the planet than just kick up the thermostat a few degrees, climate change lacks the oomph of a true activist expression.
Worse, as skeptics and a few remaining oil executives will be quick to point out, the climate is always changing, climate change is nothing new or concerning. The frustrating part is that they are right. Climate changes are normal, but we’ve still got a serious problem on our hands with carbon dioxide and its friends. So perhaps we need to find a new word to rally behind, and to do that we need to think about what it about our changing climate we really want to talk about.
Climate is controlled by many factors, on many levels.

For a broad analysis, we can consider climate as being driven by three categories of factors, also known in climatologist lingo as “forcings”. The first category would be external forcings. This includes variations in the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch cycles. The planet’s tilt, the curvature of the orbit, and the earth’s wobble on its axis vary on cycles of 23, 41, and about 100 thousand years, and these patterns give rise to the well documented approximately 100,000 year ice age cycles. Other forcings in this category would include variations in incoming solar energy.

The second category of forcings can be considered natural internal forcings. Varying from annual to decadal influences, processes like the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation fall into this category. Changes in sea surface temperature and circulation interacts with the atmosphere circulation patterns to change winds, temperatures, and precipitation. Some of these mechanisms, like the ENSO are well understood by scientists, and other undoubtedly have yet to be concretely described.

The third category of climate influences would be anthropogenic internal forcing. This category includes all kinds of factors like deforestation and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion. Other human forces include aerosol and sulfide pollutions, smog pollutants which actually have a net cooling effect as the pollution clouds reflect solar energy away in a process recently dubbed “global dimming.” Which is not to say that more smog is our solution to our global warming problem, but to demonstrate that our climate is a complicated concept.

Which makes it all the more concerning that human activity is having such a huge impact on the global climate, altering the system before we’ve even completely figured it out. We’ve got a problem because the third category of forcings is rapidly exceeding the natural variation of the natural factors, and we’re driving ourselves into uncharted territory. The climate is most definitely changing, in ways that we need to be concerned about. But saying that we need to fight “anthropogenic greenhouse gas driven global climate change” is a rather uninspiring mouthful. We’re facing more that just temperature increases and changes, we’re facing a complex network of global climate disruptions that will feed off one another in ways scientists are just beginning to predict. We all know we need to act sooner rather than later or too late if we want to preserve the world that has taken such good care of us so far. I don’t know what the battle cry should be, but the sooner we find it, the better.