Mary KennyThe pollution of the water supplies is affecting birds and fish
A wise older woman once said to me: “Mark my words: nature is not mocked. If you distort nature disproportionately, it will hit back.”
And it can often turn out to be true. A BBC documentary on birds transmitted this week has highlighted the deterioration of bird life because of the pollution of the water supplies through overuse of anti-depressants and the waste matter from oral contraceptives.
Starlings, otters, crayfish and cuttlefish have all been affected. Investigations by the British Trust for Ornithology have disclosed that the number of starlings in Britain has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s. Other species have also shown a declining interest in mating and even food over the same period. An ecologist, Dr Katherine Arnold from the University of York, has suggested that anti-depressants in the water – among other things – are contributing to the destruction of such wildlife.
Drugs which humans use are eventually flushed out through human wastage.
Thus they enter the ecological chain which nature has devised to recycle life. Worms feed on sewage disposal and birds feed on worms.
And thus birds are ingesting fluoxetine – the anti-depressant drug – and other pharmaceuticals via the worms.
Crayfish and cuttlefish have also been shown to be affected by their exposure to anti-depressants; and excreted matter from the contraceptive pill is causing fish to change sex.
A third of male fish in English rivers have developed female characteristics after ingesting female hormones via the pill (according to the Journal of Applied Ecology). Some painkillers are also suspected of causing changes observed in wildlife.
While British (and Swedish) researchers have been looking at the impact of pharmaceuticals on birds and fish, an Irish study carried out at UCC by Professor Patricia Kearney and others has reported that babies born by Caesarean section are “more likely” to develop autism. The increase in C-sections has been accompanied by a notable increase in autistic children – perhaps by as much as 23%.
Is this also nature reacting against the overuse of a surgical procedure, in preference to nature’s normal course of birth? We must remember that nature can be destructively cruel, and the normal course of birth can, and did, go desperately wrong sometimes.
Clear
It’s clear from the Gospels that we should pursue healing, and we should remedy nature’s errors, where possible, through the healing arts. But there is a question of necessity and proportion: the Caesarean section is a wonderful advance for mothers and babies where there is an obstructed labour, or a pressing medical necessity.
But perhaps nature is warning that it should not become just another choice, either for comfort or convenience, and it should not be overused.
The ‘natural law’ exists for a good reason, and helps us to measure and reflect on need and proportionality – and to understand that there can always be a cost for any benefit.
Halloween has become a brand
Folk traditions and holidays will inevitably change and evolve with the passage of time, and the Halloween we see today is a very different occasion than the one we oldsters remember from times gone by. But each generation will invent its own way of doing things, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The revival of pagan ghouls and monsters in Galway last weekend is just another innovation of the season, and if it adds to a sense of kermesse (festival) then it’s a genuine, newly-minted community tradition.
The biggest change in the observance of Halloween, however, is that it has become more monetised. From the beginning of October emblems of witches and skeletons appear in supermarkets for purchase. Halloween, like everything else, is now a brand, to be marketed along with all the other brands. Some people call this Americanisation – especially with the spread of ‘trick or treat’ – but in truth it’s just commerce.
And sometimes we can be grateful to branding. If Christmas hadn’t become such a big, global ‘brand’, it would have been abolished by the secularists. They made an attempt, seeking to re-brand it as ‘Winterval’, but the ‘Christmas’ brand was just too big to break.
If the kids enjoy Halloween as it has developed, let them – it’s an old Irish practice. But a part of me still feels a mite nostalgic for the pure simplicity of the Halloween – All Hallows Eve – that I grew up with: the apple in the water, pinning the tail on the donkey and calling around at the neighbours’ doors to be rewarded with oranges and pennies.
A tattoo on life
I am planning to get a new tattoo on my arm and had thought of having Beckett’s words: “Try again, fail again, fail better” engraved. But a friend says it’s too negative. So now I think I’ll go for Kierkegaard’s aphorism: “Life has to be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.” For I reflect on the Great Dane’s (and great Christian’s) words each day.