A Diary in the Age of Water, page 9
“Lynna!” He emphatically pointed to his microscope. “We’re turning into rotifers.”
Still standing at the door, I burst out laughing.
“It’s no joke, Lynna.” He let his eyes grow wide at me and nodded with that know-it-all smile of his. “Scientists all agree that environmental factors are the main triggers for male and female infertility through epigenetics. The list of exposure triggers is endless. You know the main culprits: heavy metals, pesticides, car exhaust—”
“And tobacco smoke,” I jumped in, wondering what any of this had to do with rotifers and this Amazon factor in women.
“Yeah, mostly chemicals with hormonal properties,” he continued, not missing a beat. “They showed long ago that pesticides are responsible for man-boobs and men not getting it up.”
I’d read somewhere that even subtle environmental factors like rain, temperature, and tree aerosols can play a role. Some scientist in France—Stefan Montpellier—created a fertility pill for men using pycnogenol from French maritime pine bark extract.
Leaning on his microscope, Daniel continued, “Wherever there’s a sewage treatment plant, pulp and paper mill, or corporate agriculture, you get endocrine disruption. They inhibit breeding in male fish. And—”
“Create feminized males with female eggs, along with reduced immunity to disease,” I finished for him. Hence, so many pandemic deaths we’ve had in the past decades. Apparently one in thirty humans now have bodies that differ notably from standard male or female. Klinefelter, androgen insensitivity syndrome, and presence of ovotestes are all on the rise.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Daniel said dramatically, “The environment is changing us faster than most think, and it’s doing it through epigenetics and HGT.”
I nodded solemnly, drawn in but still not sure where he was going with this male infertility business and this epigenetic Amazon factor responsible for more girls in the world.
I thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who posited the notion back in the early nineteenth century that acquired traits could be passed along to offspring. He was ridiculed for a century until he was proven right. In 2008, evolutionary biologists at Tel Aviv University in Israel showed that all sorts of cellular machinery played a vital role in how DNA sequences were inherited. When researchers inserted foreign genes into the DNA of laboratory animals and plants, something strange happened: the genes worked at first, but then they were “silenced.” For generation after generation. The host cells tagged the foreign genes with an “off switch” that made the genes inoperable. And, although the new genes were passed onto offspring, so was the off switch. It was Larmarckism in action: the parents’ experience had influenced the offsprings’ inheritance. Evolutionists gave it a new name. They called it soft inheritance. Where do we end and where does environment begin?
I felt Daniel finally coming to the real subject of his interest: “So this epigenetic mechanism responsible for women creating only girls is called the Amazon factor, because—aside from the obvious reason—it acts through mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited.” Why was this making me feel uncomfortable? He leaned toward me conspiratorially. “Lynna, did you read Zacharewski’s latest paper on heat shock proteins in Epigenetics?”
I frowned slightly, wondering where this was leading. I’d read the paper. Heat shock proteins help activate immune responses. They call the alarm and identify the culprits for the antigens to attack. They basically act as a shield for environmental antagonists, keeping the body in homeostasis. I offered, “Zacharewski recently confirmed that heat shock proteins are epigenetically controlled by certain environmental triggers.”
Daniel nodded and leaned back. “More like the environment is disrupting the ability of heat shock proteins to maintain homeostasis.”
I frowned at his remark. What was he implying? That heat shock proteins were being compromised by environmental changes? Wasn’t environmental variability the very thing they were meant to guard against?
Daniel jumped to his feet and approached me. “But certain epigenetic factors can help these proteins from degrading.” His voice turned into a whisper, “Steinberg’s grad student, Marie Tétrault, is about to blow the lid off climate science with her paper next month. It’s in The Journal of Toxicology & Climate Change.”
I felt a pang of jealousy—I hadn’t published a paper since 2042. I haven’t exactly been doing ground-breaking work for the past decade either. I’d hoped that Daniel and I would publish something eventually, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Daniel, however, is well-connected. Too well-connected for a blabber-mouth.
He glanced sideways in a dramatic show of paranoia then focused back on me with wild eyes. “Her paper will show the first evidence for a sex-related heat shock protein response to heat stress. Apparently, this Amazon factor—responsible for more female and intersex humans—controls HSPs in favour of heat protection—even as our degrading environmental soup of endocrine disruptors is shutting them down.”
So, that’s what he was getting at. I had to blink at its meaning.
“Do you know what that means, Lynna? Climate change-related adaptations appear stacked heavily for females and intersex humans. Males might go extinct with climate change!” He barked out his crazy annoying hyena laugh, and I jerked back from him.
I hate that laugh.
I quipped, “Next you’ll be telling me that we’re entering a brave new world where women with this maternally-inherited Amazon factor are spontaneously giving birth to these mostly female or intersex offspring—like those bdelloid rotifers of yours—and they’ll call it the Madonna syndrome. Then the ‘male extinction’ you talked about won’t mark the end of the human race, because we won’t need them—males, that is.” I gave him a churlish smile. “We’ll be like that rotifer.”
Daniel didn’t grin back. He just stared at me, dumbfounded.
Had I seized his punch line?
I decided that I’d had enough. “What are you doing here, Daniel?” When he blinked at me with confusion, I added brusquely, “In this lab, instead of working on my sediment cores.”
Daniel clammed up. I could see him searching for an answer that satisfied. “I’m doing old Carl a favour,” he stammered finally, backing away to the safety of his microscope. “He asked me to do these counts for him.”
I was sure he was doing more than that, but I didn’t challenge him.
“It won’t take long. I’ll be working on your stuff by the end of the day,” Daniel ended cheerfully. Too cheerfully.
I couldn’t stay angry at Daniel for long. What Steinberg wanted, Steinberg got; after all, that expat American was the director of CanadaCorp’s Environmental Physiology Department at U of T. All I could think of was how CanadaCorp was marginalizing me in every way—even taking my prize technicians from me.
July 13, 2049
WATERSHED: An area of land that catches rain and snow, and drains or seeps into a marsh, stream, river, lake, or groundwater. Also called a drainage basin, it is usually bounded by a ridge of land that separates ground and surface waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas.
When I was eleven, Mother and I moved from Toronto to Magog, a small rural town near Montreal in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Like two zugunruhe itinerants, we stuffed everything we had into an old blue Volkswagen Jetta and drove for five hours, Una singing in her angelic voice and telling stories about fantasy worlds or about her garden and the local wildlife. She was so happy. She was returning home. It made me happy. I don’t know why I didn’t mind that I was leaving my friends, my school, or my old home. Una seemed to create our world, loving everything with her voice and her eyes. When she was happy, the world was happy. When she was singing, the world resonated with beauty and I was home.
Una drove us into Montreal to celebrate our move. She took me to Restaurant Papillon in Old Montreal. Una ordered escargots à l’ail gratinés and a splendid salad with epinards, tomates, fromage bleu, olives noires, noix de Grenoble, cantaloupe, oranges, et raisins. I remember thinking the snails were interesting. The salad was a surprising bouquet of hidden treasures, spinach salad hidden beneath a splash of colour. My mouth was crammed with food and my face was beaming when the young waitress, Simiane, said to me, “You enjoy with your eyes, with your mouth, with everything.”
Una laughed and raised her glass of tap water to her mouth. She took a sip and sighed. “It’s nice to be back with my water. My watershed.” She looked at me. “This is your water now. Make friends with it, Wassergeist.”
That same year, the UNEP/WMO declared that over two thirds of the world was in a severe water crisis. Mother read the article in the Montreal Gazette to me. Canada wasn’t on the list. She said that was a shame; it gave us the wrong impression. It made us dangerously smug. Her comment reminded me of Maude Barlow’s warning about “our myth of abundance” in a talk she gave when I was just four years old: If you don’t cherish what you have, it will be taken away from you.
When I was a child and we lived in Toronto, Una frequently took me to the shores of Lake Ontario to see the lake and the wildlife there. We usually started our nature hike somewhere along the Credit River. If it was a hot day we waded through much of the turbulent river.
Mother found an access point off a small park in the lower reach of the river. She then led me along a little-used foot path to the creek’s edge. The river roared and churned over boulders the size of a grizzly’s head. I scrambled over them, clutching my mother’s hand. Then we plunged into the bracing water. It felt like a baptism. The current tugged my legs in chaotic pulses, and I fought to keep upright. Una held me tight, and soon I found my “river-legs.” Amid the open-throated roar, I dipped my hand in and sipped the water from my cupped hand. I beamed with glee. Una reached down through the surging waves and pulled up rocks teaming with life. Mayfly nymphs scattered for cover, and “rock-igloos” of caddis flies clung to the rock. I think it was that moment when I decided to study water as a career.
We waded downstream to the village of Port Credit, on the edge of the lake, where Una treated me to an ice cream cone and lunch.
“We are Lake Ontario,” she said to me as we stood on the lakeshore. She pointed to the water that sparkled in the sun all the way to the shimmering horizon; then she made an arc with her arm to the hazy sky before drawing her arm back to her heart. “Its water is our water. Can you feel it in the breeze?”
She said the Great Lakes were turning into Great Puddles. She showed me where Lake Ontario’s shoreline used to be. “Do you remember the time I took you to see Maude Barlow at the church on Bloor Street?”
I nodded.
“It all started that same summer: June 22, 2016,” she said.
I was just four years old then.
Eight states that adjoined the Great Lakes unanimously approved a proposal from Waukesha, Wisconsin, to draw Lake Michigan water, even though Waukesha lay outside the watershed; they broke the Great Lakes Water Compact. It signalled not only the end of the Great Lakes; it was the beginning of the end for Canada’s water.
“Alles ist Wasser,” she said, her kind smile edged with something sad. “Canada is made of water. I’m afraid that you will witness an end of an age, meine Wassergeist.” Then she embraced me and didn’t let go for a long time. I just stood there, breathing in the scent of the forest and feeling her heartbeat. I felt her heartbeat transcend the entire world; so long as that heartbeat continued, we’d be all right, I thought then.
When we drove to Montreal, we took the scenic route along the Great Lakes Waterway. Una stopped frequently to point out historic sites: Gananoque and the Thousand Islands, the locks at Iroquois, and other places where major pipeline and further dam construction were planned. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been working on diverting the Saint Lawrence River system south since the 1920s. In 2025, the Conservative government diverted ninety-three square kilometres of water from the Yukon, Liard, and Peace systems into the massive RMT Reservoir. The discharge from the Saint Lawrence River system was even higher than the LaRouche water pipeline from Canada’s west to western America.
The original seaway construction—about a hundred years ago—submerged villages and displaced people, particularly on the Canadian side. Construction destroyed fishing grounds, wetlands, and arable farmlands. A three-hundred-kilometre-long system of human-made locks, canals, and channels were opened in 1959—allowing deep-draft ocean-going vessels to enter the heart of North America. The Great Lakes Pipeline diversion in 2033 at the Moses-Saunders dam near Cornwall, Long Sault, and Iroquois was even more devastating for Canada. Not only did CanadaCorp shut off Niagara Falls in 2047, they also seized control of the entire Great Lakes Basin, a watershed the size of Turkey that holds over a fifth of the world’s fresh water.
We’re sending most of it south.
But no one here seems to care, including my co-workers at CanadaCorp. Do they know what this means? We have just lost our largest watershed; we’ve given away all our water.
But I have something else to worry about.
Today, CanadaCorp announced that the collection of rainwater was illegal. As of today, I could be arrested for using my rain catcher and cistern. I’ve decided to continue using the cistern, and I’ve warned Hildegard not to breathe a word to anyone at school about what we’re doing with the water. Thankfully, I have time to train her in the art of subterfuge before she starts Grade Two in the fall.
August 25, 2049
KÁRMÁN VORTEX STREET: A repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid around blunt bodies. Paired vortices generate an oscillating wake or vortex street behind the body immersed in the fluid flow. Named after Hungarian engineer Theodore von Kármán, it includes phenomena such as “singing” suspended power lines and the vibration of a car antenna at certain speeds.
I’m stunned. Mother of God! Daniel’s prediction came true. What stuns me more than his actual prediction is that I had no sense of it myself.
Have I lost my connection to water and its turbulent patterns?
The universe is a turbulent place.
Interstellar turbulence causes the “twinkling” of radio sources, just as turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere makes stars twinkle. Turbulence is normally associated with unpredictable chaos. Yet, from chaotic flow emerges a kernel of order in the vortex or eddy form. A kind of self-organized stable chaos. Like kármán vortex streets. Or the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability of vortex waves when two different fluids with different velocities or directions pass each other. You can see an example of it in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot or Saturn’s north polar atmosphere. These alternating swirls do a kind of dance called “eddy shedding,” often in a zigzag path—like the bubbles in a champagne glass. I read that even bees use eddy shedding from their wingtips to help them stay aloft.
What inherent pattern of consequence has Daniel locked onto?
Water naturally meanders. It spirals and creates sinuous patterns in space, forms that reflect the vortex or eddy. Water is constantly in motion—like the beating of my heart. It never stops, from the spray and turbulence of waterfalls and surging ocean currents, to the swirling vapour of my hot ersatz coffee. It is a living movement. One I thought I recognized. I used to pride myself on reading the signs in water. On recognizing the quiescent patterns, the standing waves that evolve out of the centre of a chaotic wave, the dynamic oscillations that propagate out like rays and concentric rings from their sources. Water did all this as a result of frequency.
Why didn’t I sense this?
And why did Daniel?
His crazy prediction of a water quota on the wTaps turned out to be prescient. Only a year after enforcing the wTap system, CanadaCorp put a greater lid on how much water we could buy. Daniel’s prediction was very close. Too close. Yesterday CanadaCorp announced a ceiling of three litres per day per person—just enough to drink and cook with. In the space of a mere two decades, our daily water use had been reduced from three hundred litres to thirty litres to three litres.
Where does Daniel get his information from? It can’t all be from Oracle with its rat’s nest of unreliable conspiracy theory stuff. Has he tapped into the mathematical truth of turbulent flow, like Van Gogh did when he painted Starry Night? Instability resonating with instability?
Daniel’s found a ride on some vortex street.
October 7, 2049
PLEUSTON: Organisms adapted to live in or on the thin interface between air and water (e.g., duckweed and water striders). Neuston are the microscopic organisms (e.g., algae and bacteria) that occupy water’s surface film
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
Water has a very high surface tension: it’s sticky and elastic, and it tends to clump together in spherical drops rather than spread out in a thin flat film like rubbing alcohol. The strong attraction between the water molecules creates a strong film. Water’s surface tension allows water to hold up substances heavier and denser than itself. It can support many types of creatures, from the water striders in the stagnant pond behind my house to considerably larger Central American lizards.
The algal scum that live in water’s surface film are quite different from bulk-water algae. They’ve adapted to the bizarre physics that creates a water “skin.” The skin acts like a liquid crystal with unique properties, including high surface tension—one of water’s anomalies that is essential for the transfer of energy from wind to water. Gerald Pollack, an early water scientist at the University of Washington back in the twenties, named this liquid crystal water exclusion zone or EZ water—interfacial water that was almost gel-like and excluded certain substances. The interface between interfacial water and normal bulk water acts like a battery. Using this property of the liquid crystal, Pollack later teamed up with Ed Wickham, a doctor at UCLA who partnered later with Crystal Clear Solutions, where they came up with a major breakthrough in water-cleaning technology.
