Industry Hormones

Throughout time, humankind has inflicted change upon all of nature’s beauty. Landscapes have changed, creatures have disappeared while others have adapted and recently, the climate has changed as predicted decades ago. What lies next is unpredictable. It seems that until now, all of humankind’s wastes and destruction have led to turmoil outside of themselves, and whatever we have done, and will do as individuals, would have no consequences ever on us. We, as individuals, have not yet been directly affected by the loss of certain species of animals or the rapid deforestation of our rainforests. Many of us are unaware and do not understand much of these environmental issues and pay little attention to them, as it seems they have had little effect on us in our busy and fast-paced lives. In the past, people prayed to the land and its beauty and worshipped the soil and creatures that gave them life. Mankind lived in harmony with nature and our relationship with earth was one of balance with nature and partnership with ecology. Today, little time is paid to this beauty and our indulgence and allegiance is in materials brought to life by industry. While nature has provided us with balance, equilibrium and renewable wealth, industry has brought us material luxuries, which rust and wear with time. Many of us spend our entire lives in pursuit of these luxuries, without ever glimpsing outside our windows at the beauty around us. However, by the wise and the aware, industry is well-known to be the environment’s most prominent enemy.   

Industry’s damaging effects to the environment: the Seveso accident

Industry’s damaging effects to the environment are obvious to anyone with a wandering eye. Industry has fouled our air, contaminated our waters, and spoiled our soils, as well as recently sending our climate into a whirl. Moreover, few people can forget the Seveso accident in 1976 which was one of the most publicized environmental tragedies of our times (Hillary, 1984). Due to an explosion in a chemical plant, thousands of pounds of dioxin, a form of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), spread over the countryside into Seveso inducing birth defects in both humans and animals and causing severe acute illnesses and skin alterations never before seen to the medical community. Subsequently, the entire town was evacuated for over 20 years. Moreover, it took humankind another decade to realize that even microgram levels of these compounds can induce these changes.  

Xenobiotic Chemicals and the Endocrine System

Over the past decades since the Seveso accident, numerous studies have indicated that exogenous factors from industry, such as dioxins, are influencing humankind’s endogenous hormone balance at minute concentrations. In 1991, Clement and Colborn (Clement and Colborn, 1992) formulated a hypothesis that at the time had little impact on the scientific community.  Since its conception, the paper that described its formulation has been referenced well over a thousand times and the scientific and environmental communities are now in open debate as to what is really going on and what we, as a global community must do. This hypothesis suggested for the first time that xenobiotic (Gk. xeno – stranger, Gk. biotic – pertaining to life) chemicals had the potential to disrupt the endocrine system of wildlife and humans at ecologically found concentrations. Moreover, these xenobiotic chemicals were commonly used compounds of everyday use that were being released into the environment by daily human activity. This hypothesis has become known as the endocrine-disrupting hypothesis.

References:

Hillary E. 1984. ECOLOGY 2000: The changing face of Earth. UK: Multimedia publications.

Clement C., and Colborn T. 1992. Chemically-Induced Alterations in Sexual and Functional Development: The Wildlife/Human Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scientific Publications.