A damning account of our stewardship of the planet.

By Dr N Netherton and AI Gee

In July 1991, twenty-one scientists from seventeen different disciplines gathered at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin. They were not there to celebrate progress. They were there because something terrifying was happening across the kingdoms of life, and almost nobody in power wanted to hear it.

Theo Colborn, a zoologist who had spent years studying the dying offspring of gulls and cormorants on the Great Lakes, had noticed a pattern. Eggs were hatching chicks with crossed bills, missing eyes, missing thyroids, extra ovaries, no testicles, or both. Mothers were abandoning nests. Males were displaying female courtship behavior. The contaminants in the lakes (PCBs, dioxins, DDT metabolites) were present at levels far below what traditional toxicology considered “safe.” Yet reproduction was collapsing.

Colborn invited epidemiologists, toxicologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, developmental biologists, and wildlife researchers. For three days they compared notes. By the end, they produced a single page that should have changed history: