In Africa, elephants trample farms. Some traditional herders are prohibited from grazing their herds on land occupied by tourist-magnets like lions, leopards, giraffes and gazelles.

And buffalo, zebras and antelopes eat grass that could feed cattle.

In the East African savannas, the interactions between wildlife and the people whose livelihood depends on cows and goats, are complicated, critical and contentious.

Grazing is about the only way to make a living in this hot, dry land, but livestock and many wild herbivores eat similar vegetation.

And so the competition is obvious: How can a cow eat forage that a zebra ate first?

The question answers itself, and so nobody studied the issue.

Not so obvious after all

But in other realms, ecologists have found that organisms that seem to compete may actually aid each other. “We are just beginning to understand that the relationship between species is highly contextual,” says Truman Young, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California at Davis, “and this interaction includes competition and facilitation. Once, people thought if two species were similar, they always competed, but years ago, it became clear that facilitation exists in certain situations.”

Young is senior author of new study showing that in Kenya’s highland savannas, competition is partly offset by facilitation; although during the dry season wildlife steal food from the mouths of cattle, so to speak, the situation is reversed during the wet season.

When the rains come, wild ungulates (mammals with hooves), particularly zebras, seem to benefit cattle by eating fibrous, woody grasses and revealing the more delectable, higher-protein grasses beneath.

This gives cattle access to forage with more protein, and their wet-season weight gains nearly counterbalance the dry-season losses inflicted by wildlife.

Well done

The study was performed during 2007 and 2008, on nine fenced plots, or “exclosures,” each 4 hectares in size. The researchers placed four young, unbred females of an African breed called Boran on each plot for 16-week periods, and measured their eating habits and weight gain in three conditions:

First author Wilfred Odadi, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the African Wildlife Foundation, wrote us to explain that facilitation nearly equaled competition. “Wildlife-driven depression of cattle weight gain in the dry season is 35 to 40 percent. In the wet season, cattle put on weight faster by about the same percentage when they forage with wildlife.” The real-world situation, he added, would “depend on the lengths and frequencies of dry and wet seasons.”

This was the first experimental evidence that wildlife and livestock are engaged in facilitation and competition, Young says. “There is a basic-science excitement here. With this large-vertebrate system, we have shown that you can actually sometimes have competition and sometimes facilitation.”

It’s possible that the 15-year history of experiments on the site has changed the vegetation enough to weaken the results. But the continuous grazing of cattle kept the site’s vegetation similar to the surrounding savanna, Young says. “If we had excluded all large herbivores, the rangeland would become very different, and our inferences would be skewed. But because cattle are the dominant herbivores … the plots were not that different. My belief is if we had started the exclosures last year, we would have gotten the same result.”

What are the practical implications?

Killing wildlife, except for rogue animals, is illegal in Kenya, but it still happens, Odadi told us. “Because in Kenya wildlife belongs to the state, and not to the land owner, some livestock keepers still show a negative attitude towards wildlife because of perceived ‘detrimental’ effects on livestock including competition, livestock depredation and disease transmission. Some people react by fencing off their properties to keep wildlife away. There are also situations where water sources are fenced off by pastoralists to make them inaccessible to wildlife. In extreme cases, wild animals are actually killed, albeit illegally.”

And so in a region with unreliable rainfall and few resources, it’s good news for advocates of biodiversity conservation that the competition between domestic and wild ungulates, at least on savannas, may be more apparent than real.

Good news for conservation

Indeed, large mammal ecologist Johan du Toit of Utah State University, wrote in Science that the new information should eventually “provide managers with opportunities to capitalize on facilitative interactions, intervene against competitive ones, and enhance animal production overall.”

Rangeland managers often mix native and non-native plants, du Toit added. And after “bold experimentation and a break from orthodoxy,” a similar approach with animals could boost production while conserving biodiversity.

Odadi says better knowledge of cattle-wildlife interactions could support short-term changes, such as slaughtering or marketing livestock “at the end of the wet season, when they have recovered from competition in the preceding dry season, and also to minimize competitive effects (by reducing densities) in the next dry season.”

Conservationists in East Africa and elsewhere are seeking “to manage land for ecosystem biodiversity and short-term extractive value,” says Young, “but it’s pretty hard to find good examples, other than assertions about the profitability of ecotourism. We were able to show that wildlife and cattle have a complex interaction; that wildlife is not uniformly bad for cattle, and that allows us to be a little more lenient toward wildlife.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Almost four years after the economy started sliding into the Great Recession, unemployment in the United States is still at 9.1 percent. On Sept. 1, the White House announced that it expected a 9 percent rate at least through the presidential election.

And on Sept. 13, the Labor Department revealed that the poverty rate had reached 15.1 percent, a rate not seen since 1993. A family of four must have income below $22,314 to qualify as poor.

Those numbers hide even more grievous problems: Among blacks, the rate is 16.7 percent, and among all Americans under age 24, it’s 18 percent.

And if you count discouraged workers, who have quit looking for a job, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the rate soars to 16.2 percent — or 14 million Americans.

All this, and the average period of unemployment has stretched to 22.9 weeks.

Who is looking for work? It’s easier to ask who isn’t…. According to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, men, single parents, young adults, and people with less education have been hit harder. Marybeth Mattingly, a research assistant professor of sociology who directs research on vulnerable families, says, “Jobs in manufacturing and construction have disappeared in the recession and they may or may not be coming back, and these tend to be jobs held by men and the less educated.”

Beyond the numbers

Unemployment is not just about economics. Psychologist Maria Jahoda argued in the 1930s that employment provides latent byproducts, hidden things,” says economist Arthur Goldsmith of Washington and Lee University. “She said people always see the explicit benefit — the wage — but employment also organizes your day, gives you a way to connect to other people, status; there are many other things associated with work. If all you do is say, ‘We have a lot of unemployment, the GNP is down 1.4 percent,’ you don’t capture the potential psychological and social costs.”

Goldsmith adds that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson said “your sense of self is undermined by an incapacity to become a self-sustaining member of society.”

In 2011, the psychological effects of unemployment are compounded by a devastating surge in foreclosures: Millions of families are confronting poverty and being forced to find a place to live. “Foreclosure has been an enormous part of this narrative that does not always happen with a wave of unemployment,” says Goldsmith.

And so we got to wondering. Beyond the obvious — and ominous — economic harm from unemployment, what does it do to self-esteem, psychological health, the willingness to get up and face the world with diminished prospects? In a time when so many people identify themselves by their occupation – what does it mean to be out of work?

Suffer the children

Being laid off, even when you are one of millions with the same problem, can lead to “why me?” questions, and to doubts about your self-worth, about your role and utility in society.

When the story ends with a well-paid, fulfilling job, these doubts usually answer themselves.

Otherwise, these doubts can easily lead to brooding, depression, despair, isolation and anxiety – even apparently to child abuse. A study presented in April¹ found that the incidence of shaken baby syndrome had doubled in the Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2010), compared to a prior period of prosperity.

Babies have weak neck muscles, so severe shaking can cause violent head movement and serious, even fatal brain injury. Shaking, often by angry, frustrated care-givers who cannot stop the baby’s crying, causes an estimated 1,300 such head injuries each year. Surviving children can have varying degrees of visual, motor or cognitive damage, or even end up in a permanent vegetative state — a coma.

Beyond a doubling of the rate of such abuse, the researchers also saw trends toward graver injury and a higher death rate, though they were not statistically significant.

Suffer the teachers!

In a study of school behavior among children of single mothers that started in the 1990s, Heather Hill, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, found a higher level of problems among children of mothers who had been out of work years earlier.

The study was intended to explore the effects of welfare reform, which mandated that welfare mothers find jobs, and was performed when their children were 8 to 10 years old, five years after some of their mothers had been unemployed for at least three months.

The teachers reported a rise in both “external” problem behavior, such as acting out or disobedience, and “internal” behaviors, such as seeming depressed or anxious. “Problem behavior captures how they are coping, processing, as they have to sit in class, pay attention, stay on task, and do what they are told,” Hill told us.

Both categories of behavior were much more prevalent among the children of mothers who had been unemployed years earlier. The delayed reaction reflects the fact that early childhood sets the stage for future achievement and adjustment, Hill says. “The early years, prior to starting school, are very important for the developmental process.”

Life on the line?

The stakes in unemployment may be even greater, however. A new analysis of 42 studies, mainly performed in western nations, found a 63 percent increase in deaths (78 percent for men) among those who had been unemployed.

Although this deadly impact probably reflects financial and physical roots, not just emotional ones, “Our study results clearly indicate that unemployment is not just bad for your pocketbook; it’s also bad for your health,” said Joseph E. Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, in a press release. “The results suggest a causal relationship between unemployment and higher risk of death, as well as the need to identify strategies to minimize the adverse health effects of unemployment.”

Map: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The analysis of unemployment and mortality data, which covered 20 million people, showed that a significant history of job loss raised the risk of death by 75 percent among people younger than 50. The elevated risk of mortality was 25 percent among older people.

Bright spots in a dark picture

Could the woes of unemployment be temporary? In a study of 774 Germans who lost their jobs between 1984 and 2003, psychiatrist Isaac Galatzer-Levy of the New York University School of Medicine found that most people had regained their emotional equilibrium within a year.

The participants were divided into four groups based on how satisfied they with their lives. The largest group, 69 percent, reported a relatively high and stable level of life satisfaction before job loss, and although they were affected more severely by unemployment, a year later their life satisfaction was restored to its pre-unemployment level.

Although life satisfaction scores were less positive among the other subjects, the results tend to refute the standard view of unemployment, says Galatzer-Levy. “There’s a real concern that [unemployment] will have long-term implications on the mental well-being of a large portion of the work force. But this analysis suggests that people are able to cope with a job loss relatively well over time.”

We tried to reach Galatzer-Levy to ask how well results from Germany, where unemployment is lower than in the United States, apply to the United States, but we could not connect. But by looking at the same people before and after they lost their jobs, the study sidestepped a basic pitfall in understanding the psychological outcome of unemployment: the problem of causation.

A word on method

In science, an experiment is the cleanest way to establish cause and effect, but this technique does not apply to studying the psychology of persistent unemployment. Instead, researchers try to correlate unemployment and health, behavior or psychological well-being.

They ask, are people with jobs healthier, happier, or more stable than those without?

But finding that two things go together — are correlated — cannot distinguish cause and effect. To take an obvious example, unemployment could cause psychological depression, or depression could cause unemployment.

The correlation between unemployment and psychological harm dates to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Goldsmith says. To get a better picture of causality, researchers began to follow individuals over time, as the German study did. Having evidence of mental-health and job status in 2010 and again in 2011 helps pinpoint cause and effect, Goldsmith says, but “Unfortunately, many things could also happen during this period,” and some could override employment status.

A grimmer picture

In an effort to refine the methodology, Goldsmith and colleagues are completing a study on the psychology of unemployment, using data from 2002 and ‘03. The first step was to exclude people with a history of psychological difficulties.

“We focused on people who have never had a psychological problem, or had a first bout of poor mental health in the past year,” Goldsmith says. “We all lose girlfriends, dogs, our surfboards get dented, but these are pretty tough people.”

Among subjects who were fully employed and then were unemployed, the researchers statistically controlled for education, work experience, marital status, having children, and church membership, all of which can buffer assaults on mental health.

The goal, Goldsmith says, was to tease out the psychological effects of unemployment from the other slings and arrows of unfortunate fortune. “Suppose you were unemployed last year, and had your first ever bout of poor emotional well-being. It’s hard to believe that caused your unemployment, because we know you are resilient.”

The study, which has not yet passed peer review, included contributions from Tim Diette, Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. The results, Goldsmith says, show that long-term joblessness has an especially severe emotional impact among those with more education. “This is not surprising, those are the kind of people who have an internal locus of control, a lot of self efficacy, have always had the sense that they could govern the things that happen to them.”

Similarly, a study of 9,570 people found that those who were conscientious — and likely to fulfill their obligations — had a 120 percent greater decrease in life satisfaction during unemployment. “Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being,” the authors wrote².

Although Goldsmith found a small detriment following unemployment of less than 15 weeks, people with longer unemployment were almost twice as likely as employed people to evince depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not trivial diagnoses, they are very serious, can be long lasting,” Goldsmith says. “They can spill over and have effects on people around you.”

Thus the emotional fallout is not restricted to the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged, or involuntarily working part time, Goldsmith contends. “These people have spouses, children, grandchildren, and former coworkers. This says to policy makers that the cost of joblessness is more than financial, there is a substantial social consequence, and while we are having this debate about budget deficits, we ought not to forget that putting people to work does not just produce output, but also greater well-being as a society.”

— David J. Tenenbaum

In a world studded with intractable conflicts, none seems more nettlesome than he one between Israelis and Palestinians. In this and many other conflicts, people are often trained to believe the worst about the other side, who are variously stereotyped as immoral occupiers or immoral terrorists.

These conflicts, as history has shown, are not ideal for peacemaking based on compromise, and yet the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa have come to peaceful resolutions.

But during the conflict, even mentioning the opposing side can backfire, says Eran Halperin, a professor of political psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. “When you try to tell an Israeli something positive about a Palestinian, or vice versa, the immediate reaction is defensive. In many cases, they are not willing to hear positive information about the other side.”

A sideways approach, however, may be more effective at changing attitudes and creating a willingness to compromise. In a study just published in Science¹, Halperin and co-authors demonstrated that simply reading a few sentences about the successful resolutions of historic conflicts elsewhere made Israelis and Palestinians more amenable to compromise.

“There are positive pieces of information that the parties could absorb, that could lead to a change in positions,” says Halperin, “but people in almost every group involved in a conflict are not willing to hear it. But if you try to go more indirectly … to talk in a general way, you hope they will apply these beliefs to the other group, and this is what our results show.”

Testing tolerance

In a series of experiments, Halperin and colleagues asked Palestinians and Jewish and Arab Israelis to read a few paragraphs in a supposed “reading comprehension” test. Then, as part of a supposedly different study, the same people were asked about their attitudes toward the opposing side.

The tested paragraphs that contained a more positive interpretation of history strongly affected willingness to compromise to resolve conflicts.

Instead of confronting the subjects by stressing that the other side could change its views, Halperin says, the test paragraphs “say that people in other conflicts went through meaningful change in their positions and behavior, and we expect people to understand by themselves that this can happen here.”

The study opens a crack in the despair aroused by prolonged conflicts, says Halperin. “We have now the first indication of what kind of message we should convey to people, to make them more open to the other side. And we already have preliminary data showing that the exact same pattern occurs in other long-term intractable conflicts around the world.”

Still to come, he acknowledges, is “the biggest challenge, using a larger scale intervention to make these changes.” Using the education system and mass media, he proposes a “simple message: Groups change, and behavior that is violent and immoral is a result of a specific situation, leaders and economics. They are not the result of a long-term culture with a fixed character.”

The intervention was focused on hope, Halperin says. “One of the biggest barriers to peace is because people don’t have hope, they don’t believe that the other group can change. If you don’t believe the other side can change its attitude, and as a result its behavior, there is no reason to offer a gesture or compromise, to take a risk in negotiation, and then you can’t make any progress in any intergroup conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

El Niños, the global cycles of weather that are driven by a hot spot in the tropical Pacific Ocean, have been linked to drought, storms and famine in many parts of the tropics.

Today, a study in Nature finds that deadly conflicts have started twice as often during the el Niño years – but only in the many countries affected by el Niño.

Scientific interest in el Niño mushroomed during the 1980s, when climate experts began to correlate historic cycles of anchovy harvests along the west coast of South America with changes in weather thousands of kilometers distant, and eventually unraveled a planetary cycle driven by the appearance of huge pools of warm water in the western Pacific.

Because the warming seemed to coincide with Christmas, it was called el Niño, for the Christ Child.

El Niño is now recognized as the warm-water segment of the el Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which also includes a cold-water counterpart called la Nina. Now acknowledged as an engine of global climate, el Niño is linked to prolonged droughts, heat waves and crop failures.

Previous efforts to study whether weather and global warming could affect war have related past environmental changes with conflict and the decline of civilizations, says Solomon Hsiang, who completed the new study as a graduate student at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. But the studies tended to be case-by-case, he notes, and “even if every conflict or collapse happened at random, some would occur during a period of environmental change, so this isn’t compelling evidence.”

Looking carefully

To study the issue more systematically, Hsiang and collaborators Mark Cane and Kyle Meng:

The data showed that conflicts are twice as likely to start during an el Niño, says Hsiang, and that 21 percent of overall conflicts can be attributed to el Niño. The increase was only seen in countries strongly affected by el Niño.

Surprisingly, the average changes wrought by an el Niño are quite minor, Hsiang admits – about 0.05°C rise in temperature, and about 0.1 millimeter reduction in daily rainfall.

Small is … powerful?

How could such minor changes affect warfare?

A study that correlates data does not show why they are related, but there are many ways that seemingly small effects could change human behavior, says Hsiang, who is now at Princeton University, especially considering that averages can conceal major alterations in different locations:

However, Marshall Burke, who published an influential 2009 paper ¹ that found a significant increase in warfare during hot weather in sub-Saharan Africa, noted by email that the increase in conflict was seen only inside the el Niño region, and thus, “We might conclude that these global market mechanisms are not at work.”

Still, the new study adds something to the discussion, Burke says. “The [Hsiang] paper’s main innovation is in linking historical changes in the global climate to conflict risk, whereas past studies (including ours in PNAS) looked only at the effect of local weather variations on conflict.”

Burke, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley department of agricultural and resources economics, added, “They provide very convincing evidence that ENSO-related changes in the global climate are strong drivers of conflict risk in the regions whose weather is affected by ENSO.”

Looking at limits

Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a co-author of the new study, said weather does not equal destiny. “No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall.”

Ultimately, the motivation for the new study was to peer through the keyhole of time and anticipate a warmed world, Hsiang says, but he admits that the predictive power is limited. “In relationship to global warming, we want to be careful. El Niño is very different … in terms of its spatial pattern, the changes on the ground, and the rate of change. Until we have a much better grasp of these, it’s very hard to take these results and produce any kind of projection for future climate change.”

Still, he adds, “The debate until now has been whether there is any reason to believe that a shift in climate can produce conflict.” Now, “The question is not whether it’s possible, but how much global climate will influence conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Photo: Black Friday, 2010

Is this mob about to enter retail hell or retail heaven?

Christmas is pending, and it’s time for spending! Even if you flunked Black Friday and missed Cyber Monday, we expect you’ll be watching cashiers ring up stuff you want. Stuff you believe others want.

And stuff nobody in their right mind would want.

Marketing is focused on getting us to spend money. So how do marketers find new ways to poke holes in your wallet?

Courtesy Peter Kleppin

Feeling overwhelmed by marketing? So is the cynic lurking in the background.

One standby mechanism is simply the level of overall hype that attends the Christmas season, and if you’ve noticed an outsize share of retail hype this year, that may reflect our parlous times, says Lars Perner, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “This may be an extreme year. A lot of retailers probably banked on greater economic recovery than we had, so they brought in more goods than they did last year, when they anticipated the weak economy.”

Stocked with merchandise that will quickly de-value after Christmas, “They basically have become more aggressive,” says Perner. “We are even seeing pre-Thanksgiving sales, and many retailers have joined the trend of being open Thanksgiving day.”

The shopping compulsion

We asked Perner about Black Friday fever, and he agreed that compulsive bargain hunters do exist. “Some people get a psychological benefit from getting something on sale, quite aside from the product. They can end up buying things they do not need, that will end up in storage, just to get the good deal.”

1st photo: Cracker and Cheese. Rollover image: Just_[von]Bernard.

Attention Black Friday shoppers! We have deals to satisfy all your senses. Roll over to see store employees (in dark blue) guarding video games against desperate Black Friday shoppers.

That urge may be ancient, Perner added. “Some people get their arousal, enjoyment from sports. Some compete based on the best bargain, on getting something that is in short supply.” In the distant past, he says, “life was more difficult, we had to compete to get food. Now, when we live in a society where things are more affluent, they have retained much of the same instinct.”

Aggressive shopping, he says, “is a way to compete with other people, to get the satisfaction of getting these great deals, independent of any actual use you may have for the product.”

A touching moment

The Why Files

This manufacturer wants to show off the soft strap material; but touching also increases sales by creating a sense of ownership.

In their quest to stimulate the shopping imperative, scientists are turning to the five senses. Joann Peck, an associate professor of business at University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed that little research had been devoted to the sense of touch in marketing, and she made that her specialty.

Obviously, touching conveys information about function, Peck acknowledges. “With a sweater, you get information on weight and texture.”

But touch does much more, Peck avers. In lab experiments, Peck asked student subjects to either play with a Slinky or simply touch its box, and then decide how much to pay for it. We figured playing with this classic toy would increase its value, but were surprised to learn that touching the box did likewise. Playing produced the biggest effect, says Peck, “but even if they just touched the box, that did more than not touching.”

Touching, Peck says, creates “psychological ownership, even if there are no product attributes related to touch. So you have to be careful what you touch.” The touch does not even need to occur, Peck says. “If you close your eyes and imagine touching a product, that can be as good as actually touching.”

Cultural differences affect the retail touchy-feelies, Peck adds. “In England, people are used to touching sheets, but here we use the thread count to measure softness. People who come over from England may rip open the package; they can’t believe they can’t touch the sheets.”

Package designers are busy putting tactile treats on razors, pens, pencils, even backpacks.

Touch can even operate through the mail, Peck says, noting that when a children’s museum solicited memberships using two versions of the same flier, the ones that carried a swatch of soft material elicited a better response.

The Why Files

Mail-order giant L.L. Bean had enough faith in the power of touch to paste a disk of touchy-feely material on a catalog last fall.

Because touching a soft object can improve mood, some stores place goods like sweaters near the entrance, with a placard encouraging customers to “Feel the softness.” But our touching tendency can result in finger smudges on fine clothes, so some stores have altered traffic patterns to fight unconscious product fondling en route to the kitchen or shoe departments.

The song of Christmas

You’re wandering, dazed but dogged, through retaildom, and the familiar holiday music hounds you through the aisles: Jingle Bells, Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful. The question of exactly how this music affects you fascinates Lisa Cavanaugh, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California. “We often hear music but don’t know much about how it influence behavior,” she says.

Admittedly, minor-key music makes people sad and major-key music makes them happy. Because a rapid tempo causes us to move faster, Cavanaugh says fast-food restaurants like it, “because they need your chair for the next customer.”

Music can even be a defensive measure, Cavanaugh adds, describing a 24-hour convenience store that was worried that loitering teenagers would offend customers. “They started playing classical music in the parking lot, and the kids were annoyed: ‘This is not our music; this is not us.’ And they left.”

But Cavanaugh wanted to go deeper. For example, does in-store holiday music affect us differently if it’s religious (Joy to the World) or secular (Frosty the Snowman)? “Retailers often don’t distinguish religious from non-religious music, they just put it on,” she says. “I was interested in what type of music is playing, and how that may shape what people buy.”

Courtesy Lisa Cavanaugh.

Honey, would you snag a bottle of mouthwash and some soap — er, body wash — on your way home? Cavanaugh used this mock store to study consumer choices in the presence of different holiday music.

Cavanaugh found that secular music shifted people, particularly non-Christians, toward pricier brands: “They would buy Advil, or Dixie paper plates, over the store brand.” Why? Perhaps non-Christians are responding to holiday music because “even if you are not Christian and don’t celebrate the holiday, it’s as if knowing the script is enough, you know what you are supposed to do.”

When Cavanaugh allowed the subjects to donate money to a charity after the experiment, religious music increased donations by both Christians and non-Christians.

Sweet scent of spending success

We’ve known for years that the scent of fresh bread will boost home sales, but odor can also affect retail spending:

* A 1995 study in Las Vegas found a 45 percent boost in slot-machine take when odors were piped into the one-armed bandit section of a casino.

* A study from 2000 showed that a pleasant geranium scent made it easier to remember unfamiliar brands.

* A restaurant study from 2006¹ associated the odor of lavender, but not lemon, with a longer stay and a higher bill. The authors speculated that lavender works through relaxation.

Many studies show that pleasant scents improve attention, relaxation and generosity. But scents can also increase the all-important buying behavior.

Speaking of restaurants, a 2010 study² in France showed that waitresses got tips from a higher percentage of male customers if they wore makeup. Although women’s tipping behavior did not change significantly, the average men’s tip rose from 1.1 euros to 1.4 euros. With appropriate academic caution, the authors speculated that “perhaps” the explanation lay in the “greater physical or sexual attractiveness of waitresses when they wore makeup.”

How grand is my brand?

In marketing, brands are the shots heard around the world. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple. The brand — and its representation in a logo — may be a firm’s most cherished possessions. A brand “gives an image of a product or company,” and it creates a relationship with a potential buyer, explains Ira Kalb, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California.

Tania Liu

Do these ceramic shoppers have favorite brands?

Kalb says a good brand can make life easier for buyers: When you walk into a store with a strong brand, he says, “You trust it, so you don’t have to think so hard about what you are going to buy.”

Product brands can be equally effective at stimulating the buying decision, Kalb says, because it “creates a shortcut for the buyer and inoculates the product against the competition.” iPhone buyers, he says, “Are very loyal, and most would not look at an Android phone.”

If used incautiously, a strong brand can backfire, Kalb says. The Clorox Company, for example, produces salad dressing, “but it would be totally insane to brand the salad dressing as Clorox. The company has identified itself with a product line [chlorinated cleansers] that is so far from salad dressing. This is a clear case where separate is better.”

A strong brand can also confuse, Kalb says. IBM, the computer company, went into the copier business, and Xerox, the copier company, sold computers, but both efforts staggered. Although IBM and Xerox both dominated their original markets, “but the brand identity prevented them from succeeding in other areas.”

Photo: Jim Robinson

On your mark, get set, shop! How do marketers put your spending in overdrive?

Thus it sometimes makes sense to abandon a good brand, Kalb says, noting that Toyota, Nissan and Honda all created luxury spin-offs as their market aged and grew more affluent. In the 1980s, Kalb says, “Japanese cars were good, but ugly. As baby boomers got wealthier, the Japanese auto manufacturer knew they could not use those corporate names, and they came up with Lexis, Infinity and Acura.”

“Brand carries both baggage and positives,” Kalb says, “and smart marketing people know when to use the corporate brand and when to use a separate one.”

Death is my brand

Brands can convey unconscious negative associations, according to research³ from Holland, which found that the brand of an insurance company “may (unintentionally) induce the fear of death under various conditions.”

Wikipedia

Vance Packard wrote about “the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences.” Although Packard argued that consumers were putty in the hands of science-enabled marketers, many now doubt that marketing’s “awesome tools” attain anything approaching absolute autonomy on our spending.

Ouch!

After seeing the insurance logo, the subjects “had more mortality-related thoughts than participants in the no-brand control condition,” the authors wrote. We would not predict this, but the participants then spent more on entertainment and food, and had a higher regard for products produced domestically.

Those intimations of mortality caused terror, the authors believe. “Individuals confronted with an insurance brand, are unconsciously reminded of their mortality and use spending as a means to regulate their experienced terror. The current research shows that brands can sometimes automatically trigger unconscious, hidden motives, desires, and fears that have a significant impact on consumer behavior.”

If that isn’t disturbing enough, the researchers added that “these findings empirically verify that reducing existential anxiety is conceivable through lavish consumption.”

Modern marketing = manipulation?

The prospect that we can be ruled by things we don’t even notice was raised in 1957 ago by journalist Vance Packard, who warned that unethical, coercive tactics based on science could turn Americans into free-spending robots. In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard argued that the unconscious mind could seize control of behavior.

A second event in 1957, at a New Jersey drive-in theater, raised further alarms about persuasion run amok. This “experiment” supposedly proved that on-screen text, flashed faster than the conscious mind could register, increased purchases of Coca-Cola and popcorn. The study was considered proof that marketers could beam messages directly into our unconscious minds.

But many observers now consider the experiment a fraud that could never be replicated, and many doubt that it was even performed.

To those who believe the planet is being consumed by consumption, the annual X-mas spend-a-thon amounts to a Shopocalypse.

Just_[von]Bernard

Maybe we aren’t shopping automatons, but something awful persuasive seems to be going on here.

Ask a marketer, and he’ll tell you that modern marketers do not have the power to unconsciously manipulate us. “A marketer’s job is to get people to want to buy the product,” acknowledges Kalb, “in order to convince people to buy their’s versus another’s. I don’t think anything is wrong with that. If I am marketing a product, it’s because I think it’s better than the others. If I don’t feel mine is better, I would not sell the product.”

This does leave a gray area, as Kalb admits. “You are going to have good and bad marketers. But the bad ones won’t last long, people will find out about anything. The market is a harsh critic, and you may deceive others for a little while, but not for very long.”

From French bread to non-fossil fuel?

Yeast can ferment corn starch into ethanol to be added to gasoline, but that diverts millions of tons of food from hungry people. Researchers are trying to ferment many other plant carbohydrates, especially cellulose, the tough chain-like molecule that stiffens the cell wall so plants can stand by themselves.

Unfortunately, the yeasts used to make ethanol have no taste for cellulose.

In this week’s Science, Jamie Cate, in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, reports a transfer of two genes from a fungus to ethanol-making yeast. Although the fungus was discovered on French bread in the 1840s, the result was not exactly a fine Burgundy, or even a gallon of cheap jug wine, but it was a proof of principle that a single organism could, almost single-yeastedly, convert cellulose into ethanol.

Mon dieu!

The advance may hasten the day when waste wood, crop residues and fast-growing crops such as switchgrass can replace edible crops like corn and sugar cane in producing fuel.

Raise a glass to success!

“It’s a proof of principle using lab strains,” says Cate.

The genetic transfer enabled a single strain of yeast to convert cellulose in plant cell walls into ethanol. After commercial enzymes busted the cellulose into short chains of glucose units, the yeast:

The short chains of glucose that the Neurospora crassa fungus extracts from cellulose do not normally enter the yeast cell, but the transporters ensure that they will enter the transformed yeast, enabling the yeast to make ethanol from normally indigestible compounds.

Taking lessons from fungi

The research began with a basic question. A large portion of plant biomass is cellulose, and “microorganisms in the wild live on plants; they obviously have figured out how to degrade plants as food,” says Cate. “Plants have been figuring out ways to prevent microbes from doing this, so there’s this ongoing battle, and we knew some fungi would be very good at decomposing cellulose.”

Cate focused on N. crassa, a well-studied fungus that lives in burned-over areas, but also has a taste for a stale baguette. The research team moved two genes from the fungus into Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast widely used to ferment sugar into ethanol.

One gene forms structures in the yeast’s cell wall that draw short chains of glucose into the cell. The second gene makes beta-glucosidase, an enzyme that the fungus (and now the yeast) use inside the cell to snip the short chains of glucose into individual glucose molecules, where the yeast converts them into ethanol.

Raise a glass to success!

Although the short chains of glucose that the fungus extracts from cellulose is not digestible to normal yeast, the transformed yeast used these short chains to produce an abundance of ethanol. “It’s a proof of principle using lab strains,” says Cate. “We in the Energy Bioscience Institute [a collaboration of UC-Berkeley, the University of Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and BP] have colleagues who are helping us look at some really robust, industrial yeasts to see how the transporters work in those systems.”

Cate says transporters are key. “Any cell is a fortress, with a membrane or a cell wall that keeps things out to protect its innards. To get a small molecule in or out, there has to be a way, and these are the transporters, which live in the cell membrane, with parts on the outside and parts on the inside.”

The study was “a pretty slick example of how genomic technology can rapidly get you to the gene you care about,” says Steven Slater, associate director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. “They used a combination of published literature on genes that are differentially expressed when several fungi are exposed to cellulose, and were able to rapidly go from there down to something that looks like transporter.”

Training a workhorse

The key, Slater says, is that “they took a workhorse organism that is primarily used for the production of ethanol and gave it a new genetic tool that could be used to get things other than glucose inside the cell; that’s important for producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass.”

Indeed, Cate says, many organisms have ways to transport fragments of cellulose: “You can find these all over in nature, including in the black truffle, a fungal delicacy that grows symbiotically on oak trees.”

Cate expects further progress. “We in the Energy Bioscience Institute [a collaboration of UC-Berkeley, the University of Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and BP] are testing some really robust, industrial yeasts.”

This process may not be limited to ethanol, Cate says. “It’s modular, and it may benefit research groups that have been working on yeast to make all sorts of interesting biofuels: alcohols, or things like diesel or jet fuel.”

David J. Tenenbaum

The “recall” of 550 million eggs (many of them already eaten) reminds us of the benefits of taking control of your food. We figure the recall will fuel an uptick in interest in backyard hens, which are now legal in some cities.

But avoiding salmonella (which can infect backyard chickens as well as commercial hens) is just one reason to favor urban agriculture. In the past few years, we’ve heard that it can:

• Reduce “food miles”: Food from the backyard or an empty lot across town will carry less of a diesel scent than veggies trucked in from California or Texas. Thus growing food locally may reduce the global warming impact of agriculture.
• Promote reality: Too many city people probably think food is made in a supermarket.
• Teach kids about work, the environment and cooperation.
• Get city people outside and liberate them from computer screens, phones and TVs.
• Grow fresher veggies, which should persuade more people to eat their vegetables, perhaps stemming obesity.
• Promote neighborhood solidarity by creating a gathering place.
• Earn money by selling at farm stands and farmer’s markets.

There are limits: City eggs and veggies will never replace the majority of our commercial supply. In January, Minnesota is not going to supply much lettuce compared, say, to California or Florida. Heavy metals found in many city soils can contaminate veggies, and finding enough sunny land is a constant hassle.

We figure people have been growing food in the city since the dawn of agriculture, and the modern rendition of urban ag can involve vegetables or animals. It can take place at home, on rented land, or on rural plots owned or rented by city people. The farms can be aimed at subsistence, the market, or both.

Serving

The Troy Community Garden in Madison, Wis., embodies many of these purposes. It has five acres devoted to an urban farm with a community supported agriculture operation, a five-acre community garden with 20-foot square plots, and a kids garden that hosts about 1,000 kids annually, says Christie Ralston, associate director of Community GroundWorks, the non-profit that runs the garden.

Interns at the five-acre farm at Troy Community Garden work on the harvest. The Why Files

The farm began in 2001 and is Madison’s oldest urban farm. Still, it’s a toddler compared to Fairview Gardens in Santa Barbara, Calif., which began as a community garden in 1895.

Troy also took part in a test project related to obesity. For three hours a day, five days a week, ten overweight high-schoolers have been learning to grow, prepare and eat vegetables as part of the UW-Madison’s GardenFit program. By increasing exercise and promoting vegetable consumption, the goal is to avoid a big summer jump in weight, a trend seen in overweight children. “We’re not necessarily trying to cause a lot of weight loss over the summer,” says Sarah Jacquart, a nutritional sciences graduate student, who runs the program. “We’re trying to prevent that rapid three- or six-pound weight gain that others have seen.”

This Asian squash, planted by Hmong gardeners, may have no English name. The Why Files

City gardens face unique challenges, such as obtaining approval for a new farm greenhouse, and serving immigrants who speak little or no English. Ralston says all-garden meetings are translated into Hmong, Lao and Spanish.

‘r chickens us?

Skeptics may doubt that urban agriculture will survive the dimming of its “new ‘n trendy” aura, and they are right that “farms” on vacant lots and railroad corridors will not put California’s fruit and vegetable farmers out of business.

So is urban agriculture today’s fad or a fact of the future? The Why Files shopped the aisles for a solid published assessment of the trend in the United States, but we wound up with an empty cart. “Since there’s no strict definition, it’s hard to say” how fast urban agriculture is growing, says Alfonso Morales, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an expert on urban markets. “I am confident it is growing; there is all sorts of anecdotal evidence. The number of professional organizations around the different facets — urban poultry, urban gardening, urban beekeeping…”

But many of these organizations are less concerned with agriculture than with raising food for personal consumption. Sure, raising chickens in the city is legal in some places, but most people doing it are less interested in egg production than in having “a neat experience for the kids,” says Ron Kean, a poultry expert with the University of Wisconsin who advises backyard poultrophiles.

The “locavore” movement — which esteems local food for many of the reasons mentioned above — seems have boosted the number of small flocks raised on the fringes of the city, Kean notes, but most live in rural areas and sell directly to city people, and thus are not truly urban agriculture.

Dearth of data

Community gardens, which usually rent plots to people in the neighborhood, are a large part of urban agriculture, but urban mini-farms can also be run by a single operator who grows food for sale.

There are many explanations for the dearth of data on urban ag:

• Definitions: much of the new-found interest in urban agriculture concerns “local food,” but that is often grown in the countryside — even if the farmers live in the city.
• Size: Urban farms are small and their output is diverse and hard to measure.
• Age: Many urban farms are young, and any record of success would be short.
• Motivation: Urban farms often aim beyond food to social and psychological benefits, which are not captured by the yield and profit measures used to evaluate farms.

The “simple” task of approximating the number of “urban agriculturists” is difficult indeed. The United Nations Development Program produced a widely cited estimate that 800 million people practice urban agriculture, and 200 million grow for profit. Urban agriculture, the group said, produced the equivalent of 150 million full-time jobs.
But a 2010 publication¹ called these high numbers unreliable, since they emerged from a 1996 “thumbnail sketch” based on the authors experience. The 2010 survey saw wide variation in city-farming participation: from 11 percent of households in Indonesia to almost 70 percent in Vietnam and Nicaragua. More than 30 percent of city households in 11 of the 15 nations surveyed had a significant farm inside or outside the city.

In four nations, at least one urban household in three kept livestock.

Although the study also found that city farmers were eating better than non-farmers, farming may not explain that benefit, since in many cities farmers tend to be less poor than non-farmers.

The energy picture

Pamela Martin, an assistant professor geophysical science at the University of Chicago, agrees that data are short on the urban-ag phenomenon in the United States, largely because researchers are just now focusing on the topic. Local food has the potential to reduce the energy needed to grow and transport food – but does it actually do so?

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agriculture produces about one percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, but food processing, distribution and marketing also are major users of fossil fuels.

The energy cost of urban agriculture varies with the farm location, the individual crop, and the methods used for growing, irrigating and transporting them. But do local vegetables save energy? No, said a recent New York Times commentary, which claimed that “The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus.”

Not so, says Martin. “One fact that was based on our research in Chicago was flat-out wrong, a pound of [local] lettuce does not embody the same number of calories” as a pound of lettuce that was shipped 2, 000 miles. At a city farm, “a piece of produce is grown, perhaps stored in a cooler overnight, then taken to market and it heads home. The whole supply chain is more direct than for conventional produce.”

Using a concept called “embedded-energy,” which counts how much energy is used, for example, in irrigation, tractors and fertilizer, Martin compared energy usage in conventional agriculture with local food and urban farming, based on reports from students who recorded what Chicago farmers grew and did.

To avoid polluted soil, many urban gardens import clean soil. Looks like Chicago's buildings are not stealing the sun from this garden! Courtesy: Linda N.

In first-year data from Chicago farms, local lettuce was much more energy-efficient than California lettuce, which is grown, irrigated, washed in California, and then shipped 2,000 miles, Martin says. “In terms of the environment, farms that grow lettuce in Chicago make a lot of sense. Energy and related greenhouse gases were lower than values for conventional produce, based on previous work that we did, on other studies, and on USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] data.”

Urban agriculture: modern melting plot?

Many advocates point out that urban farms are about growing neighborhoods as much as growing food, and this benefit has gained importance now that so many people are migrating. In the United States, urban farmers include a disproportionate number of immigrants, especially on the coasts, says Gail Feenstra, of the sustainable agriculture program at the University of California at Davis. “A lot of immigrant folks maybe don’t have enough money to purchase a whole farm, but are able to have a small plot of land, on the urban edge or in the city, where they can grow food, and they have a lot of expertise.”

Most urban immigrant farmers in California are Asian, Feenstra says, or in some neighborhoods, Hispanic. Joining a peaceful, productive enterprise can have social benefits, she adds. At a San Diego garden she recently visited, “Asian, Hispanic and African farmers grow food for sale or family use. This garden brings together these disparate ethnic groups, who have learned to cooperate; the amount of produce growing on that property is totally amazing. One gentleman exceeded a thousand pounds from his [20- by 30-foot] plot. Everything was packed really close, he did multiple cuttings, he knew what he was doing.”

Gardens can foster assimilation and health, says Feenstra. “These men were sitting around, watching TV, bored; it was not a good situation. Then, some of them started organizing: ‘We know how to grow food, we can do that for our families, can start eating more healthily.’ Now their kids are asking for vegetables, coming to the garden, hanging out with friends. The garden has made a huge difference in the neighborhood.”

A social mission

Social benefits are on the mind of David Iaquinta, a professor of sociology and demography at Nebraska Wesleyan University, who has studied urban gardening and agriculture in Germany, the Philippines and elsewhere. “Gardens allow immigrants to practice the new language, to learn about culture,” he says. “Gardeners like to talk to each other, to learn about different vegetables and different ways to grow them.”

In the United States and Europe, Iaquinta says, gardens are a “tremendous access point for subsistence, marketing, and exchange of ideas.” Many community gardens include a common area, sometimes with a playground, that makes a good site for informal language lessons. “Many of the gardeners come from cultures where women don’t attend much school, but that can happen in the garden.”

Urban gardens require a regulatory structure, which can become a means of teaching principles of democracy at the small scale, Iaquinta says.

Gardens also need land and access to water, which can be difficult to find in the city. “We need to see urban agriculture as a sector that needs to be planned for,” says Iaquinta. “Poor people are going to raise food rather than starve, and planners in urban areas need to add urban agriculture to their hand basket of tools to solve problem that do not appear to be food problems: the integration of people, dissemination and acquisition of democratic institution-building skills, poverty alleviation, childhood nutrition.”

"Allotment gardens" started in Germany more than a century ago, and have become a prototype of multi-purpose urban gardens that function rather like the American lawn, complete with the flowers and vegetables. Zurich, Switzerland, Roland zh

Making it work

Urban farms and community gardens need non-governmental support, says Feenstra. “Community buy-in is the basic requirement. If you come in from outside and try to impose something on the community, if a non-profit organization says ‘Start this,’ but the community has not bought in, it won’t last.”

Having outside advocates also helps, Feenstra adds, especially if the gardeners are recent immigrants. “They come here, have nothing, nobody respects them, understands them. Working with people who understand their culture and what skills they bring” can be essential to building an urban farm.

The ideal outside advocate is open-minded and “asset-oriented,” who can match skills to needs and turn obstacles into opportunities, Feenstra says.

A relationship with the surrounding community can even help neutralize development pressures. Feenstra points to Fairview Gardens, near Santa Barbara, which “was really pressured to sell out to development, and they decided to grow their relationship with the neighborhood, and started community-supported agriculture and a farm stand. They talked with neighbors, who helped them buy an easement on the land, because they were getting fresh vegetables from the farm.”

Training ground?

One of the major supposed benefits of participation in urban farms and gardens is the opportunity to learn business. Does this work? “I don’t know of any good assessment of that,” says Alfonso Morales of Wisconsin, who worked in, and now studies, city markets. “I predict, I am confident, that it will be a normal distribution. For a small fraction, it will be a life-changing experience, they will go on to become important business people. For most, it will be interesting experience, they will burden their children with stories about the city farm. And for some number, it will be a terrible experience that they would not wish on their worst enemy. But how much entrepreneurship will come about, we just don’t know.”

“I used to milk a cow,” says Morales, “and people said, ‘Go to college, you don’t want to be here all your life.’ Now all that experience I basically fled is important. It’s an interesting thing about urban agriculture, there is no single dominant entrée, nor any dominant outcome. People can weave their own tapestry from their activities. If a kid works at a laser tag shop, it’s a wage labor job. For people who garden, it’s an entrée into so many different parts of life.”

When plywood came into industrial use a century ago, the criss-crossing layers of wood were glued with a soybean derivative. Then, in the 1930s (long before tofu sprouted in the American diet), strong, synthetic glues, derived from natural gas or oil, started to shoulder aside the soy stuff.

Cheap and water-resistant, these urea formaldehyde glues helped plywood, particle board and similar composite wood products dominate the furniture and building industries.

Formaldehyde was also used in clothing, paint, paper, wall covering and roll insulation.

Many of these products released formaldehyde (CHOH) but inside the average house, the bulk of the exposure came from plywood and its plural planar progeny.

In 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency branded formaldehyde a probable human carcinogen. The compound quickly dissolves in mucus membranes in the nose, throat and lungs, causing irritation and triggering asthma attacks.

Inside the home, formaldehyde can be released from composite wood in furniture, cabinets, sub-floors and wall panels. The notorious FEMA trailers that sparked so many health complaints after Hurricane Katrina were chock-a-block with cheap, formaldehyde-glued structures.

Photo: FEMA

After Hurricane Katrina, “FEMA trailer” residents blamed health problems on formaldehyde released from composite wood products in the trailers. A new soybean-based glue could eliminate these problems after it is adopted more widely by manufacturers of particle board.

Legumes to the rescue!

Although manufacturers have taken steps to reduce formaldehyde releases, a more comprehensive solution could reside in the plant that was originally used to glue plywood — the soybean.

Charles Frihart, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory, described the evolution of a soy super glue to the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston yesterday. “Biological materials were used as adhesives until petroleum became very cheap after World War II,” he told us, “and the synthetics displaced agricultural, natural material.”

The soy-story is developing into a key advance for “green chemistry,” the quest to reduce toxic burdens from the factory to the disposal site. Until a few years ago, soy glue was less water-resistant than synthetics, Frihart says. Then, Kaiching Li of Oregon State University discovered how to increase water resistance by “cross-linking” the strands in soy-based adhesive.

More links = more power!

Long ago, cross-linking became the key to converting soft, sticky natural rubber into a useful product. “Rubber was never very useful because it would soften in the heat, until they developed a way to crosslink it,” says Frihart. Charles Goodyear invented vulcanizing, a process for cross-linking rubber, in about 1840, laying the groundwork for the bicycle and then the automobile.

Invention is usually a group activity these days, and Frihart points to cooperation between scientists at the Forest Products Lab and Columbia Forest Products, Inc., which is already making products with soy-based glues.

A key driver for the new glue came from California, which deemed formaldehyde-based glues an indoor health hazard. Before it banned the use of formaldehyde in indoor products, however, California needed to know that an alternative technology was available. Once the cross-linked soy glue was proven to work, the state enacted a low-formaldehyde standard that, in effect, went national. “California is the largest market and people are not going make a separate product for California,” Frihart says.

The cross-linking invention is already reducing indoor formaldehyde at the top of the furniture market, where plywood is used instead of particle board, Frihart says. “More than 50 percent of interior plywood used for cabinets and furniture is now being made with the improved soy-based adhesive.”

Researchers at Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. test the strength of soy glues: Two rams compress and heat the joint, then clamps at each end of the wooden strips pull until the joint breaks.

Practical for particle board?

Particle board remains the basis for most cheaper furniture, and while some particle board already uses formaldehyde-free glue, “We want to make it better, with higher strength, especially in wet conditions,” Frihart says.

Charles Goodyear did not have to integrate vulcanization into a rubber industry – which barely existed — but today, a new adhesive “has to fit into the way the product is being made commercially,” Frihart says, “and we continue to work on modifying the adhesive to fit better individual plants.”

Frihart says the soy story echoes a larger, but behind-the-scenes evolution in materials. “Because we better understand materials, and how to manipulate them, we keep figuring out ways to make them work better, even if they are not labeled new-and-improved.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

The endocrine system is a marvel of subtlety and complexity. Through the life of the animal (human or otherwise), waves of hormones control reproduction, development, behavior, even other hormones. What happens when this natural system gets bollixed up?

We’ve known for decades that endocrine disruptors sourced in pesticides and plastics can operate at the parts-per-billion level. Disruptors in common body-care products ranging from birth-control pills to shampoo are washing down toilets and drains, then causing deformations in the animals that live downstream.

In 2006, for example, David Norris of the University of Colorado caged fathead minnows in the outflow from Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant. Within seven days, adult males were “feminized,” showing female anatomy and behavior.

Water leaving the treatment plant contained a regular toiletful of hormonally active crud, including ethinylestradiol, a chemical used in most contraceptives, and natural estrogens made and excreted by people. Other endocrine disruptors in the water included two common plastic compounds, bisphenyl A and phthalates. Detergents and pesticides had contributed (is that the right word?) a further group of endocrine suspects called nonylphenols.

Diagram courtesy Renewable Water Resources

Hormones run amok

To compare their ability to trigger the estrogen receptor on cells, estrogen disruptors are measured in units called estradiol equivalents per liter. In 2006, Boulder Creek contained 30 to 40 units, most of it artificial, Norris says.

A few trillionths of a gram in a liter of water may not sound like much, Norris realizes. “At first, people thought, ‘That’s such a small quantity, it can’t be meaningful,’ but biological systems can see it and respond to it. In lab studies, as little as 1 estradiol unit is enough to feminize a fish, so there was plenty of stuff there.”

All the estrogens, artificial and natural, work through same receptor, he says, “so the effects are additive. Even if any single one is not high enough, they add up.”

Ending the endocrine monster?

After the 2006 study (and for reasons unrelated to hormone disruption), Boulder’s treatment plant was upgraded. The newly installed “activated sludge process” transfers most of the estrogen disruptors from the liquid to the solid material, called sludge or biosolid, that remains after treatment.

“Bacteria are eating the estrogen disruptors to some extent, but the vast majority of the chemicals that come into the sewage are trapped in the biosolids,” says Norris. “It’s not a mechanism that was planned to deal with these chemicals at these concentrations, but the procedures are pretty efficient at getting the endocrine disruptors out of the water.”

For the study he just presented at the Endocrine Society, Norris repeated his 2006 study, and found no feminization in fish after 28 days, even among fish that lived in pure treated wastewater.

That finding accords with tests performed at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, says Jocelyn Hemming, a research environmental toxicologist at the lab. “Activated sludge really helps a lot,” she says. In tests using both ultra-sensitive chemical analysis and living cells, “there was definitely good removal of endocrine disruptors, although it wasn’t complete at all facilities.”

The activated sludge process did transfer some unwanted hormone to the sludge, but Hemming says the bacteria likely ate some of the troublesome compounds. “I think there is a pretty good chance of destruction from the microbial community in the activated sludge; it would not all go into the solids.”

In Boulder, the chemists are not ready to release the numbers, but “preliminary chemistry shows that the levels of endocrine disruptors in the effluent have gone way down,” Norris says. “When you are dealing with nanograms per liter [parts per trillion, by weight], you have to be really careful.”

Most of the endocrine disruptors in the Boulder sewer system are artificial, Norris says, coming from plastics, solvents and drugs. About 5 percent comes from birth control pills, and about 10 percent is natural, human estrogen.

– David J. Tenenbaum