It’s getting hard to decide which global disaster is most likely to lay us low, you know?
Just when scientists had gotten me warmed up to the idea that global warming and Gulf oil leaks are bad for us, now they tell me that the latest doom we have to worry about is—well, they don’t have a name for it yet, but I suppose it would be called “global snickerdoodling”.
And it’s a bit difficult to discuss delicately, but I’ll do my best.
You don’t have to be a scientist to know that humans spew out a lot of stuff that smuggers up the environment, and the worst of it never winds up at the end of the driveway on garbage day. A lot of it gets flushed down the toilet.
See what I mean about difficulties with being delicate? But I’m trying. I really am.
My friend Flip Dunn isn’t a scientist, but he knows firsthand what I’m talking about. Sometime in the 1970’s he bought a house that needed landscaping, and he ordered a truckload of sludge to spread over his lawn. Sludge is nothing more than processed, sanitized, deodorized human waste, and it has the look and feel of finely-ground coffee. It was billed as an excellent substitute for mineral-rich topsoil.
And so Flip got in on the ground floor, so to speak. He covered his lawn with it, an inch deep.
But the excitement didn’t last long for Flip or for the sludge-shilling scientists, because what they discovered was that certain things pass right through a human’s digestive tract unchanged.
Things like tomato seeds.
Unfortunately, Flip discovered this fact the hard way, when his lawn became a tomato patch. Oh, he mowed the budding crop down every week, so he never got to can any of his flushed-from-the-can tomatoes, but it took him a year or more to get his lawn back to where it was before he dumped deodorized doo-doo all over it.
So it’s no surprise to scientists—or to Flip—that our toilets can turn out to be a gift that keeps on giving, if we’re not careful with them.
And now, researchers at the University of Washington who study water quality in Puget Sound warn us that we may be flushing our way to trouble.
Now, if you think of all of the things that we humans shove into the top of our bodies—briefly—before we dump them back out again at the bottom, you can probably come up with hundreds of things that you wouldn’t want to see drizzled over the salmon you’re munching on at that fancy fish grill you like to dine at.
Antibiotics? Contraceptives? Painkillers? Caffeine?
They all have to end up somewhere when we’re done with them, right?
Antidepressants? Food preservatives? Fertility drugs? Antacids?
Just because they swirl out of your sight doesn’t mean that they’re finished doing their dirty work.
And so you can understand that scientists might be worried about what effect these things might have on the environment once they end up in the oceans, as they inevitably do because water runs downhill—and our oceans are downhill from everywhere.
But no, this time it isn’t flushed medications that the U of W scientists are tsk-ing about as they peer into test tubes of Puget Sound water.
It’s cinnamon.
And vanilla.
According to Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography, Seattle-area residents swallowed more than a quarter-million holiday cookies each day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then, when they were done enjoying the treats, they—well, for the sake of being delicate, let’s just say that they sat down and set them free.
And now, according to Keil, the waters of Puget Sound have distinctive holiday flavor of global snickerdoodling.
Oh, the spices are present in such small amounts that it’s doubtful you could taste them. Even if you were brave enough to try it.
But the fish? That’s another story, says Keil.
“All the spices have odors associated with them,” he says, “so it’s interesting to ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration for fish to smell them.” And if their heads are turned by the smell of our holiday goodies, will they be able to smell the food for which they hunt, or the streams in which they spawn?
Could be trouble. Cinnamon-coated, vanilla-laced trouble.
And so, if you were thinking of writing to your congressman about global warming or Gulf oil accidents, don’t pooh-pooh the threat of global snickerdoodling.
But still, I wish the scientists would invent a way to talk to the fishes, so we could ask them how they feel about the whole thing. Because I can’t imagine a cod carping that we crossed the line when we sent him Charmin and spice and everything nice.
