Wild boar populations in Europe are getting out of control – and scientists are blaming climate change.

There are now millions of wild boar spreading out from their preferred woodland habitat, moving into city suburbs, and even crossing national boundaries to countries that had thought they were extinct.

In some countries, notably France and Germany, which have always had wild boar populations in their forests, they are a major cause of road accidents.

France has an estimated two million boar, and the German state of Hesse alone has 180,000. Berlin, the German capital, is erecting boar fencing around its borders in an attempt to keep the animals out of the city.

Scientists from the Research Institute for Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, report in the journal PLOS ONE that they chose the animal to study because “the wild boar has an enormous reproductive capacity, and thus the potential for remarkable population growth when environmental conditions become more favourable.”

Wild boar can have five or more young in a litter, can live as long as 12 years, and females can reach sexual maturity within their first year if there is plenty of food available.

Warmer weather means more nuts and acorns

The scientists believe that the increasingly frequent mild winters in Europe and the extra production of acorns and beechnuts by trees are aiding boar survival rates. Both factors are the result of climate change, they say.

The number of animals has been increasing since the 1980s. Because boars are secretive, nocturnal animals, the scientists had to use hunting records and road accidents to help count the animals in 12 European countries.

“Doing this, we were able to depict the growth of the wild boar population”, says the report’s lead author, Sebastian Vetter, an evolutionary biologist. “As mild winters are becoming more frequent, boar populations are also growing exponentially.”

Climate change is also having a direct effect on food supply, the authors say, with the increasing frequency of ‘mast years’ – years when trees produce huge quantities of acorns and nuts – also aiding the animals’ survival. They attribute the phenomenon to warming climate.

In severe winters, a large number of young from the previous summer used to die of cold and hunger, but the extra food supply available, even in cold spells, is enabling more to survive.

“Our analysis showed that the frequency of beech masting years has increased over the last decades, presumably due to climate change. This finding, together with the fact that cold winters had no negative effect on population growth when food resources were abundant, shows that the effect of climate change on population growth of wild boar is two-fold:

“Cold winters have become rarer and, on top of this, the remaining severe winters became increasingly ineffective in diminishing wild boar populations because of the increasing frequency of masting years. In such years, beech or oak trees produce vast amounts of energy rich seeds that are available from autumn until spring in the following year.

“If abundant, this food source likely enables juveniles to cope even with high thermoregulatory costs in a severe winter, and adults to accumulate high amounts of body energy reserves for reproduction in the following year. This result also indicates that low survival in cold winters is apparently not caused by a limited thermogenic capacity.

“Instead, increased winter mortality seems to be caused by a negative energy balance, i.e., when high thermoregulatory costs, due to severe cold, cannot be matched by the available food, especially when high caloric seeds are absent.”

From Italy to Sweden, populations surge

Wild boars are one of the most widely distributed of animals, with their numbers varying between northern and southern latitudes. However, the survival rate of boar populations in Europe seems to be increasing across all countries.

One of the reasons for the wider spread of boar populations has been the fashion for their meat. Wild boar farms have been established in countries where the species had long ago been hunted to extinction. But farmers, unfamiliar with the animals, were not prepared for their ability to break down or jump fences as high as two metres, and many boars escaped into the wild.

Sweden, for example, had no wild boar 10 years ago, but now has an estimated 150,000 in its forests. The UK also has a small but well-entrenched boar population for the first time in 500 years.

Italy, well to the south, has always had wild boar, but has also seen a huge growth in their numbers. There are now estimated to be between 600,000 and 1 million animals. Some are seen on the outskirts of Rome, Genoa and Naples, where they eat from dustbins.

The paper: ‘What Is a Mild Winter? Regional Differences in Within-Species Responses to Climate Change‘ by Sebastian G. Vetter, Thomas Ruf, Claudia Bieber, Walter Arnold is published in PLOS One.

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup is an endocrine (hormone) disruptor in adult male rats, a new study shows.

The lowest dose tested of 10 mg/kg bw/d (bodyweight per day) was found to reduce levels of corticosterone, a steroid hormone produced in the adrenal glands. This was only one manifestation of a widespread disruption of adrenal function.

No other toxic effects were seen at that dose, so if endocrine disruption were not being specifically looked for, there would be no other signs that the dose was toxic. However a 2012 study detected a 35% testosterone down-regulation in rats at a concentration of 1 part per million.

In both studies endocrine disruption was detected at the lowest level tested for, so we don’t know if, when it comes to endocrine disruption, there are ‘safe’ lower doses of Roundup. In technical parlance, this means that no NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level), was found.

Significantly, the authors believe that the hormonal disruption could lead to the potentially fatal condition know as ‘adrenal insufficiency‘ in humans, which causes fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported”, they write. The increasing levels of Roundup in the environment and food could be “one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency.”

How does this level relate to safety limits set by regulators?

One problem with trying to work out how the endocrine disruptive level of 10 mg/kg bw/d relates to how ‘safe’ levels are set by regulators.

The experiment looked at Roundup, the complete herbicide formulation as sold and used, but regulators only look at the long-term safety of glyphosate alone, the supposed active ingredient of Roundup.

Safe levels for chronic exposure to the Roundup herbicide product have never been tested or assessed for regulatory processes. This is a serious omission because Roundup has been shown in many tests to be more disruptive to hormones than glyphosate alone, thanks to the numerous other ingredients it contains to enhance its weed-killing properties.

Given this yawning data gap, let’s for a moment assume that the regulatory limits set for glyphosate alone can be used as a guide for the safe level of Roundup.

The endocrine disruptive level of Roundup found in the experiment, of 10 mg/kg bw/d, is is well above the acceptable daily intake (ADI) set for glyphosate in Europe (0.3 mg/kg bw/d) and the US (1.75 mg/kg bw/d). But this isn’t a reason to feel reassured, since with endocrine effects, low doses can be more disruptive than higher doses.

Another worrying factor is that 10 mg/kg bw/d is well below the NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level) for chronic toxicity of glyphosate: 500 mg/kg bw/d for chronic toxicity, according to the US EPA.

In other words, the level of 500 mg/kg bw/d – a massive 50 times higher than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the experiment – is deemed by US regulators not to cause chronic toxicity.

This experiment shows they are wrong by a long shot. They failed to see toxicity below that level because they failed to take endocrine disruptive effects from low doses into account and industry does not test for them.

Hormone disruption take place at or below ‘no adverse effects’ levels

Interestingly, the NOAEL for glyphosate in industry’s three-generation reproductive studies in rats was much lower than that for chronic toxicity – 30 mg/kg bw/day for adults and 10 mg/kg bw/day for offspring.

However the latter figures – at which no adverse effects should be apparent from glyphosate – are at the same as or higher level than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the new study.

These results therefore show that the reproductive processes of the rats are sensitive to low doses that are apparently not overtly toxic. This in turn suggests that the reproductive toxicity findings are due to endocrine disruptive effects.

Regulatory tests still do not include tests for endocrine disruption from low doses, in spite of the fact that scientists have known about the syndrome since the 1990s.

In the final section of the new study, the researchers discuss its implications. They note that the effects seen in the Roundup-treated rats to the Adrenocorticotropic hormone receptor (ACTH) were similar to adrenal insufficiency in humans:

“The findings that Roundup treatment down regulates endogenous ACTH, is similar to the condition known as adrenal insufficiency in humans. This condition manifests as fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss. Chronic adrenal insufficiency could be fatal, if untreated.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported. The present study describes one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency due to Roundup^{and suggests more systematic studies, to investigate the area further. “}

The study: ‘Analysis of endocrine disruption effect of Roundup in adrenal gland of male rats‘ is by Aparamita Pandey and Medhamurthy Rudraiah, and published in Toxicology Reports 2 (2015) pp.1075-1085 on open access.

This article was originally published by GMWatch. This version has been subject to some edits and additions by The Ecologist.

Last weekend I along with around one thousand other people took part in mass direct action against one of the largest open cast lignite mines in Europe, owned by RWE, which along with surrounding mines and coal powers stations is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Europe.

I took part because fossil fuel capitalism is destroying our Earth. Waiting for companies and governments to do the right things is not working and is not going to work so people must stand up and force them to.

Earlier this year, the German government caved in to the lobbying might of RWE, backtracking on plans to put a levy on the most polluting power plants, which would have led to a phase out of lignite. Last weekend, people stood up in protest to say ‘Ende Gelände’, here and no further.

This is my experience of the day. It was a long, exhausting and confused day, and what I experienced will not be the same thing that others in different parts of the action experienced. But I hope this can help anyone reading understand what happened.

The assault

“Guten Morgen, Ende Gelände!” Those were the words I woke up to at 5:45 am in my tent. An early start for a momentous day, I rushed to scramble my stuff together, go to the loo and then hastily join up with my affinity group.

We were in the ‘Green Finger’ one of the four groups with approximately 250 people in them, that would be laying siege to the mine.

When the whole finger was formed up with everyone in their agreed place, my affinity group was in the middle. The first kilometre or so passed calmly enough. I could even hear someone play ‘The Diggers Song’ on a pipe, as we searched for a way across the motorway between us and the mine.

In the end, we came upon a tunnel with only about four lines of cops blocking it. It was at this point that many people there had their first experience of police violence, in some ways I was lucky I knew what to expect from previous actions.

This is where the battle began. The nail of the finger pushed through the police line, some using sacks of straw as shields to protect themselves. The police tried to stand firm but couldn’t hold back our momentum.

So they resorted to filling the air with a mist of pepper spray and beating everyone they could reach with their clubs, in the hope of separating them from the group. Everyone around me bunched up like rugby players in a scrum so the police couldn’t drag any of us away.

After this came a mad dash across the fields going through two more police lines. Even when they weren’t in front of us, the police followed behind us on foot and in vans trying to beat and pick off any stragglers. One person in my affinity group got pepper spray in their face, so we had to guide him by hand as we ran through a break in the police line.

I’m humbled by the trust he showed in us to make sure he wasn’t beaten to a pulp. The way everyone rallied to help those around them who had been beaten or pepper sprayed was one the most beautiful displays of practical solidarity I had ever seen.

Into the mine

After we successfully got across the fields, we walked along a dirt track by the edge of the mine that was in line with some water sprinklers used to stop dust escaping. Before this point I hadn’t really grasped the scale of the place. It looked large enough to fit at least two good sized towns in. It went from sand coloured at the top down to pitch black at the bottom.

We descended down the mine on a sandy ramp wide enough to drive a van down. At a bend near the bottom there was an attempt to block the path, but we evaded the police by travelling out the bank and bypassing them instead.

We then moved as fast as we could along the top tier of the mine, shadowed by a group of riot cops on the cliff top. When we reached one of the corners of the top tier, where conveyor belts over a kilometre long ended, we met a small group of security, which most of us were able to get past without much trouble. As we moved along the side of the conveyor belt towards one of the massive Baggers the police raced after us in borrowed 4x4s.

The police tried to form a line to block us off, but there were too few of them to do anything, so we were able to bust through the line with ease. My legs were burning from running in the sand with a heavy bag full of water. My right arm felt like it was on fire from the pepper spray.

After this we formed a line in order to stop any more police being able to join those in front of us. They tried again to block our path, but we held our line together by linking arms. We successfully stood our ground and they were forced to retreat. Seeing the police retreat was a wonderful sight.

Eventually we came to a point that was too wide for us to fully block and even more police managed to get past us. They had a much stronger line in front of us, which was thickest next to the conveyor belt where I was walking. On the very far side from me people managed to break through their line next to some smaller diggers.

The members of the affinity group I was with tried to run over to flow through the police, but by the time we got there they had closed it. I saw one police officer grab someone by their front and beat them across their back, while others lashed wildly in every direction, and others pepper-sprayed around them hoping to burn someone.

Detention

After two hours, roughly seven kilometres, and numerous police lines, we were kettled at 9 am. Even then we were still winning, as just by being there we stopped the mine from running and the police guarding us couldn’t work to keep others out.

We could see the Baggers lying still while in the distance wind turbines moved. A couple of hours in, they started to pull us out one by one, taking our photos and trying to get our names. Almost no one told them.

After this, they tied our hands with zip ties behind our backs. Through all this we supported each other, and worked to keep our spirits up by playing games and chatting (small talk when you can’t say your name, or say too much about yourself is strange).

After five to seven hours we were moved onto buses and taken to a police station. We sat for several more hours chatting, singing and sharing food (our hands had been freed by then). Eventually, they gave up on trying to process several hundred people that refused to give their names and resisted having their fingerprints taken.

Around 11 pm we were dumped outside a railway station and made our way back to camp, tired but triumphant. For the train ride back, some of us brought a couple of crates of beer, we celebrated the day and talked about what we’d been through on the train back. By around 1 am I was back in my tent exhausted, sore, emotionally drained, but also felt great about what we’d done together and achieved.

We had stopped the diggers for a day but it was also about more than just that. In economic terms it will have also damaged RWE’s position on the market (their share price just hit a new low) and made them seem less trustworthy to investors.

In addition to this many there had never taken part in direct action before but now know that by working together and taking matters into our own hands we can achieve more than waiting for salvation from those above us in society could ever do.

Many people both there and watching the events from afar will also have seen the role of the police, not as keeping of the peace but as guard dogs of social and economic order which is killing us and our planet. Last weekend, we fought and we won.

Background to the action: ‘Power struggle: after Germany’s renewables surge, can it keep its coal in the ground?‘ by Melanie Mattauch.

Toni Belly is a student at the University of Birmingham and a member of Plan C. He is also active in various student political and campaigning groups fighting on both environmental and economic issues. He’s critical of solutions to economic, social and environmental issues that rely on benevolent action on the part of those at the top of our current social economic order. Instead being of the view that real change can only come through struggle enacted from below.

Wild boar populations in Europe are getting out of control – and scientists are blaming climate change.

There are now millions of wild boar spreading out from their preferred woodland habitat, moving into city suburbs, and even crossing national boundaries to countries that had thought they were extinct.

In some countries, notably France and Germany, which have always had wild boar populations in their forests, they are a major cause of road accidents.

France has an estimated two million boar, and the German state of Hesse alone has 180,000. Berlin, the German capital, is erecting boar fencing around its borders in an attempt to keep the animals out of the city.

Scientists from the Research Institute for Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, report in the journal PLOS ONE that they chose the animal to study because “the wild boar has an enormous reproductive capacity, and thus the potential for remarkable population growth when environmental conditions become more favourable.”

Wild boar can have five or more young in a litter, can live as long as 12 years, and females can reach sexual maturity within their first year if there is plenty of food available.

Warmer weather means more nuts and acorns

The scientists believe that the increasingly frequent mild winters in Europe and the extra production of acorns and beechnuts by trees are aiding boar survival rates. Both factors are the result of climate change, they say.

The number of animals has been increasing since the 1980s. Because boars are secretive, nocturnal animals, the scientists had to use hunting records and road accidents to help count the animals in 12 European countries.

“Doing this, we were able to depict the growth of the wild boar population”, says the report’s lead author, Sebastian Vetter, an evolutionary biologist. “As mild winters are becoming more frequent, boar populations are also growing exponentially.”

Climate change is also having a direct effect on food supply, the authors say, with the increasing frequency of ‘mast years’ – years when trees produce huge quantities of acorns and nuts – also aiding the animals’ survival. They attribute the phenomenon to warming climate.

In severe winters, a large number of young from the previous summer used to die of cold and hunger, but the extra food supply available, even in cold spells, is enabling more to survive.

“Our analysis showed that the frequency of beech masting years has increased over the last decades, presumably due to climate change. This finding, together with the fact that cold winters had no negative effect on population growth when food resources were abundant, shows that the effect of climate change on population growth of wild boar is two-fold:

“Cold winters have become rarer and, on top of this, the remaining severe winters became increasingly ineffective in diminishing wild boar populations because of the increasing frequency of masting years. In such years, beech or oak trees produce vast amounts of energy rich seeds that are available from autumn until spring in the following year.

“If abundant, this food source likely enables juveniles to cope even with high thermoregulatory costs in a severe winter, and adults to accumulate high amounts of body energy reserves for reproduction in the following year. This result also indicates that low survival in cold winters is apparently not caused by a limited thermogenic capacity.

“Instead, increased winter mortality seems to be caused by a negative energy balance, i.e., when high thermoregulatory costs, due to severe cold, cannot be matched by the available food, especially when high caloric seeds are absent.”

From Italy to Sweden, populations surge

Wild boars are one of the most widely distributed of animals, with their numbers varying between northern and southern latitudes. However, the survival rate of boar populations in Europe seems to be increasing across all countries.

One of the reasons for the wider spread of boar populations has been the fashion for their meat. Wild boar farms have been established in countries where the species had long ago been hunted to extinction. But farmers, unfamiliar with the animals, were not prepared for their ability to break down or jump fences as high as two metres, and many boars escaped into the wild.

Sweden, for example, had no wild boar 10 years ago, but now has an estimated 150,000 in its forests. The UK also has a small but well-entrenched boar population for the first time in 500 years.

Italy, well to the south, has always had wild boar, but has also seen a huge growth in their numbers. There are now estimated to be between 600,000 and 1 million animals. Some are seen on the outskirts of Rome, Genoa and Naples, where they eat from dustbins.

The paper: ‘What Is a Mild Winter? Regional Differences in Within-Species Responses to Climate Change‘ by Sebastian G. Vetter, Thomas Ruf, Claudia Bieber, Walter Arnold is published in PLOS One.

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup is an endocrine (hormone) disruptor in adult male rats, a new study shows.

The lowest dose tested of 10 mg/kg bw/d (bodyweight per day) was found to reduce levels of corticosterone, a steroid hormone produced in the adrenal glands. This was only one manifestation of a widespread disruption of adrenal function.

No other toxic effects were seen at that dose, so if endocrine disruption were not being specifically looked for, there would be no other signs that the dose was toxic. However a 2012 study detected a 35% testosterone down-regulation in rats at a concentration of 1 part per million.

In both studies endocrine disruption was detected at the lowest level tested for, so we don’t know if, when it comes to endocrine disruption, there are ‘safe’ lower doses of Roundup. In technical parlance, this means that no NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level), was found.

Significantly, the authors believe that the hormonal disruption could lead to the potentially fatal condition know as ‘adrenal insufficiency‘ in humans, which causes fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported”, they write. The increasing levels of Roundup in the environment and food could be “one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency.”

How does this level relate to safety limits set by regulators?

One problem with trying to work out how the endocrine disruptive level of 10 mg/kg bw/d relates to how ‘safe’ levels are set by regulators.

The experiment looked at Roundup, the complete herbicide formulation as sold and used, but regulators only look at the long-term safety of glyphosate alone, the supposed active ingredient of Roundup.

Safe levels for chronic exposure to the Roundup herbicide product have never been tested or assessed for regulatory processes. This is a serious omission because Roundup has been shown in many tests to be more disruptive to hormones than glyphosate alone, thanks to the numerous other ingredients it contains to enhance its weed-killing properties.

Given this yawning data gap, let’s for a moment assume that the regulatory limits set for glyphosate alone can be used as a guide for the safe level of Roundup.

The endocrine disruptive level of Roundup found in the experiment, of 10 mg/kg bw/d, is is well above the acceptable daily intake (ADI) set for glyphosate in Europe (0.3 mg/kg bw/d) and the US (1.75 mg/kg bw/d). But this isn’t a reason to feel reassured, since with endocrine effects, low doses can be more disruptive than higher doses.

Another worrying factor is that 10 mg/kg bw/d is well below the NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level) for chronic toxicity of glyphosate: 500 mg/kg bw/d for chronic toxicity, according to the US EPA.

In other words, the level of 500 mg/kg bw/d – a massive 50 times higher than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the experiment – is deemed by US regulators not to cause chronic toxicity.

This experiment shows they are wrong by a long shot. They failed to see toxicity below that level because they failed to take endocrine disruptive effects from low doses into account and industry does not test for them.

Hormone disruption take place at or below ‘no adverse effects’ levels

Interestingly, the NOAEL for glyphosate in industry’s three-generation reproductive studies in rats was much lower than that for chronic toxicity – 30 mg/kg bw/day for adults and 10 mg/kg bw/day for offspring.

However the latter figures – at which no adverse effects should be apparent from glyphosate – are at the same as or higher level than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the new study.

These results therefore show that the reproductive processes of the rats are sensitive to low doses that are apparently not overtly toxic. This in turn suggests that the reproductive toxicity findings are due to endocrine disruptive effects.

Regulatory tests still do not include tests for endocrine disruption from low doses, in spite of the fact that scientists have known about the syndrome since the 1990s.

In the final section of the new study, the researchers discuss its implications. They note that the effects seen in the Roundup-treated rats to the Adrenocorticotropic hormone receptor (ACTH) were similar to adrenal insufficiency in humans:

“The findings that Roundup treatment down regulates endogenous ACTH, is similar to the condition known as adrenal insufficiency in humans. This condition manifests as fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss. Chronic adrenal insufficiency could be fatal, if untreated.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported. The present study describes one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency due to Roundup^{and suggests more systematic studies, to investigate the area further. “}

The study: ‘Analysis of endocrine disruption effect of Roundup in adrenal gland of male rats‘ is by Aparamita Pandey and Medhamurthy Rudraiah, and published in Toxicology Reports 2 (2015) pp.1075-1085 on open access.

This article was originally published by GMWatch. This version has been subject to some edits and additions by The Ecologist.

Last weekend I along with around one thousand other people took part in mass direct action against one of the largest open cast lignite mines in Europe, owned by RWE, which along with surrounding mines and coal powers stations is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Europe.

I took part because fossil fuel capitalism is destroying our Earth. Waiting for companies and governments to do the right things is not working and is not going to work so people must stand up and force them to.

Earlier this year, the German government caved in to the lobbying might of RWE, backtracking on plans to put a levy on the most polluting power plants, which would have led to a phase out of lignite. Last weekend, people stood up in protest to say ‘Ende Gelände’, here and no further.

This is my experience of the day. It was a long, exhausting and confused day, and what I experienced will not be the same thing that others in different parts of the action experienced. But I hope this can help anyone reading understand what happened.

The assault

“Guten Morgen, Ende Gelände!” Those were the words I woke up to at 5:45 am in my tent. An early start for a momentous day, I rushed to scramble my stuff together, go to the loo and then hastily join up with my affinity group.

We were in the ‘Green Finger’ one of the four groups with approximately 250 people in them, that would be laying siege to the mine.

When the whole finger was formed up with everyone in their agreed place, my affinity group was in the middle. The first kilometre or so passed calmly enough. I could even hear someone play ‘The Diggers Song’ on a pipe, as we searched for a way across the motorway between us and the mine.

In the end, we came upon a tunnel with only about four lines of cops blocking it. It was at this point that many people there had their first experience of police violence, in some ways I was lucky I knew what to expect from previous actions.

This is where the battle began. The nail of the finger pushed through the police line, some using sacks of straw as shields to protect themselves. The police tried to stand firm but couldn’t hold back our momentum.

So they resorted to filling the air with a mist of pepper spray and beating everyone they could reach with their clubs, in the hope of separating them from the group. Everyone around me bunched up like rugby players in a scrum so the police couldn’t drag any of us away.

After this came a mad dash across the fields going through two more police lines. Even when they weren’t in front of us, the police followed behind us on foot and in vans trying to beat and pick off any stragglers. One person in my affinity group got pepper spray in their face, so we had to guide him by hand as we ran through a break in the police line.

I’m humbled by the trust he showed in us to make sure he wasn’t beaten to a pulp. The way everyone rallied to help those around them who had been beaten or pepper sprayed was one the most beautiful displays of practical solidarity I had ever seen.

Into the mine

After we successfully got across the fields, we walked along a dirt track by the edge of the mine that was in line with some water sprinklers used to stop dust escaping. Before this point I hadn’t really grasped the scale of the place. It looked large enough to fit at least two good sized towns in. It went from sand coloured at the top down to pitch black at the bottom.

We descended down the mine on a sandy ramp wide enough to drive a van down. At a bend near the bottom there was an attempt to block the path, but we evaded the police by travelling out the bank and bypassing them instead.

We then moved as fast as we could along the top tier of the mine, shadowed by a group of riot cops on the cliff top. When we reached one of the corners of the top tier, where conveyor belts over a kilometre long ended, we met a small group of security, which most of us were able to get past without much trouble. As we moved along the side of the conveyor belt towards one of the massive Baggers the police raced after us in borrowed 4x4s.

The police tried to form a line to block us off, but there were too few of them to do anything, so we were able to bust through the line with ease. My legs were burning from running in the sand with a heavy bag full of water. My right arm felt like it was on fire from the pepper spray.

After this we formed a line in order to stop any more police being able to join those in front of us. They tried again to block our path, but we held our line together by linking arms. We successfully stood our ground and they were forced to retreat. Seeing the police retreat was a wonderful sight.

Eventually we came to a point that was too wide for us to fully block and even more police managed to get past us. They had a much stronger line in front of us, which was thickest next to the conveyor belt where I was walking. On the very far side from me people managed to break through their line next to some smaller diggers.

The members of the affinity group I was with tried to run over to flow through the police, but by the time we got there they had closed it. I saw one police officer grab someone by their front and beat them across their back, while others lashed wildly in every direction, and others pepper-sprayed around them hoping to burn someone.

Detention

After two hours, roughly seven kilometres, and numerous police lines, we were kettled at 9 am. Even then we were still winning, as just by being there we stopped the mine from running and the police guarding us couldn’t work to keep others out.

We could see the Baggers lying still while in the distance wind turbines moved. A couple of hours in, they started to pull us out one by one, taking our photos and trying to get our names. Almost no one told them.

After this, they tied our hands with zip ties behind our backs. Through all this we supported each other, and worked to keep our spirits up by playing games and chatting (small talk when you can’t say your name, or say too much about yourself is strange).

After five to seven hours we were moved onto buses and taken to a police station. We sat for several more hours chatting, singing and sharing food (our hands had been freed by then). Eventually, they gave up on trying to process several hundred people that refused to give their names and resisted having their fingerprints taken.

Around 11 pm we were dumped outside a railway station and made our way back to camp, tired but triumphant. For the train ride back, some of us brought a couple of crates of beer, we celebrated the day and talked about what we’d been through on the train back. By around 1 am I was back in my tent exhausted, sore, emotionally drained, but also felt great about what we’d done together and achieved.

We had stopped the diggers for a day but it was also about more than just that. In economic terms it will have also damaged RWE’s position on the market (their share price just hit a new low) and made them seem less trustworthy to investors.

In addition to this many there had never taken part in direct action before but now know that by working together and taking matters into our own hands we can achieve more than waiting for salvation from those above us in society could ever do.

Many people both there and watching the events from afar will also have seen the role of the police, not as keeping of the peace but as guard dogs of social and economic order which is killing us and our planet. Last weekend, we fought and we won.

Background to the action: ‘Power struggle: after Germany’s renewables surge, can it keep its coal in the ground?‘ by Melanie Mattauch.

Toni Belly is a student at the University of Birmingham and a member of Plan C. He is also active in various student political and campaigning groups fighting on both environmental and economic issues. He’s critical of solutions to economic, social and environmental issues that rely on benevolent action on the part of those at the top of our current social economic order. Instead being of the view that real change can only come through struggle enacted from below.

Wild boar populations in Europe are getting out of control – and scientists are blaming climate change.

There are now millions of wild boar spreading out from their preferred woodland habitat, moving into city suburbs, and even crossing national boundaries to countries that had thought they were extinct.

In some countries, notably France and Germany, which have always had wild boar populations in their forests, they are a major cause of road accidents.

France has an estimated two million boar, and the German state of Hesse alone has 180,000. Berlin, the German capital, is erecting boar fencing around its borders in an attempt to keep the animals out of the city.

Scientists from the Research Institute for Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, report in the journal PLOS ONE that they chose the animal to study because “the wild boar has an enormous reproductive capacity, and thus the potential for remarkable population growth when environmental conditions become more favourable.”

Wild boar can have five or more young in a litter, can live as long as 12 years, and females can reach sexual maturity within their first year if there is plenty of food available.

Warmer weather means more nuts and acorns

The scientists believe that the increasingly frequent mild winters in Europe and the extra production of acorns and beechnuts by trees are aiding boar survival rates. Both factors are the result of climate change, they say.

The number of animals has been increasing since the 1980s. Because boars are secretive, nocturnal animals, the scientists had to use hunting records and road accidents to help count the animals in 12 European countries.

“Doing this, we were able to depict the growth of the wild boar population”, says the report’s lead author, Sebastian Vetter, an evolutionary biologist. “As mild winters are becoming more frequent, boar populations are also growing exponentially.”

Climate change is also having a direct effect on food supply, the authors say, with the increasing frequency of ‘mast years’ – years when trees produce huge quantities of acorns and nuts – also aiding the animals’ survival. They attribute the phenomenon to warming climate.

In severe winters, a large number of young from the previous summer used to die of cold and hunger, but the extra food supply available, even in cold spells, is enabling more to survive.

“Our analysis showed that the frequency of beech masting years has increased over the last decades, presumably due to climate change. This finding, together with the fact that cold winters had no negative effect on population growth when food resources were abundant, shows that the effect of climate change on population growth of wild boar is two-fold:

“Cold winters have become rarer and, on top of this, the remaining severe winters became increasingly ineffective in diminishing wild boar populations because of the increasing frequency of masting years. In such years, beech or oak trees produce vast amounts of energy rich seeds that are available from autumn until spring in the following year.

“If abundant, this food source likely enables juveniles to cope even with high thermoregulatory costs in a severe winter, and adults to accumulate high amounts of body energy reserves for reproduction in the following year. This result also indicates that low survival in cold winters is apparently not caused by a limited thermogenic capacity.

“Instead, increased winter mortality seems to be caused by a negative energy balance, i.e., when high thermoregulatory costs, due to severe cold, cannot be matched by the available food, especially when high caloric seeds are absent.”

From Italy to Sweden, populations surge

Wild boars are one of the most widely distributed of animals, with their numbers varying between northern and southern latitudes. However, the survival rate of boar populations in Europe seems to be increasing across all countries.

One of the reasons for the wider spread of boar populations has been the fashion for their meat. Wild boar farms have been established in countries where the species had long ago been hunted to extinction. But farmers, unfamiliar with the animals, were not prepared for their ability to break down or jump fences as high as two metres, and many boars escaped into the wild.

Sweden, for example, had no wild boar 10 years ago, but now has an estimated 150,000 in its forests. The UK also has a small but well-entrenched boar population for the first time in 500 years.

Italy, well to the south, has always had wild boar, but has also seen a huge growth in their numbers. There are now estimated to be between 600,000 and 1 million animals. Some are seen on the outskirts of Rome, Genoa and Naples, where they eat from dustbins.

The paper: ‘What Is a Mild Winter? Regional Differences in Within-Species Responses to Climate Change‘ by Sebastian G. Vetter, Thomas Ruf, Claudia Bieber, Walter Arnold is published in PLOS One.

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup is an endocrine (hormone) disruptor in adult male rats, a new study shows.

The lowest dose tested of 10 mg/kg bw/d (bodyweight per day) was found to reduce levels of corticosterone, a steroid hormone produced in the adrenal glands. This was only one manifestation of a widespread disruption of adrenal function.

No other toxic effects were seen at that dose, so if endocrine disruption were not being specifically looked for, there would be no other signs that the dose was toxic. However a 2012 study detected a 35% testosterone down-regulation in rats at a concentration of 1 part per million.

In both studies endocrine disruption was detected at the lowest level tested for, so we don’t know if, when it comes to endocrine disruption, there are ‘safe’ lower doses of Roundup. In technical parlance, this means that no NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level), was found.

Significantly, the authors believe that the hormonal disruption could lead to the potentially fatal condition know as ‘adrenal insufficiency‘ in humans, which causes fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported”, they write. The increasing levels of Roundup in the environment and food could be “one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency.”

How does this level relate to safety limits set by regulators?

One problem with trying to work out how the endocrine disruptive level of 10 mg/kg bw/d relates to how ‘safe’ levels are set by regulators.

The experiment looked at Roundup, the complete herbicide formulation as sold and used, but regulators only look at the long-term safety of glyphosate alone, the supposed active ingredient of Roundup.

Safe levels for chronic exposure to the Roundup herbicide product have never been tested or assessed for regulatory processes. This is a serious omission because Roundup has been shown in many tests to be more disruptive to hormones than glyphosate alone, thanks to the numerous other ingredients it contains to enhance its weed-killing properties.

Given this yawning data gap, let’s for a moment assume that the regulatory limits set for glyphosate alone can be used as a guide for the safe level of Roundup.

The endocrine disruptive level of Roundup found in the experiment, of 10 mg/kg bw/d, is is well above the acceptable daily intake (ADI) set for glyphosate in Europe (0.3 mg/kg bw/d) and the US (1.75 mg/kg bw/d). But this isn’t a reason to feel reassured, since with endocrine effects, low doses can be more disruptive than higher doses.

Another worrying factor is that 10 mg/kg bw/d is well below the NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level) for chronic toxicity of glyphosate: 500 mg/kg bw/d for chronic toxicity, according to the US EPA.

In other words, the level of 500 mg/kg bw/d – a massive 50 times higher than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the experiment – is deemed by US regulators not to cause chronic toxicity.

This experiment shows they are wrong by a long shot. They failed to see toxicity below that level because they failed to take endocrine disruptive effects from low doses into account and industry does not test for them.

Hormone disruption take place at or below ‘no adverse effects’ levels

Interestingly, the NOAEL for glyphosate in industry’s three-generation reproductive studies in rats was much lower than that for chronic toxicity – 30 mg/kg bw/day for adults and 10 mg/kg bw/day for offspring.

However the latter figures – at which no adverse effects should be apparent from glyphosate – are at the same as or higher level than the level of Roundup found to be endocrine disruptive in the new study.

These results therefore show that the reproductive processes of the rats are sensitive to low doses that are apparently not overtly toxic. This in turn suggests that the reproductive toxicity findings are due to endocrine disruptive effects.

Regulatory tests still do not include tests for endocrine disruption from low doses, in spite of the fact that scientists have known about the syndrome since the 1990s.

In the final section of the new study, the researchers discuss its implications. They note that the effects seen in the Roundup-treated rats to the Adrenocorticotropic hormone receptor (ACTH) were similar to adrenal insufficiency in humans:

“The findings that Roundup treatment down regulates endogenous ACTH, is similar to the condition known as adrenal insufficiency in humans. This condition manifests as fatigue, anorexia, sweating, anxiety, shaking, nausea, heart palpitations and weight loss. Chronic adrenal insufficiency could be fatal, if untreated.

“A progressive increase in its prevalence has been observed in humans, while a very few studies relating to xenobiotic exposure and adrenal insufficiency development have been reported. The present study describes one of the possible mechanisms of adrenal insufficiency due to Roundup^{and suggests more systematic studies, to investigate the area further. “}

The study: ‘Analysis of endocrine disruption effect of Roundup in adrenal gland of male rats‘ is by Aparamita Pandey and Medhamurthy Rudraiah, and published in Toxicology Reports 2 (2015) pp.1075-1085 on open access.

This article was originally published by GMWatch. This version has been subject to some edits and additions by The Ecologist.