Good science teaching is an essential component of this educational effort.

A key idea that people will need to understand is the notion that our planet seems to have regulated its own surface conditions within the narrow limits that life can tolerate over a vast span of time thanks to tightly coupled feedbacks between life and rocks, atmosphere and water.

This is the key insight of Jim Lovelock’s paradigm-shifting Gaia theory. Students need a basic understanding of how to think in terms of feedback loops and of the surprising emergent properties that often appear when many such loops are linked together.

They will also need to see how these concepts can help us to understand the possible consequences of our heedless lust for material growth that is so disturbing the Earth, and they will need to use these ideas to think through possible solutions.

But this kind of educational approach on its own is, I believe, doomed to fail. By focusing only on thinking (albeit in the more enlightened mode known as ‘systems thinking’) it ignores the equally vital contributions that our sensory experience, our ethical sensibilities and our intuitive capacities can make to a more holistic understanding of the Earth and of our place within it.

The problem, more succinctly put, is that our current educational paradigm emphasizes quantities at the expense of qualities, and prioritizes facts over values.

The result is that we promulgate a rather dry soulless approach to the world that is inherently dualistic and which leads us to believe that our Earth is nothing more than a vast machine which we can control as we wish by using the detached, ‘God’s eye’ view of rational scientific analysis.

Thus, as a society, we feel strangely disconnected from the Earth – it seems as if we were aliens from some other planet placed here to prod and poke this world with our scientific instruments whilst feeling no sense of meaning, belonging or closeness to her ancient crumpled surface or to her rich, teeming biodiversity. With this world view firmly in place in our minds, we engage in sustainable actions only out of fear, or if we are compelled to by law.

An experience in Africa led to a need for greater understanding

I myself experienced the immense alienating power of this approach to science during my three tortured years as a young undergraduate in zoology. For seven months before beginning my studies I had worked as a field assistant in the Sengwa Wildlife Research Area deep in the wild bush country of what was then Rhodesia.

I lived in the wild essentially on my own. At night I was enveloped by the stars and by the distant sounds of lion and hyena. By day I felt myself belonging more and more to the great wild personality of the Sengwa region with its broad meandering rivers and the great flat-topped red sandstone mountains that overlooked its complex intertwining fingers of mopane woodland, miombo scrub, and riverine acacia savannah.

Sengwa for me was clearly alive, a greater being imbued with a tremendous communicative power that possessed a coherent, healing intelligence that I could access only through my intuition, but which I could also come to know through the ancillary doorway of the rational scientific knowledge acquired through mapping vegetation, collecting plants and mammals, and helping with the ongoing research on the ecology of elephant and warthog.

I returned to England with an immense thirst to learn more about the natural world, and thought that my university experience would lead me further in to the rich realm of qualities that I had so deeply encountered in Africa. I hoped that somehow all the reading and studying would embed me even deeper within our living, turning world, but I was to be bitterly disappointed.

Inspired by the great red Karoo sandstone cliffs that overlooked the Sengwa river, I chose geology as my subsidiary subject in my first year. One of the first classes was a field trip to an outcrop of coal in a steeply cut river valley in the north of England.

Touching the black seam of rock, I sensed its immense age, its dense conglomeration of carbon atoms, and the deep meaningfulness of its very existence that seemed to be saying: “you and I are deeply connected – my presence here has contributed to the coherence of your world. I must remain here for that coherence to continue”.

Our geology teacher was somehow able to bring these qualities of the coal to life in the very way in which he delivered his scientific information, and I felt a deep excitement. If this was geology, then I wanted as much of it as I could get.

Science gave some answers, but couldn’t explain an emotional connection

But things got worse from that moment on, and I never again felt that sense of meaning and belonging to the great rocky crust of our planet. Instead, for me, geology deteriorated into nothing more than a progression of dry facts about fossils, minerals, rocks and geomorphology that had to be memorized for the exam.

There seemed to be no awareness at all in our instructors about the profound, mysterious qualities of the rocks and geological formations that we studied. My situation was so dire that I began to feel a depressing and increasingly disabling doubt about my own perceptions and intuitions as I was increasingly absorbed into a world of mere facts, dry as old bones and equally as dead.

The zoology course was not much better. It too reduced the teeming world of nature to a dry menagerie of deterministic theories meant to convince us that we live in a meaningless world in which selfishness and competition are the sole yardsticks of evolutionary success.

My formal doctoral research at Oxford on the behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer lead me no deeper into the world of meaning that I so unconsciously craved. But the qualities of the small wild semi-natural woodland where I did my field work revealed themselves to me unbidden during many long days and nights alone within the forgotten sanctuary of its ancient hazel coppices and its dark abandoned rides.

Thanks to some uncanny instinct, I interspersed periods of intense data collection with long meditative moments in which the living qualities of the wood came to the fore as I abandoned myself to the subtle messages of its criss-crossing bird song, the sound of the wind it is trees, the delicate smells of its damp earth and the luscious greenness of its vegetation as it ate up the life-giving power of the sun.

These were for me times of a genuine and deeply satisfying communication between a mysteriously animate enfolding world and my own sensing animal body.

Even great scientists were missing the intrinsic value of Gaia

The denigration of qualities such as these was deliberately built in to mainstream science at its inception some 400 years ago during the 16th and 17th centuries. The great pioneering scientific geniuses of that period such as Galileo, Bacon and Descartes convincingly argued that only quantities have validity.

They believed that nature has no intrinsic value, that the whole cosmos is in essence a vast machine, and that we have the right to use rational analysis to ruthlessly control and exploit the Earth and all her other-than-human creatures for our own ends.

Is it any surprise, then, that this world view has delivered us into the maw of a planetary crisis of such massive proportions that scientists talk about us being the cause of the sixth mass extinction and of the threat posed to civilization by the looming specter of anthropogenic climate change?

Is it any surprise that a culture that sees the world as no more than a dead object will eventually seriously perturb the web of life on which it depends? Modern science is perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the Western world, but it needs to be seriously reformed and expanded if it is to contribute to solving the urgent problems of the 21st century.

It is time for science to heal its self-imposed split between quantities and qualities and between facts and values if it is to become part of a tenable solution.

Conscious concern for nature is a tangible output

It was C.G. Jung who pointed out that we gain reliable knowledge by means of the four modalities we mentioned earlier, namely thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition. Perhaps the reunification we are seeking will take place when we educate our students to consciously cultivate their ability to think in tandem with their other three ways of knowing, for it is with these that we become sensitive to the qualitative aspects of our experience.

But how do we know that such qualities have any ‘objective’ validity? How can we be certain that they are not mere projections, as Galileo and others warned so long ago? There are various lines of evidence that support the notion that qualities can indeed provide us with genuine information about the world.

A case in point is the pioneering work of the animal welfare scientist, Francoise Wemelsfelder, who has explored how quantities and qualities overlap in our perceptions of the well-being of farm animals.

In one of her ongoing experiments, observers are asked to watch a set of video clips of pigs from different husbandry backgrounds as they interact with a human in a standardized environment. Each observer is asked to assign quantitative scores to their own qualitative intuitive perceptions of each pig’s ’emotional’ state.

Multivariate statistical analyses of these data have shown over and over again that there is a high degree of agreement amongst observers with respect to their qualitative evaluations, and that these assessments correlate exceedingly well with standard physiological measures such as levels of stress hormones in the animals.

Teaching at Schumacher College embodies a holistic approach

In a further development of this approach, Francoise and I are about to explore to what extent her methodology can be applied to the assessment of landscape quality by naïve observers.

Recently, Tom Butterworth, one of our MSc students at Schumacher College, carried out a pilot study in which he showed that qualitative assessments of different woodland ecosystems by a group of observers were well correlated statistically with standard quantitative measures of biodiversity taken within the same woodlands.

Our efforts to educate for a genuinely sustainable relationship with the Earth must therefore attempt to reunite quantities with qualities by developing the four ways of knowing in our students, an approach that we are pioneering on our MSc in holistic science at Schumacher College. When working with our students to give them the deepest possible sense of connection with Gaia, we use Lovelock’s Gaia theory to teach them how to think holistically about the Earth.

We explore the lessons of Daisyworld, we look at the consistencies or otherwise between Gaia theory and natural selection, we build mathematical models of the carbon cycle coupled to an active biota, and we look at how the Earth could respond to climate change as a fully integrated complex system consisting of life coupled to its abiotic ‘environment’.

Then we go further. We use this rational knowledge to fuel our intuitive sense of connection to the whole of community of nature by engaging in rigorous meditative explorations and by recreating Gaia’s long and complex evolutionary trajectory in our imaginations. We deliberately connect with the qualities of rocks, atmosphere, oceans, clouds, individual organisms and entire ecosystems by spending quiet time savouring their essences much as we would that of a poem or a piece of music.

As we deepen our perceptual abilities, we find a remarkable degree of commonality in what we discover by means of this more phenomenological approach to nature. In addition, we work with exercises that help to shift our everyday perceptional frameworks.

We lie on our backs outdoors, feeling how our planet’s gravity dangles us upside down over the vastness of space, and we gain a palpable sensation of her great curving spherical body as it arches away beyond us in all directions.

Intuition is one of the key aspects of learning Gaia theory

The deep experiences of connection and communion that arise out of this radical holistic approach lead us to conclude that the mechanistic metaphor that has so seriously misguided our culture during these past four centuries must now be replaced by the more ancient understanding of the Earth as a great psyche in which we are deeply immersed and with which we are in constant communication.

This intuition enriches our sensory experiences, so that we no longer see the world around us as a set of isolated mechanical objects, but as a unified field of experiencing subjects. Now, with our ethical sensibilities alive and awake, we see why it is wrong to seriously harm the great turning world within which we have our being and which gave us birth.

Our rational minds become the servants of this deeper sensibility by helping us to articulate our deep experiences of belonging to Gaia and to tease out to what extent our lifestyles are consistent with them. External compulsion or a sense of duty is no longer necessary to make us act correctly.

The integration of our reasoning, feeling, sensing and intuition fill us with an inspiring sense of the mysterious personhood of the Earth. This unleashes tremendously powerful feelings of energy and dedication that lead us spontaneously into right action, wherever our own particular paths might lead us.

Dr Stephen Harding oversees the MSc in Holistic Science and is resident ecologist and founding faculty member of Schumacher College. Stephan was born in Venezuela in 1953. He came to England at the age of six with his father and housekeeper, with whom he spoke Spanish (his mother tongue) at home. Since childhood Stephan has had a deep fascination with the natural world, and his scientific cast of mind lead him to do a degree in Zoology at the University of Durham and then a doctorate on the behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer at Oxford University.

This article was originally published by Schumacher College.

MSc, Holistic Science at Schumacher College: Join Stephan Harding, Philip Frances at Schumacher College this September for a transformational degree in Holistic Science. A chance to immerse yourself in systems, complexity and chaos theory, eco-psychology and the science of qualities. Look beyond the limits of traditional science to solve the ecological and social problems of today.

Apply by 3rd May!

This week PR Newswire carried an announcement by a law firm that is investigating the biotech firm Intrexon for allegedly misleading investors and potentially violating US securities law.

The law firm cites allegations in a new report on Intrexon’s performance and prospects from a company called Spotlight Research.

The law firm invites people who have purchased shares or have information on Intrexon’s dealings to get in contact. Two other law firms have also launched investigations.

Intrexon owns the GM mosquito firm Oxitec. Intrexon shares rallied by around 100% in the past three months due to the hype around the company’s ability to use GM mosquitoes to combat the Zika virus. Zika is blamed for causing birth defects in babies born to mothers who were infected with the virus during pregnancy.

Is the hype justified? Not according to Spotlight’s report, which was published last Thursday, 21 April. The report says Oxitec’s GM mosquito technology “won’t work, is way too expensive, and is many years from generating even minuscule revenue from Zika virus despite adding $2 billion of market cap due to the hype”.

Intrexon shares fell nearly 30% on the day of the report’s publication. They stand at around $27 today, down from $38 ion 17th April and a January high of $45. What does Spotlight’s report say? Here’s a summary.

‘Hand-waving’

In its report, Spotlight likens Intrexon to Theranos, a biomedical company that became mired in controversy after reports that it failed to deliver on its hyped promises while also trying to hide its problems – and is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
Bill Maris, founder of Google Ventures, explained why Google Ventures did not invest in Theranos:

“We looked at it a couple times, but there was so much hand-waving – like, look over here! – that we couldn’t figure it out. So we just had someone from our life-science investment team go into Walgreens and take the test. And it wasn’t that difficult for anyone to determine that things may not be what they seem here.”

Spotlight’s analysts believe that they see the same syndrome at Intrexon: “We saw the ‘hand-waving’ at Intrexon and the promotional activity of the company’s charismatic founder as serious red flags and began our intensive due diligence. We are shocked by what we have found.”

Spotlight claims that in a series of eight reports, it will “debunk all core aspects of the bull case to comprehensively demonstrate that things are definitively not ‘what they seem here’.”

‘Nonsensical’ Zika virus hype

Spotlight’s first report is titled ‘Intrexon: The Public Markets’ Theranos Part 1 – Zika Virus Hype Is Nonsensical‘.

In the report, Spotlight states that Intrexon’s technology has been questioned by high-ranking officials from the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health. It adds, “Smart money is hitting the ‘eject’ button and leaving retail investors holding the bag.”

According to the report:

• Intrexon’s long-time chief operations officer has abruptly left the company in advance of what are hyped as great opportunities;
• Intrexon has overstated its revenues by 50% by “round-tripping” its own cash through related “shell companies”;
• These related companies are almost exclusively “failed” or “shady” enterprises; blue chip companies have steered clear;
• Even the related company transactions may be overstated;
• Intrexon’s biofuels interests are likely to fail: the head of the company’s biofuels division “has worked at three failed biofuel startups in a row”.

Spotlight says that this “self-proclaimed ‘Google of life sciences’ technology platform is an overhyped, undifferentiated collection of commodity and failed products”.

It adds that the company “employs lots of fancy jargon to explain their core technologies” – but “we examined each closely and we found nothing more than a collection of products that anyone can (and does) use themselves smashed together with failed science experiments from years ago”.

Thus, while Intrexon “can pursue as many clinical trials utilizing their commoditized technology as they like to keep the dream alive, such trials in our view are extremely unlikely to result in valuable commercial products in the future. And without a real prospect of commercialized products, there can be no meaningful equity value.”

The report adds, “Intrexon has been around for more than 17 years and commercialized effectively zero meaningful commercial products using their own technology. Their technology is a ‘secret’. Nobody can explain exactly what they do … The company is only able to generate revenue through related party transactions and selling livestock. The fair value of this company is minuscule compared to its current market cap of ~$4.5 billion.”

Zika: no game-changer

Spotlight says that if Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes, which are engineered to be sterile, were shown to effectively combat the Zika virus, that could be a “game-changer” for Intrexon – but “we think that it clearly is not.” Oxitec has spent a decade fighting dengue fever and malaria, two far more serious diseases than Zika, with its technology, but “wasn’t able to generate any meaningful amount of revenues… why should Zika be any different?”

The report points out that “Oxitec has never actually measured the impact of dengue fever on its GM mosquito releases in any country, despite a scientific consensus that such measurements would be necessary to determine whether the technology was effective.”

What’s more, Spotlight says, there is some evidence to suggest that Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes actually make things worse rather than better: “A village in Brazil where the mosquitoes were being tested showed an increase in dengue fever cases.”

In an apparent comment on the potential for Intrexon to capitalize on the fear that’s been generated around the Zika virus, Spotlight says that the company is not allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story, “particularly when it involves scaring consumers / retail investors into buying up Intrexon stock”.

Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes are just one of a number of risky GMO products that have been acquired by Intrexon. The company also owns Okanagan Specialty Fruits, developer of the GMO Arctic apple. Growers are reportedly shunning it in order to avoid the GMO stigma.

Intrexon also owns the majority share of AquaBounty, the developer of GMO salmon. Commercialization of the salmon has stalled, pending the US FDA issuing labelling guidelines. Even if the GMO fish does make it onto the market, some retailers have said they won’t stock it.

Intrexon fights back

In a statement released last Friday, Intrexon called the Spotlight report “materially false and misleading” and said it appears to be part of a hedge fund campaign to manipulate the company’s stock, damage the reputation of the company and its CEO, and benefit from the consequent trading activity. It also said that it had sought the advice of lawyers and was taking “appropriate steps”.

In the midst of the row, Intrexon CEO Randal Kirk was named by Wired magazine as one of “25 geniuses who are creating the future of business”. Kirk told Wired, “Analysts don’t understand our company.”

In spite of Intrexon’s indignant response, Spotlight’s report appears to have struck a chord with some analysts. The stock commentary website Citron Research responded to the report by saying that it had previously sold its shares in Intrexon “as we found none of the company’s businesses to have any imminent viability”.

It added, “its businesses are too scattered with partners that Citron believes are not as they appear to be. Lastly, what has bothered us about Intrexon is while the company has not been shy about going to investment conferences and selling stock offerings, they were never able obtain a smart money biotech shareholder. If they don’t get it, then we don’t get it.”

The investment website, The Motley Fool, also reacted with a downbeat verdict on Intrexon’s performance and prospects:

“Despite several potentially promising research programs underway, Intrexon remains unprofitable, with management reporting an operating loss of $147 million in 2015 … Intrexon lost investors $84 million last year … While Intrexon may be intriguing, the jury is still out on Oxitec’s ability to curb the spread of Zika virus better than existing methods. For that reason, investors might be better off focusing on other investment ideas.”

My own verdict on the Spotlight report is that its motivation and provenance are uncertain – I couldn’t find out much about Spotlight Research and the document’s authors are anonymous. But the case made against Intrexon and Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes business appears convincing and reflects what we and other critics of this approach to insect-borne diseases have said for many years.

Now, with the law firms’ involvement, the questions over the worth of Intrexon’s GMO ‘solutions’ may not be solved in Internet debates, but in the courts.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

Can it be ten years since the RBCT began winding up its field work and an Independent Specialist Group (ISG) began preparing for its 2007 final report?

I have to admit to not reading its many pages when badger culling first looked likely in 2012.

At that time, incredulity for me sprang from how it could be possible to reliably quantify 70% of any given badger population, and what the future impacts of badger removal on natural communities would be.

As it turned out, the economic crash of 2007-10 would play a more important role than the RBCT in formulating UK policy on bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and  badger culling.

Last year, once the invitation to cull badgers over a wider area was announced, it was time to give the 300 or so pages of ISG report and scientific papers based upon it a proper read.

Science led policy? In our dreams …

For those petitioning or signing a full page complaint in the Observer newspaper in October 2013, the government was just plain wrong.

It was simple. Any bTB reduction from culling badgers is all but erased as the result of something called the perturbation effect. Frightened and fleeing badgers, raising levels of bTB in cattle at the edge of the cull zones. It all made sense.

The celebrities, glossy wildlife mags and occasional expert or circumspect grandee, agreed with the ISG findings and repeated that there would be ‘no meaningful contribution’ from badger culling to resolving the bovine tuberculosis crisis.

Surely the government would concede this in the face of the overwhelming scientific argument? Sadly, no. Government policy, formulated around 2010, is what chief scientist Ian Boyd articulated as being to; “Achieve Officially TB free status for England by 2038 whilst maintaining a sustainable livestock industry.”

However, unlike any other country in the world tackling bTB successfully, the UK, leaned on by the NFU, had refused to adequately test for bTB or to depopulate (slaughter) infected herds, causing the return of bTB to half of our countryside since the 1990s.

The ‘sustainable industry’ bit of the policy, means keeping infected herds and the beef and dairy exports to China alive, rather than tackling the disease head on, as in the past. The objective seems largely to try to chip away lightly at its spread, pretending the problem will resolve.

The overall aim? To try to recover the UK export markets after ruination by Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) mismanagement in 2001. It is a long time surely, since established epidemiological advice on a terrible disease epidemic like bTB was ignored in favour of some kind of ‘win now – pay later’ economic plan.

What the figures show: the minor role of badgers in infecting cattle

However, I needed to focus on the ISG report and the papers. It was, in fact, fairly simple. The ISG said that badgers pass bTB to cattle at significant levels. It attempted to measure the effects of culling badgers on the frequency of new herds ‘breaking down’ with bTB.

Two types of badger killing were conducted by the RBCT in separate ‘treatment’ areas, each of about 100 sq.km in size.

• ‘Reactive’ culling removed badgers in response to, and at and around the locations of confirmed herd breakdowns, but was scrapped prematurely after a year.
• ‘Proactive’ culling removed badgers randomly across a separate ‘treatment’ area. Both approaches removed a high proportion of badgers, and control study areas were set up for comparison. Edge areas were also monitored.

The analysis in 2007 had also been very simple. Twenty areas in a line from Lands’ End to Staffordshire, either culled or left alone. Ten paired comparisons. The ISG report offered tables that were hard to compare by eye, but with an evening or two of simple number crunching it was plain to see the trends.

Basically, in two of the control areas in one part of England, there had been large spikes of breakdown, elsewhere everything else looked pretty similar between treatment and control. Two other things stood out:

Firstly, and you had to go back to a previous ISG report to find it, the study areas had been chosen, not as random bits of countryside with bTB, but as the very centres of the most intense bTB outbreaks. One with nearly half the herds infected from the start. Not surprising then, that over five years, the rate of breakdown slowed from the centre, as study areas ran out of new herds to infect, and bTB accelerated at its edges.

It’s a pattern that might mistakenly be interpreted as a perturbation effect. Some areas had over 80% of herds infected by the end of the trials, and in one, all herds had broken down.

Second, a 2013 paper derived from the RBCT had suggested that the new breakdowns caused by badgers were not around 1 in 20 as first thought, but 1 in 27. This means that of the total 472 breakdowns in the studies, around 18 were due to badgers. That is just about a third of a new breakdown per year, per study area. Or one new herd infection over around three years.

The Foot & Mouth Disease outbreak should have ended the trials

So subtle were the effects in fact, and so vast the confidence intervals, that I was beginning to have some sympathy with the amateur maths bloggers who have derided both Imperial Colleges’ statistics and the reliability of the peer reviewers. A few breakdowns, from some unknown, uncertain or misconstrued variable, crashes the analysis.

Checking a range of papers since 2006, it seemed that the significance of findings has relied on ‘data adjustments’. One of these papers had dropped three of the ten comparison pairs due to the impact that Foot & Mouth disease (FMD) had on the calculations, taking the overall analytical power below the critical threshold.

In the middle of the RBCT, FMD resulted in the slaughter on a massive scale, of sheep, pigs and cattle, based on what other published criticism later called “unvalidated predictive models”.

What happened during the FMD epidemic has been described by one group of published statistical experts as resulting from the “abuse of mathematical models”. As the UK authorities culled herds in the proximity of outbreaks, Ireland used FMD vaccination and avoided culling on the UK scale.

The additional expenditure from the UK culling has been estimated to have resulted in the over-expenditure of more than £3 billion. Problems were apparently attributed shortly after the events to “a lack of mutual understanding between veterinarians and modellers.” The FMD outbreak messed up and should have ended the RBCT.

A full re-examination of the RBCT is needed

What was described to me as a ‘pro-cull’ website is also commenting on ISG analysis, having obtained raw RBCT data from DEFRA in March 2016. It is offering graphs showing why the concept of perturbation may be wrong. The data ‘adjustments’ create the significance, or rather – the perturbation effect is a function of the adjustments made. Something that is clear from the raw data.

This is actually quite helpful. There are many uncontrolled variables in the RBCT; bTB testing and herd numbers varied before and during the trials, pre-RBCT culling of badgers was high and uneven, and cattle testing regimes variable in type and frequency and so on. It is hard to square this with the ISG comment “very few such interactions [variables] were uncovered”. They were everywhere.

What next? Well, with unsafe controls, do badgers contribute 1 in 27 new breakdowns, 1 in 2,700 or 1 in 27,000? Impossible to say. Those closer to the folk involved in the study say (in protection of reputations and funding), that if there is contra-evidence, then publish it. A re-examination of the RBCT assumptions and methods is needed.

So was £50 million really wasted? Well not completely. We did learn about badger behaviour along the way, and that killing badgers may cause a carnivore release effect on European designated sites and species – and all nature reserves and countryside actually. This, the government now accepts, requires proper investigation before considering more badger killings.

The post-RBCT period has been peppered with new offshoots and arguments. Some big sums have been allocated to vaccine development for badger and cattle in an unenthusiastic way.

But the ‘elephant in the room’ is what EC officials pointed out to Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee members in 2013: that we really must accept that the only known way to tackle bTB is to test cattle effectively and remove infected animals. In other words, to stop side-lining disease control in favour of short term economic output.

Conclusion; badgers have been more than unlucky. They have had the bad end of equivocal science, and the bad end of bad government. The question of whether or not to kill badgers at public expense, without good evidence, is surely facing an inevitable reality check.

Tom Langton has been a consulting ecologist to government, business and industry and a voluntary sector volunteer, more recently working on assisting small pressure groups in legal opposition to destruction of species and habitats in Europe.

The largest nuclear disaster in history occurred 30 years ago at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what was then the Soviet Union.

The meltdown, explosions and nuclear fire that burned for 10 days injected enormous quantities of radioactivity into the atmosphere and contaminated vast areas of Europe and Eurasia.

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that Chernobyl released 400 times more radioactivity into the atmosphere than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Radioactive cesium from Chernobyl can still be detected in some food products today. And in parts of central, eastern and northern Europe many animals, plants and mushrooms still contain so much radioactivity that they are unsafe for human consumption.

The first atomic bomb exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico more than 70 years ago. Since then, more than 2,000 atomic bombs have been tested, injecting radioactive materials into the atmosphere. And over 200 small and large accidents have occurred at nuclear facilities. But experts and advocacy groups are still fiercely debating the health and environmental consequences of radioactivity.

However, in the past decade population biologists have made considerable progress in documenting how radioactivity affects plants, animals and microbes. My colleagues and I have analyzed these impacts at Chernobyl, Fukushima and naturally radioactive regions of the planet.

Our studies provide new fundamental insights about consequences of chronic, multigenerational exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation. Most importantly, we have found that individual organisms are injured by radiation in a variety of ways. The cumulative effects of these injuries result in lower population sizes and reduced biodiversity in high-radiation areas.

Broad impacts at Chernobyl

Radiation exposure has caused genetic damage and increased mutation rates in many organisms in the Chernobyl region. So far, we have found little convincing evidence that many organisms there are evolving to become more resistant to radiation.

Organisms’ evolutionary history may play a large role in determining how vulnerable they are to radiation. In our studies, species that have historically shown high mutation rates, such as the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), the icterine warbler (Hippolais icterina) and the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), are among the most likely to show population declines in Chernobyl.

Our hypothesis is that species differ in their ability to repair DNA, and this affects both DNA substitution rates and susceptibility to radiation from Chernobyl.

Much like human survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, birds and mammals at Chernobyl have cataracts in their eyes and smaller brains. These are direct consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation in air, water and food.

Like some cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy, many of the birds have malformed sperm. In the most radioactive areas, up to 40 percent of male birds are completely sterile, with no sperm or just a few dead sperm in their reproductive tracts during the breeding season.

Tumors, presumably cancerous, are obvious on some birds in high-radiation areas. So are developmental abnormalities in some plants and insects.

Shrinking wildlife populations

Given overwhelming evidence of genetic damage and injury to individuals, it is not surprising that populations of many organisms in highly contaminated areas have shrunk.

In Chernobyl, all major groups of animals that we surveyed were less abundant in more radioactive areas. This includes birds, butterflies, dragonflies, bees, grasshoppers, spiders and large and small mammals.

Not every species shows the same pattern of decline. Many species, including wolves, show no effects of radiation on their population density. A few species of birds appear to be more abundant in more radioactive areas. In both cases, higher numbers may reflect the fact that there are fewer competitors or predators for these species in highly radioactive areas.

Moreover, vast areas of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are not presently heavily contaminated, and appear to provide a refuge for many species. One report published in 2015 described game animals such as wild boar and elk as thriving in the Chernobyl ecosystem. But nearly all documented consequences of radiation in Chernobyl and Fukushima have found that individual organisms exposed to radiation suffer serious harm.

There may be exceptions. For example, substances called antioxidants can defend against the damage to DNA, proteins and lipids caused by ionizing radiation. The levels of antioxidants that individuals have available in their bodies may play an important role in reducing the damage caused by radiation. There is evidence that some birds may have adapted to radiation by changing the way they use antioxidants in their bodies.

Parallels at Fukushima

Recently we have tested the validity of our Chernobyl studies by repeating them in Fukushima, Japan. The 2011 power loss and core meltdown at three nuclear reactors there released about one-tenth as much radioactive material as the Chernobyl disaster.

Overall, we have found similar patterns of declines in abundance and diversity of birds, although some species are more sensitive to radiation than others. We have also found declines in some insects, such as butterflies, which may reflect the accumulation of harmful mutations over multiple generations.

Our most recent studies at Fukushima have benefited from more sophisticated analyses of radiation doses received by animals. In our most recent paper, we teamed up with radioecologists to reconstruct the doses received by about 7,000 birds. The parallels we have found between Chernobyl and Fukushima provide strong evidence that radiation is the underlying cause of the effects we have observed in both locations.

Field studies versus theoretical models

Some members of the radiation regulatory community have been slow to acknowledge how nuclear accidents have harmed wildlife. For example, the UN-sponsored Chernobyl Forum instigated the notion that the accident has had a positive impact on living organisms in the exclusion zone because of the lack of human activities.

A more recent report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation predicts minimal consequences for the animal and plant life of the Fukushima region. Unfortunately these official assessments were largely based on predictions from theoretical models, not on direct empirical observations of the plants and animals living in these regions.

Based on our research, and that of others, it is now known that animals living under the full range of stresses in nature are far more sensitive to the effects of radiation than previously believed. Although field studies sometimes lack the controlled settings needed for precise scientific experimentation, they make up for this with a more realistic description of natural processes.

Our emphasis on documenting radiation effects under ‘natural’ conditions using wild organisms has provided many discoveries that will help us to prepare for the next nuclear accident or act of nuclear terrorism. This information is absolutely needed if we are to protect the environment not just for man, but also for the living organisms and ecosystem services that sustain all life on this planet.

There are currently more than 400 nuclear reactors in operation around the world, with 65 new ones under construction and another 165 on order or planned. All operating nuclear power plants are generating large quantities of nuclear waste that will need to be stored for thousands of years to come.

Given this, and the probability of future accidents or nuclear terrorism, it is important that scientists learn as much as possible about the effects of these contaminants in the environment, both for remediation of the effects of future incidents and for evidenced-based risk assessment and energy policy development.

Timothy A. Mousseau is Professor of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.