Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You (17 page)

There’s another reason we need domesticated crops and livestock, though. By the year 2050, Sam’s going to have to share the Earth with 9 billion other people.
³⁷
Without advanced techniques for food production and distribution, that would be impossible. You can’t feed 9 billion people if you expect all of them to go out in the woods looking for edible shrubs. Like Mr. Jani, we all have to eat. Developing crops is the only way for Sam, or any of the other 9 billion of us, to do that.

I
. It’s surprisingly hard to find an answer to the question “How long can a healthy person survive if they stop drinking water?” The rate at which people lose water will depend on temperature, humidity, amount of exercise they’re doing, and their overall health. Ellershaw et al. (1995) showed that elderly people with malignant disease who stopped drinking water died within one to five days. A young, healthy person could live longer than that, but likely not much more than a week.

II
. 
Photo
means “light,” and
synthesis
describes the sugars that plants make (i.e., synthesize) with the solar energy they gather.

III
. I should note that photosynthesis isn’t the only route for energy to enter our living world. There are some bacteria that can harness energy from the breakdown of chemicals like methane or hydrogen sulfide. But they only live in extreme environments, like hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and the amount of energy they bring into the world is minuscule compared to what comes from the sun. So for simplicity I’m going to focus only on the energy that comes into ecosystems from photosynthesis.

IV
. Those fifteen plant species include things like wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, beans, and so on. If you make a list of all the plants humans have ever eaten even a tiny piece of, that number jumps to around one-eighth of all plant species (Pimentel and Wilson 2010).

V
. The disease in sheep is called cyclopea or, if you prefer bigger words, synopthalmia (Welch et al. 2009).

VI
. Honestly, the emerald sea slug’s feeding strategy has got to be one of the best tricks ever accomplished by an animal. (But wait until the chapter on wrath, when you see what its cousin the blue dragon sea slug can do!)

VII
. The technical name for DNA going from species to species is “horizontal gene transfer,” as opposed to “vertical gene transfer,” which is what happens when an animal passes on its DNA to its offspring.

VIII
. I have a good botanist friend who delights in pointing to people’s pollen-covered cars in the springtime and telling them that a tree has just pleasured itself all over their hoods.

IX
. The fish, called
Colossoma macropomum,
looks just like its cousin the piranha, but instead of razor-sharp teeth, it has rounded ones for eating fruit (Anderson et al. 2011).

X
. Vass (2001) gives a neat equation to determine the number of days it will take a body to skeletonize: just divide the number 1285 by the temperature in Celsius. At 68˚F (20˚C), that gives 64.25 days.

After two days of labor,
Sam still wasn’t born. Shelby was working as hard as anyone could, but it was as though something was physically holding him back. When Shelby pushed, Sam would descend far enough that you could see the top of his head but then immediately bungee right back up. After two hours of pushing, Sam still wasn’t progressing, so our doctor and doula recommended we think about a C-section.
^I

The choice to have a C-section was a heartbreaking one for Shelby, since she’d always dreamed of having her babies the
old-fashioned way. But Shelby’s instincts as a mom kicked in well before Sam was born, and once she could see that Sam needed help, she had no hesitation about the choice to have surgery.

In the room where the surgery happened, there was a curtain across Shelby’s neck, so she wouldn’t be able to see her belly being sliced open. As surgery began, I sat with Shelby on the “head” side of the curtain with an anesthesiologist and our doula, while other doctors went to work outside my view. (Ironically, there was some art on the ceiling of the room which, for hygiene reasons I assume, was laminated. That plastic surface turned the whole art piece into a giant mirror, meaning Shelby, of all people, could watch as much of the surgery as she wanted to.)

It all happened in a matter of minutes, and once Sam was out, the medical team put him on a blanketed table and invited me to come meet him. I stood up and walked over, bracing for what would surely be one of the most important moments in my life.

At first I wasn’t seeing Sam so much as the parts of him. His legs were crooked and bony. His head was cone-shaped, bent and compressed from the hours it had spent wedged in Shelby’s pelvis. I looked at his chin and could immediately see my great-aunt Claire’s mouth on him.
^II
It was clear to me that he was mine, and yet he was still so unfamiliar. I couldn’t comprehend that this person could be my son. The whole thing overtook me, like falling into water and trying to get oriented in the bubbles so you can start swimming upward.

Sam was kind of squirming, with his face all scrunched up.
I thought maybe he might be uncomfortable, being held and prodded by all those doctors around him, so I put my hand on his chest. Some friends had once told me that a baby can learn its father’s voice while it’s still inside the womb, and can recognize that voice immediately after birth. So I tried speaking to him.

I spoke in my warmest, calmest voice: “It’s okay, little guy.”

Sam froze immediately, opened his eyes, and listened. That was our first contact. It was wonderful . . . but it only lasted a moment.

One of the doctors gently asked me to remove my hand, and as I did, I realized that the team of doctors and nurses swarming around the room hadn’t slowed at all. I looked back at Shelby and saw her open abdomen on the operating table and the placenta sitting in a metal bowl next to her. Then I looked back down at Sam and realized he was purple! I hadn’t even noticed it, but Sam still wasn’t breathing.

The doctors kept working on him, inserting a tube down his throat to clear mucus, but the suction machine wasn’t operating properly, and the intercom system one of the doctors was using to request a backup tube wasn’t functioning either. Our own doctor calmly covered Sam’s mouth and nose with a mask and pumped air into it with a handheld bulb. With each sequence of pumps, his skin turned less blue for a moment, but then she’d back away to let him take a breath on his own, and he would slowly go purple again. No one looked panicked—not even the doctor struggling with the intercom system—but everyone looked very, very serious. I couldn’t tell from their expressions whether this was all normal or if I should be terrified (the doula was out of my sight), so I just stood there and watched. I was totally helpless. I really
didn’t know if my son was going to die. Seconds ago I had been full of joy, and now suddenly fatherhood was totally terrifying.

It was like that for several minutes, until Sam finally drew in that first breath. When he did, the exhalation that came from all the doctors around him showed me just how scared they too had been. As for me, I could barely stand up. Sam’s first breath came
six minutes
after he was born. I didn’t know what to feel. I was still disoriented, wanting to swim upward but not yet knowing which way was up.

Apparently, once a baby gets that first breath out of the way, it usually keeps breathing, so once Sam’s lungs had started up, my doctor smiled, put him in my hands, and told me to take him over to meet his mom. I pulled him against my chest, supported his head with two fingers, and carried him back to Shelby. A minute ago I didn’t know if Sam would die and now everyone was acting like everything was normal. I sat down, smiled with Shelby at Sam’s scrunched-up face, and then sobbed uncontrollably, like I can’t remember ever crying before.

Our doctor told us afterward that Sam’s delay taking that first breath was fairly normal. Babies often do that if they’re born via C-section, and research hasn’t shown any long-term consequences from that kind of ordeal. Because she’d been pumping air into his lungs, he’d gotten plenty of oxygen that whole time. Our doctor also told us that when Sam was removed from Shelby’s uterus, they’d seen that the umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck. It hadn’t strangled him or anything, but she supposed that could explain why Sam didn’t progress further during labor. I have no way of knowing whether Sam would have survived birth without medical interventions, but the whole experience was about as intense as anything I’ve
ever been though in my life. On the one hand, I was overwhelmingly grateful that he was alive, but the helplessness I’d felt before that first breath left me feeling that I might not have the skills I’d need to raise this kid. It was exciting, but the stakes seemed unimaginably high. Fatherhood had turned every single one of my emotional dials to eleven.

Looking back, though, I can’t help but see the way I experienced that day as textbook animal behavior. Here’s the father meat robot, following orders from his DNA molecules, releasing stress hormones with all the predictable physiological effects, in response to seeing his offspring in danger.

And I still see myself like that to this day. Even though it feels like magic when Sam does something new, or even when he looks me in the eyes and smiles, it’s all just biology. I know that no matter what it felt like in those first six minutes, the emotions I felt the day he was born were really no more special than the hormones that guide a bird through building her nest.

Envy is a big part of having a new baby, because you’re constantly comparing notes with other new parents. For Shelby, it was most pronounced when she spoke with other mothers who didn’t have C-sections. In the first few months after Sam was born we talked about it often. It didn’t matter what our doctor had said about the umbilical cord. Shelby couldn’t seem to shake the gut feeling that if she’d just been tougher or more patient, somehow her C-section could have been avoided. For so many of the mothers we’d talked to, it had just worked out, so Shelby’s instincts kept telling her that she’d done something wrong. With a couple of years between
her and the experience now, she’s not so sensitive about it as she once was, but I know that it still bugs her.

Now the comparisons we make with other families tend to be less about childbirth and more focused on child development. And we know that other parents are making comparisons too. Sam woke up four times again last night, but our friend’s kid, Julia, has been sleeping through the night for two months already. Sam’s learned to count to three, but Olivia can count backward from ten. Shelby and I know that the rate of development is different for different kids (and we’ve read several books and scientific papers about development—we’re scientists after all), but it’s still really hard not to have an emotional reaction sometimes when you hear something about another person’s kid. When Sam’s ahead, we feel smug, and when Sam’s behind, we speculate that it’s only because other aspects of his development are so advanced. But I’m embarrassed that we make those comparisons in the first place.

It’s so stupid, really. Shelby and I know people whose kids have had cancer, for God’s sake. We have friends who have miscarried. You would think that we could just count our blessings and move on. Sam is a healthy, happy kid and he’s doing great. But there’s something about the experience of raising a kid that makes you listen very carefully to see what’s going on with all the kids around you.

I suppose that from an evolutionary perspective, paying attention to the parenting experiences of other people is a good way to see how well your child is doing. After all, as we discussed in the chapter on greed, your kid is going to have to compete against other kids down the road, so how he compares to those kids is going to matter someday. But worrying about how many
words Sam knows at eighteen months compared to the Joneses’ kid is a waste of energy. I really don’t like that I experience envy at all. Envy has been described as “feeling negatively about someone else’s success,” and I don’t want that to be part of how I raise Sam.