Science, society & stereotypes: examining the lives of trailblazing women in STEM

I was recently flicking through a glossily illustrated Australian book on the history of STEM when I found the name of a pioneer I didn't recognise: Marjory Warren, a British surgeon who is best known today as the 'mother of modern geriatric medicine'. Looking in the index I could find only two other women scientists - compared to over one hundred and twenty men - in a book five hundred pages long! The other two examples were Marie Curie (of course) and American astronomer Vera Rubin. Considering that the book was published in 2008, I was astounded by how skewed this seemed to be. Granted that prior to the twentieth century, few women had the option of becoming involved in science and mathematics; but for any history of STEM, wouldn't the last century contain the largest proportion of subject material?

I therefore thought it would be interesting to choose case studies from the twentieth century to see what sort of obstacles - unique or otherwise - that women scientists faced until recently. If you ask most people to name a female scientist then Marie Curie would probably top the list, although a few countries might have national favourites: perhaps Rosalind Franklin in the UK or Rachel Carson in the USA, for example. Rather than choose the more obvious candidates such as these I have selected four women I knew only a little about, ordered by their date of birth.

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) was an American cytogeneticist who was ahead of her time in terms of both research and social attitudes. Although her mother didn't want her to train as a scientist, she was lucky to have a father who thought differently to the accepted wisdom - which was that female scientists would be unable to find a husband! McClintock's abilities showed early in her training, leading to post-graduate fellowships which in turn generated cutting-edge research.

At the age of forty-two, Barbara McClintock was only the third woman to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. However, her rapid rise within the scientific establishment didn't necessarily assist her: such was the conservative nature of universities that women were not allowed to attend faculty meetings. 

After publishing her research to broad acceptance, McClintock's work then moved into what today would broadly come under the term of epigenetics. Several decades' ahead of its time, it was seen as too radical by most of her peers and so after facing intense opposition she temporarily stopped publishing her results. It is unlikely that being a woman was entirely responsible for the hostility to her work; similar resistance has frequently been experienced throughout the STEM avant-garde. It seems that only when other researchers found similar results to McClintock did the more hidebound sections of the discipline re-examine their negative attitude towards her work.

There has been a fair amount of discussion as to whether it was because McClintock was female, or because of her secretive personality (both at home as well as at work, for she never married) - or a combination of both - that delayed her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even by the slow standards of that particular awards committee, 1983 was rather late in the day. However, by then she had already been the recipient of numerous other awards and prizes.

Regardless of the recognition it gave her, Barbara McClintock relished scientific research for the sake of uncovering nature's secrets. In that regard, she said: "I just have been so interested in what I was doing and it's been such a pleasure, such a deep pleasure, that I never thought of stopping...I've had a very, very, satisfying and interesting life."

Tikvah Alper (1909-1995) was a South African radiobiologist who worked on prions - otherwise known as 'misfolded' or 'rogue' proteins - and their relationship to certain diseases. Her outstanding abilities were recognised early, allowing her to study physics at the University of Cape Town. She then undertook post-graduate work in Berlin with the nuclear fission pioneer Lise Meitner, only to be forced to leave before completing her doctorate due to the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany.

Having had her research curtailed by her ethnicity, Alper was initially also stymied on her return to South Africa thanks to her private life: due to the misogynist rules of that nation's universities, married women were not allowed to remain on the faculty. Therefore, along with her husband the veterinary medicine researcher Max Sterne, she continued her work from home. However, eventually her talents were acknowledged and she was made head of the Biophysics section at the South African National Physics Laboratory in 1948. Then only three years later, Alper's personal life intervened once again; this time, she and her husband were forced to leave South Africa due to their opposition to apartheid.

After a period of unpaid research in London, Alper turned to studying the effects of radiation on different types of cells, rising to become head of the Medical Research Council Radiopathology Unit at Hammersmith Hospital. Alper's theories regarding prions were eventually accepted into the mainstream and even after retirement she continued working, writing a renowned text book, Cellular Radiobiology, in 1979. 

Alper's life suggests she was very much a problem solver, tackling anything that she felt needed progressing. As a result of this ethos she worked on a wide range of issues from the standing of women in science and society, to the injustice of apartheid, even to learning and teaching sign language after one of her son's was born profoundly deaf. Despite being forced to leave several nations for different reasons - not because she was a woman - Alper was someone who refused to concede defeat. In that respect she deserves much wider recognition today.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was interested in chemistry, in particular crystals, from a young age. Although women of her generation were encouraged in this area as a hobby, it was highly unusual for them to seek paid employment in the field. Luckily, her mother encouraged her interest and gave Hodgkin a book on x-ray crystallography for her sixteenth birthday, a gift which determined her career path. 

After gaining a first-class honours chemistry degree at Oxford, she moved to Cambridge for doctoral work under the x-ray crystallography pioneer J.D. Bernal. Not only did Hodgkin then manage to find a research post in her chosen field, working at both Cambridge and Oxford, she was able to pursue cutting edge work labelled as too difficult by her contemporaries, Hodgkin and her colleagues achieved ground-breaking results in critical areas, resolving the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. 

Hodgkin's gained international renown, appearing to have faced few of the difficulties experienced by her female contemporaries. In addition to having a well-equipped laboratory at Oxford, she was elected to the Royal Society in 1947 and became its Wolfson Research Professor in 1960. She was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 - the only British woman to have been a recipient to date. Other prestigious awards followed, including the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1976; again, no other woman has yet received that award.

Presumably in response to the loss of four maternal uncles in the First World War, Hodgkin was an active promoter of international peace. During the 1950s her views were deemed too left wing by the American government and she had to attain special permission to enter the United States to attend science conferences. Ironically, the Soviet Union honoured her on several occasions, admitting her as a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences and later awarding her the Lenin Peace Prize. She also communicated with her Chinese counterparts and became committed to nuclear disarmament, both through CND and Operation Pugwash.

Her work on insulin, itself of enormous importance, is just one facet of her life. Ironically, as someone associated with left-wing politics, she is often remembered today as being one of Margaret Thatcher's lecturers; despite their different socio-political leanings, they maintained a friendship into later life. All this was despite the increasing disability Hodgkin suffered from her mid-twenties due to chronic rheumatoid arthritis, which left her with seemingly minimal dexterity. Clearly, Dorothy Hodgkin was a dauntless fighter in her professional and personal life.

Marie Tharp (1920-2006) was an American geologist best known for her oceanographic cartography work regarding the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite followed the advice of her father (a surveyor) and taking an undergraduate degree in humanities and music, Tharp also took a geology class; perhaps helping her father as a child boosted her interest in this subject. It enabled her to complete a master's degree in geology, thanks to the dearth of male students during the Second World War. Certainly, it was an unusual avenue for women to be interested in; at the time less than four percent of all earth sciences doctorates in the USA were awarded to women.

From a modern perspective, geology during the first half of the twentieth century appears to have been exceedingly hidebound and conservative. Tharp found she could not undertake field trips to uncover fossil fuel deposits, as women were only allowed to do office-based geological work - one explanation for this sexism being that having women on board ship brought bad luck! In fact, it wasn't until 1968 that Tharp eventually joined an expedition. 

However, thanks to painstaking study of her colleague Bruce Heezen's data, Tharp was able to delineate geophysical features such as the mid-Atlantic ridge and consider the processes that generated them. Her map of the Atlantic Ocean floor was far more sophisticated than anything that had previously been created, giving her insights denied to both her contemporaries as well as her predecessors. As such, Tharp suspected that the long-denigrated continental drift hypothesis, as envisaged by Alfred Wegener three decades previously, was correct. It was here that she initially came unstuck, with Heezen labelling her enthusiasm for continental drift as 'girl talk'. Let's hope that phrase wouldn't be used today!

In time though, yet more data (including the mirrored magnetic striping either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge) proved Tharp correct. Heezen's incredulity was replaced by acceptance, as continental drift was reformulated via seafloor spreading to become the theory of plate tectonics. Mainstream geology finally approved what Wegener had proposed, and Marie Tharp was a fundamental part of that paradigm shift. 

What is interesting is that despite receiving many awards in her later years, including the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal in 1978, her name is mentioned far less often than other pioneers of plate tectonics such as Harry Hess, Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, even Heezen. It's unclear if Tharp's comparative lack of recognition is due to her being female or because she was only one of many researchers working along similar lines. Her own comment from the era suggests that just being a women scientist was reason enough to dismiss her work: she noted that other professional's viewed her ideas with attitudes ranging "from amazement to skepticism to scorn."

There are countless other examples that would serve as case studies, including women from non-Western nations, but these four show the variety of experiences women scientists underwent during the twentieth century, ranging from a level of misogyny that would be unthinkable today to an early acceptance of the value of their work and a treatment not seemingly different from their male colleagues. I was surprised to find such a range of circumstances and attitudes, proving that few things are as straightforward as they are frequently portrayed. However, these examples do show that whatever culture they grow up in, the majority of the population consider its values to be perfectly normal; a little bit of thought - or hindsight - shows that just because something is the norm, doesn't necessarily mean it's any good. When it comes to the attitudes today, you only have to read the news to realise there's still some way to go before women in STEM are treated the same as their male counterparts.

Self-destructive STEM: how scientists can devalue science

Following on from last month's exploration of external factors inhibiting the scientific enterprise, I thought it would be equally interesting to examine issues within the sector that can negatively influence STEM research. There is a range of factors that vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, showing that science and its practitioners are as prey to the whims of humanity as any other discipline. 

1) Conservatism

The German physicist Max Planck once said that a "new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." With peer review of submitted articles, it's theoretically possible that a new hypothesis could be prevented from seeing the light of day due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time; or more precisely, because the reviewers personally object to the ideas presented.

Another description of this view is that there are three stages before the old guard accept the theories of the young turks, with an avant garde idea eventually being taken as orthodoxy. One key challenge is the dislike shown by established researchers to outsiders who promote a new hypothesis in a specialisation they have no formal training in. 

A prominent example of this is the short shrift given to meteorologist Alfred Wegener when he described continental drift to the geological establishment; it took over thirty years and a plethora of evidence before plate tectonics was found to correlate with Wegener's seemingly madcap ideas. More recently, some prominent palaeontologists wrote vitriolic reviews of the geologist-led account of the Chicxulub impact as the main cause of the K-T extinction event. 

This also shows the effect impatience may have; if progress in a field is slow or seemingly negative, it may be prematurely abandoned by most if not all researchers as a dead end.

2) Putting personal preferences before evidence 

Although science is frequently sold to the public as having a purely objective attitude towards natural phenomena, disagreements at the cutting edge are common enough to become cheap ammunition for opponents of STEM research. When senior figures within a field disagree with younger colleagues, it's easy to see why there might be a catch-22 situation in which public funding is only available when there is consensus and yet consensus can only be reached when sufficient research has as placed an hypothesis on a fairly firm footing.

It is well known that Einstein wasted the last thirty or so years of his life trying to find a unified field theory without including quantum mechanics. To his tidy mind, the uncertainty principle and entanglement didn't seem to be suitable as foundation-level elements of creation, hence his famous quote usually truncated as "God doesn't play dice". In other words, just about the most important scientific theory ever didn't fit into his world picture - and yet the public's perception of Einstein during this period was that he was the world's greatest physicist.

Well-known scientists in other fields have negatively impacted their reputation late in their career. Two well-known examples are the astronomer Fred Hoyle and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Hoyle appears to have initiated increasingly fruity ideas as he got older, including the claim that the archaeopteryx fossil at London's Natural History Museum was a fake. Margulis for her part stayed within her area of expertise, endosymbiotic theory for eukaryotic cells, to claim her discoveries could account for an extremely wide range of biological functions, including the cause of AIDS. It doesn't take much to realise that if two such highly esteemed scientists can publish nonsense, then uninformed sections of the public might want to question the validity of a much wider variety of established scientific truths.

3) Cronyism and the academic establishment

While nepotism might not appear often in the annals of science history, there have still been plenty of instances in which favoured individuals gain a position at the expense of others. This is of course a phenomenon as old as natural philosophy, although thankfully the rigid social hierarchy that affected the careers of nineteenth century luminaries such as physicist Michael Faraday and dinosaur pioneer Gideon Mantell is no longer much of an issue. 

Today, competition for a limited number of places in university research faculties can lead to results as unfair as in any humanities department.  A congenial personality and an ability to self-publicise may tip the balance on gaining tenure as a faculty junior; scientists with poor interpersonal skills can fare badly. As a result, their reputation can be denigrated even after their death, as happened with DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin in James Watson's memoirs. 

As opponents of string theory are keen to point out, graduates are often forced to get on bandwagons in order to gain vital grants or academic tenure. This suggests that playing safe by studying contemporary ‘hot' areas of research is preferred to investigating a wider range of new ones. Nobel Laureate and former Stephen Hawking collaborator Roger Penrose describes this as being particularly common in theoretical physics, whereby the new kids on the block have to join the entourage of an establishment figure rather than strike out with their own ideas.

Even once a graduate student has gained a research grant, it doesn't mean that their work will be fairly recognised. Perhaps the most infamous example of this occurred with the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. One of the two recipients was Antony Hewish, who gained the prize for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars”. Yet it was his student Jocelyn Bell who promoted the hypothesis while Hewish was claiming the signal to be man-made interference. 

4) Jealousy and competitiveness

Although being personable and a team player can be important, anyone deemed to be too keen on self-aggrandising may attract the contempt of the scientific establishment. Carl Sagan was perhaps the most prominent science communicator of his generation but was blackballed from the US National Academy of Sciences due to being seen as too popular! This is despite some serious planetary astronomy in his earlier career, including work on various Jet Propulsion Laboratory probes. 

Thankfully, attitudes towards sci-comm have started to improve. The Royal Society has advocated the notion that prominent scientists should become involved in promoting their field, as public engagement has been commonly judged by STEM practitioners as the remit of those at the lower end of scientific ability. Even so, there remains the perception that those engaged in communicating science to the general public are not proficient enough for a career in research. Conversely, research scientists should be able to concentrate on their work rather than having to spend large amounts of their time of seeking grants or undertaking administration - but such ideals are not likely to come to in the near future!

5) Frauds, hoaxes and general misdemeanours 

Scientists are as human as everyone else and given the temptation have been known to resort to underhand behaviour in order to obtain positions, grants and renown. Such behaviour has been occurring since the Enlightenment and varies from deliberate use of selective evidence through to full-blown fraud that has major repercussions for a field of research. 

One well-known example is the Piltdown Man hoax, which wasn't uncovered for forty years. This is rather more due to the material fitting in with contemporary social attitudes rather than the quality - or lack thereof - of the finds. However, other than generating public attention of how scientists can be fooled, it didn't damage science in the long run. 

A far more insidious instance is that of Cyril Burt's research into the heritability of intelligence. After his death, others tried to track down Burt's assistants, only to find they didn't exist. This of course placed serious doubt on the reliability of both his data and conclusions, but even worse his work was used by several governments in the late twentieth century as the basis for social engineering. 

Scandals are not unknown in recent years, providing ammunition for those wanting to deny recognition of fundamental scientific theories (rarely the practical application). In this age of social media, it can take only one person's mistake - deliberate or otherwise - to set in motion a global campaign that rejects the findings of science, regardless of the evidence in its favour. As the anti-vaccination lobby have proven, science communication still has long way to go if we are to combine the best of both worlds: a healthy scepticism with an acceptance of how the weird and wonderful universe really works, and not how we would like it to.

The Twelve (Scientific) Days Of Christmas

As Christmas approaches and we get over-saturated in seasonal pop songs and the occasional carol, I thought it would be appropriate to look at a science-themed variation to this venerable lyric. So without further ado, here are the twelve days of Christmas, STEM-style.

12 Phanerozoic periods

Although there is evidence that life on Earth evolved pretty much as soon as the conditions were in any way suitable, microbes had the planet to themselves for well over three billion years. Larger, complex organisms may have gained a kick-start thanks to a period of global glaciation - the controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis. Although we often hear of exoplanets being found in the Goldilocks zone, it may also take an awful lot of luck to produce a life-bearing environment. The twelve geological periods of the Phanerozoic (literally, well-displayed life) cover the past 542 million years or so and include practically every species most of us have ever heard of. Hard to believe that anyone who knows this could ever consider our species to be the purpose of creation!

11 essential elements in humans

We often hear the phrase 'carbon-based life forms', but we humans actually contain over three times the amount of oxygen than we do of carbon. In order of abundance by mass, the eleven vital elements are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium. Iron, which you might think to be present in larger quantities, is just a trace mineral; adults have a mere 3 or 4 grams. By comparison, we have about 25 grams of magnesium. In fact, iron and the other trace elements amount to less than one percent of our total body mass. Somehow, 'oxygen-based bipeds' just doesn't have the same ring to it.

10 fingers and toes

The evolution of life via natural selection and genetic mutation consists of innumerable, one-off events. This is science as history, although comparative studies of fossils, DNA and anatomy are required instead of written texts and archaeology. It used to be thought that ten digits was canonical, tracing back to the earliest terrestrial vertebrates that evolved from lobe-finned fish. Then careful analysis of the earliest stegocephalians of the late Devonian period such as Acanthostega showed that their limbs terminated in six, seven or even eight digits. The evolution of five-digit limbs seems to have occurred only once, in the subsequent Carboniferous period, yet of course we take it - and the use of base ten counting - as the most obvious of things. Just imagine what you could play on a piano if you had sixteen fingers!

9 climate regions

From the poles to the equator, Earth can be broadly divided into the following climate areas: polar and tundra; boreal forest; temperate forest; Mediterranean; desert; dry grassland; tropical grassland; tropical rainforest. Mountains are the odd region out, appearing in areas at any latitude that contains the geophysical conditions suitable for their formation. Natural selection leads to the evolution of species suited to the local variations in daylight hours, weather and temperature but the labels can be deceptive; the Antarctic for example contains a vast polar desert. We are only just beginning to understand the complex feedback systems between each region and its biota at a time when species are becoming extinct almost faster than they can be catalogued. We upset the relative equilibrium at our peril.

8 major planets in our solar system

When I was a child, all astronomy books described nine known planets, along with dozens of moons and numerous asteroids. Today we know of almost four thousand planets in other solar systems, some of a similar size to Earth (and even some of these in the Goldilocks zone). However, since 1996 our solar system has been reduced to eight planets, with Pluto amended to the status of a dwarf planet. Technically, this is because it fails one of the three criteria of major planets, in that it sometimes crosses Neptune’s orbit rather than sweeping it clear of other bodies. However, as there is at least one Kuiper belt object, Eris, almost as large as Pluto, it makes sense to stick to a definition that won’t see the number of planets continually rise with each generation of space telescope. This downgrading appears to have upset a lot of people, so it’s probably a good to mention that science is as much a series of methodologies as it is a body of knowledge, with the latter being open to change when required - it’s certainly not set-in-stone dogma! So as astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson and author of the best-selling The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet put it: "Just get over it!"

7 colours of the rainbow

This is one of those everyday things that most of us never think about. Frankly, I don't know anyone who has been able to distinguish indigo from violet in a rainbow and yet we owe this colour breakdown not to an artist but to one of the greatest physicists ever, Sir Isaac Newton. As well as fulfilling most of the criteria of the modern day scientist, Newton was also an alchemist, numerologist, eschatologist (one of his predictions is that the world will end in 2060) and all-round occultist. Following the mystical beliefs of the Pythagoreans, Newton linked the colours of the spectrum to the notes in Western music scale, hence indistinguishable indigo making number seven. This is a good example of how even the best of scientists are only human.

6 mass extinction events

Episode two of the remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson was called 'Some of the Things That Molecules Do'. It explored the five mass extinction events that have taken place over the past 450 million years. Tyson also discusses what has come to be known as the Holocene extinction, the current, sixth period of mass dying. Although the loss of megafauna species around the world has been blamed on the arrival of Homo sapiens over the past 50,000 years, the rapid acceleration of species loss over the last ten millennia is shocking in the extreme. It is estimated that the current extinction rate is anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand times to the background rate, resulting in the loss of up to two hundred plant or animals species every day. Considering that two-thirds of our pharmaceuticals are derived or based on biological sources, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot. And that's without considering the advanced materials that we could develop from nature.

5 fundamental forces

Also known as interactions, in order from strongest to weakest these are: the strong nuclear force; electro-magnetism; the weak nuclear force; and gravity. One of the most surprising finds in late Twentieth Century cosmology was that as the universe expands, it is being pushed apart at an ever-greater speed. The culprit has been named dark energy, but that's where our knowledge ends of this possible fifth force. Although it appears to account for about 68% of the total energy of the known universe, the label 'dark' refers to the complete lack of understanding as to how it is generated. Perhaps the most radical suggestion is that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is incorrect and that an overhaul of the mechanism behind gravity would remove the need for dark energy at all. One thing is for certain: we still have a lot to learn about the wide-scale fabric of the universe.

4 DNA bases

Despite being one of the best-selling popular science books ever, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything manages to include a few howlers, including listing thiamine (AKA vitamin B1) as one of the four bases, instead of thymine. In addition to an understanding how the bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) are connected via the double helix backbone, the 1953 discovery of DNA's structure also uncovered the replication mechanism, in turn leading to the development of the powerful genetic editing tools in use today. Also, the discovery itself shows how creativity can be used in science: Watson and Crick's model-building technique proved to be a faster way of generating results than the more methodical x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins - although it should be noted that one of Franklin's images gave her rivals a clue as to the correct structure. The discovery also shows that collaboration is often a vital component of scientific research, as opposed to the legend of the lonely genius.

3 branches of science

When most people think of science, they tend to focus on the stereotypical white-coated boffin, beavering away in a laboratory filled with complex equipment. However, there are numerous branches or disciplines, covering the purely theoretical, the application of scientific theory, and everything in between. Broadly speaking, science can be divided into the formal sciences, natural sciences and social sciences, each covering a variety of categories themselves. Formal sciences include mathematics and logic and has aspects of absolutism about it (2+2=4). The natural or 'hard' sciences are what we learn in school science classes and broadly divide into physics, chemistry and biology. These use observation and experiment to develop working theories, but maths is often a fundamental component of the disciplines. Social or 'soft' sciences speak for themselves, with sub-disciplines such as anthropology sometimes crossing over into humanities such as archaeology. So when someone tells you that all science is impossibly difficult, you know they obviously haven't considered just what constitutes science!

2 types of fundamental particles

Named after Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Nath Bose respectively, fermions and bosons are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The former, for example quarks and electrons, are the particles of mass and obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, meaning no two fermions can exist in the same place in the same state. The latter are the carriers of force, with photons being the best known example. One problem with these particles and their properties such as angular momentum or spin is that most analogies are only vaguely appropriate. After all, we aren't used to an object that has to rotate 720 degrees in order to get back to its original state! In addition, there are many aspects of underlying reality that are far from being understood. String theory was once mooted as the great hope for unifying all the fermions and bosons, but has yet to achieve absolute success, while the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson is only one potential advance in the search for a Grand Unifying Theory of creation.

1 planet Earth

There is a decorative plate on my dining room wall that says "Other planets cannot be as beautiful as this one." Despite the various Earth-sized exoplanets that have been found in the Goldilocks zone of their solar system, we have little chance in the near future of finding out if they are inhabited as opposed to just inhabitable. Although the seasonal methane on Mars hints at microbial life there, any human colonisation will be a physically and psychologically demanding ordeal. The idea that we can use Mars as a lifeboat to safeguard our species - never mind our biosphere - is little more than a pipedream. Yet we continue to exploit our home world with little consideration for the detrimental effects we are having on it. As the environmental movement says: there is no Planet B. Apart from the banning of plastic bags in some supermarkets, little else appears to have been done since my 2010 post on reduce, reuse and recycle. So why not make a New Year’s resolution to help future generations? Wouldn’t that be the best present for your children and your planetary home?