I've spent a lot of time in the last week strolling around Paris, eating long meals at cafes, stopping in little shops, wandering through cathedrals, sitting on park benches, and generally enjoying the aesthetic pleasures of the world's most beautiful day-to-day culture.

So it was a shock to the system to enter the cavernous Palais des Congress, with its blank-faced modernity, and sit in conference rooms listening to functionaries from government and business recite PowerPoint presentations on their five-phase action plans, three-part performance contracts, and seven-stage technology development strategies. It's great, mind you, to see this kind of work, but the proceedings are so divorced from the city and culture around them, so devoid of poetry or vision or joy. So bloodless.

This, it seems to me, is the great shortcoming in the push for efficiency. The word itself reeks of sterile technocracy. It envisions communal life as a business process, purely a practical matter, to be stripped of ornamentation, trimmed and tucked, standardized and expedited. It's no wonder advocates have such a hard time getting it the prominence it deserves on the public agenda, no wonder it hasn't captured the public imagination.

Several speakers noted the fact in different ways, lamenting that efficiency is "boring," pleading with the attendees to be "passionate." One, EU parliamentarian Claude Turmes, spoke plaintively of the need to make energy efficiency "sexy."

But efficiency and sex are antithetical. Sex is voluptuous and beautiful, virile and messy -- anything but efficient. If sexiness is not efficient, why should the converse be true?

What's needed is not just a new term (please lord, not another "climate change" vs. "global warming"). What's needed is a new vision, a new way of thinking about what efficiency advocates are really after.

Architect William McDonough, who frequently makes a similar point, has suggested "energy effectiveness." Unless you have 10 minutes for McDonough to explain what that means, though, I doubt it's going to do much for you; the connotations aren't much better.

In passing, Turmes himself suggested what struck me as a promising alternative: "resource intelligence."

I'll have to think about it more, but at first blush I like it -- at least it has a spark of humanity. "Intelligence" carries connotations not only of adeptness but of sophistication and even elegance. After all, there's something marvelous about how a mind like, say, Einstein's took what seemed like a jumble of parts and derived compact, holistic explanations out of them. Intelligence doesn't imply less, like efficiency, but better. And that's what people want -- not less, but better.

Consider McDonough's frequent example: is a tree "efficient"? No, it grows far more leaves/acorns/branches than it needs and scatters them everywhere. But the tree itself is an intelligent integration of a system into a larger system. There is no waste. When you understand the elegance and intelligence behind the beauty, there's real resonance, even, dare I say, a kind of passion.

Now, imagine you live in a house that gathers rainwater and captures, cleans, and recycles 100% of the water used in it. In that house, you do not need to use less water; the house's design provides you with an abundance! The water is not used in a miserly way, but in an intelligent way.

Efficiency implies scrimping and trimming and subjecting every move to a cold cost-benefit analysis. Intelligence, like nature, leaves room for beauty and abundance and progress.

I realize the ship has sailed. I won't be able to single-handedly engineer a change in usage. But for my part, I'm going to try to talk less about efficiency and more about intelligence, because that's what this evolution is really about: substituting intelligence for brute force.

Only an economist could wish for Paris to be more efficient. But a Paris that uses its resources more wisely, that allows for guilt-free abundance, is something even a wine-guzzling aesthete like me can support.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

You once replied to a request for some simple things all environmentally concerned individuals should do by pointing them toward some "Top Ten lists" for eco-minded people. Without a doubt, hands down, the number 1 action that should be followed for anyone concerned with the environment is to limit your procreation to 1 child per individual (2 per couple), i.e., replace yourself only. This dwarfs anything you might do in other areas, like using compact fluorescents or choosing paper over plastic, or weatherizing your home.

Stan B.
Williamsburg, Mich.

A. Dearest Stan,

The ten-foot pole gives reproduction another poke. In '03 and '05, the Royal We tickled all our reproductive clocks with brief reminders to consider childbearing and childrearing as ecologically significant acts. Since then I have followed my own advice and borne seven children, all of whom have grown up to work for Environmental Defense.

The right to bear arms ... and legs.iStock

As you know, this is a hot topic, and there's a reason I poke at it only occasionally. I'm almost hesitant to do so now, but I feel strongly about one aspect, so here goes.

Environmentalists tend toward believing that our goal is preservation of the environment as it currently exists, with extra credit if we improve anything already destroyed by humans. Humans are the problem in this picture, and hence new humans are seen by some as an additional difficulty. The connection between population pressures and environmental degradation are logical and documented. People use natural resources to live, which is in part why we have deforestation, extinction, soil depletion, water supply problems, and excess greenhouse gases. High population growth is environmentally significant in areas with poor resource management, poor government, and poverty; it is also significant in areas with excess wealth and high resource consumption.

I'm not going to say too much about our personal reproduction today. Instead, I want to talk about a crucial role environmentalists should play in our local, national, and global communities.

It is very important for us to advocate for accessible family planning programs, for decent education for girls and women, and for women's rights. We have all heard about the cause and effect of equal status for women. Women bear fewer children when we have access to affordable contraception and understand how to use it. We delay childbearing when we receive decent education, and are also better able to care for the children we do have. When we have better if not equal social status and rights, childbearing can be a choice.

Environmentalists need to advocate for girls and women at all levels. In our home communities, we need to be sure that girls are receiving equal opportunities, all youth are receiving substantial reproductive education, and teenagers are engaged in interesting projects rather than marking time with sex and drugs. Nationally and internationally, we need to actively advocate for family planning funding, the eradication of bogus abstinence-only programming, and policies that enrich the lives of women of all ages.

Social justice is inextricably linked with the natural environment. Choosing to limit the amount of children we have needs to be a realistic option for women worldwide.

Adieu, ten-foot pole!

Javelinly,
Umbra

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Women exposed to lots of hairspray in the workplace -- hairdressers, beauticians, and the like -- are more likely to give birth to boys with genital defects, says a British study published in Environmental Health Perspectives. Surprise: Hairspray contains phthalates.

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Mothers exposed to high levels of phthalates during pregnancy are more likely to bear sons with abnormal genitals, says new environmental research published in the journal Environmental Research. (See what we did there?) The study looked at only 106 mothers and sons, and the afflictions -- undescended testicles, smaller penises, and a shorter anogenital distance -- aren't serious problems in and of themselves. But the results, combined with previous studies linking phthalates to reduced sperm quality, DNA damage, hormonal changes, reduced lung function, and premature puberty, make researchers understandably wary. (The American Chemistry Council is decidedly not wary, declaring on its website, "There is no reliable evidence that any phthalate has ever caused a health problem for a human from its intended use.") Phthalates are in all kinds of things -- sex toys, baby items, and yoga mats, to name a few -- via which they make their way into drinking water, breast milk, and household dust.

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Ah, sex. Source of carnal bliss, domestic harmony, cute infants ... and global population problems. (Oh, environmentalists are such killjoys.) Overpopulation aside for the moment, sex is fundamental to humanity, and to the rest of the natural world -- and besides, it's a dang fascinating subject, as Mary Roach found out while researching her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

Mary Roach.

Photo: David Paul Morris

To produce her latest work, Roach delved into the quirky and occasionally sordid history of human sexual research, following the fearless scientists who devote their lives to figuring out exactly how the deed gets done. In the process, she learned that rats wearing polyester underpants have lower sperm counts, that the scent of Good & Plenty could make you irresistible to potential partners, and that participating in a sex study is just about the least sexy thing you can do. Grist caught up with her recently to find out more.

Are these scientists really that different from scientists who are, say, obsessed with ants, or orchids, or other aspects of the natural world?

I don't think so. Someone who gets interested in sex, that's actually much more understandable, because sex is such an endlessly interesting topic -- it makes perfect sense that someone would want to study it. On the other side, these scientists have had to deal with the possible misunderstanding of peers and their families, which was more of an issue in the '40s and '50s than it is today.

What are some of the things we've gained from these studies? I mean, how has science contributed to our sex lives?

In [late 19th century sex researcher] Robert Latou Dickinson's archives, he talks about some of the people who came to him with a profound ignorance about sex. There was a couple who thought they'd had sex when the guy hadn't gone further than the outer labia -- they said, 'Well, we're having trouble getting pregnant,' and it took someone like Dickinson to say, 'Well, what are you doing in bed?' In the Victorian era, there was just no imagery to come by, no sources of information, nobody talking about it. So at a very basic level, getting people to feel comfortable speaking about it was a pretty valuable thing.

You and your husband participated in one of these studies -- I won't ask you to recount the details, but did it change your feelings about the scientific study of sex?

What it did was address a certain curiosity that I had when I read [the work of sex researchers] Masters and Johnson. I thought, 'How the hell could anyone do this in front of researchers?' And what better way to find out than to do it yourself?

Like most things you cannot imagine, it's less onerous and simpler than you anticipated -- there's this fear and apprehension because it's such an unknown, you can't picture the scene, can't imagine what anyone will say -- and then when you get there, it's like any other medical procedure. I mean, I was taking notes during it.

You're kidding! You were not!

I was. And [my husband] Ed was just like, 'Dear God, let me get through this.' It was as though it wasn't sex. If it had been a study of female orgasm, I wouldn't have been able to help them out.

So, science can tell us a lot about sex. But what can't science tell us about sex?

Bonk, by Mary Roach.

Science is not very good at factoring emotion into sex. Someone's emotional state is a huge factor in what sex is like, and that's really hard to study in a lab. There was a Masters and Johnson study from the '70s that compared committed gay and straight couples and couples who had been assigned partners -- that touched on qualitative issues, the differences between efficient sex and really great sex. Even then, if you were to try and pin down how being in love affects arousal and orgasm, how does passion affect it -- how do you begin to define those things, how do you know that the [people who say] they're in love are in love? Trying to study love in the lab doesn't work very well.

OK, so you have to tell me a little bit about the rats in Egypt and their polyester pants.

[Egyptian sex researcher] Dr. Ahmed Shafik was a fairly extraordinary guy, and I was fascinated by his work. I came across his rats-in-underpants study before I went to see him, so when we met I brought it up, and I was kind of exclaiming with glee that they had made underpants for rats. And he said 'Yes, yes, we did that,' and I realized that he didn't think it was all that strange. I was going to ask to see the underpants, but then I thought that would make me seem like I was trivializing his work. So I didn't push to see the underpants, and now I regret that. Maybe he would have given me a pair. I did a story on sumo wrestlers once, and I meant to go to the store where they sold sumo wrestler underpants. I regret that, too -- I would have had the makings of a fine little underwear collection.

When [Shafik] found that the polyester lowered sperm count [in the rats], he actually came up with a polyester scrotal sling that he would have advocated as male birth control. While it might have been effective, it would have been hard to convince a man to wear a scrotal sling that you had to launder separately. It wasn't a hugely practical notion, but I kind of admired him for looking into it.

So, I need to ask you something on behalf of Grist readers. Grist is an environmental magazine, and environmentalism is not often seen as a very sexy topic. Any advice from science for environmentalists looking to increase their sex appeal?

Well, don't wear polyester pants, number one. Don't wear cologne -- cologne lowers female vaginal blood flow. You could slather yourself in Good & Plenty, that's supposed to [have the opposite effect]. Don't bother smearing synthesized rhesus monkey copulins on your chest, in case you were planning to attempt that. Likewise, Boarmate -- the synthesized boar pheromone -- it's hideous. It's like a musty, intense body odor times a thousand. It's the most repellent odor. I'm not being very helpful, though.

You're just finishing up a book tour. What did your readers most want to know from science about sex?

People have been volunteering some things. A guy who's a sex researcher stood up and asked me if I'd heard about sperm surfing, and I said 'No, I have not! Please tell me!' I was so crestfallen that I'd somehow overlooked sperm surfing. It's something about how sperm navigate the vaginal wall, some kind of surfing they do, which seems kind of incredible to me given that they have no arms and legs, and no surfboard.

Then there was a radiologist who wrote an email to me about this footnote that I had, about a comprehensive review of the world's literature on things stuck in rectums. He wrote that several different kinds of small, furry rodents -- well, that some cases had come to his attention. I wrote back and said, 'Is there a paper, or do you have an X-ray?' He said he'd been called in to look at an X-ray where they were trying to figure out if it was a hamster or gerbil. And I said, 'Who cares? Who gives a shit if it's a hamster or a gerbil? You just gotta get the thing out!' He didn't write back to me.

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Hard up for ways to preserve the Amazon rainforest, the Brazilian government has announced it's opening a condom factory that will use rubber harvested sustainably from the imperiled rainforest -- no tree-chopping required. The latex will come from the Chico Mendes reserve, named for a well-known Amazon activist gunned down by ranching interests. Conservationists hope that providing locals economic incentive to leave the forest intact will help slow deforestation. The Brazilian government is also touting the program as a buy-local initiative; the new factory aims to displace about 100 million of the roughly 500 million condoms the country imports annually and distributes for free as part of its initiative to fight HIV/AIDS.

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