environment 9781501361906, 9781501361937, 9781501361920

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Environmental Beginnings
Chapter 2: The Stuff We Are Made of
Chapter 3: Life in a Bubble
Chapter 4: Turning Petroleum into People
Chapter 5: Running Out of Ink for ­Human Blueprints
Chapter 6: Tracing Rachel Carson’s Path
Chapter 7: Regrettable Substitutions
Chapter 8: From Tobacco to Teflon Babies
Chapter 9: Yesterday’s Fuel ­Becomes Today’s ­Forgetfulness
Chapter 10: The High Price of Meat
Chapter 11: Plastic Hangover
Chapter 12: Shrapnel in Human Eyes and Bodies
Chapter 13: Diagnosing Humanity
Chapter 14: One with the Environment
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Index

Citation preview

“

The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’” Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas

Come From and How We Got to Now

“

Object Lessons describe themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I’ll say, amen. . . . If you read enough Object Lessons books, you’ll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones—caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though . . . they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we’ve taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look.” John Warner, The Chicago Tribune

“ “ “ “ “

For my money, Object Lessons is the most consistently interesting nonfiction book series in America.” Megan Volpert, PopMatters

Besides being beautiful little hand-sized objects themselves, showcasing exceptional writing, the wonder of these books is that they exist at all. . . . Uniformly excellent, engaging, thought-provoking, and informative.” Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington Independent Review of Books

. . . edifying and entertaining . . . perfect for slipping in a pocket and pulling out when life is on hold.” Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

[W]itty, thought-provoking, and poetic. . . . These little books are a page-flipper’s dream.” John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these books are anything but slight.” Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

“

The joy of the series, of reading Remote Control, Golf Ball, Driver’s License, Drone, Silence, Glass, Refrigerator, Hotel, and Waste . . . in quick succession, lies in encountering the various turns through which each of their authors has been put by his or her object. . . . The object predominates, sits squarely center stage, directs the action. The object decides the genre, the chronology, and the limits of the study. Accordingly, the author has to take her cue from the thing she chose or that chose her. The result is a wonderfully uneven series of books, each one a thing unto itself.” Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

“ “

The Object Lessons series has a beautifully simple premise. Each book or essay centers on a specific object. This can be mundane or unexpected, humorous or politically timely. Whatever the subject, these descriptions reveal the rich worlds hidden under the surface of things.” Christine Ro, Book Riot

. . . a sensibility somewhere between Roland Barthes and Wes Anderson.” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania:

Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

iv

A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors: Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board: Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, Renée Hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with

BOOKS IN THE SERIES Bird by Erik Anderson Blanket by Kara Thompson Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow Bulletproof Vest by Kenneth R. Rosen Burger by Carol J. Adams Cell Tower by Steven E. Jones Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis Coffee by Dinah Lenney Compact Disc by Robert Barry Doctor by Andrew Bomback Dust by Michael Marder Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton Egg by Nicole Walker Email by Randy Malamud Environment by Rolf Halden Eye Chart by William Germano Glass by John Garrison Golf Ball by Harry Brown Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Drone by Adam Rothstein Fake by Kati Stevens Hair by Scott Lowe Hashtag by Elizabeth Losh High Heel by Summer Brennan Hood by Alison Kinney Hotel by Joanna Walsh Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee Luggage by Susan Harlan Magnet by Eva Barbarossa Ocean by Steve Mentz Password by Martin Paul Eve Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly

Pill by Robert Bennett Potato by Rebecca Earle Questionnaire by Evan Kindley Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté Shipping Container by Craig Martin Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton Silence by John Biguenet Sock by Kim Adrian Souvenir by Rolf Potts Traffic by Paul Josephson Tree by Matthew Battles Tumor by Anna Leahy Veil by Rafia Zakaria Waste by Brian Thill Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz Bicycle by Jonathan Maskit (forthcoming) Exit by Laura Waddell (forthcoming) Fat by Hanne Blank (forthcoming) Fog by Stephen Sparks (forthcoming) Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey (forthcoming) Office by Sheila Liming (forthcoming) Pixel by Ian Epstein (forthcoming) Political Sign by Tobias Carroll (forthcoming) Signature by Hunter Dukes (forthcoming) Snake by Erica Wright (forthcoming) Train by A. N. Devers (forthcoming) Wheelchair by Christopher R Smit (forthcoming)

environment ROLF HALDEN

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Rolf Halden, 2020 Cover design: Alice Marwick For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 128 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-6190-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6192-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-6191-3 Series: Object Lessons Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Preface xii

1 Environmental Beginnings  1 2 The Stuff We are Made of 5 3 Life in a Bubble  13 4 Turning ­Petroleum into People  17 5 Running Out of Ink for ­Human Blueprints  23 6 Tracing Rachel Carson’s Path  29 7 Regrettable Substitutions  47 8 From ­Tobacco to T ­ eflon Babies  57 9 Y ­ esterday’s Fuel B ­ ecomes Today’s ­Forgetfulness  71

10 The High Price of Meat  75 11 Plastic Hangover  85 12 Shrapnel in Human Eyes and Bodies  97 13 ­Diagnosing Humanity  107 14 One with the Environment  115 Epilogue 121 Acknowledgments 128 Notes 131 Index 138

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Contents

PREFACE

I

n the 1960s, the United States bore ominous signs of a nation in peril. The air in Los Angeles and New York City was as polluted and toxic as it is today in Beijing and New Delhi. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill set a new record in aquatic pollution, as did the environmental catastrophes of the Exxon Valdez and Deep Water Horizon spills of 1989 and 2010. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio had caught fire for at least the thirteenth time in recorded history, sending a warning signal to humanity, as do the flames and smoke rising from the Amazon basin today. In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson published her seminal book Silent Spring that effectively initiated widespread environmental awareness. Through her research and writing she warned the public and testified before Congress about the toxic nature of the organochlorine chemistry of DDT, a chemical compound that can travel through our waterways, from worms to chickens, from prey to predators, to the food we eat—ultimately becoming detectable in the blood of today’s infants, born over four decades after this compound was banned in the United States.

Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964, but her legacy spawned the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Soon after, a Republican administration created the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which issued far-reaching amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1970 and 1977 and signed into law the Clean Water Act of 1972. In 1972, six years after Rachel Carson’s death, government leaders saw the wisdom of her call and the carcinogen DDT was banned. But the drop-in alternatives of DDT have turned this victory into defeat. By neglecting the underlying root cause of DDT’s harm, we have allowed into our living spaces and into our bodies a risky chemistry. Halogenated flame retardants, forever-chemicals of the Teflon type, as well as nonbiodegradable plastics and their embedded softeners, have created a soup of chemicals whose known and suspected human health impacts include infertility, miscarriage, premature birth, early onset puberty, allergies, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. Today’s parents worry about their children suffering from anxiety, depression, autism, and substance use disorder, while their children are concerned about climate change and projections of decreased life expectancy. And along comes Earth Day: April 22, 2020. Fifty years have passed since the early inspiration and yet the future of our environment and the world we have wrought seems more uncertain than ever.

Preface

xiii

xiv

1 ­ENVIRONMENTAL BEGINNINGS

Maybe it was because I grew up in the 1960s near Braunschweig, Germany, just west of the death strip of the Inner German Border, which sliced through my divided birth country. Or, maybe it was because my manicdepressive father, with his alarming split identity, created an ever-changing environment in my childhood home, where sunshine—without warning—could turn into a violent storm, triggered by the slightest irritation, imperceptible to those who had not yet experienced it or developed an awareness for such a force of Nature, such uncontrolled wrath. Be careful. Always pay attention. Be vigilant of your surroundings or things may turn deadly. My siblings and I had seen our fair share of close calls at home. To be home does not mean to be safe. When everything around you is constantly at risk of being taken away, learning to take things for granted becomes much harder. To be cognizant and wary

of my environment, by necessity, became second nature to me from early childhood on. Getting out into Nature provided relief. An escape of sorts. It still does. Through fog-covered fields of sugar beet and rapeseed, dotted by the few native trees and bushes that had been allowed to remain in this 1970s’ German landscape dominated by agriculture and violated by “Flurbereinigung” (land consolidation), my legs and bicycle would take me away from home, transforming a fearful child into a fearsome explorer—or at least so I felt, in my naïve mind. Maybe it was then, at that early age, when the desire was instilled to go out and see the world. To explore far-flung places and cultures, to trade the familiarity and trappings of my home for the freedom and danger to shape an environment different from the one I knew. In those early travels into fields and forests, I observed the wariness of vulnerable prey, constantly on the lookout for the inevitable arrival of a deadly predator, knowing it will emerge when one is least prepared. So, I discovered the joy of observing life, of studying biology, and the existential need for practicing vigilance, everywhere at all times. And I discovered companionship with the newly hatched birds and the newborn fawn, with those others who were similarly vulnerable. It’s good not to be alone. There are many of us. And we are not defenseless. Not anymore. As we grow and mature, a transformation sets in though. Roles become reversed, and they do so at different scales. Once just timid prey subjected 2

ENVIRONMENT

to our Nature’s whims, we now have evolved into a species representing the planet’s top predator. We have usurped full control over what we call the environment. But one existential lesson remains to be learned. It has taken me decades as a biologist, engineer, and human to fully comprehend this: The boundaries we have internalized and observe are imaginary. They do not exist. The concept of self and the surrounding environment is a cherished delusion. The environment is not simply “out there.” We breathe it. We eat it. We drink it. We wear it. We create it. We and the environment are one and the same.

ENVIRONMENTAL BEGINNINGS

3

4

2 THE STUFF WE ARE MADE OF

What a privilege it is to be alive! We experience this privilege each day, appreciate it, or take it for granted. This privilege was first extended almost four billion years ago; but we humans would only know this good fortune much later. The year is 1988. I am clinging to a nearly vertical rock face of an icy mountain in the Andes at 18,000 feet altitude. My knees are shaking uncontrollably, and the realization has set in that my powers soon will expire, and my loosening grip will put an end to the precious privilege of life. No rope. No plan. No future. How on earth did I get here? How stupid! It’s ironic, but true: We value things fairly and squarely only when they are about to be taken away from us. The odds of being alive are so incredibly slim. Humble beginnings some 3.8 billion years ago on a rocky planet that, ejected by the Big Bang, found its place just right in a Goldilocks distance from the sun, a location perfectly suitable for the miracle we call life.

Initially our planet’s chemical inventory was limited to elemental building blocks tallied on the periodic table and arranged into basic minerals—like the rock I was holding on to, part andesite, part dacite. But long before this, way back near the beginning, the random assortment of matter soon began to swell as a result of physical-chemical reactions, transformation, and weathering. Rocks dissolved into water and, by releasing carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrogen, formed a primordial stew—precursors to what we would come to call “life.” Random electrical discharges on this barren planet’s surface gave rise to amino acids, short strings of carbon atoms that, decorated with hydrogen and nitrogen appendices, became simple three-dimensional structures. Soon, the stringy amino acids combined by chance to form more complex corkscrew helices and stacks of sheets, giving rise to the first proteins, the macromolecules that catalyze most reactions in what we recognize as the “environment.” After enough amino acids formed and combined by chance, a miracle sprang from the dilute, primordial soup. So, “life” began, a rudimentary membrane, not yet fit to recreate itself, a first take on cellular life. But it perished soon after birth. Like a spark unable to find kindling, unable to start the fire burning in each of us. It happened again. And again. Until futile bursts of randomness, ongoing maybe for millions of years, turned into self-replicating cells. A second miracle, capable of sustained life, commenced—and endured. 6

ENVIRONMENT

Initially, our cellular progenitors only managed to increase in abundance, occupying more and more of the habitable space. The tiny creatures clung to rocky surfaces on Earth— not so unlike hapless me, clinging to the vertical rock face in the icy Andes so many years later. But then these tiny creatures started a revolution, driven by the opportunity to coexist, cohabitate, and cooperate. They became one, a remarkable success and inspiration— something our species has yet to emulate. Here’s what happened: They were just two cells, primed to compete fiercely for limited resources and living space. But instead of competing, they took an alternative path, and by doing so, invented new possibilities in the adventure of survival. One swallowed the other—but without destroying it. Two monocellular organisms unexpectedly merged into a single living organism, in an instant. Rather than fighting each other, they began to cooperate. They divided essential chores, the bigger one creating an internal habitat for the other; and the small intruder in turn becoming a biochemical energy plant, known as a mitochondrium, powering the newly sprung cellular union. Then it happened again, this time giving rise to chloroplasts, the locus of modern photosynthesis. This happened about 1.5 billion years ago. The gamble of cellular cooperation and co-inhabitation paid off in multiple, unexpected ways, creating an explosion of new possibilities. The newly formed eukaryotic cells, containing first a single and soon multiple mitochondria, THE STUFF WE ARE MADE OF

7

were compartmentalized by membranes and contained a nucleus harboring their genetic blueprint. They began to rule our early world. From singular to multicellular designs, one new model after another ran off this assembly line of life: molds, mollusks, mammals, monkeys, and mankind. And the factory work is not complete. Our cellular forebears paved the way for a comfortable future for humans, by inventing a supportive machinery that harvests energy contained in sunlight, an essentially unlimited source of power that freely traverses outer space to visit and penetrate us. This was and continues to be the good fortune of a planet bathing in seemingly eternal sunshine. Harvesting light energy to split water made all the difference for the future of life. Bacteria deserve credit not only for inventing the process of photosynthesis but also for the art of harvesting the energy contained in light and directing it at, and splitting, water. The water-busting process released oxygen into the atmosphere. One by one, each water molecule split into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Two oxygen atoms held hands, forming molecular oxygen, or O2—the quintessence of our atmosphere, and what we breathe today. Algae swalled the photosynthetic bacteria and adopted the art of photosynthesis and water splitting to soon evolve into plants that perform these tasks both in water and on land. This life-induced change of the global atmospheric environment made possible our way of life. The food we 8

ENVIRONMENT

consume, a smorgasbord of strings of organic carbon, generated mostly by photosynthetic plants, is incinerated in our bodies. Plants pull building blocks out of thin air in the form of carbon dioxide, a process powered by the sun. We in turn burn the plants’ biomass in our bodies and extract the usable energy. Rather than allowing this energy to escape as mere heat, we instead capture it and deposit the energetic power into our savings bank in the form of phosphate compounds. These tiny molecular phosphate batteries become charged when the foodstuff we take in with each breath reacts with the atmospheric oxygen. The output we exhale, carbon dioxide, is promptly taken up again from the atmosphere by the primary producers, bacteria, and plants, to complete the cycle. Bacteria and plants are the ones that drive this endless cycle of life. We humans are born to be consumers, dependent on the products manufactured by those enjoying greater autonomy but also more modest returns. Our cellular forebears, and we ourselves, have a long history not only of consuming, but also of interacting with and changing our environment, and, with it, the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. No creature is ever outside this cycle. In the past, the process moved along rather slowly, allowing various life-forms time either to adapt or to take shelter. But over the past two hundred years, we have rushed the process to a degree that makes adaptation impossible. Petroleum accumulated in the Earth’s crust over time spans of millions of years is now being brought to the surface and burned up in a stupefying spectacle, releasing carbon THE STUFF WE ARE MADE OF

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dioxide that traps the heat of the sunlight. While enjoying the energy extracted from fossil deposits formed over millions of years to power our cars and air conditioners, we are dialing up the thermostat of our atmosphere. This atmospheric change forces glaciers to melt and retreat. It is topping off our oceans—now—changing our entire Earth system. The early bacteria that never adapted to the reality of a new atmosphere charged with oxygen, known as archaebacteria, can teach us a cautionary lesson. Clinging to a lifestyle not supported any longer by the surrounding environment did not work out well for them. Today, they are relegated to a life in the shadows. They reside deep in the soil, far away from oxygen. If we don’t pay attention, a similar fate may of retreat and demise may await us in the environment, atmosphere, and climate we create with our everyday actions. Luckily, my death was postponed on that mountain face. Cooperation from an unlikely source saved my life and helped me to descend into safety from the ice-covered rock face I clung to high up in the Andes. One hundred miles east of my hometown, Meine, a village near Braunschweig, across the Iron Curtain, in a part of Germany that was created by slicing the homeland in two from 1952 to 1990, another boy my age grew up. He read books penned by South American mountaineers and dreamed of seeing parts of the world other than the Soviet Bloc. 10

ENVIRONMENT

Risking his life, he crossed the death strip of the Inner German Border unharmed. After saving up a sufficient amount of money, he boarded a plane to Ecuador to fulfill his dream of climbing the legendary Chimborazo mountain, of reaching its peak and, with it, the point farthest from the center of the Earth. While his dream would not come true, he did arrive in time to save my life. We met at the mountain’s base camp, the Whymper refuge at 16,400 feet altitude, two maverick travelers, used to relying on ourselves alone, yet deciding to climb together for an exploration of routes alternative to the main path up the mountain, which was plagued by an onslaught of falling ice and rock mobilized by the sun’s rays. I can still hear and see in my mind a rock the size of a baby’s head zipping by a couple of inches from my right ear a day earlier. It was traveling at a hundred miles per hour. Stuck on the icy rock face without a rope and with my ice pick out of reach, strapped to the top of my backpack, the East German refugee, now a free citizen of the world, risked his life all over again, climbing my way without a safety rope to unfasten my ice pick, placing within my reach the lifesaving tool, and then guiding me back across the hazardous ice channel I had crossed before so much more easily on the ascent, down the mountain, and into the safety of the base camp shelter below. I can’t recall his name and remember his face only vaguely. But I owe him my life. A second chance. How could I make something of the new lease of life I was so lucky to have? THE STUFF WE ARE MADE OF

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Perhaps the change in my country’s border, an artificial division, offered insight. On November 9, 1989, that border opened for East Germans and, soon after, the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Metaphorically, and literally, the streets were filled with people who could travel for the first time in decades. Strangers from East and West, meeting for the first time that weekend in November, drew each other in for celebratory, anonymous embraces. Hopes were soaring high—for a happy reunification of the two halves of our long-divided nation, for a future of collaboration, joy, and prosperity. The future was in our hands.

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ENVIRONMENT

3 LIFE IN A BUBBLE

Why is it so hard to appreciate our home planet? Why are we struggling to understand that the world is not revolving around us but that, instead, we are part of the world? Again: the boundaries we have internalized and observe are imaginary. They do not exist. The concept of self and the surrounding environment is a cherished delusion. Our human bodies, moving about like pollinators on an eternal quest for food and love, are constantly permeated by fluids, specifically gas and water. As these two enter and exit our bodies to keep us alive, to keep us hydrated and oxygenated, we soak up and give off an arsenal of molecules. Some arrive dissolved in water, some suspended in a fresh breeze. Lonesome travelers are rare. Mixtures are the norm. Complex groups of molecules constantly enter and exit our bodies from what we call the “environment.” Some groups of molecules arrive wrapped in a cocoon of magnetlike molecules that have self-assembled into membranes, making for tiny spheres. Some of these bubbles are blanks.

Some are loaded. Some carry a toxic payload. And some … are alive. Microorganisms! These are our constant companions. Our cells are bigger than these microorganisms that freely dive in and out of our bodies at all times. They mix and they mingle. Like water, it’s hard to say where we—our bodies— end and where they, our bubbly constant companions, begin. In the end, it may not matter. Our bodies and the microbes that reside within and upon us can and should never be separated. Outnumbered by these tiny colonialists, our human cells make up less than half of that astonishing machinery of cells we experience as the human body. These companions are our microbiome—tens of trillions of cells living upon and within us. This implies we can never be absolutely clean. Indeed, our immune systems require a balance with environmental microbes. To be without them is an unnatural state bringing in its wake malnutrition, disease, pain, and premature death. Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, the membranes that envelop us come in different dimensions and layers. On the cellular level, they are the demarcation lines of the building blocks that compose our bodies, individual cells. On the organismal level, they make up our skin. On an even larger macroscale, they are the protective layers our species relies on for survival. 14

ENVIRONMENT

To see one of the smallest such shells serving as a lifesupport system for humans, step outside on a clear night in a place void of light pollution. Silently orbiting our planet, you can observe the sunlight reflecting off the International Space Station, a human manifestation of chutzpah and global cooperation. A tiny engineered shell in microgravity at the fringe of outer space, orbiting our planet. This planet of ours, though larger, is similarly shaped with the atmosphere as the outer protective layer. It is wrapped in this protective shield perfectly fit for blocking out harmful radiation, for trapping a sufficient amount of heat to make us comfortable, and for providing a breathable air enabling us to live. In 2012, our research team was curious to find out how the analysis of environmental samples from that small bubble, the International Space Station, could shed light on the sustainability of our species here on Earth. We thought that looking at Earth from afar would lend an insightful perspective on our chemistry and doings. I had analyzed tens of thousands of environmental samples before, but this one was special. Precious. Maybe even priceless. This cluster of water molecules had traveled far and fast, all the way from the International Space Station, moving at 17,000 miles per hour around a blue bubble suspended by gravity in a vacuum of nothingness; orbiting humanity for several years, and in this time span, passing through the bodies of the co-ed crew, one by one through all of them, over and over until its recent return LIFE IN A BUBBLE

15

to Earth and its delivery to my university laboratory in a plastic bottle. What would we find in these three precious liquid ounces of well-traveled space water, of recycled dinosaur piss that, ejected into space aboard a tin can, became drinking water, became astronaut, became male, became female, became dirty and clean, before finally returning to a spaceship much bigger than the vessel we see when we look in the mirror, much bigger than the space shuttle and the International Space Station, this spaceship we call Earth? What would our analytical measurements teach us about the astronauts’ exposure to chemicals in space in their engineered life-support bubble? And what would it teach us about ours here on Earth? A lot. We found a contaminated soup thick with persistent synthetic chemicals dreamed up by humanity. We found evidence of a new epoch we are ill-prepared for: the Anthropocene. The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its contractor requested our team not make public what we found in the space water. But it won’t remain a secret much longer. Too much evidence is lurking in too many places without and within us. To see what’s in hiding, let’s focus back on our home bubble, planet Earth.

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ENVIRONMENT

4 TURNING ­PETROLEUM INTO PEOPLE

Humanity was a minor league player on Earth for much of our existence. In the early 1800s, though, the seed was sown for things to change. That change arrived in earnest in the second industrial revolution, when humankind ramped up its revolt against Nature, circa 1870. Soon, railroads traversed the land, converting far-flung wilderness into humankind’s playground. Powered by coal, human industry began to perforate the Earth’s crust, exposing its hidden treasures, and toxins, at a stupefying rate, that is still accelerating today. Energy embedded in coal and natural gas brought human progress to all corners of the world, and the telegraph became the precursor of another gift and present-day addiction, as well as a source of fear and hope, the global communication tool we call the internet. A perfect marriage of growing global demand and supply was about to be consummated, sending shock waves that reverberate ever more potently around the globe.

But the world population, still small, had yet to experience explosive growth. This growth was made possible in the second half of the nineteenth century by black gold, petroleum, and by a new relationship to, and expectation of, energy accessibility. Humanity went on a binge. Opportunity seemed endless, natural resources appeared inexhaustible—until the 1970s, when we began to realize more and more that they were limited. Gaining access to the planet’s energy sources put humanity in the reckoning for finally controlling and subduing Nature. Dams, tunnels, seawalls, container ships, engineered rain from cloud seeding, and enormous earthmovers enabled humanity to set the planet in a new direction. Anything seemed to be possible; no natural barrier had to be taken for granted anymore. We changed the indoor environment, too. The arrival of residential air-conditioning in the late 1940s expanded our habitable space, and energy efficiency and safety concerns in high-rise structures harboring ever more, ever more unhappy, people prompted a complete sealing-off of occupants from the natural world that once had awed them. Today, on average, we spend 87 percent of our lives indoors and another 6 percent sealed off in cars and mass transportation, leaving just 7 percent of time to get to know Nature, while we still can. Both, Nature and we, are at risk of disappearing.

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ENVIRONMENT

Nature can do without us, but we cannot do without Nature. Not yet, anyway. Too many lessons still remain to be learned, there are too many umbilical cords we rely on. We are tied to Nature by key things that we take for granted. The air we breathe in our elected prisons of luxury and misery is, on average, two to five times more polluted than the ambient air outside. Petroleum-powered machinery, petroleum-fueled ferti­ lizers, and petroleum-propelled irrigation water enabled a human revolution that transformed “unproductive” soils into hot spots of agricultural production, turning the Great American Desert—the western part of the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains to about the 100th meridian west—into a major section of America’s breadbasket. By the early 1900s humanity was consuming nonrenewable fossil fuels as an energy source and drawing down the ancient, subterranean waters of the giant Ogallala aquifer as a nonrenewable source of drinking and irrigation water. This agricultural revolution, a banquet continuing today, not just in North America, but also in other parts of the world, contributes to the poisoning of the air that has now become toxic, yet is inhaled by 91 percent of humanity. This air contains soot, dust, and other air pollutants, emitted in part as a result of the production of vast quantities of food. Food that we need to grow our bodies, otherwise known as “human biomass.”

TURNING PETROLEUM INTO PEOPLE

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All over the world, all the world’s crops went into season at once, and are now available all year round, anywhere, anytime, thanks to global commerce. Devoured by a world population, now growing exponentially, subsisting for now, but not much longer, on unsustainable energy use, unsustainable water use, and unsustainable degradation of topsoil. Too many people now crowding the nipples of the planet and siphoning off its reserves at an ever-accelerating pace. It took about 200,000 years for the world population of anatomically modern humans to reach one billion around 1804. A mere century later, the milestone of two billion was passed in 1927. We got to three billion just thirty-three years later, in 1960. Since the birth of the last baby boomers, including me, in 1964, the world population has more than doubled, today exceeding 7.7 billion people. And at those last boomers’ projected death in 2045, it will have more than tripled to 9.4 billion. Since 2008, for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural settings worldwide. By the year 2050, two out of every three humans will live in cities. The first city of one million people likely was Italy’s Rome, some 130 years before the start of our modern calendar. The modern metropolises of London and New York City needed two millennia to catch up around 1810 and 1875, respectively. Today, there are over five hundred cities of a million people or more, with about fifty of these having 20

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reached the questionable privilege of calling themselves megacities, human settlements harboring more than ten million people. Meine (translated as the possessive word “mine”), that sugar beet-processing German village I grew up in, harbored some 3,000 souls. By contrast, my children are coming of age in the fifth most populous city of the United States, nested in a larger metropolitan area counting over four million people. When it is their time to pass away, the world is expected to be home to around eleven billion people. Whether we reach that mark will depend in part on our ability to replace the currently used fuel for making human biomass: petroleum. Today millions of city dwellers around the world are born, live, and will perish in their home city. Many will never see and experience the life-support system that enables their survival, the agricultural soils and ecosystems that satisfy their thirst and hunger in the megalopolises they call home around the world. This point raises an alarming question: How do you value and care for something that you have never experienced?

TURNING PETROLEUM INTO PEOPLE

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5 RUNNING OUT OF INK FOR ­HUMAN BLUEPRINTS

What will put an end to the rapid growth of the world’s population? Will global depletion of petroleum spell the end? Maybe we will learn to better emulate the easy life of green plants that efficiently utilize the eternal sunshine raining down on us to satisfy the desire for external energy. But even if we succeed to do so, at a global scale, another danger lurks: We are projected to run out of ink for making genetic blueprints for future generations. Our genetic information is penned into strings of nucleic acids and these, it turns out, contain lots of phosphorus in the form of phosphate. We need phosphorus to grow our bodies, but this element, which is in limited supply, is being used excessively and wastefully to drive an agricultural juggernaut. Current, unsustainable agricultural and water management practices allow the phosphorus lifeblood to bleed into the oceans where it is lost to pollution and cannot be reused.

The problem starts in America’s corn belt. Contributors include the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all representing major farming enterprise in the Mississippi River Valley. Each year they douse their agricultural land with an overabundance of nutrients, namely nitrogencontaining nitrates and ammonia and phosphoruscontaining phosphates. Seeking to boost short-term gains, we set ourselves up for long-term pains. Predictable rain and unpredictable, yet ever more frequent, extreme weather events mobilize the excess nutrients and carry them away as runoff from the land, first into rural streams and then into the mighty Mississippi River. Not only do the nutrients depart, but so does the topsoil, formed and matured over a millennium. Storms are not the only culprit, rather, excessive tilling also breaks down the structure of the soil making it an easy victim of runoff into surface waters and erosion by wind. Once set into motion, this annual convoy of death barrels through the aquatic axis of the United States bound for the Gulf of Mexico, more than a thousand miles from where this tailgate party of excess first started. Analogous to the overabundance of food that now is plunging Americans into mass obesity and diabetes, the release of excessive quantities of phosphates into aquatic environments can have catastrophic consequences by allowing the uncontrolled growth of algae, which in turn suffocate aquatic life in waterways and marine environments. Seawater overwhelmed by oxygen consumption turns into a 24

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dead zone, disallowing any life that is dependent on aerobic metabolism. The impacts of unchecked growth are on display every year in the Gulf of Mexico, with the Mississippi Delta playing host at the spectacle’s epicenter. At the end of the journey, the Mississippi River sheds its deadly stew of nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico to poison large swathes of coastal water, an area the size of New Jersey. The deadly 3-D event extends essentially all the way from the Gulf ’s surface down to its bottom sediments, triggered by a lack of oxygen, without which higher life-forms such as fish can’t live, hypoxia. Nutrients that, in moderation, were a lifeline—promoting survival, growth, and biodiversity—in overabundance turn into a deadly curse. Photosynthetic algae starved of phosphate and nitrogen-containing compounds see their growth limiters removed and begin to divide and grow uncontrollably. Soon there is so much algal biomass in the salty waters that visibility is reduced to a few inches in depth. Below this photic zone, death is lurking in the darkness of lost transparency. An entire ecosystem, relying on the availability of dissolved oxygen, is perishing below. The overabundance of dying algal biomass drifting into the abyss gets attacked by opportunistic eubacteria that draw copious amounts of dissolved oxygen while digesting their abundant meal. Their feasting swiftly depletes the limited mass of oxygen carried by the water, creating what begins as a small zone of hypoxia, an absence of measurable dissolved RUNNING OUT OF INK FOR HUMAN BLUEPRINTS

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oxygen. This tiny dead zone then grows as a function of the load of nutrients mobilized, the temperature of the water, and the weather conditions, among other factors. The festival of death begins in the spring, makes headlines all summer and ends in the fall, when the nutrient burden eases and storm events break up and reoxygenate the layer of water void of aerobic life. Only for the cycle to repeat the coming spring. Some seasons are blessed with cameos of special guests. Many monocellular species can cause algal blooms but some have gained special fame and notoriety. Red tides, for example. Their reigning stars are the so-called dinoflagellates, whose uncontrolled growth reddens the water and produces large quantities of powerful poisons that then kill fish, turtles, manatees, dolphins, and other marine mammals, which otherwise may have swum to safety from this annually recurring threat of suffocation and poisoning. Since 1941, there have been over 700 mass die-offs caused by red tides and other harmful algal blooms, with each event killing over a billion animals, wiping out 90 percent of the population of local aquatic species, and extinguishing an amount of biomass equivalent to the weight of some 1,900 Empire State Buildings. This cycle of overabundance of nutrients in water resources, referred to as eutrophication, is not unique to the Gulf of Mexico, however. It also occurs regularly in parts of the Chesapeake Bay, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Pacific, and other places and oceans around the world. 26

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But even when the nutrient load can be tolerated by the seas without killing every oxygen-breathing organism in its wake, the mobilization of phosphorus from land to sea, and its dilution into the world’s oceans, still poses a severe problem for humanity. There is no rhyme or reason to this deadly spectacle. Growing government-subsidized corn to make ethanol is a folly with a history of yielding a negative energy balance. The work of lobbyists and politicians, it amounts to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Even with today’s tricked-out agricultural yields that push terrestrial ecosystems to the brink, it takes just about as much petroleum to make corn ethanol as it does to make gasoline from petroleum. Weaning humanity off petroleum is a hard thing to do. This nonsensical business model, created by lobbyists in Washington, continues to be perpetuated one election cycle at a time. Corn that is not used for ethanol finds other problematic uses, fattening the nation’s population as high-fructose corn syrup by being added to just about everything in the American diet. Then there’s unprocessed corn, an unnatural bovine food, forced into the rumens of dairy cows and cattle that, raised with a tremendous environmental footprint, deliver more meat than is healthy into the hungry mouths of American consumers. Phosphorus is an essential element we cannot live without and we cannot manufacture. We have to make do with what we can find in the Earth’s crust. Phosphorus deposits RUNNING OUT OF INK FOR HUMAN BLUEPRINTS

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around the world are being mined and drawn down rapidly. Already this element, which is essential to life, is rumored to potentially destabilize the world, joining petroleum and water as a third resource for nations to war over. Nations privileged by an abundance of phosphorus and the new risk of a potential hostile takeover include Morocco, China, Algeria, and Syria. Unless we begin to capture and reuse phosphorus, global supplies will be depleted. Estimates as to when this will occur vary. Initial estimates in the early 2000s put the time of phosphorus depletion within the next 50–100 years, while later, more accurate, studies allow for two to three centuries before disaster will strike. That’s 8–12 human generations. How many generations is a satisfactory number to be content with before the decline of humanity?

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6 TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves. —RACHEL CARSON

In 2007, for the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, I was invited to Rachel Carson’s historic home on Berwick Road in Colesville, Maryland, to deliver a speech on environmental progress and to commemorate her life. What do you say when someone’s life work continues to be celebrated, yet not acted upon as diligently as required, for more than half a century now? Carson’s findings and suspicions had informed my own professional life for the better part of the previous five years. Arriving in America from Germany as an unemployable biologist, I had rebooted my education with a graduate degree in environmental engineering and, after working at a US national laboratory

near San Francisco, was recruited to the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health as an assistant professor of environmental health sciences. Reluctantly at first, my wife and I fell in love with Maryland. Moving from pricey San Francisco to a prestigious school on the East Coast had been a siren call difficult to resist. Yet, we found it hard to leave behind the wide open spaces of the American West. After some back and forth with my department chair, I ultimately launched this chapter of my life with a fancy business card from the largest school of public health in the world and a modest salary just barely sufficient to keep our family afloat. With my wife now staying home to take care of our oldest daughter, and pregnant with our second child, we had gone from being San Francisco Bay Area DINKS (double income, no kids) to a single-income family trying to make ends meet with less than half of our prior combined earnings. But never judge your quality of life on the amount of money you make. Maryland and particularly Baltimore were a blessing in disguise. Gritty and honest, the city presented herself unpretentiously and with arms wide open. Gone were the six-foot fences of Bay Area suburban backyard privacy, now replaced with front porches attached to modest middle-aged homes in constant need of repairs. And friendly occupants invited in acquaintances and strangers alike, for a chat and a sip of water, juice, wine, or beer, freely sharing their joys and sorrows in the long, warm summer evenings illuminated by fireflies. 30

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No wonder Carson loved her home and developed a heightened sense for the beauty and fragility of her environment. Her house to this day is surrounded by trees and bushes giving shelter to a variety of bird species common to North America. Our young daughters, the older one seven at the time, the youngest now already five years of age, enjoyed exploring Carson’s backyard, while I went over in my mind the things to say. For a good five years I had been trailing the scientific route of discovery Carson first charted some four decades earlier. My scientific exploits at Hopkins had begun not with an idealistic quest, but a pragmatic question of more existential nature: How can one make a living as a non-medically trained engineer in a soft-money environment dominated by medical doctors and epidemiologists, all competing jointly for scarce research dollars to pay for their laboratory operations and for their students in a brutal race to make tenure—the panacea, promising guaranteed lifelong employment and academic freedom? Academia is a privileged, yet unforgiving, environment: Publish or perish. What could I contribute? After some back and forth, I decided to venture into environmental health and exposure science, using as a knowledge foundation my prior expertise gained in bioremediation, which is the use of degradative microorganisms to break down toxic pollutants in contaminated soils and groundwater, and in analytical chemistry, which is the art of detecting and quantifying molecules of human health import. TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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I had no expectation that this newly selected research area of tracking toxins from their anthropogenic sources through the global environment and into people would bring me six years later to Rachel Carson’s house and another four thereafter to Capitol Hill for a scientific briefing of members of Congress. Dioxins! For those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, this chemical name immediately brings up associations of toxic spills, carcinogenic byproducts contained in the defoliant Agent Orange (used extensively to destroy ground cover in the Vietnam War), and the environmental disasters of Seveso (Italy), Bhopal (India), Love Canal (New York), and Times Beach (Missouri). We’re taken back to images of sick children disfigured by chloracne and stricken by unexplained clusters of rare cancers. To most of my students, born in the 1990s and thereafter, the term dioxins does not carry much meaning anymore, if it brings up any emotional associations at all, other than a reflexive aversion to all things related to chemistry. But whether or not the students are aware, each of us has dioxins—and hundreds of other contaminants—circulating in our bloodstream every day. My team observes these loads on a daily basis in our analytical laboratory at the university. Dioxins existed in the natural environment long before humans ever learned to synthesize organochlorines but their sources and quantities in the environment have changed significantly over the last two centuries. In prehistoric times, 32

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this group of some 210 family members, referred to as congeners, would form by chance during volcanic eruptions and as a result of wildfires. With the beginning of the age of organochlorine synthesis, however, human activities soon would become the primary source of dioxins in the environment, in wildlife, in food animals, and ultimately, in people. Organochlorines, including DDT, were the miracle chemistry of yesteryear and inspired Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring. Organic chemists, that is, those concerned with understanding and synthesizing molecules containing carbon and hydrogen, discovered the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality of chlorine-carbon bonds. Take an ordinary string of carbon atoms, no matter whether linear or circular in shape, douse them in chlorine gas to pull off the naturally present hydrogens, substitute them with chlorine atoms and, voilà, a miracle compound arises. In the heyday of organochlorines, they were used for everything. From their start with a well-defined sixmembered carbon ring known as benzene, a major component of gasoline, to their use as a feedstock for pesticide synthesis, obtained by extracting camphene from pine wood. React these precursors with chlorine gas in ultraviolet light and you arrive at hexachlorobenzene and toxaphene—two powerful killing agents soon produced at the million-ton scale. The former, hexachlorobenzene, was widely applied to wipe out fungal diseases on wheat, while the latter, toxaphene, TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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a complex mixture of over 670 different chlorinated organics, was sprayed on cotton to fight pests, paving the way for long-term exposure of ourselves and our progeny through contaminated food and contaminated clothing. Upon release in agriculture, many more environmental pathways returned the chemistry right back to us. Both hexachlorobenzene and toxaphene turned out to be too good at what they do so well: Kill what’s alive. When the collateral damage became apparent—the indiscriminate harm inflicted upon benign insects as well as on higher animal species and people—they eventually were banned in the United States, and later worldwide under the 2001 Stockholm Convention. Whereas every organic compound christened by a bath in chlorine takes on imposing new qualities, no compound has been celebrated and abhorred more than DDT. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless pesticide carrying five chlorine atoms on its carbon skeleton. Sometimes it is billed as having saved more lives than any other synthetic compound. DDT was the miracle agent that could take out the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito and many other disease-carrying insects. First used extensively in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops, it garnered Paul Hermann Müller a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 for his discovery of DDT’s efficiency in killing insects. DDT was also heavily used in the United States—visitors to 34

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Coney Island, Rockaway, and many other New York beaches would on occasion be covered in the white powder when the pesticide was blasted from trucks for mosquito control in Manhattan and on Long Island. But DDT was much more powerful than anyone bargained for. With detrimental effects emerging from its indiscriminate killing power and its notorious capacity to bioaccumulate in living organisms and to biomagnify up the food chain, the pesticide soon smothered birdsong around the world and gained notoriety for thinning the eggshells of the American bald eagle, rendering the breeding attempts of America’s icon futile. Driven to the brink of extinction, declining populations of this and other cherished American birds caused public outrage, forcing the newly formed US Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to DDT use by declaring a ban in 1972. Other organochlorines of similar structure, function, and detriment soon took DDT’s place, only to be banned for causing similar, unwanted collateral damage: All uses of mirex, carrying 12 chlorine-carbon bonds, were canceled in 1977; heptachlor, featuring 7 carbon-chlorine bonds, saw most uses canceled by 1978; also in 1978, all uses were banned of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that featured up to 10 chlorine-carbon bonds and were used not as pesticides but as transformer fluids and in other electrical installations; all uses of endrin, carrying 6 chlorine substituents, were canceled in 1984; hexachlorobenzene, carrying 6 chlorine atoms, was canceled for use in 1985; aldrin and dieldrin, TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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carrying 6 chlorine atoms each, were banned for all uses by 1987; chlordane carrying 8 carbon-chlorine bonds followed in 1988; toxaphene, carrying anywhere between 5 to 12 chlorines, was restricted in use first in 1982 and banned completely in 1990. My path to Carson’s house, however, began with a chemical compound that had only three chlorines attached to the carbon skeleton of antimicrobial ingredients formulated into personal care products. It didn’t matter that the compound had relatively few chlorines; less bad is still bad. It was frustrating to see that humanity continued to produce polychlorinated organics, after such a long succession of spectacular failures. But there are always opportunities for making bad things worse, opportunities for further escalation. The voyage of organochlorine-pickled products into not only our homes, but more purposefully into our bodies, continued with the production of compounds designed to be directly applied on the human body. Hexachlorophene, an aromatic compound carrying six chlorine atoms, was synthesized to kill bacteria and soon was formulated into personal care products ranging from soaps and mouthwashes to vaginal rinsing solutions. Hundreds of consumer products were formulated with hexachlorophene, until scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed in the 1970s that hexachlorophene is a powerful neurotoxin, causing brain damage in rats and baby monkeys. In an unusually swift 36

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regulatory action, the chemical was removed from most personal care products. But hexachlorophene was just one of many other organochlorines manufactured for application on our bodies. In 1957, the chlorine bath christening of aromatic compounds had given rise to triclocarban, a compound containing two benzene rings carrying a total of three chlorine atoms. Billed as a powerful antimicrobial, triclocarban soon was added at concentrations of up to 5 percent to bar soaps and detergents used mostly in healthcare settings. Seven years later, in 1964, a carbon skeleton featuring a striking similarity to that of the carcinogenic dioxins, was selected as the building block for yet another antimicrobial for broad use in households and personal care, triclosan, with the name originating from the phonetic first syllables of trichlorinated sanitation (agent). Starting in the late 1950s with triclocarban, and then accelerating in the mid-1960s with triclosan, these antimicrobial agents initially were added to only a small number of personal care products. From the beginning, there had been concerns over both the safety and efficacy of triclosan and triclocarban, chemicals better known to consumers as the active ingredients of a popular gingivitis-fighting toothpaste and of antibacterial bar soaps. Triclocarban, along with other organochlorines, also was formulated into antimicrobial laundry detergents used in hospitals and clinics. In the 1960s and 1970s in both America and Europe, newborn babies were dying in the infant wards of hospitals TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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from unexplained causes. Epidemiological investigations found that the newborn victims had been swaddled in reusable cotton cloths and diapers laundered with detergents containing antimicrobial organochlorine compounds. Insufficient rinsing had left the textiles impregnated with a coat of poisonous chemistry that then went on to smother the newborns’ lives. Still, little changed and regulatory oversight failed spectacularly. Triclocarban and triclosan, along with other antimicrobials added to personal care products, are regulated in the United States under a monograph, issued by the FDA. The first draft of the FDA monograph from 1974 pointed out important shortcomings in both the safety profile and the documentation of the disinfecting efficacy of both triclosan and triclocarban. Regardless, the chemicals were formulated into a variety of hygiene products used primarily in medical clinics. In 1978, the FDA drafted an updated Tentative Final Monograph (TFM), again emphasizing a notable lack of evidence for both the safety and efficacy of the two organochlorine antimicrobials. But the 1978 Tentative Final Monograph did not become law, not for a long time anyway. In 1994, it was amended and watered down thanks to lobbying efforts, removing antimicrobial soaps from the drug category, and opening the floodgates for a rerun of the hexachlorophene experience. 38

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To kick-start the unhealthful frenzy, consumers were misinformed by aggressive ad campaigns that their lives and the lives of their loved ones could be protected and spared by buying antimicrobial or antibacterial personal care and consumer products. In an extraordinary proliferation of commercial products pushed by misleading ad campaigns, stores and supermarkets in America were soon filled with antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps, detergents, mouthwash, deodorants, school supplies, highlighters, shoes, shirts, socks, doormats, carpets, kitchen counters, pet collars, and more. Consumers bought into the scam. Soon American households became weaponized with antimicrobial and antibacterial personal care products, launching a nuclear war of sorts against bacteria, all bacteria, everywhere, anytime. Billions of dollars in revenue started to flow, creating a highly profitable industry of germophobia. All these products contain an organochlorine chemistry known to have taken the lives of newborns three decades earlier. By the 2000s, less than a decade after the FDA’s 1994 easing of the Tentative Final Monograph, the number of antimicrobial personal care products in the United States swelled from a few dozen to over 2,000. In short, human exposure now was both intentional and inevitable. For triclosan, there had been a modest, but continuous flow of studies suggesting both adverse environmental and unwanted human health outcomes. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in one of its earliest documents TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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published in the 1970s, had identified triclosan as a predioxin, a chemical that could serve as a precursor for the formation of super-toxic, cancer-causing dioxins. Triclosan, however, not only had the dangerous properties posed by other organochlorines but also featured yet another, possibly deadlier threat. Manufactured to suppress and kill the growth of microorganisms, the microbes exposed to the sanitation agent put up defenses. Soon they developed resistance not only to the antimicrobial itself, but also to up to half-a-dozen antibiotic drugs used in human medicine to save the limbs and lives of people suffering from pathogenic microbial infections. Careless use of antimicrobials had fostered the emergence of multi-drug-resistant pathogens, a major problem in human medicine claiming at least 23,000 lives each year in the United States alone. Through its antimicrobial and antibacterial campaign, the US personal care product industry had built a bridge for humanity to walk back from the twenty-first century of effective antibiotic cures into the medieval ages of infectious diseases and death without recourse. This knowledge of triclosan health threats was available at the time of my arrival at Johns Hopkins. Interestingly, however, similar information on the antimicrobial triclocarban was unavailable. We decided to investigate. My modest team at Hopkins, then consisting of only two graduate students and one postdoctoral scholar, set 40

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off to understand what happens to the two antimicrobials triclosan and triclocarban when millions of pounds of them are used each year in US households. Since no information was available on the environmental fate of triclocarban, common sense suggested that the work should begin at the drains of American households, the presumed disposal route of the thousands of antimicrobial personal care products that were carried into homes, applied to every household and human body surface, and then rinsed off during house cleaning, handwashing, and showering. From household sinks, the millions of pounds of organochlorines would have to disappear ultimately down the drains, carried away in domestic wastewater. To understand the antimicrobials, we had to follow the sewage. In 2002, my team ordered the first bottle of high-purity triclocarban for use as an analytical standard. The warning label printed on the chemical’s container took our team by surprise (all punctuation is exactly as shown on the compound’s original packaging container): Mutagen! Irritant! Cancer suspect agent! Target organ: nerves, heart! Target organ: liver, kidneys! Who in their right mind would bring this chemical into hospitals and homes to expose every man, woman, and TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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child and newborn in America to it? Particularly in the face of 4,800 years of data attesting to the safety and efficacy of regular soap? One issue with environmental pollution is that it often can go undetected. In the case of triclocarban, it took some forty-five years for its occurrence in the environment and its impact on people to finally become observable and known. The reason for this lack of knowledge on triclocarban, our team soon determined, was the difficulty of detecting the antimirobial. We developed and deployed a new tool unavailable to many researchers at the time. And with the newly gained ability to observe the antimicrobial compound, triclocarban, the chemical’s path through society and through our bodies suddenly came into focus. While triclosan had been investigated for over forty years for its environmental behavior, triclocarban up until then had been like a person without a place of residence, an email address, or social media account. No one knew where it went or what its actions were. This changed in 2004, when my team shared with the scientific community the new analytical tool for monitoring triclocarban. When I spoke in Carson’s backyard in 2007, our team had just discovered with our newly developed analytical methods that triclocarban and triclosan were detectable everywhere in Carson’s home state, Maryland, and the mid-Atlantic region. We found it to the north in the streams flowing through Baltimore, and to the south in treated wastewater discharged by the Washington, DC, treatment plant, as 42

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well as to the east in the Chesapeake Bay. We observed the chemical to break through the defenses of Maryland’s sewage treatment infrastructure to contaminate surface waters statewide. Application of our methods—using a single mass spectrometer or two mass analyzers sandwiched together— catapulted triclocarban from total obscurity to the top rank of pharmaceutical and personal care products known to pollute the environment. But the occurrence of the antimicrobials triclocarban and triclosan in the water environment was just the beginning. We had already predicted that triclocarban likely constitutes a nationwide contamination issue for water resources, but we had yet to demonstrate this conclusively or determine where it went from there. Soon additional studies by our team and fellow scientists established triclocarban and triclosan as among the top ten pollutants in US drinking water resources and in municipal sewage sludge produced in US wastewater treatment plants, ranking in concentrations and detection frequency ahead of many antibiotics, prescription drugs, and steroidal hormones. The Tentative Final Monograph by the FDA, was eventually finalized in 2017, becoming effective on December 20, 2018, four decades after the release of the 1978 draft TFM. What we learned from this work is that we, the scientific community, have a tendency to look only in likely places, under the lamppost, ignoring threats that are difficult to detect. TRACING RACHEL CARSON’S PATH

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One may ask, could this happen again? The answer is a resounding yes. We will explore further examples, when turning to the Teflon chemistry of organofluorines and the microplastics in your lungs. But let us first see through and finish the story of organochlorines, a story whose opening chapters came from Carson’s pen. Close to a decade after Carson’s death from cancer in 1964, and 46 years after the 1972 ban of hexachlorophene because of safety concerns, the replacement chemistry of trichlorinated aromatic compounds was banned for similar detrimental impacts on human health and the environment. It is astonishing how far the persistent ingredients of consumer products we use on a daily basis can travel and how long they can endure in the environment. In the Chesapeake Bay and in Jamaica Bay near John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, we found in the muck of sediment deposited decades earlier the toxic ingredients of personal care products used by prior generations. To this day the chemicals are still sitting there, still waiting to be degraded. And in the three ounces of space water that NASA retrieved for us from outer space from the International Space Station, we also detected the antimicrobials. They now are everywhere—contaminating the living spaces of humans here on planet Earth and even in outer space. And whereas NASA allowed us to mention antimicrobials but kept confidential the exposure profiles of its flight crew to protect the astronauts’ right to privacy, we had plenty of data to report to decision makers of the state of Maryland 44

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and the nation. In February 2011, I climbed the stairs of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, to brief members of Congress, their staff, and the public on the fate and impact of the organochlorines contained in over 2,000 personal care products sold in the United States. For most of the years it took me to compile the research findings, I had felt less like a research scientist and more like a science historian, retracing and documenting discoveries and hypotheses generated half a century earlier by a courageous Rachel Carson.

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7 REGRETTABLE SUBSTITUTIONS

We humans often take great risks for financial gain, even when we know, at least intuitively, that it’s a bad idea. I learned that lesson in the 1980s when working for a large medical supplies company in a warehouse-sized manufacturing plant. The steel doors of the giant sterilization chamber swung open, and I donned my oxygen mask to retrieve with a forklift the wooden pallets loaded with medical supplies in boxes upon boxes made from cardboard that, still moist from the steamy gas bath, gave off a musky, somewhat sweet odor. I had a hunch that this job, while well paid, probably was not a healthy long-term occupation. In the cardboard boxes were plastic syringes packed in plastic blister packs. My job was to shuttle the pallets of medical syringes through a sterilization cycle within a metal box the size of a cargo container used on trucks and container ships. Only later did I come to understand that the sweet smell was ethylene oxide, off-gassing from the cardboard—a colorless, flammable, and explosive gas known to induce

mutations and cancer in humans. It also historically has found uses in thermobaric weapons, a high-temperature explosive featuring blast waves much longer than those of conventional munitions. This was a weaponry killing at the microscale and at the macroscale, similar to the organochlorine chemistry of the antimicrobial compounds, hexachlorophene, triclosan, and triclocarban, that had harmed not only their intended targets, microbial pathogens, but also wildlife and babies. Use of organochlorines peaked between the 1940s and 1960s, and a reasonable expectation of the public was that mistakes from the past would not be repeated. But that’s not how history unfolded, as we learned from the continued uses of polychlorinated antimicrobials from the 1960s through the 2000s, and as we entered the age of flame retardation with bromine chemistry. There is considerable beauty in how the elements that shape our environment can be organized in a simple periodic table. Similar to people, elements do not have endless random characteristics. Natural philosophy teaches: Natura non facit saltus, Nature doesn’t make jumps. One may reasonably expect that, after our disastrous relationship and experience with organochlorines from the 1940s through the 1960s and beyond, chemists should have exercised insight and caution when designing new chemical structures for mass-produced commodities. Tragically, far from it. An anonymous quote, predating Albert Einstein yet often attributed to him, states: “The difference between genius 48

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and stupidity is that the former is limited, whereas the latter is not.” What could possibly be the next big mistake humanity would inflict upon the environment and upon itself when creating new chemicals? The answer of course is to choose from the periodic table the element most similar to chlorine and then expect significantly better results when pumping the resultant synthetic chemistry into our homes and bodies. Looking at the periodic table that organizes elements by relatedness and character traits, chlorine and bromine belong to the same elemental group, known as the halogens, and bromine is chlorine’s next of kin. The halogens are a restless bunch, as they are just one step away from perfect satisfaction. This perfection is attained when an element has satiated its desire to fill up its outer valence shell with electrons orbiting the nucleus—imagine an opera house that could be advertised as sold out if only that last vacant seat would be filled. The elements to the right of the halogens in Group 18 of the periodic chart have accomplished this feat and are referred to as the noble gases. These elements are about as docile as they come, being essentially nonreactive and content as solitaire atoms, without the need to reach out to one another or to representatives of other groups of elements; they simply have no passions, no burning desires to quench; they are abstinent loners of perfect content.

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Readers may be familiar with some of these “noble gases” from aeronautical history and from light sources. Following the 1937 explosion of the large airship Zeppelin Hindenburg, which gained buoyancy in the air by a fill of highly combustible hydrogen gas, future dirigibles used helium, an inert and therefore stable element, which made it a safer replacement. Likewise, neon, argon, and xenon are known for their common and safe uses in incandescent and fluorescent light sources. Aspiring to reach the electronic status of nobility of the noble gases, every atom in the periodic table seeks to fill its onion-like electron shells that, from the inside out, accommodate an increasing number of electrons until reaching perfection in the seating arrangement of a full house of electrons. Imagine you are the element missing just one single additional electron to go from longing and despair to blissful nirvana. That’s how halogens feel and act. They have a need to reach out to and hold onto another molecule, ideally one exerting a lesser grip on its orbiting electrons. After suffering a severe hangover from overindulging in chlorine-carbon chemistry, humanity moved on to chlorine’s big brother, bromine. The bromine industry was itching to find new markets after ethylene bromine, long used in leaded gasoline as a fuel additive, had been phased out of automotive fuels along with the toxic heavy metal lead; this eliminated about three-quarters of the world market of bromine use. From a toxicological vantage point, picking up bromine as a 50

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replacement for chlorine was a blatantly bad choice. Similar to chlorine, the formation of bonds between organic carbon and bromine is rare in Nature and the human body does not produce polybrominated compounds, or carbon skeletons carrying more than one bromine atom. The human body can be hurt if the mostly unfamiliar chemistry of organochlorines and organobromines infiltrates our internal machinery, interfering with a large number of life-critical functions, including the development of an embryo to a baby, the development of sexual organs reproductive maturity, and maintenance of a healthy body weight and metabolism. Like a fine-tuned engine into which sand is poured, the essential pathways of metabolism, cellular communication, cell division, and cellular differentiation predictably are affected and often grind to a halt when exposed to persistent, foreign organochlorine and organobromine chemistry. But what the periodic table foretells, humanity seems insistent upon experiencing, by fully immersing people, animals, and plants in a broth of flame retardants. These resemble our bodies’ hormones so much, that they are mistaken as bodily messengers, now taking on an unintended secondary role of reprogramming our physiology and health profile. Today, we are left to simmer in this predictably harmful stew, with the realization finally setting in among the broader public and political decision makers that this concoction is causing harm to us, our children and future generations. After having struck out with the organochlorines for several decades starting in the 1940s, humanity began the REGRETTABLE SUBSTITUTIONS

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mass production of organobromines for flame retardation in the 1970s. Organobromines (hydrocarbons divorcing one or more of their hydrogen atoms to take on more exotic and temperamental bromine companions) were billed as the godsent gift to help us overcome the dangers posed by a cultural phenomenon that had large sections of the human population inhale over two hundred toxicants and carcinogens, for recreational purposes, from the early morning hours until our stressed bodies were laid to rest for the night: tobacco smoking. In addition to representing a formidable way to inflict disease and death upon the human body, this harmful addictive behavior of inhaling toxic smoke also posed a further danger of setting ablaze not only the tobacco itself, but also the surrounding environment, living spaces, and its occupants. By taking up the smoking habit, we were constantly at risk of incinerating ourselves, while also creating a toxic microclimate in our homes analogous to the poisoning of the global atmosphere with too many heat-trapping gases. The threat of fire and of losing one’s livelihood, due to negligence, burning cigarette butts tossed out of automobiles and flung from nicotine-stained fingers onto the pavement, presented a welcome opening for organobromines to enter into our homes and bodies. Bromines and organobromines have the capacity to extinguish fires by snatching up chemical radicals that are the hallmark of combustion chain reactions, self-sustaining fires burning at high heat. Responding to the need for flame retardants, whether real or perceived, organobromines soon found their way 52

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into many consumer products—not just airplanes where they are actually needed to prevent electrical fires and the potential crashing of planes, but also objects that seldom catch or cause fire, and thus do not warrant extensive flame retardation. It rapidly became accepted that furniture, bedding, and sleepwear required fire retardation in an age where everyone lit up. Organobromines soon would become one of the most highly produced chemicals formulated into consumer products around the world. We are bathing in them to this very day. Look around and imagine these invisible agents lurking in every corner of your life, oozing out of the carpet below you, from the seat cushion you’re resting on, and from the foam mattress you lay your newborn baby upon to have it inhale the toxic, hormone-rattling fumes for seventeen hours each day. As mass production accelerated, exceeding 100 million pounds annually, the predictable adverse environmental and human health effects soon began to manifest themselves. However, similar to the failed management of the observed harm done by organochlorines to humans, the production of organobromines would not cease. Instead, one failed organobromine compound would again simply be replaced by another one of almost identical structure, following the playbook of the failed organochlorine story. And similar to the organochlorines, organobromines were soon implicated in an array of adverse health outcomes, including, once again, a disruption of the human hormonal balance, a toxic effect referred to as endocrine disruption. REGRETTABLE SUBSTITUTIONS

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One scientist, Arlene Blum, who in 1977 discovered the adverse outcomes of an early organobromine, Tris, or tris(2,3dibromopropyl) phosphate, succeeded in promptly getting the responsible chemical removed from children’s sleepwear in California in the late 1970s. Thereafter, Blum went off to become a famous mountaineer, leading the first American expedition to successfully ascend Annapurna, a 26,545 feet (8,091 m) tall mountain in the Himalayas. But after returning to the hills of Berkeley in the 1990s, the trailblazer discovered that the chemical she once helped to ban from children’s sleepwear was now back in California, formulated into couches and a whole new array of baby products. And the production of brominated flame retardants continued to grow along with the total mass of all fire retardants used globally, a quantity now estimated to exceed five billion pounds per annum. California has a special relationship with fire. With its beautiful forests that cover the magnificent landscape from the Sierra to the coastline, California is especially vulnerable to wildfires. Adding to the threat is a Mediterranean climate that makes for sunny summers of little to no precipitation, thereby raising the seasonal risk of uncontrollable wildfires considerably. California reacted to the threat of fire particularly diligently by making the addition of flame retardants a state requirement for many consumer products. These state laws, written with the help of the bromine industry, insured the continued and accelerating production of brominated flame retardants. 54

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By the 2000s, the best way to demonstrate and assess human exposure to brominated flame retardants was to analyze house dust and blood from a resident of a Californian home, any Californian, to find levels of brominated flame retardants two times higher than those of other Americans residing in less fire-retarded regions of the nation, and organobromine levels in house dust up to two hundred times higher than those in Europe. Was there anything remaining in the death basket of halogen chemistry? To think that this is as bad as it gets would be completely understandable—and unfortunately also naïve. With the body count of casualties from the overuse of persistent organochlorine and organobromine chemistry slowly disappearing in the rearview mirror, humanity embarked on the last remaining stage of this journey into persistent organohalogens. Today is the time to immerse humanity in organofluorines and for consumers to demand and receive the miracle chemistry they deserve, in the age of Teflon. While nothing sticks to Teflon, the Teflon fluorocarbon chemistry became permanently attached to humans. This is because the fluorine-carbon bond is among the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. There are no microorganisms known that can successfully pry from a carbon atom the multiple fluorines holding on with an iron-clad handshake. This chemistry created indestructible waste—eternal pollution. REGRETTABLE SUBSTITUTIONS

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We seem to want the chemistry of organofluorines in our shoes and on our shirts, in contact with our food and implanted and ingested into our bodies. We want this chemistry that repels both water and oil to keep us and our living spaces clean, ever so superficially clean. And once we have laid this magic protective coat upon all of our living spaces’ surfaces, our bodies become contaminated forever with the precursors needed to make the polyfluorinated consumer products we demand, such as pizza boxes, fast food packaging, non-iron shirts, membrane-equipped shoes, and other indoor and outdoor gear.

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8 FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

While growing up in Braunschweig, tobacco and beer were constant environmental factors. I still remember the distinct smell of a freshly lit cigarette, one of the forty or fifty my father would smoke each day. Back then, everyone smoked. Even doctors. And beer was deemed an essential nutritional staple, served around the clock in the cafeterias of the automobile manufacturing plants that dominate employment in the region to this day. But work, smoke, and drink at the VW assembly line would come later. First, there were acorns to be collected on my grandfather’s forest ranger station, and cherries to be picked in the town’s expansive orchards before graduating next, at the age of fifteen, to recurring summer jobs in construction and commercial painting. From the back seat of a twin cab VW pickup truck, I watched workers drink and smoke on the Autobahn en route to our work site, comfortably getting to their half-gallon mark of beer by the 9:00 a.m. morning break.

We typically started work by putting up steel scaffolding alongside low-income high-rises on the outskirts of our state’s capital city, hauling the steel frames from the truck across concrete pavers to the buildings, then scrubbing and painting the endless ugly surfaces, once the structures were all wrapped up in a corset of steel weighed down by heavy wooden planks. These wooden boards, on occasion, would turn into deadly projectiles during construction, when released involuntarily from unmotivated, intoxicated hands high up in the sky. I preferred sandblasting to scrubbing, dumping 100-pound bags into a giant funnel at shoulder height, while the truck driver, in full protective suit, with a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) would sweep the walls with the hazardous jet—looking like an alien from outer space who had arrived on Earth to eradicate mankind and its despicable creations. Yes, sandblasting was better than hand scrubbing. But only as long as the wind blew favorably to carry away the dust from where I was standing without protective gear, not even a mask, and not having the slightest clue about environmental safety and the dangers posed by quartz sand busted into smithereens upon impact with the walls confining Germany’s poor. Alcohol and smoking went hand in hand in those days. The black-haired, red-faced, disabled painter with a skull made half of steel once had taken a drunken tumble from the fifth level of the scaffolding down to the ground— 58

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and, miraculously, had survived. Perpetually cheerless, he preferred to smoke cigarettes of the brand Lord Extra. I would fetch them along with additional bottles of beer during the daily breaks, to keep up with work-site demand. No identification card or proof of drinking age was needed, no questions were asked. Hours, days, and weeks dragged on like molasses. On the way back from the state capital city, headwinds would slow the underpowered, overloaded VW to a crawl on the Autobahn. Advertised to the world under the banner “Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger” (free passage for free citizens)—the Autobahn— this boon to the affluent seemed to have been designed for a species utterly different from pathetic us, riding the van home, to a terminal destination of more smoke and beer, and of watching other people live on TV screens until the lights went out. Upon return to the work site, the new day would often start by assessing the damage and theft of our gear and machinery during the previous night, of tools high up in the air suspended from the scaffolding, of building materials chained to immobile objects, and of other miscellaneous assets locked away in the trailer, which now featured fresh graffiti that had sprouted in the dark during the predictable overnight assault. With this backdrop of poverty, substance use, and hopelessness, Lord Extra’s omnipresent, lavish commercials were particularly ironic, featuring successful, middle-aged men wearing sharp, white suits quite different than the FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

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paint-speckled ones covering our tired bodies. These fantasy people navigated white yachts over crystal-clear waters with confidence and cunning, while being admired and desired from the bow by sunbathing female companions of surreal beauty. Accepting illusion for possibility gives comfort. But only for so long. Curiously, it was Big Tobacco money, paid as a penalty to the Maryland state government, that allowed our research team to study the pollution caused by the emerging organofluorine chemistry. Pollution that was embedded in the water- and oil-repelling membranes found in non-iron shirts, stainresistant textiles, super-smooth dental floss, hiking boots, jackets, sportswear, tents, and many more household and consumer products. At Hopkins, our team studying organofluorine exposures consisted of three faculty members: a former assistant administrator for toxic substances of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), turned professor of children’s environmental health; a professor of gynecology and obstetrics; and myself. We wanted to learn more about human fetal exposure to carcinogens, and we got financial backing from the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund. Eager to begin, we did not anticipate what we had got ourselves into, how long this scientific journey would continue, or where it would lead. Polyfluorinated compounds carry at least two fluorine atoms on their carbon skeletons. Replacement of all hydrogen60

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carbon bonds with fluorine-carbon bonds results in what’s called perfluorinated or fully fluorinated compounds. The most well-known perfluorinated compound is Teflon. One may think of it as the generic packaging plastic now made essentially completely indestructible to living organisms by having replaced each and every carbon-hydrogen bond with an iron-clad handshake between carbon and fluorine. In the beginning, our vision of the project was simply to study whether babies are exposed to the building blocks of Teflon chemistry and whether the uptake and potential accumulation of these compounds by pregnant women would cause harmful exposures and health effects in the fetus developing in the womb. A huge challenge in answering these types of questions is that it’s not ethically or morally justifiable to willfully expose people in controlled experiments to potentially harmful substances; this is particularly true for vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and, more importantly, for fetuses, babies, and children that cannot speak on their own behalf. We therefore elected as our experimental design an observational study—a hospital-based, cross-sectional, epidemiological study. The idea was to get a sense of the overall spectrum of exposures in the entire population of babies born at the hospital. We also wanted to see whether those who had an above-average level of contamination showed different health outcomes than population segments with more moderate or below-average exposure to organofluorines. FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

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After drafting detailed study design protocols and being given permission to move forward, three doctoral student volunteers took turns in collecting samples twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for several months. On standby with cell phones nearby, they would be awakened in the middle of the night and rush to the nearby Baltimore hospital whenever a birth occurred. We knew it would take months to gather enough samples. And while immersing myself in the study of public health at work, I allowed my children to be poisoned by a neurotoxin at home. To conserve energy in our Victorian home, my wife and I had hired contractors to replace all the single-pane windows with low emissivity, double-pane windows. Wary of the presence of lead paint in the old house that dated back to 1899, I had instructed the contractor not to use any electric grinders and instead to smooth out the wood surfaces by scraping, a process I was intimately familiar with from my summer jobs on construction sites during my high school and college years. But my cumbersome request went unheeded and when I returned home late one day, the whole house, porch, and garden soil was covered in a white dust of finely ground paint. My wife and I swept the floors, vacuumed, and wetwiped all surfaces as best as we could to contain the hazard of lead, a powerful neurotoxin formulated into paint until its ban from such uses in 1978 in the United States. We thought we had succeeded but mandatory blood testing soon revealed that our youngest daughter had been poisoned by lead to a level three times that considered acceptable in children. A 62

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mandatory home inspection was ordered, and we again went on a now even more thorough cleaning campaign to remove the hazard from our home. We also stopped eating vegetables grown in our garden. Within a year, the blood lead level of our youngest daughter declined. Lead is a metal and cannot be destroyed. The Teflon precursor chemistry I was studying at work had similar unwanted characteristics, meaning that, short of incineration, it is destined to persist with little to no transformation occurring in the environment. Back at work, our study was nearing the end of the sample collection period. Over the course of four months, there were just over six hundred births at the hospital. Upon postpartum delivery of the placenta, about 15–30 minutes after birth, nurses would collect the organ, considered a throwaway material then. With a syringe, the hospital nurses would draw cord blood from the side of the placenta that had provided nourishment for the baby. Our students arriving at the hospital would take custody of the cord blood samples, carry them across the street to our laboratories, and then split the blood volume into different vials and process the whole blood into blood serum. The students breathed a sigh of relief when we terminated the sample collection after having collected specimens from about three hundred study participants. The analysis of the samples took years and is ongoing to this day. Our efforts were boosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, which had committed time and resources to collaborate with us to FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

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help determine the babies’ chemical inventory of pollutants detectable at birth. In order to protect the identity of study participants, the hospital staff coded the individuals with a random identifier and then provided to our team vital birth statistics, such as birth weight, length, and head circumference, the last representing an indirect measure of the size of the central nervous system, the baby’s brain. We compiled the data in a master database to enable a statistical analysis of the results. Such observational studies are complex and difficult to analyze because the researchers have no control over the time point, duration, and level of exposure of the study subjects, in this case, the mothers and their babies. Since we live in a complex soup of chemicals, none of the study subjects were exposed to fluorinated chemicals only. Co-exposure to metals and organochlorines and organobromines was essentially a given. Some mothers smoked during pregnancy while others did not. Some filled out the health questionnaires truthfully, while others may have forgotten or not reported certain behaviors. With habits like smoking, researchers often can get a more robust assessment of actual behavior and habit by measuring the characteristic human metabolites of behaviorrelated exposures. For tobacco consumption, which is known to be harmful and for which we had to account in our study on the effects of polyfluorinated compounds, we measured the human metabolite cotinine as a proxy to nicotine intake from smoking. 64

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Each of these co-exposures to chemicals other than our perfluorinated targets, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA), made our work more complicated. Factors one cannot control for but that nevertheless may have an impact on the outcome of a study are called confounders—they are variables lurking in the background. We found a lot of these and used statistical methods and models to account for the uncertainty injected by them. From an idea hatched in 2003 to a draft of our first findings ready in 2007, we were excited when the journal Environmental Health Perspectives wanted to publish our work. But we began to wonder: How troublesome would the information we collected be for the multi-billion-dollar industry that manufactured the polyfluorinated chemicals we had hunted for and found in undesirable places? What would the Teflon industry’s reaction be? We spoke to many colleagues, to lawyers, and to representatives from various entities on how best to proceed with communicating and defending the obtained data. Four years earlier, in 2003, the precursor compound PFOS, used by many chemical companies to make consumer products that repel oil and water, had been found to induce developmental and reproductive effects in experiments with rats and mice. This included reduced birth weight, decreased gestational length, structural defects, developmental delays, and increased neonatal mortality. Similarly, rodent studies on PFOA exposure, published in 2004, also reported FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

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developmental toxicity, including pregnancy loss, reduced fetal weight, reduced postnatal survival, and delays in postnatal growth and development in offspring. These were serious risks that, if applicable to humans, could trigger regulations to stop the production of such chemicals, thereby endangering a highly lucrative and rapidly growing segment of the chemical synthesis market. Our study results showed that babies are indeed exposed during pregnancy to both PFOS and PFOA contaminants. This exposure must have occurred by transferring the pollutants from the mother to the developing fetus. After correcting for confounding factors, our results showed an inverse relationship between the amount of perfluorinated chemistry present in the newborns and their birth weight, ponderal index (a measure of body mass at birth), and head circumference. In other words, as the amount of chemicals in babies went up, their health statistics deteriorated. Babies with smaller heads have less space available for their central nervous system. Thus, the chemicals’ presence was correlated with a decrease in the size of the babies’ brains. As the publication date neared, we braced ourselves for impact. Our study was published in July 2007. We were prepared to enter an extended nerve-racking time period between the initial disclosure of our data and an eventual duplication of the study and, hopefully, a confirmation of our findings by other research groups. But in the end, our

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concerns about potentially being attacked by the multibillion-dollar fluorochemical industry faded quickly. Unbeknownst to our team, another research group from Europe had also studied the impact of perfluorinated compounds on the development of the human fetus. This group had used similar methods and their findings corroborated the major outcomes of our work. The serendipitous co-discovery helped to shield both of our teams from scientific skepticism. Today, some twelve years later, the harmful impact of early exposure of the human fetus to perfluorinated chemicals is widely acknowledged and accepted. We just have not applied this knowledge to the next generation of chemicals we produce and use. Starting in the 2000s, the production of PFOA and PFOS was slowed or completely discontinued in the United States. In 2016, the US EPA issued a Lifetime Health Advisory (LHA) for PFOS and PFOA of 70 nanograms per liter in drinking water. That is an incredibly low level of pollution we are concerned about here. The unit of ng/L is equivalent to parts per trillion (ppt), roughly the concentration caused by dissolving a single grain of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool. The PFOS and PFOA that were released into the environment beginning in the 1940s will stay in the environment for eons. Microorganisms cannot degrade it effectively and neither can the human body. Everyone will be exposed to this chemistry—for as long as the chemicals keep cycling through the global environment. Estimates for

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this time frame vary from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of years. And the chapter humanity is writing today on organofluorine chemistry is far from over. While the production of PFOA has decreased in the United States, other nations, including China, India, and Russia, have not only picked up the slack but also increased the overall global output. Meanwhile, the US industry and government regulators predictably have reverted to the tried and proven strategy of regrettable substitutions. PFOA and PFOS contained eight carbon atoms decorated with fluorine. The chemical industry now is trying to convince toxicologists and the entities overseeing chemical safety in the United States that the problem can be solved by moving from precursors featuring 8-carbon atoms to shorter-chain ones that have six carbons or four carbons. But will the babies be safe if bombarded with a chemistry of slightly smaller caliber than used previously? And the underlying issue of the nearly indestructible nature of perfluorinated organic chemistry remains completely unaddressed in these proposals and actions. At the same time, the number of per- and polyfluorinated compounds known to be present in the environment has increased dramatically. Today this chemical arsenal lacking an end-of-life strategy is referred to as perfluorinated or polyfluorinated alkyl substances, PFAS for short. Some 3,000 PFAS compounds have been discovered already as emerging pollutants and 68

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new ones are added every year, deepening the chemical soup we are immersed in, from conception, to swimming in a small amniotic sac, to getting released upon birth into the bigger bubble of planet Earth. For us, the exposed, the country of origin of global PFAS pollutants is utterly irrelevant. No matter where these chemicals are manufactured, they will travel, become dispersed and find their way to even the most remote places on this planet, such as the polar regions or animals in the deep sea. We have the data to prove it. So human exposure around the globe is inevitable and comes with an eternal warranty for this and any number of future generations. So what do we do about it? The samples of baby blood taken from the placenta have taught us much about the status of global environmental pollution and the toll it takes on the most vulnerable humans, the developing fetus, and newborns. What does this senseless potpourri of harmful chemicals in babies include? Methyl mercury from coal-fired power plants, lead from lead paint and leaded gasoline, long-banned legacy pesticides like chlordane and DDT, as well as newer ones like permethrin from agricultural operations, endocrinedisrupting and carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) previously used as transformer fluids, polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants that compete with the neonatal thyroid hormone in guiding the development of newborns’ bodies, and perfluorinated compounds that are known to impact reproductive health and early development, FROM TOBACCO TO TEFLON BABIES

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and that have been linked to cancer in some studies on humans, as well as trichlorinated antimicrobials that have been linked to a variety of health outcomes such as endocrine disruption, food allergies, osteoporosis, and immune disorders. Over twenty publications prepared by our team document the toxic brew we already harbor in our bodies at birth, this chemical stew that pickles our existence on our journey from the amniotic sac into the Earth’s biosphere. Whereas the three students who collected the cord blood have moved on to become researchers at Hopkins and Columbia University and at a European National Risk Assessment Institute, the samples they collected are still in the freezer, preserved at ‒110 degrees Fahrenheit, 80 degrees Celsius below the freezing point of water. With every advance in toxicology and the analytical sciences, we have the opportunity to learn more about the composition of the chemical environment within us and the effects it exerts on our bodies, behavior, feelings, and actions. It is likely that in the future, we will return to the freezers to retrieve archived cord blood samples and analyze them for the occurrence and concentrations of synthetic pollutants that have yet to be discovered in the future but to which we are already being exposed today—an avoidable exposure we elect to endure rather than learning from past mistakes and designing and using safer, more sustainable chemicals and consumer products.

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9 ­YESTERDAY’S FUEL ­BECOMES TODAY’S ­FORGETFULNESS

Truly ironic, in today’s globally interconnected world most of the fresh seafood delivered and consumed in the coastal cities of the western United States makes a pit stop in the desert, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to be exact, not much more than a stone’s throw from my laboratory at Arizona State University. In 2012, on a hot summer’s day, a long-time food inspector came to visit me, recounting an implausible story and eager to do some good. He told me that for years he had been responsible for inspecting frozen fish in transit through Phoenix, until one day he became so ill he could not find his way home. On that day, he got in his car and headed away from his home, inexplicably, toward the Pacific Ocean, the source of much of the seafood he retrieved and screened as part of his job. Barreling down Interstate 10 past Buckeye, Arizona, he

was well on his way to the California border before finally stopping, regaining his bearings, and turning around to head back to his Phoenix home. He realized he couldn’t think clearly. He had read about the work we were conducting at Arizona State University on environmental safety, and he came to my lab to support our study on antibiotic residues in fish and shellfish sold in stores across the western United States. After a tour of our lab, he told his story to me and one of my students. His job as a food inspector was to intercept seafood shipments, take a sample and prep it for subsequent analysis in a government-certified lab to determine if there were biological or chemical contaminants. “This was perfectly fine food, why let the sizable leftovers go to waste?” he recounted, smiling regretfully. So he took home the opened packages and ate the fish. A lot of it. Almost daily. Barbecued swordfish and albacore tuna were his favorite dinner treats. After his disoriented drive along I-10, his doctor helped him figure out what was happening. With blood samples and a set of questions—“Where do you work? What do you eat?”—the physician was able to piece things together. Swordfish and tuna are among the top predatory fish species in the world’s oceans crisscrossing at depth the vast blue expanses and feeding ferociously for years. Some live to be a decade or two before ending up in giant commercial fishing boats and, ultimately, packaged into fillets, turn into meals to feed the hungry human population. 72

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Living atop of the food chain has its risks, as our food inspector can attest. The story starts at the bottom of the chain: Air pollutants rain down from the skies to join the toxins already released into and swimming in the deep, blue seawater. Aquatic life, like countless little vacuum cleaners, concentrate the toxins and then store them in their body fat. Small creatures get consumed by bigger ones, with the fatsoluble, persistent toxicants always clinging on and increasing in concentration each step along the way in a process termed biomagnification. By the time these environmental toxins—made up of innocuous carbon atoms decorated with poisonous appendices such as halogens and heavy metals— reach the top of the food chain, their concentrations in fat tissue often are millions of times greater than what is found in open seawater. Our food inspector had eaten and bioaccumulated a smorgasbord of toxins biomagnified in this fashion. From the literature on seafood contamination, we know he had been exposed to cancer-causing dioxins made in the heyday of Agent Orange production during the Vietnam War; to endocrine-disrupting transformer fluids known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were banned in the United States in the late 1970s; and to polybrominated fire retardants that tend to co-mingle with dozens of other human-made toxins. The one chemical among these causing the inspector’s forgetfulness and sensory numbness, his doctor speculated, was a derivative of a metal, methylmercury—a powerful neurotoxin. FUELING FORGETFULNESS

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Pumped into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, mercury gets distributed by wind around the planet. When precipitating in rain, it is returned to soils and water, where microorganisms convert the metal into methylmercury, a neurotoxic organometallic compound. This globe-trotting poison is known to bioaccumulate in living tissue and to biomagnify up the food chain to reach dangerously high levels in top predators and particularly in swordfish. It then gets consumed by millions and millions of predatory humans, including our food inspector. Once diagnosed with mercury poisoning, he recovered reasonably well through chelation therapy, a treatment involving intravenous administration and long-term ingestion of a multi-tentacled chemical that binds the toxic organometal efficiently, rendering it into a form that is easy to flush from the human body in urine. After our new friend had left, my student and I marveled over the tragic irony of his experience: A food inspector was poisoned by poisoned food, made poisonous by society’s need for energy that was satisfied by burning cheap but dirty coal.

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10 THE HIGH PRICE OF MEAT

As a growing boy, there never seemed to be as much meat in my childhood home as I wanted to eat. But at my grandfather’s house that was never a problem. My grandfather and my uncle both were forest rangers with their stations located north of the Lüneburger Heide, a barren region of heath and brushland in Germany, which, in the fall, explodes into a mauve spectacle of blooming heather flowers interspersed with juniper bushes and pine trees. Visiting them meant feasting on venison, pheasant, and, best of all, wild boar. My grandmother was a spectacular cook. Some of her recipes were handed down to my mother, including Gulasch, a German stew of slow-cooked meat, one of my favorite dishes to this day, and predating my discovery of the existence of spices other than salt and pepper. In my grandmother’s kitchen, she may have made Gulasch from venison and wild boar. My mother prepared it from beef. That was just fine with me. It always was delicious! In a family of forest rangers, contemplating a meatless diet would be preposterous—akin to forbidding a fisherman

to eat his catch, or a food inspector to consume packages of seafood opened for sampling. As a biologist, I look at the human body, and see an animal that is designed to eat everything. Our jaws, our teeth, the length of our gut, and the build of our body all betray the physiology of a carnivorous omnivore, destined to hunt and gather; we are predators by design. But meat consumption has turned problematic— how problematic, I would explore in years to come in my first academic job at Johns Hopkins. In my high school years, my parents would go grocery shopping at the weekend, and I remember what played out thereafter with shame. We would stay in bed until the afternoon. Then, my brother, my sister, and I would emerge from our late slumber along with our occasional sleepover companions. We would take turns visiting the refrigerator, devouring cold cuts and sausages first. By late afternoon, the raids would render the refrigerator void of groceries purchased for the coming week. Short of less desirable staples, just about everything else vanished within hours. This would play out weekend after weekend, until we, the hungry brood, finally moved out of the house. Fast forward to the early 1990s. Now living in the United States and having just begun a graduate program in environmental engineering in Minneapolis, I didn’t have a lot of money. My future wife and I together were living off less than $10,000 a year, my meager student stipend made possible by research grants and start-up funds awarded to my faculty advisor. With my German girlfriend and future wife 76

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being ineligible to work for pay, the two of us subsisted below the official government threshold for poverty in the United States. When the weekend came, we would mount our bikes with two well-traveled expedition backpacks strapped to our shoulders, and head to the nearest supermarket to stock up for the week. In the dead of winter, these shopping trips would turn into bus rides or hikes at a negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit through ice and snow to our modest student housing. We did not need much to live, but when we went grocery shopping, there was no holding back. That’s where most of our income went. Food, including meat and dairy products, was important. Like most academics, I worked hard to cobble together a livelihood to keep my family going. In the early stages of one’s academic career, landing big sponsored research projects is especially challenging. But then, in 2005, another junior colleague of mine and I got an unexpected, lucky break. The Pew Charitable Trust was ready to write a check for several million dollars for US researchers to investigate the costs to human health and the environment of putting meat on American dinner tables. Agriculture, invented 8,000 years bc, when the world population stood at a meager five million people, had transformed humanity. The project sought to determine how recent changes in agriculture were transforming our planet. The problem was that there were no takers for this research topic, despite the appeal of the money. One by one, THE HIGH PRICE OF MEAT

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major land-grant universities with big agricultural research and extension programs were declining the research offer. It was risky money, money too expensive to take. Investigating and then publishing the impact on the environment and on American public health of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and industrial farm animal production (IFAP) looked to be equivalent to professional and institutional suicide. Individual researchers would risk becoming outcasts in their research community, and their home institutions were dependent on research dollars from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and from industry. Accepting a few million dollars for a controversial study could mean losing tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to these institutions annually from these two established funding sources. But Johns Hopkins University is a private university and lacked a large agricultural program. It does not depend on USDA funding. Hopkins accepted the check, and we embraced the opportunity. Studying American agricultural practices was an eyeopening experience. Family farms, like the one I had biked to in Germany on weekday evenings to bring home a reusable metal can full of fresh milk straight from the udder of a dairy cow, were gone. They had been replaced with industrialized efficiency to mercilessly extract short-term gains at significant costs to ecosystem integrity and human health. Farmers, the stewards of agricultural land which had been carefully cultivated and handed down from generation to 78

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generation, had surrendered control over their irreplaceable resource. Agriculture now was both industrialized and integrated. Industrialized in the sense that the human- and animal-welfare dimensions of living on a farm now largely were being ignored for the benefit of increasing short-term yields and profits for a few people. Integrated in the sense that executives residing in faraway cities, not farmers living on the land, were dictating the quality of the food produced on American farms and the lives lived there. Our Pew team produced multiple reports that then served to inform the consensus statement, which was issued by the non-partisan Pew Commission in 2008 and later delivered to Congress: The Commission’s findings make it clear that the present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health, damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food. In addition, the current system of industrial food animal production is detrimental to rural communities. Food animals in America produce about one million tons of dry matter waste every day. That’s ten times the amount produced by the American people. But, contrary to human waste, animal waste is only loosely regulated, and waste treatment is rudimentary, if it occurs at all, prior to release of the septic load into the environment. THE HIGH PRICE OF MEAT

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Impacts on water, soil, and air are severe from this onslaught of nutrients, agricultural chemicals, and pathogenic microorganisms. Freshwater resources are depleted to grow animal feed that then is fed to crowded animals, 86 percent of which are held in confinement. Crowding fosters the emergence of disease, which are combated with the heavy use of antibiotics for prophylaxis and treatment. Additional antibiotics are administered particularly heavily to animals for growth promotion. Farm waste then gets into the surrounding environment. The waste produced in highly localized, concentrated animal feeding operations ends up in waste ponds called lagoons that contaminate groundwater and are subject to flooding and overflow during heavy rains and extreme storm events. The microorganisms living in the guts of the animals develop resistance to the antibiotics administered, requiring more and different drugs to keep the population of farm animals from collapsing. Drug resistance genes, and the pathogenic microorganisms harboring them, leave the farms in contaminated meat, with the farmworkers, and with the ambient air that is forced through the CAFOs to then exit and later expose people residing in rural communities. The foul odor emitted by farms is stinging the senses, causing depression in both people and the value of their land. Farmers have surrendered their autonomy in this integrated farming model. They see trucks arrive on their land, with feed whose composition they don’t know, to be fed to animals they don’t own—all for the security gained 80

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knowing that whatever comes off the farm will be picked up at a predetermined, guaranteed price, albeit one so low that animal husbandry has become a low-income but highly polluting affair. All that the farmers own is the waste left behind and the human and environmental misery that come in its wake. Aside from freshwater depletion and drinking water pollution, tremendous amounts of energy are needed in order to produce the animal feed. Cattle no longer feed on open range grasslands. Their feed now is generated on prime agricultural land using large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides. The energy for feed production comes from nonrenewable fossil fuel. A simple way of comparing the efficiencies of meat production is to look at how many pounds of feed are required to produce a single pound of animal meat. Conversion ratios are best for cold-blooded animals that do not expend energy to raise their body temperature. Accordingly, the most favorable ratios are achieved in aquaculture where one pound of feed can yield almost the equivalent amount in fish wet weight. Chickens are among the best warm-blooded converters of feed, producing one pound of body mass per every 1.7 pounds of feed. Pigs have a conversion factor of close to three. Cattle stand out in a very unfavorable way, in that the conversion ratio is approaching a value of seven. Furthermore, beef production generates large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. Beef has been promoted by the cattle industry as a staple of the American diet and a key ingredient of steak meals, fast food, and hamburgers that are THE HIGH PRICE OF MEAT

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served across the nation. But raising cattle emits tremendous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, by way of incessant flatulence and burping of the confined animals. Methane is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas featuring a global warming potential (GWP) value some thirty times greater than that of carbon dioxide, which is pegged at unity. Overall, agriculture is responsible for 9 percent of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The feed required to grow cattle is produced in monocultures of agricultural crops grown on fields that seem to stretch on forever. Foregoing crop rotation and not letting the land intermittently go fallow reduces biodiversity, which limits resilience and renders the crops more vulnerable to plant diseases so that they then require the application of large amounts of pesticides to prevent the collapse of the entire harvest. These killing agents further reduce the ecosystem’s biodiversity and pollute soil, water, air, workers, and the crops alike. Monocultures of crops and recurring tilling lead to soil depletion, thereby making soils vulnerable to erosion by wind and stormwater runoff. Pesticides migrate through feed crops and animals into the human food supply, where these toxic and persistent contaminants can bioaccumulate and biomagnify to add to the toxic burden of our pollution within, of the landfill that our bodies and babies have become. Yet we believe this meat to be “inexpensive,” and we, in the developed world, eat excessive amounts of meat, which has led to an epidemic of heart disease and obesity. The true 82

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cost for this industrialized animal production model is still emerging. It is difficult to put a price on a non-replaceable natural resource like topsoil, or on an atmosphere essential for protecting us from climate change and extreme weather. The meat we obtain for little money is neither cheap nor good for us. If we add up the healthcare costs incurred as a result of obesity and drug-resistant infections as well as the economic burden of our reduced life expectancy, of our lost economic productivity, and of soil and water degradation, we learn that we pay dearly for our abundant, allegedly cheap meat. The Pew Commission formulated recommendations on how to begin to address this conundrum. But who listens? Five years after the release of the Pew Commission’s findings, the principal investigator at Johns Hopkins summed up the progress: “There has been an appalling lack of progress. The failure to act by the USDA and [Food and Drug Administration] FDA, the lack of action or concern by the Congress, and continued intransigence of the animal agriculture industry have made all of our problems worse.” And still we continue to consume more meat, jeopardizing our health and, with it, the health of the planet. My wife and I had reduced our family’s meat intake significantly and we avoided eating beef altogether, but more drastic personal measures were needed. It was time for the forest ranger’s descendant to quit eating meat, to become a vegetarian and pescatarian. It was the least I could do. THE HIGH PRICE OF MEAT

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The year was 1981 and I was dreading the descent on the wooden ladder down into the lock of the canal. The lack of sunlight, lack of a breeze and fresh air, and the smell of chemicals were numbing—this job couldn’t be over fast enough. Salzgitter, Germany, is a dull place to begin with. Mostly featureless and flat, it first was violated by iron mining operations in the 1930s and then bombed into submission during World War II. The landscape’s most noticeable attributes are piles of earthen debris and, mostly rectangular, ponds left behind by the mining and earthmoving operations. Invisible to the eye, the Konrad Mine (Schacht Konrad) was lurking below, considered since the mid-1970s to be a viable option as the final resting ground for an eternal legacy of humanity, the radioactive waste generated by Germany’s nuclear power plants. Through this mostly barren landscape runs a side arm of the Midland Canal, or Mittellandkanal, the country’s largest artificial river and a principal east-west inland waterway that links Germany with France and allows

ships, by way of the River Elbe and the Elbe-Lübeck Canal, to travel all the way up to the shipping lanes of the Baltic Sea. This summer job again afforded me the opportunity to help improve Germany’s infrastructure for an hourly wage. The dam and locks were in poor repair, metal parts and structural components in need of a fresh protective layer of plastic coating to shield them from degradation and wear and tear. The epoxy we used was black as the night and came in two components. We mixed them together on site and then applied the paste as quickly as possible to the locks’ walls before the glue became too viscous from the curing process that set in instantaneously. Upon making contact, the two liquids would react, giving the impression of boiling tar, throwing bubbles like a prehistoric mud pond. First, we noticed a stinging smell, then a bit later a burning sensation on our skin and down our airways. We had no face masks. We mixed the materials at ground surface and then descended quickly with the heavy buckets down the wooden ladder into the lock. At the bottom, the fumes had no place to go but to engulf our bodies and to eat into our lungs. We tried to work as quickly as possible and periodically surfaced from the abyss to mix more buckets of the plastic soup. On the first day of work we acquired in the twilight what looked like a radiant sunburn. On the second day, our skin began to peel from faces and forearms. By day three we were hurting badly and came prepared with Penaten cream, a thick white barrier cream, which we applied to our faces and 86

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exposed skin to escape the attack of the corrosive gas emitted from the epoxy that was eating into our flesh. A grotesque scene unfolded when we remerged from the lock, ascending up the ladder and gasping for fresh air, looking like pantomime figures fighting imaginary suffocation. Two weeks of mixing and applying the polymeric plastic brew, and finally the job was done. It was time to move on to another work site. Some thirty years after mixing epoxy in the dam and locks near Salzgitter, Germany, I returned to the task of working with plastics but more carefully and with a different purpose in mind. My family and I had moved from the East Coast to the Valley of the Sun in the Sonoran Desert, home to America’s largest university under a single administration, Arizona State University, in Tempe. And again we worked in a team, which makes life’s ups and downs so much more enjoyable and bearable. A professor welcomes and loses a family member on average about every four years. That’s the typical time span between accepting a new doctoral student into one’s group and sending them off with a brand-new Ph.D. degree. Getting to know one’s students and accompanying them on their paths, from searching for a suitable topic of their doctoral thesis to completion of the latter, is one of the true joys of my profession. Time spent in graduate school coincides with becoming oneself; these are important, formative years of dealing with self-doubt and struggling to determine one’s PLASTIC HANGOVER

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place in the world, before ultimately identifying a true calling. I know, I’ve been there and shepherded many along this path. If things go well, students not only get a degree and secure a job but also define their purpose, and they may even find a companion for life during their studies. Exciting job opportunities, self-discovery, and weddings are common in our research group—but first comes the struggle. An incoming student, Charlie, had transferred to our team from another research group, and now was looking to settle on a thesis topic. After some back and forth, we settled on plastics—an abundant material worthy of investigating from an environmental health perspective. Because plastics are everywhere. Today’s plastics are an anachronism. Many were discovered by happenstance, and they were never designed for mass production and recycling. In other words, plastics are an ongoing accident causing damage of global proportions. Their impacts on human health are multifaceted and are still emerging. A few years before Charlie first contacted me, I had compiled a literature review on the components of everyday plastics and the hazards these materials pose. “Plastics and Health Risks” was published in the Annual Review of Public Health. It summarizes the vast array of issues associated with today’s plastics, including the use of monomers (or building blocks of plastics) that are carcinogenic, and the addition of plasticizers, such as various phthalates (the ph is not 88

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pronounced), endocrine disruptors that have been linked to a spectrum of health disorders—from malformations of the male reproductive system, to reduced sperm count in men and early onset puberty in girls, to weight gain and insulin resistance. Plastics are also frequently coated with additional problematic chemicals, including perfluorinated compounds, brominated flame retardants, antimicrobials, and toxic metals used as pigments. Aside from chemical risks, plastics also present a physical hazard as a choking risk for humans and wildlife and an agent causing inflammation and, potentially, cancer when entering animal and human tissues in the form of microplastic and nanoplastic debris. Today’s plastic production philosophy can be summed up as this: Toxins in, toxins out. I found plastics intriguing because these materials represent one of the few types of pollutants that are easily discernible with the naked eye. Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, observable, and ugly; it can serve to teach us something about our relationships with the environment and the products we consume. Walk along a river and you see plastic trash protruding from river sediment, floating in the water, and hanging from branches of trees on the riverbank, hinting at the high-water line set during flooding. Go beneath the water surface, and you can be sure there are more plastics there. Plastic bags, plastic cigarette filters, plastic wraps, plastic bottles, plastic clothing, plastic fishing line, and so on. PLASTIC HANGOVER

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Today, just about everything is made from plastics despite the fact that these materials have no end-of-life strategy. Each year, humanity produces and releases into the environment over three hundred million metric tons of a material that has nowhere to go and cannot be degraded effectively by microorganisms. From previous chapters we might surmise that the lack of biodegradation potential of conventional plastics is due to, once again, the replacement of hydrogens with halogen atoms on the plastic’s carbon backbone. But that’s not the case, at least not for all plastics. It is true only for polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as Teflon, and for polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a common persistent plastic polymer carrying many carbon-chlorine bonds. While most plastics do not contain carbon-halogen bonds, they still constitute extremely persistent global pollutants, expected to linger in the environment for centuries and even millennia. Why is that? The plastic trash that is visible everywhere in the environment stands as a testimony to the lack of effective biodegradation of today’s polymer chemistry. Although biodegradation of plastics is feasible in principle, it is not happening for a variety of reasons. First, for bacteria, plastics are not a good food source. Microbes may like to sit and colonize plastics, but they rarely bother to attack them. Second, there is the issue of accessibility. The polymers are too big to enter cells and, for the microbes, the scenario of excreting precious degradative enzymes to 90

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destroy the polymers outside of the cell is not a good resource investment, as the excreted proteins may quickly get lost or become inactivated. Third, microbes are loath to work on chemicals of random structure, as they prefer repetitive structural motives that can be processed in an assembly-line approach using their molecular scissors, or enzymes. Fourth, microorganisms are finicky eaters. Many kids won’t touch broccoli and spinach until all the available candy is gone; microbes behave no differently. Fifth, microorganisms may not operate effectively under the environmental conditions prevailing in the locales where plastics accumulate. With these limitations in mind, let’s take another look at conventional plastics. These materials were first massproduced in the 1940s and, against our better judgment, have not been improved upon since. These materials are not being degraded in the environment because microbes have every reason to ignore them. Bacteria have little, if anything, to gain from bothering with this type of polymeric chemistry. It is irrelevant whether the plastics are made from fossil fuels or from 1 percent or even 100 percent plant-based feedstock. If the final products are conventional first-generation plastics, such as polycarbonate and PVC, they will still be persistent and polluting. Charlie had seen his fair share of plastic pollution while growing up in California and he was eager to embark upon a doctoral study that permitted him to fight plastic pollution. He was trained by a colleague of mine in the use of an analytical tool, a µ-Raman spectrometer, to identify synthetic PLASTIC HANGOVER

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plastics and subsequently went on to detect and inventory plastic pollution in samples collected by our team or sent to our laboratory from around the world. In the summer of 2017 Charlie and I met up with a film crew from Hollywood to shoot a commercial for Arizona State University, Oceans: How one life powered by ASU can change the world. It took three days of filming to produce the final product: a sixty-second commercial that was also cut down to a shorter thirty-second version. The commercial received a Rocky Mountain Emmy award and became impossible to avoid, playing for what seemed like an eternity in local movie theaters, and it was even broadcasted by Arizona television stations during the halftime commercial break of the 2017 Super Bowl. During the filming of the clip, some notable mishaps and near-misses occurred that were memorable but not featured on screen in the final product. On the way to Monterey harbor from the airport, the film crew stopped for lunch at a barbecue smokehouse. The smell of the BBQ fire and meat transferred me back to the happy days on the front porch of our Victorian home in Baltimore, where, sitting on the wooden front steps, I watched our two young daughters play fire captains while I was tending to the meat sizzling on our miniature charcoal grill. I had observed a pescatarian diet for over two years at that point, but the smell of the house specialty, pork ribs, was irresistible during the video shoot in Monterey. I indulged. 92

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Soon we were in the harbor and our boat pulled out into Monterey Bay, where the seas quickly turned rough. The cameraman, although being continuously steadied by one of the film crew members, dropped the camera when we hit a particularly bad wave. For the commercial’s opening shot of the boat on the water, Charlie and I moved to the front of the vessel, where we promptly got completely soaked by the ice-cold waves. Next, the oversized camera drone had to be retrieved from the air, but the swells were so bad that landing it on the boat’s deck now was impossible. So the film producer volunteered to catch the flying object with his hands, bravely making his move and grabbing on at the opportune moment after a couple of failed attempts. He had never performed this maneuver before. Had he reached a bit higher or had the boat dropped unexpectedly, he would have lost several fingers to the rotating blades of the drone’s four propellers. Soaked in seawater, sickened by the swell, and freezing from standing in the cold windy gusts, I pitied Charlie for having to take off his clothes and change into the diving suit in these conditions—to get just the right shot. But our roles soon would be reversed. Minutes later, Charlie watched me with pity as I, overcome by the cold weather and a bad case of seasickness, went back and forth between filming a sequence and then rushing to the railing to heave repeatedly, releasing into the foamy ocean the pork ribs I had longed for, for more than two years. The hug at the end of the video was a genuine celebration of returning to terra firma. PLASTIC HANGOVER

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There is a carefully cultivated myth of plastic recycling that has helped delay taking meaningful action with respect to plastic pollution control and prevention. Plastics cannot be effectively recycled. Most recycling really is just downcycling, always arriving at a material of lesser value. An example is the downcycling of plastic water bottles to create plastic park benches. Downcycling also implies that the amount of material needed to make the initial high-value product never gets reduced. This is not a long-term workable solution. And much of what we dutifully place in the recycling bin and what is shuttled to recycling centers across the nation still is not being subjected to recycling—or even to downcycling. Plastic trash production outpaces recycling demand by far. As few as one in four plastic water bottles arriving at US recycling centers actually is recycled or downcycled. The others are incinerated, landfilled, or shipped overseas to countries that still, at least for now, accept our ever-increasing amount of plastic waste. Charlie and I presented a TEDx talk at Arizona State University. This talk, “Plastic Hangover,” goes over the history of how plastics were developed and the fact that we have not improved these materials in over seventy years. Change is long overdue. In 2018, the Chinese government issued a wake-up call for America and other developed nations around the world when it refused to take plastic trash from foreign countries anymore. The global environmental inventory of landfilled and polluting plastics is estimated to swell to thirteen billion tons 94

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by 2050, the year when there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. And even if we were to stop producing plastics today, the large pieces of plastics that already have escaped into the environment will continue to be physically broken down into bits and pieces by the wind, the waves, and the surf, to produce the still increasing progeny of a new environmental threat we came to realize only recently: plastic “shrapnel,” known as microplastics.

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Plastic fragments have a long and convoluted history. They torment and delight us, as I would soon find out. Back in World War II, the cockpit canopies of fighter planes were manufactured from plastic polymers. Gunfire and crashes often shattered the plastic domes, sending shrapnel flying into the faces and eyes of the pilots and crew. On the ground in the United Kingdom, Harold Ridley at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London was one of the eye surgeons tending to the injured. He noticed something remarkable while providing care. Plastic fragments made from acrylic polymers, once lodged in the eyes of victims, did not lead to rejection of the foreign object, a typical and expected bodily reaction and immune response. Plastic fragments apparently could be left in the eyes long term, possibly forever.

After the war, he revisited his earlier idea to embed in the eye of the vision-impaired a lens shaped to help people see better. He consulted an optical scientist, John Pike, who speculated that manufacturing such a medical device would cost less than $35 per lens in today’s money. The two agreed that if this new surgical procedure was feasible, they would not want to profit from it financially. In 1949, Ridley performed the first artificial lens implantation surgery. As an added novelty, the procedure was televised at St. Thomas’s hospital to his colleagues, who were sworn to secrecy, so that Ridley could observe whether the lens remained functional over time and undisturbed by the host’s body. The operation was successful, but Ridley’s peers in his birth country remained skeptical about this new invasive procedure they deemed both too risky and infeasible for routine surgery. Resistance lingered in the UK into the 1970s, by which time some 4,000 surgeons were already practicing Ridley’s implant surgery in America. In 2000, a year before his death at age 94, Ridley received his long-overdue recognition, when Queen Elizabeth II knighted the inventive eye surgeon in a ceremony that, coincidentally, included Sean Connery, an actor made famous for playing the role of a special agent known for device trickery, James Bond 007. Today intraocular implant surgery for cataract removal is the most common surgery in the world, performed to address cloudiness of the human eye’s lens, an age-related condition affecting every other octogenarian. By the time of 98

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Ridley’s death, over two hundred million such eye surgeries had been performed, half a century after he had pioneered the procedure. In September of 2017, I was diagnosed with retinoschisis, an abnormal splitting of the retina’s neurosensory layers, and received an unexpected taste of torture from a tiny doctor with remarkably large eyes. She performed the Ludovico Technique on me, or so it felt. After numbing my eyelid to avoid feeling the pain of prying it open with a clamp identical to those made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s disturbing movie, A Clockwork Orange, the hyper-cooled metal probe came down relentlessly on my unanesthetized eyeball to freeze in place the retina that had partially peeled off on the other side inside my head. The pain was excruciating. After the operation, my oldest daughter took custody of her blindfolded father and drove his broken spirit home to mend. The second time over, the procedure felt even worse—an amalgamation of pain and anticipated horror. Afterward, I never much liked to look my doctor in the eye and ultimately sought out another practitioner for the regular checkups. After having received cryogenic treatment on both eyes to stabilize my retinas, an eye surgeon diagnosed cataract and recommended lens implant surgery as a potential option. I decided to hold off for a bit longer, keeping glasses of various prescription strengths around the house and car and, when tiring of them, I eventually tried contact lenses. SHRAPNEL IN HUMAN EYES AND BODIES

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Soon the reading glasses that were once scattered throughout my home, car, and office work area collected in a new abode: a closet drawer. I graduated to blister packs of individual contact lenses and placed those strategically throughout my living environment. Before going to sleep, I would take out the lenses and place them in the trash. At least that’s what I thought I was doing, until discovering the next day that the pesky little plastic lenses had flung themselves into various places, sticking to the bathroom mirror, the faucet, and the lid of the bathroom trash can. There was no way to keep track of them because they were nearly invisible to start with, and once removed from the eye, depriving me of proper eyesight, they were impossible to spot. One day while talking with my students in the office, we were brainstorming about new projects and I brought up my frustration with the disposable lenses and the suspicion that I may not be the only person suffering through this end-ofday ordeal in the bathroom each night. If the lenses were indeed occasionally lost and ending up on odd surfaces in the bathroom, what fraction of the millions of lenses used in America each year would wind up in wastewater, and what would happen to them when leaving the house in domestic sewage? My students jumped on the opportunity to do some detective work on the ultimate fate of America’s single-use plastic contact lenses. Small numbers can add up to big ones, we soon would find out. 100

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Engineers like to keep track of the quantities of stuff we use, an activity known as conducting a mass balance. It is much like looking at your year-end credit card statement to find out where in the world all that hard-earned money from last year went. If contact lenses used in American homes across the nation were flushed down bathroom sinks and toilets, we needed to find out whether that created a pollution problem, to determine how many lenses were used annually, and to discover what fraction of them ended up in wastewater. From sales data we learned that in 2017, in the United States alone, some forty-five million individuals purchased about fourteen billion contact lenses, creating an inventory of almost half a million pounds of contact-lens plastics. What fraction of this plastic mass ultimately would wind up in wastewater? To find out about lens-disposal practices, my students took to the internet and conducted an online survey similar to the polls done leading up to political elections. Soon the students returned to my office to report that indeed, based on self-reporting by a representative sample of the US population, one in five contact-lens users across America was flushing the vision aids down the bathroom drains and toilets. That meant that each day, over seven million contact lenses were sent off in sewage on a journey to an unknown destination. To study what happens to wastewater-borne lenses, my students contacted the operator of a local wastewater treatment plant and were granted permission to investigate. SHRAPNEL IN HUMAN EYES AND BODIES

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Soon the students were placing in various locations at the plant net pods filled with contact lenses affixed to long lines of rope to enable later retrieval. This fishing expedition at the sewage plant was followed by scrutinizing the wastewaterexposed lenses in the laboratory using an analytical tool called a µ-Raman spectrometer. From the studies in the laboratory and at the sewage treatment plant we learned that contact lenses sink to the bottom of the treatment tanks, where they become part of what’s known as municipal sewage sludge. The students bravely dug into the sewage sludge and indeed found contact lenses. But the vision aids had been crushed during treatment. Whereas the µ-Raman analysis showed that the polymers themselves were still intact, the physical sludge agitation and pumping in the tank had fragmented the lenses, creating a progeny of plastic shrapnel, invisible to the naked eye: microplastics. Today more than half of the sewage sludge generated in the United States gets treated to comply with US regulations and, thereafter, is applied on farmland as so-called municipal biosolids. Contained in this mass, we discovered, are the fragments of contact lenses that were flushed down the drain by consumers. We estimate the mass of contact lenses sequestered nationwide in municipal sewage sludge annually to be on the order of 100,000 pounds, assuming an almost complete capture efficiency by the treatment plant. Just over 50,000 pounds of this mass, contained in biosolids, is then applied on farmland each year, while an estimated 25,000 102

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pounds is landfilled, and an additional 13,000 pounds of contact-lens hydrogel contained in biosolids is destined for a fiery death by incineration. Worldwide, the quantity of discarded contact lenses released into the environment is still growing. We announced our discovery of this new type of microplastic pollution at the 2018 General Meeting of the American Chemical Society in a press conference. The news story went viral and was covered by over 740 media outlets around the world. We are now seeking to assess how the media coverage has impacted the lens-disposal practices of consumers and whether it has, hopefully, reduced the number of lenses disposed of in wastewater across the United States. However, the problem of microplastics is much bigger than contact-lens fragments. Much bigger. The work of Charlie and our collaborators in the underwater canyon of Monterey, California, where we filmed the ASU commercial, showed that microplastics are present throughout the ocean, not only at the surface. This was an unexpected finding. Global pollution of the oceans with plastics was first reported when a giant gyre of plastic trash was observed in 1997, swirling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We knew additional plastic had been buried at the bottom of the ocean, where humans for decades had dumped and accumulated over a billion tons of waste, including plastics and radioactive material. Charlie’s work in Monterey, performed with a large team of collaborators, showed that microplastics are present SHRAPNEL IN HUMAN EYES AND BODIES

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throughout the water column of the ocean to depths of 3,300 feet and beyond. In this remote, deep sea environment of eternal darkness these plastics are cycling through the food web to emerge, delivered by way of fishing nets, as seafood that later ends up on our dinner plates and in our stomachs. And microplastics are not only present in the ocean water and in table sea salt, seafood, beer, and bottled water—they also are present in the ambient air of cities, in snow in the polar regions, and on the glaciers of remote mountains. There is no place left on this planet that hasn’t been touched by and become contaminated with plastics and microplastics. If you are not already breathing them right now, go and try on a fleece jacket or plastic shirt in a clothing store near you. Plastic threads will be shed by the textiles and become part of the air you breathe. Laundering synthetic textiles can release additional microplastics into water and air. In a single laundry cycle, a fleece jacket may release up to 250,000 synthetic fibers into the wash water. The science of detecting and determining the health impact of this microplastic and nanoplastic pollution is still in its infancy. Plastics have become an addictive material of our society and the long-overdue hangover finally is setting in with the realization that we cannot mass produce materials that lack an end-of-life strategy. And the inventory of microplastics in the global environment will continue to increase for many more decades, even if we were to discontinue the production of these failed polymer materials today. That’s because the larger plastics that already have been released will continue to 104

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fall apart into smaller microscale fragments. What’s already out there will be ground into pieces to then be fed or blown into the stomachs and lungs of wildlife and humans alike. Is there anything we can do? In 2018, a surgeon who specialized in cataract removal performed Ridley’s procedure on both of my eyes. Colors I had not seen in such intensity in more than two decades were jumping out to my delight. Initially, the acrylic plastic lenses in my eyes felt a bit like my wedding ring that, when first placed on my left hand some twenty-two years ago by my bride, left me with the feeling of a foreign object. But, as with the ring, the awkward sensation in the eyes passed within a few months, and when I run, go to work or travel to meetings, reading glasses are not in my luggage anymore. Also gone from my bathroom vanity are the recycling jars for blister packs and contact lenses. Not all plastics are bad, as I’m sure Ridley would agree. But the plastic pollution problem will remain with us until we change our ways.

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13 DIAGNOSING HUMANITY

I didn’t know it back then, but in the early 2000s my team started what today looks like a lifetime project, the creation of a Human Health Observatory (HHO) that, figuratively speaking, allows us to put a finger on the pulse of global populations to learn essentially in real time how close we have come to extinction and how much progress we are making toward creating a safer, more livable, and more sustainable future. The HHO came into being in the summer of 2006, when a contractor of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) arranged for me to pick up municipal sewage sludge samples left over from the 2001 US National Sewage Sludge Survey. Sewage sludge is a byproduct of municipal wastewater treatment that often is referred to as biosolids and disposed of on land. We acquired even more nationwide samples from the agency in 2007, and soon expanded the network of monitoring locations around the world to cover today over thirty-two million Americans and a quarter of a billion people in over 350 cities worldwide. Soon we expect

to regularly receive samples of sewage sludge and wastewater produced by and representative of the health an behavior of over one billion people from around the world. Analyzing the output of one-eighth of the human population and the chemistry of sewage sludge produced in cities around the world can reveal to us the inventory of persistent chemicals we pump into our life-support system, bubble Earth, and their impact on the health status of humanity. We can collect this information as frequently as needed, for example every week, every month, or every year, to detect and track over time the global health status of humanity and our planet. In 2003, we visited the first US wastewater treatment plant to find out about the ultimate fate of the antimicrobials triclocarban and triclosan. Over the years, we added more cities, and new chemical targets for monitoring, as well as new process streams generated by advanced treatment-unit operations. Today the resultant sample archive constitutes the largest collection of sewage sludges and wastewater in the United States and the largest sampling network worldwide. Initially curious only about the transfer of persistent chemistry from wastewater into sludge and then from sludge onto soils, we began to understand by 2010 that the digested sewage sludge can serve as a proxy to learn about contamination in the human body, about our landfill within. Digested sewage sludge is not poop, although it retains some of the aroma; instead, it is a concentrate of the chemistry rejected by Nature’s cleanup operations that are 108

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emulated in the thousands of sewage treatment plants that are operated across the United States. With no planned place to go, the chemical migrants remaining in this material seek temporary shelter in the lipids and carbon of decomposing bacteria, which did what they could but did not succeed in tackling the human-made poisons. Coincidentally, and similar to sludge, our bodies also are composed of carbon and lipids, of flesh and fat. In other words, broadly speaking when considering the general chemical makeup, sludge and people are pretty much the same thing. Since Rachel Carson rang the alarm bells to warn of the persistence and accumulation of DDT in the environment, chemists have learned to appreciate that the human body stores in its fat what we call a body burden of environmental poisons. If sludge and people consist of the same ingredients, carbon and lipids for the most part (aside from water), and if the microbiome of the human gut mirrors the microbiome extant in municipal anaerobic digesters generating the sewage sludge, then the types and concentrations of organic toxins accumulating in sludge and in people may be similar or even identical. Measuring the persistent chemistry of digested sludge, then, would allow us to assess the chemistry accumulating in our bodies as a toxic body burden. We would be able to study people by using sludge as a reliable proxy material. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the fat-adjusted concentrations of toxic organic chemicals in digested US sewage sludge to the average body burden of toxins harbored DIAGNOSING HUMANITY

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by American people, as determined in the largest human monitoring program conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Lo and behold, we found a remarkable correlation, showing a 70 percent overlap between the persistent chemistry remaining in American sewage sludge after treatment of this material and the toxins stored in the lipids of thousands of people across the United States that were part of the NHANES study. But the relationship was not only qualitative. When we put the information into a graph for visual interpretation, we discovered a linear relationship between the lipid-adjusted concentrations of pollutants present in digested sludge and their respective concentration detected in American people. Once we knew to what level a synthetic organic chemical persists and accumulates in digested sludge, we could quickly estimate from the correlation plot the average body burden of toxins in people living in the area served by the treatment plant. This discovery opened the door to a new and inexpensive way of estimating the occurrence of chemicals in the human body. We termed it sewage sludge epidemiology. Now, rather than having to conduct expensive cohort studies with Institutional Review Board approval to collect and analyze samples of human tissue, we could infer the toxic chemistry and approximate amount of pollutants accumulating in people by analyzing sewage sludge produced in their local 110

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wastewater treatment plant. And while clinical studies cost millions, our method costs a fraction of a penny per person. We were intrigued and excited. For example, when analyzing a single sample of composited sewage sludge from the city of Chicago’s wastewater treatment plant, America’s largest, we were able to learn about the burden of chemistry stored up in the bodies of approximately two million people whose human waste, a diagnostic medical material, is treated by the giant wastewater treatment plant. In addition to sewage sludge, we can also use wastewater as a diagnostic material to measure the health of human populations around the globe. This emerging field of science, first successfully practiced in Europe, is called wastewaterbased epidemiology. In human medicine, patients provide their medical doctor with samples of their urine and stool to learn about their personal health and the potential need for medical treatment. Our team is using the same clinical assays from medicine, but we are now applying them to the composited urine and stool of entire city populations, samples we acquire with automated samplers over the course of twenty-four hours. This approach can help us to transition from expensive precision medicine for disease management to an inexpensive public health observation approach that costs little and can accomplish much. One of my students lost two of his friends to accidental drug overdoses. Like so many other individuals who had to deal with sports injuries, his friends had slipped from the use DIAGNOSING HUMANITY

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of opioids, pushed by the pharmaceutical industry and by the overprescribing of medical professionals, into a death spiral of drug misuse. This particular student helped to develop and launch the world’s first online dashboard to display both the types and quantities of drugs consumed in a city at the neighborhood level, by demonstrating it in Tempe, Arizona, home of Arizona State University. For this purpose, my team and city workers collect wastewater at strategic locations across the city of Tempe. Automatic sampling devices fill up individual sample bottle over the course of twenty-four hours to collect chemical information for seven consecutive days, or one week each month. The analytical results we obtain are posted without delay on an internet portal for all to see, giving rise to a public health dashboard. We meet once a month with the mayor of Tempe’s team to analyze the data and plot a path forward on how to respond to the addiction crisis in our hometown. The wastewater-based epidemiology approach has created an information stream that in itself is addictive, but in a good way, and that we hope will help to solve the drug abuse crisis that claimed over 70,000 lives in 2017 in the United States alone. Our neighboring nation, Canada, has taken note of the opportunity to measure public health in near real time. In August of 2019, the Canadian government launched an online dashboard to study the impact of marijuana legalization on the consumption and health of residents in major cities across Canada. The wastewater-based epidemiology approach can be used to protect populations not only from chemical agents but also 112

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from biological threats. We demonstrated this possibility by analyzing a cocktail of sewage and sludges produced by some thirty-two million people in over two hundred American cities. Working with a virologist and a biomedical researcher, our team extracted the genetic information from the sample and analyzed the totality of all viruses present in the national cocktail. This metagenomic sequencing procedure produced an inventory of all the viruses detectable in wastewater across the United States. We found the viral pathogens we were looking for. But we also found much more. Via analysis of one national sewage cocktail, we discovered some 3,500 new viruses that had never been observed before. The role of these viruses for public health and medicine is currently under investigation. Over the lifetime of our four-year study, funded by the National Library of Medicine, we aim to create an Atlas of Viruses for the United States and to produce a prototype of a nationwide early warning system to detect and contain viral outbreaks, such as seasonal flu. Similar to bacteria, viruses are not all bad. On the contrary. They have served as important evolutionary accelerants that have sped up the exchange of genetic information to enrich biodiversity. Some viruses kill bacteria, and some are specific to bacteria that kill people. Maybe in this crowd of viral agents there lies a solution to fight the ineffectiveness of antibiotics induced by triclosan, triclocarban, and a spectrum of antibiotics overused in American food animal production. We are investigating. DIAGNOSING HUMANITY

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14 ONE WITH THE ENVIRONMENT

Our studies of human populations worldwide show that we cannot hide from our actions, cannot hide from the chemistry we are and produce. Regardless of where the emissions of persistent and harmful chemicals originate globally, we all get exposed. The actions taken by people living on the opposite side of the world affect our health; and our consumption affects the health of our antipodes. We create each other’s environment, and we are responsible for and dictate each other’s health. This applies at differing scales and to different threats. Carcinogenic dioxins created by wildfires burning in the Amazon and by trash burning in Indonesia will be carried around the world to reach us and to accumulate in our bodies. As the Amazon continues to burn, loss of this “green lung” will make it difficult for us to breathe, and it will change our weather. A person sick with the flu deciding to go to work anyway will spread a virus that may go on to kill a susceptible elderly person or a prematurely born infant.

In 1982 scientists at the Exxon Corporation correctly predicted that by 2020 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere would rise from 340 parts per million (ppm) to surpass a critical threshold of 415 ppm. It did not matter where the oil came from or where it was burned. They already knew then that changing our atmosphere would also change our planet. Unless one has a death wish, we intuitively know not to start up a combustion engine car in a closed garage and certainly not to then inhale the exhaust being produced. But that’s what we are doing on a global scale by changing the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. The increasing heat is a warning signal of worse things to come. There once were over 1.7 million different species of animals, plants, and algae present on this planet. But this biodiversity is constantly decreasing, and at an alarmingly fast rate. As we synthesize and release into the global atmosphere new chemicals, the impact of these chemical creations on the health of life-forms worldwide is mostly unknown. The more new chemicals we manufacture and the more persistent these are, the greater the risk of causing harm and of eradicating additional species from our home planet. And ultimately ourselves. Anticipating the impact of humanity’s actions on the planet can be challenging. When tinkering with our lifesupport system, it is of existential importance to exercise caution, to act according to the precautionary principle: If there is uncertainty about the consequences of our actions, 116

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but the potential harm is great, we should not take the risk. However, with carbon dioxide amassing in the atmosphere, we saw the writing on the wall in 1982 and yet, driven by short-term need, convenience, and greed, we still went on a petroleum consumption binge that is now costing us billions of dollars in infrastructure and claiming thousands of lives each year. We knew forty years ago of the challenges we would create and have to deal with today. A few years ago, I wanted to know how long it would take from gaining knowledge about a chemical’s problematic properties to implementing a regulatory intervention addressing a newly identified threat. After reviewing some 143,000 papers published in the peer-reviewed literature, I learned that it typically takes about fourteen years for a chemical to emerge as a threat before regulatory action is taken in the United States. Coincidentally, that is the exact number of years that passed between our discovery of triclocarban as a US nationwide pollutant and the chemical’s subsequent ban by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Of course, from a public health perspective it is unacceptable to know about a threat and then still allow an entire population to get exposed for over a decade before implementing a remedy. But we also have to acknowledge that we, individually and collectively, are in control and complicit in the failure of exercising global stewardship and protection of future generations. What types of chemicals are produced globally is a function in part of what chemicals ONE WITH THE ENVIRONMENT

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we buy. In addition to the industry’s chemical choices and the government’s reactive oversight, it is us, you and me, who determine our environment and our future with our purchasing and consumption behavior. We know enough to act. A positive example of our ability to do so is the Montreal Protocol that addressed the threat of depletion of the ultraviolet-light blocking ozone (O3) layer in the Earth’s stratosphere. The agreement, signed by 196 countries and the European Union, went into effect in 1989 and, along with multiple revisions and updates, has resulted in a slow recovery of the ozone layer over the Antarctic. The chemicals targeted by the Montreal Protocol are chlorofluorocarbons and other polyhalogenated organics that naturally are absent or rare in the global chemosphere, and that feature one or multiple halogen-carbon bonds, a chemistry we have learned is prone to get us into trouble again and again. And it will continue to do so until we learn our lesson. When it comes to judging the magnitude of threats, people often ask: So what? Show me the bodies! Smoking tobacco in the United States alone kills about 480,000 people each year, roughly the population of the city of Miami. This is an almost incomprehensible number. To put it in perspective, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, claimed the lives of some 3,000 Americans, and was declared a national tragedy. But each year tobacco smoking inflicts a death toll some 160 times greater. That’s equivalent 118

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to allowing one 9/11 event to occur in America every three days. You may ask, but where is the evidence that the contaminants in our bodies are harmful? Have you personally seen anyone die from organohalogens, plastics, or climate change? These are legitimate questions to ask. The answer is this. If you look at only one person at a time either inhaling flame retardants, swallowing plastics, or smoking cigarettes, then the health outcome is almost impossible to detect, unless it is acute and deadly. However, if you look at large populations, diseases and health outcomes can be detected that are the result of environmental stress. Will you commit suicide if you use the internet? Probably not. Have people committed suicide or harmed others based on information from the internet and social media? Yes. Should we live without synthetic chemicals and information exchange? No. Should we be mindful and weigh risks when leveraging these material and data resources? Absolutely! Across the United States and in nations around the world, parents are worrying about the health and wellbeing of their children. Diseases and behavioral disorders including asthma, anxiety, autism, allergies, depression, obesity, substance abuse, and suicide are all on the rise, causing national and global epidemics. Our children in turn worry about their futures, shortening life expectancies, and dimming prospects of ever attaining the quality of life and prosperity their parents and previous generations had the privilege to enjoy. ONE WITH THE ENVIRONMENT

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Diseases and adverse outcomes are what make us miserable and cut short the lives of future generations—if not always immediately apparent, we can observe at the population level the stagnation and decline in life expectancy, health status, and quality of life. These consequences are inextricably linked to our environment, to the place and climate we create together each day anew.

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EPILOGUE

Getting ready for a morning run, I step out of our family’s desert home, which is kept comfortably cool by air conditioners powered with a photovoltaic system I installed by myself on our rooftop. Whereas the modular system was easy to assemble by a single person over the course of just three days, the permitting process, in contrast, took over six months to complete and appeared specifically designed to disincentivize us from becoming less dependent on the energy utility. By 2022, the sunshine collection device will have paid for itself. It creates more energy than our household consumes, and the excess power is fed back into the electrical grid. My family and I maintain a mixed diet that includes some meat most days. Avoiding beef is easy enough for me and I cherish the return of the backyard barbecues that bring together our family and friends on weekends over grilled vegetables, chicken, sausages, and fish. My environmental footprint now is dominated by air travel. As with meat consumption, I have conflicting thoughts about the need for and benefit of traveling. Like many other decisions in life, a categorical yes or no is typically not the way

to go, with individual situations requiring a more nuanced case-by-case, decision-making process. Overindulging and then paying a small carbon credit as absolution is not a viable option, at least not when pursued by all of humanity. The convenience and math of some of the carbon credit exchanges has me worried. [At any given moment, there are over one million people circling the earth in commercial planes alone, and the number of flights is still increasing.] I would prefer to take a week or two off each year and plant trees again with guidance from a forest ranger, as I had done during my high school years at my uncle’s ranger station in northern Germany. My students and I are studying critically different means of transportation. We were surprised to learn how polluting the cruise ship industry is, for example. A single cruise ship puts out a large amount of toxic sulfur emissions, equivalent to thirteen million passenger cars—that’s about 3,000 cars worth of pollution for each passenger on board, plus the additional pollution from the vessel’s raw sewage that is released untreated straight into the ocean. More sustainable shipping lines exist, with one shuttling chocolate from Europe over the Atlantic to return from the Americas with coffee beans in the hulls of a fleet of sailboats. But sailing is not an option for the totality of global trade, nor for my wife and me, when we occasionally want to visit our oldest daughter, who has reverse-migrated back to Germany. Passenger jet planes powered by algae-based fuels first completed experimental flights more than a decade ago 122

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and sustainable aviation fuels today make up a still small but growing percentage of the over 37 million airline flights annually worldwide. But not every aviation biofuel used today is truly sustainable and all aviation biofuels that have been used thus far in more than 130,000 commercial flights served as additives of fossil fuels only, typically contributing no more than 30 percent to the total fuel volume. Amazingly, for short distance hopping in congested traffic areas the idea of electric airplanes is being seriously entertained now, but electric air taxis are still years away, have not flown with passengers yet and may be reserved for the well to do. Nevertheless, it is important to further advance research and innovation in sustainable global transportation, and to do so not only for the sake of global trade and family reunions. Visiting with other nations is educational, it helps to prevent conflict, and it is a welcome reminder of our shared values and joint interest in ensuring the sustainability of global ecosystems and the survival of our species. My wife, who eventually did receive her green card and work permit in the late 1990s, has started a number of school gardens and is now working as a garden teacher and garden coordinator. She provides the children of lowincome city dwellers with an opportunity to gain handson experience in food production, and to learn about the interconnectivity of plants, insects, and animals in the terrestrial ecosystems that produce the food crops we consume and rely on for survival. Her enthusiasm and dedication are a daily inspiration to me. EPILOGUE

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The youngest is 13 and has virtually moved out, living online and on the phone now. I look forward to talking with him, when he returns, about growing up and fatherhood; this book may be a conversation starter. Maybe he may teach me a thing or two about social interactions, a skill he has mastered and I am lagging behind in. Our middle child, now finishing high school, is an aspiring architect. She worries about the change in the composition of the global atmosphere and is asking us why our generation has been standing by for so long, rather than taking action. During an internship at a design school in Manhattan, she has researched the types of toxins embedded in the materials used in construction materials and home furnishings. She now is educating our family during home remodeling projects on what to use and not to use. She also introduced me to a very talented classmate of hers who created, at very short notice, the illustrations included in this book. The oldest is completing an internship in a German hospital right now, as part of her medical studies. A few years back, on a family road trip, I got to show her the hospital in Pleasanton where her mother’s life was saved during her premature birth by emergency C-section, and the strip mall nearby, in front of which I slept off a migraine the Sunday morning we greeted her on this planet. The students working on their thesis projects in ASU’s Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering are excited about effecting change and making a quantifiable difference. Some work on keeping toxins and regrettable 124

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substitutions out of the supply chain of chemical manufacturing. Some have helped to launch a non-profit initiative, One Water One Health, and are working toward making accessible the wastewater analytics approach to disadvantaged communities in the United States and around the world. Their shared goal is to create safer consumer products and to help prevent, in the future, disasters such as the lead-in-drinking-water crisis of Flint, Michigan. When teaching in the classroom, the students and I seek answers for simple, yet provocative, questions: (1) What are your core values? (2) Are they truly yours? (3) What is the geographical and social space you see yourself being part of? (4) Can your answers to questions 2 and 3 be reconciled easily? (5) What is the biggest obstacle to attaining global sustainability? (6) What are the most powerful tools we have for advancing sustainability both individually and as a society? Many of the students are reflecting on these questions for the first time. I am concerned that our educational system is not keeping pace with the radical changes that have occurred in our society and in the global environment. Teachers of sustainability, like myself, our students working toward their academic degrees, and the academic institutions we teachers and students are part of—all are at risk of falling victim to hypocrisy. For solutions and to call out those responsible for past failures, individuals point to their institutions and government, and the government and institutions point to individuals. We have not yet decided what we really want. For those who have nothing, who fight for food and survival every EPILOGUE

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day, this question is both moot and unfair to ask. But for those of us more fortunate, at least for now, this is a very uncomfortable question to entertain. Do we first and foremost want to preserve the planet and the long-term survival of our species? Or are we content with living a good life now … all the while risking a livable future for ourselves and for future generations by violating the very environment that nurtures us? To better answer this question, it is helpful to remember: The boundaries we have internalized and observe are imaginary. They do not exist. The concept of self and the surrounding environment is a cherished delusion. The environment is not simply “out there.” We breathe it. We eat it. We drink it. We wear it. We create it. We and the environment are one and the same.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like many things in life, this book had a rather improbable gestational history, and I would like to thank all the individuals who helped this manuscript into existence. Like all my writings and doings, this book inevitably will contain mistakes and let me thank you in advance for bringing them to my attention. A big thank you to Steven Beschloss, Senior Director for Narrative Development at Arizona State University, for visiting me in my office on April 5, 2019, to learn about our center’s research and for believing that there may be a story worth telling; thanks also, Steven, for all the feedback and support you provided along the way. Thanks also to Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, who encouraged me at a writer’s workshop in May 2019 to write this book and who served as the handling editor. Thanks to Deborah (Rachael) Bishop, an academic, journalist, public relations professional, and friend, who helped me to maneuver through the publication process, and who provided valuable feedback along the way. Thank you also

to Haaris Naqvi, Editorial Director at Bloomsbury Academic US, and to his team for both believing that the book could be written in five months, and for making it available to readers in time for Earth Day 50. Also, a big thank you to Griffin Finke, the talented young artist who created the wonderful illustrations to this book. I am indebted to my family and friends for supporting me in this endeavor and for allowing me to tell stories of our lives: to my mother—a writer and inspiration to me and many others—for sharing stories, reflecting on life events, and for allowing me to explore the world; to my wonderful wife—known in the Valley of the Sun as the “garden lady”— for putting up with me and for allowing yet another summer vacation to get cut short in order for this book to be completed in time; to my beloved children who are all perfect in their own way and who provided feedback, questions, and helpful suggestions during the writing of this book. And thank you to the unnamed individuals whose stories are told here. I am grateful for the mentorship I received throughout my career from a spectrum of outstanding scholars and human beings. A special thank you goes out to the members of my doctoral advisory committee at the University of Minnesota. Thank you also to John Ziagos, Robert Lawrence, M. Gordon (Reds) Wolman (1924–2010), Lynn Goldman, Ellen Silbergeld, and Bruce Rittmann. This book and the stories told therein would not exist without the hard work and dedication of a wonderful group of talented individuals, including interns, students, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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postdocs, collaborators, university staff, visiting scientists, faculty colleagues, and countless supporters. Thank you all for all your ingenuity, for putting up with me, and for making academia such a fun place to work in! Finally, I would like to thank all the peer-reviewers, sponsors, and funding agencies that made possible the work reported in this book as well as in the publications and theses generated by our research team. Hopefully, the effort was worthwhile, and you enjoyed the read. Your feedback is much appreciated.

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NOTES

Chapter 1 Meine, Lower Saxony, Germany (formerly West Germany). https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meine.

Chapter 2 Madigan, M. T., Bender, K. S., Buckley, D. H., Sattley, M. W., and Stahl, D. A. (2018). Brock Biology of Microorganisms (15th edition). New York: Pearson.

Chapter 3 Halden, R. U. (ed.) (2010). Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations. American Chemical Society (ASC) Book Series. New York: Oxford University Press. Huttenhower, C., Gevers, D., Knight, R. et al. (2012). Structure, Function and Diversity of the Healthy Human Microbiome. Nature, 486 (7402): 207–14.

Chapter 4 A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises. https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/06/climate/world-waterstress.html.

Chapter 5 Carson, R. (2002). Silent Spring (Anniversary edition), Introduction by L. Lear and Afterword by Edward O. Wilson. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Chapter 6 Carson, R. (2002). Silent Spring (Anniversary edition), Introduction by L. Lear and Afterword by Edward O. Wilson. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Halden, R. U. (2014). On the Need and Speed of Regulating Triclosan and Triclocarban in the United States. Environmental Science & Technology. 48 (7): 3603–11. Halden, R. U. and Paull, D. H. (2005). Co-Occurrence of Triclocarban and Triclosan in US Water Resources. Environmental Science & Technology. 39 (6):1420–6. Halden, R. U. et al. (2017). The Florence Statement on Triclosan and Triclocarban. Environmental Health Perspectives. 125 (6): 064501. Kolpin, D. W., Furlong, E. T., Meyer, M. T. et al. (2002). Pharmaceuticals, Hormones, and other Organic Wastewater Contaminants in US Streams, 1999–2000: A National

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Reconnaissance. Environmental Science & Technology. 36 (6): 1202–11. New York Times. (2019). These State Birds May Be Forced Out of Their States as the World Warms. New York Times. October 10. https://nyti.ms/35ni4eo. New York Times. (2019). Birds Are Vanishing From North America. New York Times. September 19. https://nyti. ms/2IepqH8.

Chapter 7 Blum, A. (2005). Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life. New York: Lisa Drew Books. Herbstman, J. B., Sjödin, A., Apelberg, B. J. et al. (2007). Determinants of Prenatal Exposure to Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) and Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) in an Urban Population. Environmental Health Perspectives. 115 (12): 1794–1800. Herbstman, J. B., Sjödin, A., Apelberg, B. J. et al. (2008). Birth Delivery Mode Modifies the Associations between Prenatal PCB and PBDE and Neonatal Thyroid Hormone Levels. Environmental Health Perspectives. 116 (10): 1376–82. Veen, I. van der and Boer J. de. (2012). Phosphorus Flame Retardants: Properties, Production, Environmental Occurrence, Toxicity and Analysis. Chemosphere. 88 (10): 1119–53. Venkatesan, A. K. and Halden, R. U. (2014). Brominated Flame Retardants in US Biosolids from the EPA National Sewage Sludge Survey and Chemical Persistence in Outdoor Soil Mesocosms. Water Research. 55: 133–42.

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Zota, A. R., Rudel, R. A., Morello-Frosch, R. A., Brody, J. G. (2008). Elevated House Dust and Serum Concentrations of PBDEs in California: Unintended Consequences of Furniture Flammability Standards? Environmental Science and Technology. 42 (21): 8158–64.

Chapter 8 Apelberg, B. J., Goldman, L. R., Calafat, A. M. et al. (2007). Determinants of Fetal Exposure to Perfluorinated Compounds. Environmental Science & Technology. 41 (11): 3891–7. Apelberg, B. J., Witter, F. R., Herbstman, J. B., Calafat, A. M., Halden, R. U., Needham, L. L., and Goldman, L. R. (2007). Cord Serum Concentrations of Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) in Relation to Weight and Size at Birth. Environmental Health Perspectives. 115 (11): 1670–6. Fei, C., McLaughlin, J. K., Tarone, R. E. et al. (2007). Perfluorinated Chemicals and Fetal Growth: A Study within the Danish National Birth Cohort. Environmental Health Perspectives. 115 (11): 1677–82. Venkatesan, A. K. and Halden, R. U. (2013). National Inventory of Perfluoroalkyl Substances in Archived US Biosolids from the 2001 EPA National Sewage Sludge Survey. Journal of Hazardous Materials. 252–3: 413–18.

Chapter 9 Bakulski, K. M., Lee, H., Feinberg, J. I. et al. (2015). Prenatal Mercury Concentration Is Associated with Changes in DNA 134

NOTES

Methylation at TCEANC2 in Newborns. International Journal of Epidemiology. 44 (4): 1249–62. Done, H. Y. and Halden, R. U. (2015). Reconnaissance of 47 Antibiotics and Associated Microbial Risks in Major Seafood and Aquaculture Products Consumed in the United States. Journal of Hazardous Materials. 282: 10–17. New York Times. (2019). The World’s Oceans Are in Danger, Major Climate Change Report Warns. New York Times. September 25. https://nyti.ms/2mDGYnW. Wells, E. M., Herbstman, J. B., Lin, Y. H. et al. (2016). Cord Blood Methylmercury and Fetal Growth Outcomes in Baltimore Newborns: Potential Confounding and Effect Modification by Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Selenium, and Sex. Environmental Health Perspectives. 124 (3): 373–9. Wells, E. M., Herbstman, J. B., Lin, Y. H. et al. (2017). Methyl Mercury, but not Inorganic Mercury, Associated with Higher Blood Pressure During Pregnancy. Environmental Research. 154: 247–52. Wells, E. M., Jarrett, B. J. J. M., Li, Y. H. et al. (2011). Body Burdens and Descriptors of Mercury, Lead, Selenium and Copper among Newborns at an Urban Hospital. Environmental Research. 111 (3): 411–17.

Chapter 10 Halden, R. U. and Schwab, J. K. (2008). Environmental Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production, A Report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/ wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/industrial_agriculture/ pcifapenvimpactpdf.pdf

NOTES

135

Pew Commission. (2008). Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America—A Report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. http:// www.ncifap.org/_images/PCIFAPFin.pdf.

Chapter 11 Choy, C. A., Robison, B. H., Gagne, T. O. et al. (2019). The Vertical Distribution and Biological Transport of Marine Microplastics across the Epipelagic and Mesopelagic Water Column. Scientific Reports. 9, Article no. 7843. Halden, R. U. (2010). Plastics and Health Risks. Annual Review of Public Health. 31: 179–94. Oceans: How One Life Powered by ASU Can Change the World. 2017. Rocky Mountain 2018 Emmy Award Winner in Category of “Commercial – Single Spot.” https://youtu.be/ ILA5Ivzv84A. Plastic Hangover. (2019). TEDx Talk. Arizona State University. https://biodesign.asu.edu/plastic-hangover.

Chapter 12 Newsweek. (2018). Tech & Science—Stop Dumping Your Used Contact Lenses in the Sink and Toilet, Report Pleads. Newsweek. August 20. https://www.newsweek.com/stopdumping-your-used-contact-lenses-sink-toilet-report-1079954. New York Times. (2018). Trilobites. Before You Flush Your Contact Lenses, You Might Want to Know This. New York Times. August 19. https://nyti.ms/2MX23Ch.

136

NOTES

Chapter 13 City of Tempe and Arizona State University: Tempe Opioid Wastewater Collection Data Online Dashboard. https:// tempegov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/­ 69d996bc23dc461f82d01f47a5d70bfe. Gushgari, A. J., Driver, E. M., Steele, J. C., and Halden, R. U. (2018). Tracking Narcotics Consumption at a Southwestern US University Campus by Wastewater-Based Epidemiology. Journal of Hazardous Materials. 359: 437–44. Gushgari, A. J., Venkatesan, A. K., Chen, J. et al. (2019). Long-term Tracking of Opioid Consumption in Two United States Cities Using Wastewater-based Epidemiology. Water Research. 161: 171–80. Venkatesan, A. K., Done, H. Y., and Halden, R. U. (2015). United States National Sewage Sludge Repository at Arizona State University—A New Resource and Research Tool for Environmental Scientists, Engineers, and Epidemiologists. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. 22 (3): 1577–86. Venkatesan, A. K. and Halden, R. U. (2014). Wastewater Treatment Plants as Chemical Observatories to Forecast Ecological and Human Health Risks of Manmade Chemicals. Scientific Reports. 4, Article no. 3731.

Chapter 14 Halden, R. U. (2015). Epistemology of Contaminants of Emerging Concern and Literature Meta-analysis. Journal of Hazardous Materials. 282: 2–9. One Water One Health (2019). The Answers Are in the Water Source. https://onewateronehealth.org/. NOTES

137

INDEX

A Clockwork Orange (movie)  99 absolution  99 acrylic  105 adaptability and extinction, archaebacteria, nearextinction  10 advertisement campaign  39 Agent Orange defoliant, Vietnam war  32 agricultural revolution animal farming (see industrial farm animal production) end of crop seasonality  20 fertilizer, petroleumfueled  19 “human biomass” growth  19 industrialization  79 integration (managerialproduction splitting)  79

phosphate fertilizer crisis  23–4 “unproductive soil” transformation  19 unsustainability (Pew Commission report, 2008)  79–80, 83 water irrigation (petroleum-powered)  19 agriculture and meat consumption, study  23, 34, 77–83 air pollution, industrial/ agricultural revolution  19, 15, 80, 86 airplanes  53, 123 alcohol  58 aldrin, organochlorine, cancelled, 1987  35–6 algae-based fuel  122 algae bloom, red tides (aquatic life suffocation)  25–6,

115; see also phosphate fertilizer crisis Algeria  28 Alzheimer’s disease  xiii Amazon (Brazil)  114 American Chemical Society, General Meeting (2018)  103 America’s breadbasket, Great Plains  19 America’s corn belt, Mississippi River Valley  24 American diet  81 American West  30 amino acid  6 analytical sciences  41, 70 Andes  5, 10 animal production  83 animal species  34 animal waste  79 Annapurna mountain (Himalayas)  54 Annual Review of Public Health, journal  88 Anopheles mosquito  34 Anthropocene epoch, ISS space water analysis (2012)  15–16 anthropogenic sources  16 antibiotic drugs  40, 43, 80 antibiotic residues, fish and shellfish  72

antimicrobials  38–42 aquatic life suffocation (algae bloom, red tides)  24–6, 73 archaebacteria, extinction  10 argon  50 Arizona State University, Tempe  71–2, 87, 92, 94, 112, 124 Oceans: How one life powered by ASU can change the world, commercial  92–3 Arkansas  24 artificial lens implant surgery  98, 99 assembly line of life  57, 91; see also life on earth, genesis astronauts  16, 44 Atlanta, Georgia   63 Atlas of Viruses (USA), National Library of Medicine study  113 atmosphere; see earth atmosphere autobahn  59 babies  48, 57, 61, 64, 69 baby boomer  20, 51 bald eagle  35 Baltic Sea, coastal water poisoning  26, 86 Index

139

Baltimore, Maryland  42, 62, 92 ban  44 bar soap  37 BBQ  92 bedding  53 beef production conversion ratios comparison  81 greenhouse gas emission  81–2 beer/alcohol  57, 58–9, 59, 104 Berlin Wall, fall of  12 behavior  64, 70 Bhopal disasters (India)  32 Big Tobacco  60 bioaccumulate  35, 73, 82 biodegradability, lack of in plastic  90–1 Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering  124 biodiversity  25, 82 biologist, biology  2, 76 biomagnification, biomagnify  35, 73, 82 biomass  9 biosphere  70 biosolids  102–3 bioremediation  31 bird species  31 140

Index

birth  64–5 Black Sea, coastal water poisoning  26 blister pack  47, 100, 105 blood  55, 62, 63, 69, 72 blueprint  8, 23 Blum, Arlene  54 body burden of environmental poisons  109, 110 body surface  41 body weight  51 Bond, James, agent 007  98 border  72 bottled water  104 boundaries cellular  14 macroscale (protective earth layers)  3, 13, 14, 15, 126 organismal (skin)  14 Braunschweig (Germany)  1, 10, 57 breadbasket  19 brominated  89 bromine  48, 50, 51, 54 bromine chemistry  48, 50–1 bubble  13, 69, 86, 108 Buckeye, Arizona  71 building blocks  88 CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations)  78, 80

California (brominated fire retardant, obligatory use)  54–5, 72, 91 Canada  112 canal  85 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO)  78, 80 Capitol Hill  32 carbon  6, 73 carbon credit  122 carbon dioxide concentration, Exxon Corporation prediction (1982)  6, 9, 82, 116, 117 carcinogen  52, 69 carnivorous  76 carpet  39 cars  18 Carson, Rachel  xiii, 29, 31, 33, 36, 42, 44, 45, 109 casualties  55 cataract  105 catastrophic consequences  24 cattle  82 cell division  51 cellular intruder  7 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia  63–4 central nervous system  64

Charlie, doctoral student, Arizona State University, Tempe  88, 91–4, 103 chelation therapy, anti-toxin treatment  74 chemical environment  65 chemical industry, regrettable substitution strategies  47–57 ethylene oxide sterilizer/ weapons  47–8 organobromines, flame retardants  48 organochlorines pesticides  48 organofluorine chemistry/ Teflon, indestructible waste  55–6 polychlorinated antimicrobials  48 chemical soup/stew  69–70 Chesapeake Bay, New York City  26, 43, 44 Chicago  111 chicken  81, 121 children  51, 62, 119 China  28, 68, 94 Chimborazo mountain, Andes (Ecuador)  11 chlordane, organochlorine, cancelled, 1988  36 Index

141

chlorine-carbon bonds  33, 35, 50 chlorofluorocarbons (CLF)  118 chloroplast  7 chocolate  122 choking  89 christening  34 cigarette  52, 57, 60, 89 Cigarette Restitution Fund, Maryland  60 cities  20, 107, 111 Clean Air Act  xiii Clean Water Act  xiii cleanup, Nature’s  108 climate  xiii, 120 climbing rescue, Chimborazo mountain  10–12 coal, second industrial revolution (1870)  17, 74 coastal water poisoning  25 cockpit  97 cocktail  113 coexist  7 co-exposure  64–5 cold-blooded  81 Colesville, Maryland  29 collapse  82 collateral damage  34 colonialist  14 colorless  47 Columbia University  70 142

Index

commercials  59 communication  17, 51 compartmentalization  8 concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)  78, 80 Coney Island  35 confidential  44 confounders  65 Congress  32, 79, 83 Connery, Sean  98 consumer products  53, 70 contact lenses, disposable  99–103, 105 downcycling to microplastic (municipal sewage sludge)  102 environmental release as microplastic  103 lens-disposal practices, wastewater-borne lenses  101 pollution study  100–3 contamination, contaminated environments  31, 34, 61 conversion ratios (energy input: meat)  80–1 cooperation, cellular earth atmosphere, life support (oxygen)  8 life creation  7

cooperation, human global: International Space Station  7, 15–16 individual: climbing rescue, Chimborazo (Ecuador)  10–12 see also environmental interconnectedness, mutual responsibilities cord blood  63, 70 Corn belt  24 corn ethanol folly  27 corrosive gas  87 cotinine  64 crop, all-year-seasonality  20 crop rotation  82 cruise ship  122 cryogenic treatment, eyes  99 cures  40 cycle  9, 26, 67, 104 dairy products  77 dams  18 dashboard, public health  112 DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-­ trichloroethane) biomagnifying, bioaccumulate  35 EPA prohibition, 1972  35 extensive environmental damage  35

initial appreciation: insect killer: (Nobel Prize)  34 warning: Silent Spring (Rachel Carson)  29, 33, 45 see also dioxines; organochlorines dead zone  25, 26 death  52 decision makers  51 decomposing  109 degradative enzymes  90 delusion  13, 126 deodorant  39 depression  1, 80 desert  121 detergents  37, 39 developmental toxicity  66 diabetes  24 diagnostics  111 diapers  38 dieldrin, organochlorine, cancelled, 1987  35–6 diet  27 digested sewage sludge  108 DINKS (double income, no kids)  30 dinoflagellates, red tides phenomena  26 dinosaur  16 Index

143

dioxines  32–45, 114 congeners (natural dioxines)  33 environmental disasters (Bhopal, Seveso, Love Canal, Times Beach)  32 synthesized dioxines and damages  34–5 see also organochlorines dirigibles  50 disease  14, 119, 120 disposal routes  41 disruption  53 dissolved oxygen  25 doctoral student  87 doctoral student experience  87–8 dollars  39 dolphins  26 domestic wastewater  41 doormats  39 downcycling  94 Dr. Jekyll  33 drains  41 drinking age  59 drinking water  43, 81 drone  93 drug-resistance  80, 83 drug-use observation (wastewater epidemiology)  112 144

Index

Earth  7, 15, 69, 70, 115 Earth atmosphere, changes beef production  8, 74, 81–2, 82–3, 115 effects  10 human contribution: petroleum extraction/ carbon dioxide release  9–10, 116, 117 life-support, cell cooperation  8 oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle, disturbances  9 Earth Day  xiii Earth’s crust  17, 27 East Coast (US)  87 East Germans  12 East Germany  11 ecosystem  27 Ecuador  11 education  29 efficacy  42 Einstein, Albert  48–9 Elbe, river  86 Elbe-Lübeck Canal  86 electric air taxi  123 electrical discharge  6 electron shell  50 email  42 embryo  51 emerging pollutants  68 Emmy Award  92 Empire State Building  26

end-of-life strategy  68, 90 endocrine disruption by synthetic chemicals  51, 53, 70, 89 endrin, organochlorine, cancelled, 1984  35 energy  20, 74 additional need in intense animal farming  81 cellular (mitochondrium)  7 sunlight harvest, biological (photosynthesis)  8 environment global interconnectedness (see global environmental interconnectedness) knowledge-to-action times/delays (atmospheric carbon dioxide)  117–20 environment, change, German landscape changes (Flurbereinigung)  1–3 environment, fragility awareness, vigilance (personal reaction)  1–2 social: abusive/endangering father  1

environment protection– climbing rescue analogy  5, 6, 10 environmental conditions  91 environmental engineering  29 environmental factors  57 environmental health  60 Environmental Health Perspectives, journal  65 environmental impact research, harmful organofluorine impact on human fetus  60–1 environmental interconnectedness, mutual responsibilities  115–20 Amazon burning (“green lung” loss / carcinogenic dioxins distribution)  115 atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration  116, 177 biodiversity decreases  116 individual virus distribution (personto-person infection)  115 Index

145

Indonesia, trash burning  115 knowledge-to-action times/delays  117–20 environmental pathways  34 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  xiii, 35, 39, 60, 67, 107 environmental safety, construction  58 EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)  xiii, 35, 60, 67, 107 epidemic  82 epidemiology  38, 111 sewage-sludge based  43, 102, 107–11 wastewater-based  111–13 epoxy  86, 87 erosion  82 escalation  36 eternal pollution  55 ethanol, corn  27 ethylene oxide, military use (thermobaric weapons)  48 ethylene oxide sterilization, mutation, cancer link  47–8 eukaryotic cells  7; see also life on earth, genesis Europe  37, 67 146

Index

European National Risk Assessment Institute  70 eutrophication  26 expedition  54 explosive gas  47 exposure  34 extension program  78 Exxon Corporation  115 eye  97 face mask  86 failure  125 fantasy  60 farmers  78, 80, 81 farmland  102 fast food  81 fat tissue  73 fat-soluble  73 feed  81 feed crops  82 fertilizer  19 fetus  66 fibers  104 fillets  72 fire retardation  53 fire, self-sustaining  52 fireflies  30 fish, contamination and toxin accumulation (foodchain effect)  72–4, 81, 95, 115, 121 fishing line  89

flame retardants, bromine chemistry  48 California (brominated fire retardant, obligatory use)  54–5 toxicity, endocrine disruption  51 uses  52–3 flatulence  82 fleece jacket  104 flesh  87, 109 flight crew  44 flights  123 Flint, Michigan  125 fluids  13 fluorescent light  50 fluorine-carbon bond  55 Flurbereinigung (land consolidation, Germany), landscapechanging effects  2 flying  122 foam mattress  53 food  13, 19 food allergies  70 Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  36, 38–9, 83, 117 food chain  73, 74 food inspector  72–6 food supply  82 forbears  8 forest ranger  83, 84, 122

forgetfulness  71, 73 fossil fuel  19, 81 France  85 Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger” (free passage for free citizens), German autobahn slogan  59 freshwater  80–1 fuel  71, 123 fumes  86 fungal diseases  33 furniture  53 future  12, 51, 120 genetic information  23 German division (1952–1990)  1, 10 German re-unification  12 Germany  1, 10, 21, 29, 58, 75, 85, 87 germophobia  39 gingivitis  37 glacier  10 global atmosphere  8, 124 global communication internet  17 telegraph (19th century)  17 global environment  32, 67, 69 global industrialization, second industrial revolution (1870)  17 Index

147

global pollutants  90 global trade  122 Global Warming Potential (GWP)  82 glue  86 Goldilocks distance, earth–sun  5 government subsidies  27 graduate school  87 graduate students  40 graffiti  59 Great American Desert, agricultural transformation  19 Great Plains  19 green lung  114 greenhouse gas  82 greenhouse gas emission; see earth atmosphere, changes groundwater  31 growth  23 growth promotion  80 Gulasch (dish)  75 Gulf of Mexico, coastal water poisoning  25, 26 gun fire  97 gut  76 gynecology  60 gyre  103 habitable space  18 halogen  49, 50 148

Index

Hamburgers  81 harmful stew  51 hazard  89 head circumference  66 health  27, 53, 88, 120 heart  41, 82 heat-trapping gas  52 helium  50 heptachlor, organochlorine, cancelled, 1978  35 hexachlorobenzene, organochlorine, cancelled, 1985  35 hexachlorophene, organochlorine cancelled, 1976  36 heydays of organochlorines  33 Himalayas  54 Hindenburg, zeppelin explosion (1937)  50 homes  41 hopelessness  59 hormonal balance  53 hormones  43, 51, 69 hospitals  37, 41, 62–3 hourly wage  86 house dust  55 household sinks  41 human as “born consumer”, plant-dependency  9 human being–environment, equivalence of

humans as part/main creator of the environment  3, 13 microorganism sharing (boundary blur)  13–14 misconception of human body–environment boundaries  14 “human biomass” growth  19 human bodies  13 human exposure  55 human fetal exposure to carcinogens, research project  60 human generations  28 human gut  109 human health  31 Human Health Observatory (HHO)  107 human influence on planet revolt against Nature (second industrial revolution)  17–18 turning point: access to energy resources  18 human waste  111 humanity  28, 49, 90 hydrocarbons  52 hydrogen  6, 50, 52, 90 hygiene products  38 hypocrisy  125

hypothesis  109 hypoxia  25 ice  11 IFAP (industrial farm animal production)  78 Illinois  24 immune disorder  70 implantation  98 India  68 indoor  18 industrial farm animal production (IFAP)  78 animal waste impact (groundwater, soil, air contamination)  79–80 antibiotic use, resistance (health, growth promotion)  80 arable support/extensive energy needs  81 conversion-ratio changes  80–1 integrated farming model, effects  79, 80–1 intense, confined animal farming  80 see also agricultural revolution; beef production infant wards  37 infertility  xiii infrastructure  43, 86 Index

149

Inner German Border  11 innocuous  73 insects  34 inspiration  123 insulin resistance  89 interconnectivity  123 Internal Review Board  110 International Space Station  15–16 human cooperation, example  15 space water pollution study (antimicrobials proof in space) (2012)  15–16, 44 internet fear and hope  17 global communication tool  17 Interstate  71–3 intraocular implant surgery  98 inventory  92, 94, 101, 108 investment  91 Iowa  24 iron mining  85 irrigation  41 Jamaica Bay, New York City  44 JFK Airport, New York City  44 150

Index

Johns Hopkins University, Maryland  30, 31, 40, 60, 70, 76, 78, 83 kidneys  41 kitchen counters  39 knowledge-to-action times/ delays atmospheric carbon dioxide, from 1982  117 Montreal Protocol (1989)  118 regulatory action to chemicals’ threat (14 years)  117 US tobacco use  118–19 Konrad Mine (Schacht Konrad), Salzgitter (Germany)  87 Kubrick, Stanley  99 laboratory  71, 72 ladder  85 lagoons  80 land consolidation  2 landfill  94 law  39 lead paint  62 lead poisoning (paint), neurotoxic effects  62–3 lens  98

life as privilege (individual/ life on earth)  5–12 life expectancy  xiii, 8, 83, 119, 120 life on earth genesis  5–12 chances of  5–6 cooperation vs. fighting in multicellular life evolution  7 photosynthetic organisms (sunlight harvest, oxygen production)  8 plant development  8 time frame  5–6 life on earth genesis, stages amino acids–protein– progenitor cells (cellular life)  6 eukaryotic cells  7 multicellular organism  8 photosynthetic organisms  8 planetary pre-conditions, Goldilocks distance  5 primordial-stew  6 life-forms  115 lifeblood  23 lifestyle  10 Lifetime Health Advisory (LHA) for PFOS, PFOA  67 light pollution  15 limitations  91

lipid  109, 110 liver  41 livestock farming; see industrial farm animal production living space  7, 52 lobbying  38 London, UK  20, 97 Moorfields Eye Hospital  97 population growth  20 Long Island, New York City  35 Love Canal disasters (New York)  32 luck  11 Ludovico Technique  99 luggage  105 Lüneburger Heide (Germany)  75 macroscale  14, 48 malnutrition  14 manatees  26 Manhattan, New York City  35 mankind  8 Marijuana  112 marine environments  24 Maryland  44, 60 Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund  60 mass analyzer  43 Index

151

mass balance  101 mass production  52, 53 mass spectrometer  43 Matryoshka dolls  14 maverick  11 meals  72 meat production; see industrialized animal production model medical devices  98 megacities  21 megalopolises  21 membranes  14 mercury  74 meridian  19 metabolism  51 metabolite  64 metagenomic virus detecting/sequencing (USA)  113 Meine (Germany)  10, 21 metagenomic sequencing  113 metal  63 methods  43 methylmercury, neurotoxin  73; see also seafood contamination metropolis  20 microgravity  15 microbiome  14 microorganism  13–14 152

Index

microplastics  44, 95, 102, 103–5 ambient air and  105 disposable contact lens waste  99–103 food networks and  105 infancy of health impact studies  104 ocean distribution of (surface/sub-surface)  103–4 ubiquity in global environment  103–5 see also plastics microscale  48, 105 mid-Atlantic region  42 Midland Canal (Mittellandkanal), Germany–France  87–8 millennium  24 Minneapolis, Minnesota  76 Minnesota  24 minor league player  17 miracle  6, 55 mirex, organochlorine, cancelled, 1977  35 miscarriage  xiii Mississippi Delta, coastal water poisoning  25 Missouri  24 mixtures  13 modern humans  20

molds  8 molecular oxygen  8 mollusks  8 monkeys  8, 36 monocellular  26 monomer  88 Monterey, California  92, 93, 103 Monterey underwater canyon, California  103–4 Montreal Protocol (1989)  117 Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, UK  97; see also Ridley, Harold Morocco  28 mosquito  34–5 mountaineers  10, 36 mouthwash  39 Mr. Hyde  33 Müller, Paul Hermann  34 municipal sewage sludge, analysis  43, 101, 107–8 US municipal sewage sludge data (2007)  107 US National Sewage Sludge Survey (2001)  107 see also sewage sludge, analysis munition  48 mutation  48 myth  94

nanoplastic pollution  104 NASA: space water pollution study (antimicrobials proof in space) (2012)  15–16, 44 National Center for Health Statistics of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  110 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)  110 National Library of Medicine  113 Natura non facit saltus  48 natural gas  17 natural resources  18 Nature  1–2, 3, 17–19 disappearance (awareness/first-hand experience)  18, 21 disappearance (industrial destruction)  18 human dependency on  19 negative energy balance  27 Neon  50 nerves  41 neurosensory  99 New York City  20, 34, 35 Chesapeake Bay  44 Coney Island beach  35 Index

153

Jamaica Bay  44 Long Island  35 Manhattan  35 population growth  35 Rockaway beach  35 newborn  38, 39, 66, 69 nicotine  64 nitrogen  6 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1948), DDT efficiency in killing insects  34 noble gases  49–50 nuclear power plant  85 nucleic acids  23 numbness  73 obesity/diabetes  24, 82 observational study  61, 64 obstetrics  60 occupant  52 ocean  92, 104 octogenarian  98 offspring  66 Ogallala aquifer  19 oil  xiii, 65 omnivore nature of humans  76 one-million people cities  20–1 opioid  112 orbiting  15 organic toxins  109 154

Index

organobromines failed management of  53, 54–5 harm to human body  51–2 practical uses  48–51, 52–3 see also flame retardants, bromine chemistry organochlorines failed management of  48, 53 harm to human body and prohibition  34–6, 51 initial practical uses  33–4, 48–51 triclocarban/triclosan, long-term pollution case  36–43 see also dioxines organochlorine-pickled  36 organochlorine synthesis  33 organofluorine chemistry  55–6, 61–2 health studies: harmful organofluorine impact on human fetus  60–2, 63–9 health studies: prebirth organofluorine effects on rats/mice (2003)  60–2, 63–9

nearly indestructible nature of (eternal pollution)  55, 61, 65 PFOA, PFOS production restriction (USA)  67–8 polyfluorinated compounds (per-/fully fluorinated)  60–1 Teflon  44, 55, 61, 63, 65, 90 organohalogen  119 organometal  74 osteoporosis  70 overdose  111 oxygen deficiency (hypoxia)  25 oxygen source, cellular water splitting (photolysis)  8 oxygen–carbon dioxide cycle  9 Pacific, coastal water poisoning  26, 79, 83 pain  14, 99 painter  58, 62 parents  119 parts per million (ppm)  115 parts per trillion (ppt)  67 pathogen  80, 113 PBDE (polybrominated diphenyl ethers)  69

PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), organochlorine, cancelled, 1978  35, 69, 73 peer-review  117 perfluorinated  61, 65, 67, 89 perfluorinated/polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS)  68, 69 perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS)  65–8 perfluorooctanoate (PFOA)  65–8 periodic table, elements  48–9 persistent chemicals  108 personal care products  37, 38, 40, 44 pesticides  33, 81–2 pet collar  39 petroleum agricultural revolution  19 industrial revolution  18 petroleum extraction/ carbon dioxide release, earth atmosphere heating  10 Pew Charitable Trust  77 PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate)  65–8 Index

155

PFOA (perfluorooctanoate)  65–8 PFAS (perfluorinated/ polyfluorinated alkyl substances)  68, 69 Phoenix Skyharbor Airport (PHX)  71–2 phosphate fertilizer crisis  23–8 aquatic life suffocation (algae bloom, red tides)  24–6 corn ethanol folly  27 eutrophication  26 hypoxia  25 phosphorus resource depletion  27–8 topsoil/nutrients erosion  24 phosphorus  23, 27 photic zone  25 photosynthetic plants/ photosynthesis, human benefits from: energy source (plant biomass)  8 oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle  9 oxygen-filled atmosphere  8 photovoltaic system  121 pigments  89 156

Index

pigs  81 Pike, John  98 planet  13 plants  115 plastic trash gyre, Pacific Ocean  103 plasticizer endocrine disruptors  88–9 health disorder linkage  89 phthalates  88–9 plastics cancer risk (micro/nano plastic in tissues)  89 chemical risks  89 physical hazard (choking, human and animals)  89 “Plastics and Health Risks,” article  88 microplastic ubiquity: sewage sludge epidemiology  43, 102, 107–11 non-biodegradability  90–1 pollution ubiquity  89–90 plastics, coating  89 epoxy resins, exposure Konrad Mine (Germany)  86–7

plastics, recycling myth downcycling vs. recycling  94 incinerating/landfilling/ out-shipping vs. recycling (3:1 ratio)  94 plastic waste import refusals (China, 2018)  94 Pleasanton, California  124 poison  26, 73, 74 pollutants  73 pollution  23, 55, 60 polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE)  69 polybrominated flame retardants  73 polychlorinated antimicrobials use, harm  48 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), endocrinedisrupting transformer  35, 69, 73, 74; see also seafood contamination polyfluorinated  68 polyfluorinated compounds; see organofluorine chemistry polymer  90, 97, 104 polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)  90

polyvinyl chloride (PVC) 90–1 population  18 population growth  18, 20 pre/post industrial revolution  20 urbanization  20–1 pork ribs  93 postnatal growth/survival  66 poverty  59, 77 ppm  115 pre-dioxin  40 Precautionary Principle  115 precursor  17, 65 precautionary principle, environmental action  116 predator  2–3 human as planet’s top predator  3 prey behavior  2 pregnancy  xiii, 61, 66 premature birth/death  xiii, 14 prescription drugs  43 prey  2 primordial soup/stew  6 privacy  30, 44 privilege  21 profit  98 progenitor  7 proliferation  39 prophylaxis  80 protein  6, 91 Index

157

PTFE (polytetrafluoro­ethylene)  90 puberty/puberty (early onset)  xiii, 89 public health  30 public health dashboard  112 publications  70 publish  31 PVC (polyvinyl chloride)  90–1 quality of life  120 radicals  52 radioactive waste  85, 103 railroads  17 rain  24 Raman  91, 102 random structure  91 randomness  6 ranger  57, 75 rape seed  2 rats  36 reading glasses  100 recycling  94 red tides, algae bloom  25, 26; see also phosphate fertilizer crisis regrettable substitution; see chemical industry, regrettable substitution strategies 158

Index

regulations/regulatory action  37, 66 remote  69 reoxygenate  26 reproductive health/maturity/ system  69, 51, 89 residence  42 resistance  40 respiration  9 retinoschisis  99 reunification  12 Ridley, Harold  97–9 artificial lens implant surgery  98, 105 plastic particles, lack of immune-response to  97 risk  78, 88, 116 risk–gain imbalance, chemical industry; see chemical industry, regrettable substitution strategies riverbank  89 Rockaway  35 rodent  65 Rome (Italy)  20 runoff  82 rural communities  80 Russia  69 sailboat  122 Salzgitter (Germany)  85, 87 sampling network  108

San Francisco, California  30 sandblasting  58 sanitation agent  37, 40 scaffolding  58–9 scam  39 SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus)  58 school garden  123 school of public health  30 school supplies  39 seafood  71, 104 seafood contamination, food chain effect (toxin accumulation)  73–4 seasickness  93 seat cushion  53 seawalls  18 seawater  24, 73 second industrial revolution  17–18 security  80 self  13 self-assembled  13 self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA)  58 self-doubt  87 self-replication  6 self–surroundings concept, delusion  13 September 11, 2001  119 septic load  79 Seveso disasters (Italy)  32

sewage sludge, analysis  43, 102, 107–11 analysis transfer of persistent chemistry into environment  109 data sources: global  107–8 data sources US: municipal sewage sludge data (2007)  107 data sources US: National Sewage Sludge Survey (2001)  107 disease management change (medicine to public health observation)  111 research aim: contamination status of human bodies  108 toxin burden correlation: sludge–human body  109–10 sewage sludge epidemiology  43, 102, 107–11 sexual organs  51 shock waves  17 shopping  77 showering  41 shrapnel  95, 97 Sierra, California  54 Silent Spring  29, 33, 45 Index

159

skepticism  67 skin  87 sleepwear  53, 54 smell  86, 92 smoking  52, 58, 64, 118 smorgasbord  9, 73 soap  36, 39, 42 social media  42 soil  19, 80, 82 solar power  121 South America  10 Soviet Bloc  10 space water pollution study (antimicrobials proof) (2012)  15–16, 44 spaceship  16 species  115 spectrometer  91 sperm  89 spinach  91 splitting water  8 sponsored research  77 statistical analysis  64 steak  81 sterilization chamber  47 steroidal hormones  43 steward of agricultural land  78 Stockholm Convention (2001)  34 stormwater  82 stratosphere  118

160

Index

stupidity  49 substance (mis)use  59 suburban  30 succession  36 suffocation  87 sugar beet  2 suicide  78 sulfur  6 summer job  86 sunlight  85 sunshine  8, 23 Super Bowl  92 super-toxic  40 surgeon  98, 105 surgery  98, 99 survival  7, 14 sustainability  125 sustainable chemicals  70 swordfish  72 Syria  28 TEDx talk  94 Teflon (perfluorinated compound), indestructible waste  44, 61; see also organofluorine chemistry Teflon babies, harmful organofluorine impact on human fetus (studies)  60–2, 63–9

television (TV)  59 Tempe, Arizona  87, 112 Tennessee  118 textiles  38 thermobaric weapons  48 threat  118 thyroid  69 time  7, 10 time consumption changes, indoor/outdoor behavior  18 Times Beach disasters, Missouri  32 tobacco/nicotine  52, 56, 57, 58–9, 64, 118 tons  90, 94 topsoil erosion/degradation  20, 24, 83 torture  33, 99 toxaphene, organochlorine, cancelled, 1990  33, 36 toxic body burden  109 toxic exposures and effect, research, harmful organofluorine impact on human fetus toxic ingredients  44 toxicant  52, 73 toxicological  50, 68, 70 toxins  17, 89, 109, 124 trailblazer  54

transformer fluid  35, 69 travel  121 treasures  17 treatment plant  42 triclocarban/triclosan, organochlorines  36–43, 113 advertised for antimicrobial/ antibacterial use  37 development of antibiotic, antimicrobial residence  40 early indications of poisonous effect: infant deaths (1960/70s)  37 FDA monographs (1974, 1978)  38 Hopkin University  2004: pollution proof  41–3 prohibition 2017 43 body care use (household/ healthcare settings)  37 trichlorinated antimicrobials  70 Tris(2,3-dibromopropyl) phosphate  54 turtles  26 typhus  34

Index

161

ultraviolet  118 umbilical cord  19 unnatural  14 unpredictable  24 unsustainable  20 unsustainability agriculture: phosphate crisis  23–8 agriculture: water management  19, 20, 23 urbanization  20–1 megacities (10 million people)  21 one-million people cities  20–1 urine  74 US Department of Agriculture (USDA)  78 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  35, 60, 67, 107 vaginal rinsing solution  36 valence shell  49 Valley of the Sun, Sonoran Desert, Arizona  87 venison  75 victims  38 Victorian house  92 video  92 Vietnam War  73

162

Index

vigilance  2 virologist  113 volcanic eruption  33 vulnerable populations  61 VW (Volkswagen)  57, 59 warm-blooded  81 Washington, DC  42 wastewater  42–3, 108 wastewater treatment plant  101, 108 wastewater-based epidemiology  111–13 Atlas of Viruses (USA), National Library of Medicine study  113 biological threats protection  112–13 drug abuse crisis monitoring  112 drug-legalization effect evaluation (Canada, 2019)  112 metagenomic virus detecting/sequencing (USA)  113 water  8, 20, 65, 80 water bottles  94 water management  23

weaponize  39 wedding  88 weight gain  89 Whymper refugee, Chimborazo mountain, Ecuador   11 wild boar  75 wind  82 Wisonsin  24

world population  18, 20 World War II  34, 85, 97 Xenon  50 yachts  60 yield  81 Zeppelin  50

Index

163

164