They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah Blake; Crown, 320 pp., $30
Investigative journalist Mariah Blake’s They Poisoned the World will inevitably be likened to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s 1962 account of the chemical pollutant DDT was a national wake-up call that inspired the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Blake’s book, a masterly exposé of the chemicals known as PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—similarly reveals the extent to which these toxins permeate our planet. Let us hope that it also leads to the kind of policy shift that a story of this magnitude demands.
PFAS are synthetically produced chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine. Fluorine, sometimes called Lucifer’s gas, was long feared by scientists because of its tendency to burst into flames on contact with water. But when carbon chains are swaddled in fluorine, the resulting molecule takes on extraordinary qualities, resisting water, heat, and oil—which is why PFAS are found in everything we don’t want to become stained, burned, or sticky.
The United States’ chemical industry was born with the Revolution, when French-American Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours became the go-to gunpowder manufacturer in the colonies. His DuPont company remained on solid footing through the next century and a half, until World War II propelled it to new heights. The Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb program required a lot of enriched uranium, fast, so DuPont secretly developed and manufactured fluorinated chemicals as sealants and lubricants for the enrichment machinery.
After the war, DuPont, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (which later became 3M), and other companies investigated whether the chemicals invented to stave off fascism could have practical uses. They found many: PFAS could be stretched to form nonstick coatings like Teflon; layered over cloth to make waterproof, breathable fabric like Gore-Tex; turned into vascular grafts and surgical sutures; and used to fireproof textile products from baby clothes to carpets.
Meanwhile, the companies also studied the substances’ toxicity and effects on the environment. Experiments found that in rats, PFAS could affect eye formation and were related to certain tumors, and in monkeys could cause liver problems and kidney abnormalities. Scientists discovered that PFAS didn’t break down naturally like other substances, “meaning every molecule of the chemical that it produced would linger on the planet for millennia,” writes Blake—hence the moniker “forever chemicals.” Nevertheless, a DuPont-funded scientist “articulated the principle that now forms the bedrock of our system for regulating potentially toxic substances—namely, that they should be presumed safe until proven otherwise,” Blake continues. “This is why the vast majority of the 80,000-plus chemicals circulating in the United States today have never undergone any form of safety testing.”
In one harrowing account, former DuPont machine operator Sue Bailey recalls being repeatedly exposed to Teflon overflows in a small room—while pregnant. She gave birth to a child with similar malformations as some of the rats: half a nose and a serrated eyelid that drooped toward his cheekbone. Initially, DuPont pulled pregnant women off the floors where PFAS were produced. But months later, claiming insufficient evidence to prove the chemicals’ toxicity, the company reversed the decision.
Blake’s research on PFAS relies on more than 600 firsthand interviews, along with thousands of emails, archival records, court documents, and U.S. government accounts, many of which were previously classified. Indeed, what gives They Poisoned the World its power and readability is chronicles of people like Bailey, whom Blake follows into courthouses, hospital rooms, churches, and dive bars as they struggle to amplify the dangers of PFAS. Three residents of the small town of Hoosick Falls, New York, which hosts a cluster of factories that have been producing and using PFAS since the mid-1900s, largely drive this narrative. Michael Hickey is an insurance underwriter whose father, Ersel, retires from the Teflon factories to spend more time golfing and driving a school bus. When Ersel becomes suddenly ill with kidney cancer, Hickey connects with a local doctor, Marcus Martinez, who is already suspicious about the role of pollution in his patients’ health. Soon, Martinez himself is diagnosed with a rare cancer. They cross paths with Emily Marpe, who names her house Cloud Nine because she is so elated to have a safe place to live—until she discovers that her water contains five times the EPA’s safety limit of forever chemicals. Her baby is born with PFAS levels in her blood nearly 40 times the national average.
They form a team of unlikely activists: Hickey is clean-cut and hates public speaking; Martinez is slight and devoted to medicine; Marpe is overworked but relentless. Their efforts to tell the truth about PFAS and bring to account the corporations that produce them elicit the ire and obfuscation of those corporations, their PR firms, their clever lobbyists, and the federal government. The activists also face the opprobrium of their neighbors, who rely on those same corporations for their jobs, and local leaders who want to avert bad publicity.
Thanks to the work of these and other activists, however, some progress has been made on regulating PFAS and scaling back production. But the fight is far from over, and even more unnerving facts have emerged: shorter chains of carbons surrounded by fluorine, including trifluoroacetic acid, or TFA, used to make pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and fluids for heating and cooling systems, may be more insidious. In one German study, TFA accounted for more than 90 percent of the harmful fluorinated substances in tap water. Not only are these chemicals harder to filter from drinking water than PFAS themselves, their toxicity has been largely ignored.
Following Blake through her sweeping investigation of fluorinated substances, one begins to understand that “forever” is an alarming understatement. These chemicals are not just for all time, they are also in all places. From the tissues of orcas to the dust on the Tibetan plateau, and in the bodies of nearly every person on Earth. There is no escape, anywhere. That’s why this book is critical reading for us all.
