They Poisoned the World

I checked out They Poisoned the World
from the local Laurel County Public Library.

Mariah Blake. They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. Penguin Random House, 2025.

This is a book that you must read - but also must not read. Because it will shake you. It is a horror story going on all around us and even within us. Even though most of us are aware of harmful chemicals and some of the problems with plastics, Blake exposes and explains the rippling dimensions of this crisis. 

The Washington Post called it "Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time." True enough, but this misses the deeper point that it is more than a "moral" scandal - the manufacture and proliferation of these chemicals -in secret and hidden from public knowledge and regulatory oversight - has altered all life on earth, interfering with and altering metabolic processes for all organic living beings, and contaminating soil and water globally at a molecular level. 

It is not just a moral scandal - though it is that. It is a global catastrophe that literally turns the fundamental realities of life on earth - soil, water, food - into poison. It is a betrayal of the covenant and circle of life. Every human being and animal on the planet has these chemicals in their blood.  

Blake is an amazing investigative journalist. She conducted over 600 interviews for the book. That means the book is filled with names, dates, events, and well-documented with sources. She keeps the footnotes to a minimum, but there are plenty of endnotes documenting the case of the global exposure to these chemicals and the massive industry cover-up of their health effects. 

The "They" in the title are the chemical manufacturers - huge multinational corporations like DuPont, 3M, and Saint-Gobain. These companies manufacture types of "forever" chemicals that don't break down in the environment at all, "meaning that every molecule of the chemical that is produced would linger on the planet for millenia" (87). There are thousands of these chemicals that are completely unregulated and untested, in fact "the vast majority of the 80,000 plus chemicals circulating in the United States today have never undergone any form of safety testing" (81). Blake focuses on one class of chemicals: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS - of which the most notorious are known as PFOA and PFOS, used to make Teflon and Gore-tex. These companies not only produce these chemicals but make many products containing them. Their proliferation in the environment is virtually unpreventable and they are "biological dynamite" linked to numerous illnesses "including cancer, heart disease, infertility and declining sperm counts (104), early puberty, reduced IQ, ad neurological disorders like ADHD" (xii) and PFOA is specifically linked to kidney, testicular, and breast cancers, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, birth defects, and more.

At every turn, these companies intentionally hid the data linking these chemicals to widespread fatal health effects, even while expanding production putting millions in harm's way, and manipulated the science to order to continue raking in massive profits (109). "What began as a cover-up between two U.S. companies, DuPont and 3M, had morphed into a global conspiracy of silence involving dozens of major corporations" (122).

The book is also the story of brave grassroots activists - primarily the people who experienced the debilitating health effects of these chemicals - whole communities rocked by epidemics of cancer - and fought back. Blake tells the stories of several of these "accidental activists" and writes:

Most of the improbable victories that have occurred so far were brought about by people in places like Hoosnick Falls who dared to take on some of the world's most powerful corporations, often at great personal cost. People who fought to protect everything they held dear by filing lawsuits, holding protests, speaking out in the media, and demanding action from political leaders. (228-29)

Some of these activists were Appalachians. One of the major sites of contamination was Parkersburg, West Virginia, a town of 30,000 on the Ohio River where DuPont had a plant. Blake recounts the amazing story of local people who not only won a major lawsuit, but also coordinated an enormously successful community health study that "assembled one of the largest, most detailed pools of data ever collected during a single health study" allowing scientists to correlate "PFOA exposure with particular diseases." As the study leader later said, "These hillbillies threw a rock in DuPont's machine" (128).

There is no happy ending here. In the epilogue, Blake describes how new forever chemicals are taking the place of PFOA. One in particular, trifluoroacetic acid, TFA, is even more widespread, more difficult to filter out of drinking water, and just as dangerous. A recent study by Emory University showed that TFA levels in Indiana homeowners' blood was higher than levels of PFOA at its peak (221). 

It is hard not to be pessimistic, even fatalistic in the face of what Blake writes. In a world where exposure is inevitable, what can you do? Blake advises keeping up the fight - private citizens who arm themselves with knowledge and organize to demand justice. 

On a personal note, in 2024 the EPA set binding standards for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water at 4 parts per trillion (ppt). I looked at the latest drinking water data from Corbin Utilities, which supplies the water my family and friends drink\. The report shows PFOA averaging at 4.13 ppt and some of the other PFAS at slightly higher levels. You can find the Corbin Utilities report linked here. 

How I Define Paganism

John Duncan, Riders of the Sidhe, 1911.

I was on study abroad trip following a tour guide down a Paris street and chatting with another member of the group. Learning of my research area, my acquaintance said he wasn't very familiar with Paganism and asked how I would describe it. 

In that moment, it was as if years of research and thought coalesced into a clear definition. What a great moment. When you have been looking at all this data, all these pieces, and suddenly out of the morass, a structure emerges, a set of characteristics that makes sense of something, sheds light and lets you see the thing with clarity. In fact when I got back to the hotel that night, I had to immediately sketch it out. I love it when a definition or a category comes together, especially when it stands the test of time and continued experience. 

What is Paganism? In that  conversation in Paris, this five-point definition emerged and has remained very useful and helpful for quickly describing the main characteristics of contemporary Paganism. So here it is. Pagan religions are those that are . . . 

• Past oriented
• Nature based
• Polytheistic
• Ancestor venerating
• Magical

Past-oriented: Pagan religions look to the past for religious and spiritual inspiration. Pagan religions tend to hold that the cultures and religions of the pre-Christian past were deeper, spiritually richer, socially more integrated, living in closer balance and harmony with nature, etc. Pagan religions seek to discover and recover the spiritual wisdom of these ancient cultures - ideas, practices, lifestyles, spirituality and religion - and bring it into the present. This is in contrast to New Age religions, which tend to look for a future transformation or evolution of human beings into a higher spiritual consciousness, an Age of Aquarius. In my book Being Viking: Heathenism in America, see chapter 4 "Spears and Shieldwalls: The Self and the Struggle of Life" 

Nature based: Pagan religions look to nature in various ways, to see nature as sacred and to live closer to the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. There many different ways that Pagans incorporate the natural: temporally around a nature-based religious calendar;  magically be making use of natural materials like wood, plants, and herbs; aesthetically by using natural objects in art or symbols drawn from nature; cosmologically through astrology; geographically by seeking or cultivating places of power in the landscape; relationally by communing with nature spirits or interacting with plants, animals, and places like rivers or mountains as other-than-human people; physically by affirming bodily experiences as sacred, and so on. Pagan religions tend to be this-worldly. This is in contrast to other-worldly religions that prepare their believers to escape from the physical world into a transcendent reality and see worldly, earthly, bodily realities as impure or sinful. In Being Viking, see chapter 7, "The Wind-Swept Tree: Nature Religion in Asatru."

Polytheistic: Pagan religions see the world as full of many gods. They conceptualize and experience the divine as manifested in many differentiated beings of power. This includes an openness to the divine feminine. Pagans cultivate relationships with many gods through worship, ritual, and offerings, creating complex cult systems that incorporate liturgy, sacred space, music, costume, dance, magic, ritual, sacrifice, education, community, etc. This is in contrast to the dominant monotheistic religions, which see divinity expressed in one deity. Pagans see monotheism as a historical anomaly that is out of synch with the polytheism that has characterized the religious beliefs of most human cultures. See Being Viking, chapter 5 "Hard Polytheism in a Soft World"

Ancestor Venerating:  Pagans cultivate an awareness of ancestral beings and seek to connect to  ancestors in their lives and religious practice. Ancestors are often thought of in three ways: blood ancestors represent the line of biological kinship; ancestors of place represent those who came before oneself on the land, in the place where one resides; ancestors of faith or spirit are those forebears who share a common spirituality or worldview. Of course, this resonates with past-orientation. However, ancestor veneration has become an important part of Paganism, perhaps even more important than polytheism for many. Many Pagans have ancestral altars or ancestor shelves in their home, where offerings and prayers are given. Connection to ancestors is an important part of Pagan identity, of belonging to a family and a tribe, feeling connected to the people, practices, objects - to live in some way like they did, and also to cultivate living relationships with ancestral beings who might give wisdom, courage, strength. This is in contrast to other modern religious and philosophic ontologies that prioritize the individual as an autonomous agent. See Being Viking, chapter 9, "Kith and Kin: Asatru as a Family Religion"

Magical - Pagan religions see the world as functioning magically - understanding that reality is interconnected through correspondences, and malleable to the focused will. Pagans make use of a variety of magical practice, from high magic to hedge magic, sigil magic, goddess magic, chaos magic and more. Many of these are drawn from the past, although modern theorists and practitioners of magic such as Aleister Crowley and groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn have also been very influential on Pagan magic. Magical systems and practices can be part of specific Pagan traditions such as seidr in Norse Heathenry; taught and passed down in families in trad Paganism; and developed or innovated through individual discovery, experimentation, and intuition. See Being Viking, chapter 8, "Asatru as Magical Religion."