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. 

Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza

Mario Alejandro Ariza, author of Disposable City.
  Read the NYT interview here. 

Mario Alejandro Ariza. Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020.

Mario Ariza's book, Disposable City, takes a front line and personal look at the impact of anthropogenic climate change in the city of Miami, Florida. 

I am headed to Miami in a few days for the meeting of the American Academy of Religion Southeast Region. This is an annual gathering of religion scholars and students from colleges all over the Southeastern U.S. to discuss all manner of academic religious topics. This year it happens to be held in Miami, Florida, a city at the epicenter of climate change. So to prepare for my Religion and Nature session, I have just read his book.

Ariza is a journalist and this book is a work of journalism. Ariza takes us with him as he investigates, interviews, and reports on the many facets of this complex issue. Interestingly, the book also came from Ariza's three years as a Michener Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. And that shows. It isn't a dry book, but a work of creative non-fiction. Each chapter is a story in which the reader journeys with Ariza to a new part of the city and region, meeting interesting and compelling people, and getting a close-up, hands-on view of one thread of the climate disaster slowing but inevitably approaching Miami and South Florida. Miami, he tells us, is a "blisteringly new city, even by American standards. Most of the housing stock in Miami-Dade county was built after 1970" (89). He touches on everything from the real estate market, king tides, pythons in the Everglades, water management infrastructure, community organizing in Little Haiti, and to the offices of scientists, politicians, and courtrooms in which climate change decisions are being made . . . or avoided. The reader gets a detailed tour of the city and region, personalities, history, cultures, and inequities. The book is an amazing picture of a vibrant and fragile American city with an uncertain future. I learned so much about Miami, its history and cultures, its optimism and growth, as well as its multifaceted struggle with the most important global issue of our lifetime.

Ariza's intensely local focus is compelling. The book emphatically and unwaveringly points to the real impact of anthropogenic climate change and makes it personal. Ariza tells us how this city is drowning and how these people are impacted. As readers, we are drawn into the stories of those who are both effected by climate change and who are working passionately to pull Miami out of this environmental death spiral. At the same time, the local issues are woven into a global story that affects all of us.  

This map from National Geographic shows how
sea level rise will radically alter
South Florida and the city of Miami.

Chapter 5 "History Is a Swamp" looks at the doubly threatened Everglades, the unique and once massive freshwater wetland known as the River of Grass. Cut off from its water source of Lake Okeechobee and inundated with fertilizer run-off, the Everglades has shrunk and withered. At the same time, rising sea levels are causing rapid "saltwater intrusion" that is radically changing the ecosystem (130).  Ariza introduces us to Michael Frank, an elder of the Miccosukee tribe who is deeply engaged in the struggle to save the Everglades. The Miccosukee, like other Native people, are deeply connected to land in their stories, history, and lifeways. They are land-wise and interact with the landscape as a person and a community of which they are part. When the Miccosukee nation was being hounded and  threatened by the U.S. Army genocidally empowered by the Indian Removal Act, the Everglades embraced the people, hide them, and provided a refuge and home (128-29). Now they have adapted to fight the political and legal battles that will shape the future of their homeland. Although communicating that Native vision and relationship to land is difficult. I wish we could have learned more about this in Ariza's book. However Michael McNalley's Defend the Sacred:Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment is a great resource to learn more about how Native people have been approaching and fighting these battles at the frontlines of the ecological crisis.

If you are interested in Miami, other coastal cities, if you are concerned about the environment and about climate change, I highly recommend Disposable City. Just remember that what happens in Miami affects the entire nation. Ariza's discussion of climate refugees, displacement, and migration, powerfully communicates how Miami's future with climate change is eye of a hurricane of social change that will spin out in a "massive internal migration" that will reshape the U.S. (231). Yet, he doesn't leave this as an abstract issue. Ariza shares his own personal grief about the devastating impacts of this unfolding reality on the lives of real people (224-25). Ariza's transparency calls us into a more personal involvement and approach to these issues. What are the climate-related stories of tragedy, stress, migration, and upheaval that have impacted our own lives and those of our neighbors? Are we listening and telling these stories.

Ariza definitely does. He ends Disposable City by envisioning a somewhat optimistic future. It is a future in which Miami does not die, but survives and adapts. It is a story of human innovation and cultural creativity in developing new ways of life in the midst of climate change, sea level rise, and ecological stress. This is a story of Miami, but also a story that involves us all. Human-caused climate change is inevitably re-making the world. Will our human communities continue to hold stubbornly to the values, lifestyles, and institutions that led us to this brink? Or can we change, re-make our own relationship to land, ecosystems, and the other beings that we live among? 

In Chapter 4, Ariza and a filmmaker friend kayak up the Miami River through the heart of the city. This chapter and its epic waterborne tour from Virginia Key to the Miami International Airport is worth reading just on its own. As the pair float around a bend in the river near the airport, they encounter two people standing on the bank under the spreading branches of a poinciana tree. Both are dressed in white, conducting a religious ritual. Ariza's friend quickly recognizes them as "Santeros" (123). They are practitioners of Santeria, one of the Afro-Caribbean religions that emerged from the forced migration and enslavement of West African people. Ariza recognizes something significant perhaps transcendent in that moment and writes, "I can't help but feel like I've entered the realm of Yemaya, the mother of the waters, the Yoruba deity worshipped by African diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic" (123). As a scholar of religion, this scene grabbed my attention with its compelling possibilities. What answer does Yemaya offer to the crisis that faces Miami and her waters? Do these religious practitioners bring a different understanding of water, river, and ocean that offers new possibilities of a more ecological relationship? Ariza describes a religiously inspired connective energy that reaches from Miami, to Cuba, to the coast of West Africa. Could religions help to unite human communities in responding to climate change? Religion can be a dangerously conservative and retrograde social force. But it also is a source of values, ideas, symbols, rituals that can motivate human communities in transformative ways. We need to further explore the ways that religions can be a resource for the species adaption that we must navigate. How can religion help us move into a post-Anthropocene era where we learn to live well in a world we have changed and devastated?

The Blue Line Project, Circular Church in Charleston, SC

 Almost every year at our academic conference, someone brings up the relevancy of these meetings. Are we just talking without any effect? In our Religion and Nature section, we are trying to make connections to local activists and eco-justice projects. It is something that we have been thinking about for a couple years and I was able to pull it off this year.

Circular Church,
Charleston, SC
photo by author

I just started searching the internet for churches and community groups in Charleston, SC that were doing work in environmental justice. I found Circular Church, a UCC congregation pastored by Jeremy Rutledge who did his doctoral work in religious naturalism. The church has its own Climate Work Group and also participates in the Charleston Area Justice Ministry. Pastor Rutledge as keen to be involved, so things started tracking from there.

On its historic campus downtown, Circular Church has set up a Blue Line Project that shows anticipated sea level rise and storm surge. As the church website states, "Blue Line Projects are found around the world in coastal communities seeking to draw attention to the climate crisis. Many blue lines mark the height to which sea levels are expected to rise."

Circular's blue line marks the height of the storm surge if the 1989 Hurricane Hugo were to land in Charleston again. Hurricane Hugo was a big and devastating storm. Of course, the reality is that with climate change and rising ocean temperatures, storms are becoming bigger, more powerful and dangerous. The next hurricane to land in Charleston may indeed be worse than Hugo. 

Circular's Blue Line Project is pretty modest, to be sure. It consists of four small informational placards, and future storm surge levels marked on the wall of one of the church buildings. 

What do you think about this as 1) a type of environmental justice action, and 2) as a religious practice?

The religious and the environmental are not separate of course - the blue line project is both. As the signs indicate, this awareness of climate change and its impact arises from the religious and ethical imperative to love the world and care for the neighbor.

Blue Line Project at Circular Church,
photos by author

As a religious practice, the signs serve as reminders of what or where one's core ethical commitments should be. 

As people - congregation members or visitors - walk through the historic cemetery surrounding the church, they have the opportunity to be aware of the place where they are - note how the placards point out that Charleston is particularly at risk, how "you are standing at 10.4 feet above sea level" on the church campus, how the public housing projects - such as the one by Gadsden Creek - are in lower-lying areas. 

So it is a very place-based sort of approach. The blue line project is a sort of augmented reality. It overlays a future potentiality onto the present. By marking potential storm surge, the blue line asks us to see the place from a different perspective. It's not "what if" but "when this place is underwater." Can you see the place with this in mind. If you have that awareness of "when," the inevitability of that, then how does that change the way you live in the place now?

In The Location of Religion, Kim Knott writes about the simultaneity of space - that spaces are "synchronically dynamic because at any time they are overlapping, co-existent, in parallel with other spaces, and because they are internally in tension, being made up of multiple, contested, real, and imagined sites and relations." Synchronous spaces, she writes, "contain the past within them" like a palimpset (Knott, 23).

But they may also contain the future within them. Or potential futures that can be marked or indicated in certain ways. And that is how I understand the blue line project. It indicates this simultaneity of space - that both the past - like Hurricane Hugo - and potential futures - like devastating storm surge - are present, contained within the space in the present, all simultaneously experienced if we can become aware of it. As Knott points out, these are not "layers" like a slice through time, but the "dynamic and simultaneous coexistence of social relations" in that space (Knott, 20).