You Are Contaminated
Guest Essay
Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the 'exposome': the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.
There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by crashing waves, in dreamy Japanese mountaintop clouds and in the breath of dolphins. When scientists test Antarctic snow, or the ice upon Mount Everest, plastics are there. When, in 2019, an explorer reached the ocean's greatest depths in the otherworldly Mariana Trench, he found that plastics had beaten him there, too, miles past the reach of natural light.
Plastic is now threaded through the flesh of fish, where it is interfering with reproduction, and the stalks of plants, where it is interfering with photosynthesis, and in much else we place upon our dinner plates and set about eating. There might be plastic in your saliva, and almost certainly in your blood. Plastic has been found in human hearts and kidneys and other organs, in the breast milk expressed by new mothers and on both sides of their placentas. And because plastic has been found in ovarian follicular fluid and testicular tissue and in the majority of sampled human sperm, it is already embedded in not just the yet-to-be-born but the yet-to-be-conceived.
The penetration appears so complete that some researchers have begun to worry that their methods, too, are compromised by ambient contamination and plastic materials in the lab. Some have called for whole new protocols to systematically stress-test the findings of their colleagues, which seem on first blush simply impossible. But to trust their findings is to believe, for instance, that the buildup inside brain tissue has grown 50 percent in just eight years, and that, as of last year, there might be inside your skull the equivalent of a full plastic spoon — by weight perhaps one-fifth as much polymer as there is brainstem in there.
It isn't just plastics. Centuries after we began using the term 'nature' to describe what it was that modern civilization was despoiling — and several decades since the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben warned of the end of nature — there is no longer really such thing, or such place, as pristine. There is now some kind of contamination in much of what we eat, and breathe, and touch, which is how it gets inside us: by digestion, in the gut; via respiration, in the lungs; and through our pores, the smallest particles delicate enough to slip through the skin when they aren't being carried, practically weightless, thousands of miles through the air. This essay is the first in a series on the subject — the way our lives are embedded in ecological context, and vice versa, each of us inescapably linked to one another and to the external world, now woven through with waste.
A more poetic phrase is 'second body,' which comes from the essayist and novelist Daisy Hildyard, whose beautiful 2017 book of the same name sketches a twinned experience — alongside your fleshly body is another kind, distended through overlapping and external ecosystems. If memory is a butterfly net, collecting some magical fluttering treasures and letting others fly free, so too are those second bodies, trawling for poisons alongside other morsels to eat and breathe and otherwise shape into the stuff of personal fate.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
4 hours ago
- Washington Post
The Los Angeles fires may have killed hundreds more people than official records show
The devastating January fires that consumed entire swaths of Los Angeles, displaced tens of thousands of people and altered parts of the city's iconic landscape, may have been far more deadly than previously recorded. While the official death toll was at least 30 people, the blazes could be linked to hundreds of fatalities in the month after the fires first sparked, according to new research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The scientists compared recorded deaths in Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to those of past years — excluding 2020 through 2023 because of the coronavirus pandemic — and estimated that 440 more deaths this year in that time could be attributed to the fires. In total, 6,371 deaths were recorded, compared to 5,931 expected, according to their models. The findings emphasize how climate-driven disasters can be far deadlier than they initially seem, with ripple effects that extend in the weeks and months after the extreme events. The disasters are linked to lingering environmental damages and social upheaval that result in long-term, dangerous ills for hard-hit communities. The methodology to calculate excess deaths in the wake of a natural disaster is sometimes used to capture the complete toll of these events — scientists catch fatalities that may not be directly linked to the catastrophe, but were a result of circumstances that would not have otherwise occurred. 'These additional deaths likely reflect a combination of factors, including increased exposure to poor air quality and healthcare delays and interruptions,' the authors wrote. The amount of excess deaths linked to the Los Angeles fires stunned one of the paper's authors, Andrew Stokes, an associate professor the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Stokes also worked on conducting excess death studies during the coronavirus pandemic, where he and other researchers found an approximately 16 percent increase in deaths than were recorded, he said. But for the fires, the amount found is more than 10 times the 30 fatalities recorded. 'It highlights that it's very difficult to attribute a death to a natural disaster,' he said. 'Because while some deaths are due to direct exposure others are due to the sustained exposure.' Stokes also noted the time period of the research was small — less than a month — and effects beyond Feb. 1 are entirely likely but would be missed in their count. 'There's certainly a long tail,' he said, adding first-responders and those living in LA County and neighboring areas may face long-term health hazards given their exposure to the smoke and contaminants. Similar studies have been done in the wake of other extreme events including heat waves and hurricanes. Researchers found that a European heat wave this summer may have resulted in nearly three-times as many heat-related deaths. And an analysis published last year found that the average U.S. hurricane leads to as many as 11,000 excess deaths. For the authors, the Los Angeles fires were an opportunity. Often excess death studies linked to disasters are challenging because they rely on robust mortality data that's not always accessible in the rural areas where these events occur. But when the fires razed parts of one of the largest counties in the country, burning homes, cars, storefronts and nature preserves, there was a chance to show the extent of the hazards. The hope, Stokes said, is that their results demonstrate that in other places, where you don't have that data, you could still be aware of the harms. 'I worry, for example, that when it comes to wildfires that have occurred elsewhere that we'll never know the full toll of those because the studies haven't been done and are difficult to do,' Stokes said. 'But here we've been able to show this discrepancy between the official toll versus what we believe to be the the true toll and the the differences are quite staggering.' Brianna Sacks and Kevin Crowe contributed to this report.
NBC News
11 hours ago
- NBC News
New Zealand evacuates three from U.S. Antarctic base in high risk winter rescue
SYDNEY — New Zealand's air force said on Wednesday it had evacuated three people from a United States research base in Antarctica, in what it said was a high-risk operation in freezing temperatures and perpetual darkness. One person requiring urgent medical care and two others needing medical attention were taken on the rescue flight from the McMurdo Station on Tuesday, the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) said in a statement. The aircraft landed in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Wednesday morning. The statement gave no details of the medical emergency or nationalities. Andy Scott, a New Zealand Air Commodore, said the extreme cold and landing on a runway of ice in the dark make mid-winter flights to Antarctica one of the most challenging air crews can perform. '(It is) an extremely challenging environment to fly in on night vision goggles due to the extreme weather conditions, which are highly changeable at this time of year and makes accurate forecasting a challenge,' he said. Temperatures at the McMurdo Station fell as low as -24 Celsius (-11 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, hampering the 20 hour mission that took place in the complete darkness of the Antarctic winter. The U.S. Chargé d'Affaires for New Zealand Melissa Sweeney said the evacuation had been carried out 'flawlessly'. 'We are so very grateful. Our Kiwi partners didn't hesitate to undertake this mission in one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. Their skill and readiness are truly world-class,' she said.
CNN
13 hours ago
- CNN
Australia's Great Barrier Reef devastated by worst coral bleaching on record, new report finds
OceaniaFacebookTweetLink Follow Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef, famed for its stunning colors and biodiversity, suffered its biggest ever decline last year after a marine heatwave bleached vast swathes of hard coral, a new report has found. The reef had its worst summer on record in 2024 when the world underwent a rare global mass coral bleaching event impacting dozens of countries. Surging water temperatures combined with an El Niño weather pattern caused stressed corals to expel algae and lose their color. An official analysis released on Wednesday now shows the reef lost between a quarter to a third of its hard coral cover across three main regions, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). In some areas, particularly hard-hit reefs lost up to 70% of their living coral. The 2024 bleaching event 'had the largest spatial footprint ever recorded on the (Great Barrier Reef),' the report found. 'The declines in the north and south were the largest in a single year since monitoring began 39 years ago.' CNN witnessed the widespread bleaching in visits to the Great Barrier Reef in 2024 – and to the Ningaloo Reef on Australia's western coast in 2025 – during which one scientist described the devastation as like 'wildfires underwater.' The massive loss across the 2,300-kilometer (1,400-mile) ecosystem is especially discouraging after it experienced significant growth in the last few years, with some fast-growing corals that helped the reef recover from previous bleaching. But these corals 'were known to be extremely vulnerable and one bad summer away from losing those gains,' the report said – adding that those fears came true last year, with the fast-growing corals among the most severely impacted. 'It raises the prospect that the Great Barrier Reef may reach a point from which it cannot recover,' it warned. Covering nearly 133,000 square miles (345,000 square kilometers), the Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef, home to more than 1,500 species of fish and 411 species of hard corals. It contributes billions of dollars to the Australian economy each year, mainly through tourism, and is promoted heavily to foreign visitors as one of the country's – and the world's – greatest natural wonders. But all that is in danger, with activists and scientists warning with increasing urgency over the past decade that the reef's future is at risk. Severe mass bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef had previously been observed in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022. Corals can recover from bleaching if the temperatures return to normal, but they will perish if the water stays warmer than usual. Water temperatures spiked again early this year during Australia's summer, peaking in March and causing even more bleaching – though its impacts have not yet been fully measured and were not included in this report. Oceans are now storing 90% of the excess heat from global warming — and each of the last eight years has set a new record for the amount of heat stored in the ocean. The destruction of marine ecosystems would deliver an effective death sentence for around a quarter of all species that depend on reefs for survival, scientists warn. Reefs also provide vital protection for coastlines, reducing the impact of floods, cyclones and sea level rise. The bleaching is 'a call to action,' said the non-profit Queensland Conservation Council on Wednesday after the report's release. The council, the peak body for dozens of Queensland's environment groups, called on state and national leaders to reduce emissions and shut down coal power stations. Australian is transitioning to renewable energy, like other developed nations, but critics say it's not happening fast enough. 'The coral reefs of the future are unlikely to look like those of the past. The loss of biodiversity seems inevitable,' the report read, urging more research into reef adaptation and protection while the world works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
