The Wrong Forevers
3/31/22 – To be of use to life
Hello everyone:
For the medical needs of Ukrainians, consider donations to Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders. For refugees from Ukraine, consider the UN World Food Program. For refugees across the globe who have been suffering like the Ukrainians for much longer, read this Vox piece to consider your options.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing.
I had planned to write about Big Night, the first warmish rainy nights of spring soon to arrive here in the North. This is the time when amphibians come out of winter hiding and head en masse for vernal pools and other water sources to breed. It’s a crucial time for these species. Salamanders and frogs don’t call it Big Night, though; herpetologists and frog lovers and naturalists do, as a way of advertising the importance of the moment.
On warm (45°F+) wet nights these gentle, soft-bodied animals are driven by an ancient biological urge that does not recognize the Anthropocene threats of road and truck. The carnage can be extensive, even if invisible to passing cars. Big Night, then, is a community effort to shepherd the busiest crossings, an all-night watch party by folks in reflective vests, their cars parked and flashing on the roadside to warn oncoming cars, as they gently nudge, direct, or carry the travelers across the death zone and back onto their damp primordial path.
I wrote about Big Night very briefly in one of my three essays on road ecology and was looking forward to expanding on it. But before I write about Big Night and what it means within Anthropocene culture, I’m going to sidetrack into the darker heart of that culture. I’ll begin with a follow-up to a more recent essay, and see if I can bring it back around to frogs and salamanders.
The story of PFAS chemical contamination in Maine (and everywhere else) is beginning to blow up. You’ll remember I wrote about the heartbreaking experience of Adam and Johanna at Songbird Farm several weeks ago. Now their story, and the wider Maine PFAS tale, have been covered by the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. I recommend the read if you want a bit more insight into the developing saga of “forever chemicals” which will haunt the world – not just the farmers – for generations.
As a society we’re only beginning to be honest with ourselves about this particular self-inflicted wound. Maine is struggling with it not because we are unusually contaminated but because we’re one of the few places actively beginning to confront it. Last year, Maine became the first place in the world to initiate a ban on the use of PFAS in all products unless deemed “currently unavoidable.” The ban takes full effect in 2030. Meanwhile, activists are working to close loopholes in the law which still allow for PFAS-laden sludge to be dumped on farmland, and farmers like Johanna and Adam are working to convince the state to set aside money for farmers whose lives have been upended. It’s only a start, though.
It’s important that we each know the scale of what’s happening. I think of the vast family of PFAS chemicals (more than 4,700 and growing) as a microcosm of the plastics nightmare; they’re everywhere, in everything, and accumulating as a poison in our bodies, soil, water, and fellow species. All current analysis suggests that they will be harmful for millennia, because PFAS molecules don’t break down. Their presence is growing, and will continue to grow, without any current prospect for remediation or removal. Here’s an explanation of their persistence from The Lancet, in a study titled “PFAS: Here today – here tomorrow:”
There is no stronger bond in organic chemistry than the one between carbon and fluorine. Chains of carbon and fluorine, such as those that make up perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), have a half-life measured in thousands of years. It is PFAS that make Teflon cooking utensils non-stick, that confer oil and water resistance onto Gore-Tex clothing, and allow processed foods to slide off intact from their packaging.
97% of Americans have PFAS in their blood, and up to 200 million Americans may be exposed through their drinking water. The impacts on human health and environmental health now, and for generations to come, are a dark litany we’re only now beginning to recite because they exist in a gray area between ugly and the unknown. The industries that produce and utilize these poisons, passing them on to us every day, have actively fought to keep us in the dark for decades.
Numerous studies show that low doses of PFAS are linked to cancers (testicular, kidney, liver and pancreatic), reproductive problems, weakened childhood immunity, weakened antibody response to vaccination, low birth weight, endocrine disruption, increased cholesterol, and weight gain. Yet only a handful of the thousands of PFAS chemicals have been thoroughly assessed. Little is known about impacts of the vast majority of the chemicals in this family, much less the impacts of exposure to multiple PFAS toxins, which is a description of our average day. To be clear, though, what is known about this class of chemicals is enough to initiate strict regulation.
Exposure to contaminated drinking water is not the primary way in which we’re exposed to PFAS. The Intercept has an excellent 2020 article reporting on a study which documented the presence of PFAS in a much greater range of products than was previously known. This ubiquitous presence across the industrial and commercial landscape explains the scale of human exposure. The chemical industry’s greed and perfidy, as well as the EPA’s complacence and complicity, explain why nearly all of us remain ignorant of the depth and scale of that exposure.
After reading the incredibly thorough, detailed, depressing study the Intercept article cites, I find that I cannot include here the full list of product uses and their purposes, much less the products themselves, because it would stretch on for pages. (Take a look at Table 4 in the study to see what I mean.) The study identified more than 200 categories and subcategories of industrial and commercial uses for more than 1400 different PFAS, which makes it far and away the most comprehensive public assessment of the problem.
They found a wide range of PFAS uses not previously reported in the scientific literature. Examples on the commercial side include ammunition, climbing ropes, guitar strings, artificial turf, and even soil remediation (yes, doing “remediation” with a persistent toxin seems a bad idea). To build their list, the authors spent a year combing through a variety of records to assemble this still partial assessment, because industry (with help from the EPA) aggressively protects every aspect of their production. According to the Intercept, the authors
tried to obtain the amounts of various PFAS manufactured and imported in the U.S. but was told that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would not make that available because companies had claimed it as confidential business information, or CBI.
Here’s a compact version of Table 1, a list of industries and other use categories where PFAS were or are employed. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of subcategories:
Industry branches
Aerospace (7), Biotechnology (2), Building and construction (5), Chemical industry (8), Electroless plating, Electroplating (2), Electronic industry (5), Energy sector (10), Food production industry, Machinery and equipment, Manufacture of metal products (6), Mining (3), Nuclear industry, Oil & gas industry (7), Pharmaceutical industry, Photographic industry (2), Production of plastic and rubber (7), Semiconductor industry (12), Textile production (2), Watchmaking industry, Wood industry (3)
Other use categories
Aerosol propellants, Air conditioning, Anti-foaming agent, Ammunition, Apparel, Automotive (12), Cleaning compositions (6), Coatings/paints/varnishes (3), Conservation of books and manuscripts, Cook- and bakingware, Dispersions, Electronic devices (7), Fingerprint development, Fire-fighting foam (5), Flame retardants, Floor covering including carpets and floor polish (4), Glass (3), Household applications, Laboratory supplies/equipment/instrumentation (4), Leather (4), Lubricants and greases (2), Medical utensils (14), Metallic and ceramic surfaces, Music instruments (3), Optical devices (3), Paper and packaging (2), Particle physics, Personal care products, Pesticides (2), Pharmaceuticals (2), Pipes/pumps/fittings/liners, Plastic/rubber/resins (4), Printing (4), Refrigerant systems, Sealants and adhesives (2), Soldering (2), Soil remediation, Sport article (7), Stone, concrete and tile, Textile and upholstery (2), Tracing and tagging (5), Water and effluent treatment, Wire and cable insulation/gaskets/hoses
Can you spot your exposure(s) in here somewhere? Do you use paper, waterproof clothing, plastic, rubber, textiles, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, or paints? Do you work in medicine? Play guitar? Use a cell phone? Eat food? The furniture and clothing and carpet waterproofed with PFAS become “PFAS factories,” shedding the molecules over time. It’s not hard to find multiple PFAS chemicals in a single product, like a cell phone, which may have been manufactured with different PFAS in the wiring, the circuit boards, and the screen.
I really don’t like sounding alarmist, and whatever our PFAS-laced future might be, we have to settle in for the ride, because the facts are that 1) nearly all of us have PFAS in our blood, 2) PFAS are toxic, 3) the extent and consequences of the toxicity are still deliberately difficult to determine, and 4) the future of the toxic exposure seems locked in. Even if/when some belated regulations come along to severely restrict the use of PFAS in commercial and industrial products, we still have long-term food and water concerns to deal with. Farmland and groundwater – at Songbird Farm, throughout the country, and around the world – are contaminated with PFAS through pesticides, fertilizer, and the spreading of sewage. That contamination migrates and accumulates.
The Intercept described a recent private investigation in Massachusetts which found that Anvil 10+10, a pesticide used for aerial spraying in at least 25 states, contains eight different PFAS. The investigation began because several towns in southeastern MA have PFAS in their well water, despite not having any local concentrated source of the chemical. Neither industry nor government would answer residents’ questions about whether there were PFAS in the pesticide used in those towns, so a resident who is also a science policy director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) submitted the pesticide for testing herself. “The burden of finding chemicals and proving them guilty often falls on small NGOs, like PEER, or citizens who are fighting for their lives,” she said, “and that’s not right.”
There are of course other impacts other than human health, as the study notes:
The most widely used substance in the electronic industry in the Nordic countries and the US is the hydrofluorocarbon 1H-pentafluoroethane… [which] is not only of concern due to its high persistence but also because it has a global warming potential that is 3500 times that of carbon dioxide.
Environmental impacts overall remain a great unknown. PFAS spread quickly through soil, water, and air; they are incredibly persistent and bioaccumulative. While there is some slight degradation of the more complex of these tough molecules, they only break down into simpler PFAS molecules which are extraordinarily resilient. Studies on environmental toxicity are still uncommon, since global concern about PFAS as ecologically hazardous is relatively new (that’s thanks in part to the secrecy of the industry), but there are toxic impacts across animal species, from invertebrates to mammals. Amphibians, especially in their larval stage, seem particularly vulnerable to these contaminants.
The challenges for scientists working to understand the scale and types of environmental threats from PFAS are enormous. They include the large number of PFAS chemicals, their impact as a mixture in ecosystems rather than as individual chemicals, the industry’s recalcitrance, lack of funding, and the rate of bioaccumulation.
What can we do? We can start by becoming informed and spreading the word, since this is going to be a multigenerational task. Here’s a good explainer article on PFAS from the Environment Working Group (EWG). Also from EWG, here is a map of known PFAS contamination in drinking water around the U.S. For our own safety we should try to reduce our contact with PFAS, but this is extraordinarily difficult. From SaferChemicals.org, here’s a list of retailers committed to phasing out PFAS-related chemicals from their products and packaging. Encourage your state legislature to look to Maine’s example as they work to regulate PFAS as strictly as possible. Track your Senators’ and Representatives’ engagement with current federal PFAS legislation. Finally, are you a public employee for a state or federal agency? Check out PEER’s resources for reporting and taking action on issues like PFAS.
Our best personal action is to push retailers to cut ties with products and manufacturers that use PFAS, and our best legal option is to regulate PFAS as a class of chemicals while banning new PFAS. It’s madness for regulatory agencies to chase each chemical for decades while as a group they continue to wreak havoc in human society and ecosystems, and while the industry continues to churn out new variants. One estimate suggests that the current rate of review it would take centuries for the EPA to catch up. It’s possible that certain uses of these chemicals will be essential in industries (e.g. medicine) for many years until a healthy replacement is found, but the majority are a convenience for industries that have not been motivated to search for environmentally-responsible alternatives.
We have been for too long now a society which manufactures the wrong forevers. We create planetary-scale harms (chemical and otherwise) that will last millennia, and we push communities of species toward extinction. These wrong forevers are the detritus and signature of a myopic civilization. They are the Anthropocene. Governance, industry, and a public both hornswoggled and complacent have focused on short-term gain as if willfully blind to the erasure of nature and of a sustainable future for generations to come.
If life has a prime directive, it is this: To be of use to life.
As a tonic to all this dark matter, and a vision of the better forevers we can aim for, I’d like to first remind you to read Sy Montgomery’s “Shell Shock,” the Orion article about Natashia Nowak and Alexxia Bell in Massachusetts, two women who have dedicated their lives (and their very crowded house) to their nonprofit Turtle Rescue League. It’s one of the loveliest stories I’ve read in a while, not least because they have made (and continue to make) a huge difference in thousands of turtles’ lives. It is also a revelation about those lives:
Turtles are unlikely, surprising animals. Some breathe through their butts, some pee through their mouths. Some stay active under ice-covered waters; others climb fences and trees. Some are red, some are yellow, and some change color dramatically once a year. There are turtles with soft shells; turtles with necks longer than their bodies; turtles with heads so big they can’t retract them; turtles whose shells glow in the dark… Some species of turtles, as it turns out, can be quite talkative. Various species croak, squeak, belch, whine, and whistle. (When Velociraptors bark at each other in the film Jurassic Park, it’s the sound of tortoises having sex.)
Perhaps more amazing is that turtles apparently “don’t really die of old age.”
The major organs of a hundred-year-old turtle, he said, are indistinguishable from those of a teenager. Their hearts can cease beating for long periods without damage. In species that hibernate (brumation, for reptiles), turtles can survive, buried in mud, for months without taking a breath. In fact, if it weren’t for infection or injury, the curator said, turtles might just live forever.
That’s the kind of forever we should be working to sustain.
I recommend also Life Under the Ice, an amazing photo essay by Maine master naturalist Edwin Barkdoll, who documented the surprisingly vibrant life under the ice of a vernal pond. (The photo below this paragraph is his. Here’s a 20-minute video as well.) The movement he documents of boatmen and larval salamanders and caddisfly larvae, etc., have been going on quietly, invisibly, for eons. That's another kind of forever we need to protect, restore, and recreate where possible. Our own forever needs to be allied with those, or we won’t have a forever we want.
Which brings me back, finally, to Big Night. Here in the north spare a thought on the first rainy nights of spring for these amphibians and their ancient urges. If you’re on the road, please drive carefully with an eye out for small hoppers and crawlers. If you’re in Maine and motivated to help, you can start here and here. If you’re elsewhere and motivated to help, search for Big Night groups or others devoted to protecting amphibians. The time is now. After 300 million years on Earth, amphibians have declined rapidly over the last several decades – from habitat destruction, disease, and climate change – with that rate of decline increasing year by year.
Big Night is of course a northern phenomenon. The highest concentration of amphibians, frogs especially, is in the tropics. It’s hard to help directly from so far away, but whatever you can do to slow tropical deforestation is essential, e.g. by refusing to use products made with palm oil or tropical lumber. Donations to the groups linked here are always welcome.
I’ll close with one more story and a link. The Guardian has a new article on newt patrols in the hills outside San Francisco. Like Big Nighters, these volunteers are out in their reflective vests on warm wet winter nights, searching with their flashlights for Pacific newts to shepherd across the road. This winter one group helped about 4,400 newts and documented nearly a thousand deaths, scraping the small soft bodies off the road with metal spatulas. As with many amphibians, Pacific newt populations have crashed and may not survive for long without real care from us, given the mortality rates they suffer from habitat loss, climate change, and road crossings. And though it’s hard to know if leaving your warm couch for a night of dodging cars to save a few cute wrigglers will prevent their extinction, when legislation isn’t forthcoming and road crossings don’t exist is there a better option?
Against the incomprehensible immensity of the climate crisis and unchecked development, many of the brigade volunteers said it was the audacious smallness of the effort that appealed to them. Helping a few small newts cross a one-mile stretch of country road offers a way, they said, to keep hope. “It’s about just getting out and just doing something,” said Sally Gale, who founded the brigade three years ago. “You don’t have to justify each effort by saying it will change the world. You just have to start somewhere.”
Whether you’re working to eliminate PFAS from guitar strings, or helping a newt cross the road, you have to start somewhere. It’s a long road ahead.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In curated Anthropocene news:
Some extraordinary, haunting, beautiful photos of polar bears living in abandoned Arctic buildings. It’s not exactly Anthropocene news, unless you imagine it as the re-blossoming of life in a post-human scene, but it is very much worth your time.
Temps in East Antarctica reached astonishing record highs recently. I once visited Vostok, a Russian base in East Antarctica with the distinction of recording the coldest temperature on Earth (-128.6°F), though it was a balmy -30°F when I stopped by. Two weeks ago it was 64°F, about 27 degrees higher than the previous record. That’s nuts.
Microplastics are (almost certainly) in your blood. Which means they’re in the blood of many other animal species too.
A very thorough assessment in an interactive article from the Washington Post of how Europe might cope with the loss of Russian gas imports next winter. And here’s one of the sources they cite regarding how an aggressive movement toward clean energy could have Europe free of Russian gas by 2025.
Energy efficiency in its fullest definition – particularly how we design everything – can resolve most of our energy needs in the midst of the climate crisis, according to the Amory Lovins, the “Einstein of energy efficiency.” We don’t need new technologies nearly as much as we need to be smarter about how we already live.
For anyone who is interested in what the federal government might do to help farmers suffering from PFAS contamination, here's a page from ME Sen. Angus King's site about the Maine delegation's request to the USDA: https://www.king.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/maine-delegation-urges-more-usda-aid-for-pfas-crisis
Jason, this is excellent and informative if not disturbing news. I’ll balance my grumpy feelings with reading the article about the turtles. Laurie