They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by investigative journalist Mariah Blake is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past decade. The title is not an allegory so much as a statement of fact:

THEY: Corporations including DuPont and 3M, along with the US Government 

POISONED: Created, used, and marketed substances known to be incredibly toxic and pervasive, while covering up the health implications. 

THE WORLD: These human-made chemicals can be found at various concentrations in every single biological organism, water body and soil sample on earth. 

With echoes of the immense importance of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book is at once a history of an entire class of chemicals, a profile of the roots of corporate power and government influence, and a contemporary story of the unbelievably dedicated citizen activists who have been responsible for the grassroots movement that has led to 30 states passing some variety of PFAS bans, including outright bans on the entire class of chemicals, along with some 15,000 lawsuits underway. 

It is equal parts a riveting history of how industrial chemistry has transformed our world and an inspiring profile of the immense dedication of regular people who discovered the unimaginable, that they, their families, and their entire communities were being poisoned without their knowledge by global corporate chemical companies. This is not a story set entirely in some early pre-regulatory era; while the development of the chemicals themselves originated in the early part of the 20th century, this is absolutely a contemporary story, taking place within the past decade. It remains literally criminal that this level of corporate malfeasance and lack of effective government oversight continues to exist today. 

Sadly, a number of these activists – mothers, sons, daughters, fathers – have already died as a result of the toxic exposure that they sued manufacturers like DuPont and 3M for. Much of what we know about the health effects of this class of chemicals, as is detailed in the book, comes from the discovery that emerged as part of these lawsuits. The companies knew it all along. The takeaway is the combination of the brutal legacy of our modern corporate industrial society and the power and importance of grassroots citizen activism. 

I had the opportunity to speak to the author, Mariah Blake, about the research she conducted for the book, the incredible stories she uncovered and the state of the field of PFAS pollution and prevention. (Read an excerpt tracing the Manhattan Project origins of PFAS.)

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. 

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TEO GROSSMAN, BIONEERS: Thank you so much for speaking with me. This is a phenomenally well-researched project that took nearly a decade to complete. How did you end up deciding to write this book?

MARIAH BLAKE, AUTHOR OF THEY POISONED THE WORLD: It really was a personal journey at first. When I was pregnant with my son back in 2010, I started to be concerned about toxic chemicals that are known to be extremely harmful to developing fetuses and to young children, so I started researching chemicals like BPA. What I discovered was really troubling and I started writing investigative stories, first about BPA, then about BPA replacements, then about the tobacco industry-style tactics that the plastics industry uses to downplay the health effects of certain plastics. In the course of that research, I happened to stumble upon a legal complaint that had been filed by a family of West Virginia farmers, which was my introduction to PFAS. 

These family farmers had sold DuPont some acreage for a landfill, and DuPont ran a local factory that made or made Teflon. After this family sold DuPont the acreage, their cows started getting sick in horrible ways and dying off, and the family was convinced that the landfill was to blame. They brought suit against DuPont, which ended up exposing a cover-up involving the forever chemical PFOA, which is used to make Teflon. The documents from that lawsuit and a subsequent class action lawsuit indicated that DuPont had knowingly contaminated the drinking water with this chemical.

At the time that I stumbled upon that complaint in 2015, almost no one had heard of this class of chemicals outside the scientific community. I was mind-blown, and decided to write a story about these farmers and their legal battle with DuPont. There have since been additional lawsuits and litigation, but a lot of what we know about these chemicals is a result of what happened in this one community – Parkersburg, West Virginia. 

I wrote and published that story in 2015, and that’s really what got me started on this path. 

TEO: Can you explain what the class of chemicals known as PFAS (technically: perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are?

MARIAH: PFAS are a large family of substances. There are about 9,000 of them that have some pretty amazing properties that make them incredibly useful, and as a result, they have found their way into thousands of everyday products. They’re in everything from lipstick and cell phones to diapers, children’s clothing, carpeting, dental floss, kitty litter, feminine hygiene products, cleaning products, outdoor products – you name it. They are also very useful for a variety of industrial applications.  

They are also the most insidious pollutants, I believe, in all of human history. They persist in the environment for thousands of years. I have seen internal industry documents that suggest that some of them persist for much longer. One particular molecule is estimated to have a half-life of a million years, which is way longer than plutonium. We’re talking about a timescale that’s more akin to nuclear waste. 

Those that have been studied are extremely toxic to life, even in the smallest of doses. They are literally polluting the entire planet, including human blood and ecosystems in the remotest parts of the world.

There has been a lot of concern in recent years about microplastics and the fact that microplastics are in the deepest parts of the ocean, that they’re in our brains and human testicles. PFAS are also in all of those places. Virtually every living being carries these chemicals in its body, and the evidence that they are harmful to human health and the environment is much stronger than for microplastics. 

TEO: You mentioned nuclear waste. In some ways, this is a story about the relationship between corporate power and the American government. In the book, you uncover the through line between the birth of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project, and the large-scale development of PFAS. As I understand it, it’s very unlikely that PFAS could have been produced at the current scale without the enormous investment that resulted from the effort to build the first nuclear weapon. There is a certain sort of tragic irony in the entwined beginnings of two of humanity’s most long-lived and toxic technological achievements.

MARIAH: That is absolutely true. This is one of the things I found most astonishing in the course of my research, because this is not part of the sort of official history of the Manhattan Project or the official history of PFAS. This class of chemicals, which is now ubiquitous in the environment and in our homes, was developed by the U.S. government as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. 

There had been a couple of molecules that were developed by accident and existed in tiny quantities. They had never been produced on scale. One was developed by DuPont prior to the war, and one was developed by a chemist working in a university laboratory. But the entire class would not exist if it weren’t for the Manhattan Project. 

It was a large and elaborate program to develop materials with special properties that could contain a chemical essential to the bomb called uranium hexafluoride, which was so corrosive that it burned through everything, including steel. 

Manhattan Project scientists determined that only substances that involved a combination of fluorine and carbon, which together form the strongest bond in chemistry, could contain this highly corrosive chemical. PFAS fit the bill. 

Just as there were physicists and engineers working in secret laboratories all across the country to develop nuclear fuels and the bomb itself, there were chemists working in laboratories all across the country to develop PFAS. DuPont oversaw a lot of this work and began mass-producing them in 1943.

TEO:  You write about a meeting between someone who was way up in the Manhattan Project and the team at DuPont in charge of producing PFAS, who apparently declined a couple times initially when approached. 

MARIAH: A top Manhattan Project official approached DuPont and actually disclosed what they were working on, which at that point was highly secretive, and DuPont believed the entire project was beyond human capability, that it would involve enormous liability, and they wanted nothing to do with it. 

But the government eventually persuaded DuPont to get involved. Both of these efforts were technological marvels that would probably never have happened if it weren’t for the vast quantity of government resources that were thrown at them during the war.

I often think about what we, as a society, could do if we directed those kinds of government resources towards other types of problems that society faces, bringing in all the leading scientific minds in the country together. 

TEO: You mentioned DuPont’s initial reluctance to get involved had to do with whether they could pull it off and how expensive it would be. Were they also concerned about liability?

MARIAH: Given the toxicity of the feedstocks of the chemicals used to make PFAS, I think almost as soon as they went into mass production, it became clear that this was dangerous chemistry. 

One of the interesting aspects of liability is that the U.S. government agreed to indemnify DuPont, meaning the U.S. government would be liable, not DuPont. The U.S. government conducted research very early on that found that PFAS were highly toxic and that they were accumulating in human blood. By the 1970s, U.S. government scientists, as part of a secret medical research program that began under the Manhattan Project, had determined that these chemicals were accumulating in human blood all over the United States. But the U.S. government chose to suppress that information because of the potential liability to itself. So the liability wasn’t just a concern for the corporations; it was a concern for the government. 

The FDA started looking at contamination around this plant in New Jersey, where DuPont produced PFAS in the 1940s. Leslie Groves, the very top official in the Manhattan Project, maneuvered to shut that inquiry down. 

The manufacturers of these chemicals – DuPont and 3M were the main manufacturers – have known since the 1960s that they were highly toxic. They’ve known since the 1970s that they don’t break down in the environment. They have known for many years that they have devastating effects on lab animals, that they are linked to all kinds of diseases, and workers—that they are in the blood of people all over the world. 

It wasn’t so much liability concerns as the primacy of profit that drove these companies to withhold that information. I think there was also, early on, this mentality among the scientists and companies involved in developing these synthetic materials that the potential benefits to society were so enormous that they outweighed any potential drawbacks. 

They made that decision, but the rest of us, who are all exposed to these substances, didn’t have the opportunity to comment. They were foisted on us without our consent. 

TEO: You outline a fact in the book which is something that I don’t think most people are aware of: that the vast majority of the chemicals in use in this country have not been tested for toxicity.

MARIAH: There are 80,000 chemicals in circulation in the United States, and there are hundreds, maybe, that have undergone systematic, EPA-supervised review. The principle that underlies our system for regulating toxic substances is that they should be presumed safe until proven otherwise. This is a principle that was first articulated by DuPont scientists in the 1920s, during the development of leaded gasoline, the question of whether or not to bring leaded gasoline onto the market without researching the health and environmental implications of releasing huge quantities of lead into the air. 

The Toxic Substances Control Act is the main law governing chemical safety in this country. All of the chemicals that were in existence at the time it was passed were grandfathered in, and even new chemicals aren’t required to be tested for safety in the vast majority of circumstances. People presume that the chemicals that they’re coming into contact with every day wouldn’t be on the market if they hadn’t been vetted for safety, but in fact, very, very few of them have.

TEO: Your book takes two connected paths. One is the historical narrative about the development of forever chemicals that we’ve discussed just recently. That is juxtaposed with a contemporary personal narrative focusing on individuals from two communities that turned out to be hotbeds for PFAS pollution as well as the beginning of what continues to be a very inspiring example of citizen activism in the face of corporate malfeasance. 

MARIAH:  I didn’t really set out to write a book about citizen activists. I actually thought this was going to be an investigative history of the chemical industry told through this one class of chemicals, and the human story was going to be what happened in Parkersburg, West Virginia, which I described earlier. I went and spent some time there when I wrote that story. This family of West Virginia farmers had been completely devastated by PFAS contamination on their farm. They had lost over 150 head of cattle. They had many serious health problems. In fact, almost all of the family members are dead at this point. 

When they began to speak out against DuPont, they got incredible flak from the community. But they persisted, and ended up scoring this pretty remarkable victory against the company, which set the groundwork for everything that followed. 

In 2016, stories about Hoosick Falls, a community in upstate New York, began cropping up in the national headlines. Hoosick Falls had discovered PFOA, the Teflon chemical, in its drinking water. A local insurance underwriter named Michael lost his father to a miserable death from kidney cancer. His father had worked at the local factory that made Teflon-coated fabric and Michael suspected that the community’s drinking water was polluted because the factory was right next to the village’s well field. When he tested his own tap water, he found levels that were 100 times the EPA safety standard.

I traveled to Hoosick Falls to meet Michael. He was the least likely activist you can imagine, an unassuming insurance underwriter who had no interest in politics or environmental issues. He had a fear of public speaking. He liked to joke that he got his political news from ESPN. Yet he was spearheading this fight against several giant multinational corporations and government agencies to get his community clean drinking water. 

Other people in the community, who were equally unlikely activists, joined this fight, and I was moved by their stories. Many suffered devastating personal losses, and they were driven by their anguish and grief. They were becoming very effective advocates, and things were starting to change as a result of what they were doing. 

I ended up spending basically eight years embedded in the lives of four families in Hoosick Falls and it was through their eyes that I witnessed the rise of this broader movement.

TEO: In the end, their advocacy really did influence the course of political and regulatory events. 

MARIAH: As I was witnessing the events unfolding in Hoosick Falls, variations of what was happening there started playing out all over the country. Partially as a result of what was happening in Hoosick Falls, tens of millions of Americans learned their drinking water was contaminated. Farmers all over the country began learning that their farms had been polluted with sewage sludge that had been spread over the land as fertilizer. All of this generated a wealth of media coverage and scientific interest, leading to studies showing that these chemicals were ubiquitous in consumer goods.

As this happened, unlikely activist groups sprang up all over the country. And people began to get involved who wouldn’t normally consider themselves activists – farmers, factory workers, suburban moms, Republicans and Democrats. By 2019, we began to see pretty dramatic shifts in policy starting to happen as a result of their advocacy. Bipartisan legislation to restrict PFAS began passing through Congress during the first Trump administration. The EPA began working on drinking water standards for six PFAS, which were finalized under the Biden administration. Some of this progress has been repealed by the current Trump administration, but most of it is actually still in place. 

More important than what’s happened on the federal level is what’s happened on the state level. Largely as a result of this citizen activism, there has been a groundswell of legislation on the state level that is really unprecedented. So far, 30 U.S. states have passed more than 200 bills restricting PFAS, and that includes at least 16 full or total bans on the entire class of chemicals in consumer goods. This is groundbreaking because that’s not how we regulate chemicals in this country. We normally regulate them one by one. 

Perhaps the most interesting and hope-inspiring part of the story is that progress has continued under the Trump administration. There are 250 PFAS-specific bills pending in state houses right now, many in red states – Texas, Oklahoma, Montana. 

There is also an enormous volume of litigation, with at least 15,000 lawsuits pending against manufacturers. These two forces, combined with the groundswell of legislation and the groundswell of litigation, combined with the reality that the EU is weighing a class-wide ban on these chemicals, are prompting large swathes of the economy to voluntarily move away from PFAS. 

3M, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of these chemicals, has announced that it will quit producing them by the end of 2025. At least 40 major retail chains with nearly $2 trillion in sales have committed to eliminating or radically reducing these chemicals in their supply lines.

What I argue in the book, and what I still believe, is that this is moving us closer to the kind of economic tipping point that could actually lead us to turn off the tap on these chemicals. 

All of this is driven by ordinary citizens and citizen activism. Everything we know about these chemicals we wouldn’t know without the Tennant family and those in Hoosick Falls. The book outlines the powerful and entrenched obstacles that all these families are up against. It is an enormous victory and a testament to their will that they’ve made the progress that they have.

TEO: It’s literally the definition of criminal that citizen activism is required to expose the systematic poisoning of an entire population. Where do we go from here?

MARIAH: Turning off the tap is everybody’s goal. But there is no step two. That’s the problem. There really is no way to clean up these chemicals once they are in the environment. They can be filtered out of drinking water, but then you just have a concentrated stew of PFAS. What do you do with that? Well, you can put it into a landfill, but all landfills eventually leak, when you’re talking about a material that persists in the environment for thousands of years or more. You can incinerate them, but unless you incinerate them at a high enough heat, they just break down into smaller PFAS and disperse through the environment. There are three incinerators in this entire country that burn hot enough to actually destroy PFAS. There are technologies under development that could potentially break them down, but not on a meaningful scale, given the vast quantities of these chemicals already in the environment. 

The solution is to turn off the tap. Scientists who study these chemicals will tell you the same thing. That’s the goal of every activist out there. The solution has to be upstream. 

TEO: That leads us to the next question, and then we can conclude. I read your book, and immediately upon finishing it, I looked up my town’s water report. Lo and behold, my town water report did actually report on PFAS, which I believe is a new EPA requirement. I checked whether the water filter that I have in my house already filters for these contaminants. Given the ubiquity of these chemicals and their terrifying health impacts, what can we all do to protect ourselves and our families?

MARIAH: That’s a very good starting point. I would recommend that everybody filter their water, because the EPA is only testing for, I believe, 26 of the 9,000 PFAS that are out there. Scientists are now discovering that there are certain PFAS molecules that are more abundant in the environment than all of the ones they’re testing for combined, and we don’t have the technology to test for that. Even if your water quality report says they’re not in your water, they may be in your water. Buy a filtration system that is certified to remove PFAS, an under-sink system. Those are affordable and easy to install.

The best thing for people to do is to consult the resources that are available online. I have some resources available on my website. The Environmental Working Group, which has really been at the forefront of this issue from the very beginning, has some excellent resources on its website. Clean Water Action and Toxic Free Future are two organizations fighting for state and federal regulation of PFAS. There are a lot of opportunities for people to get involved with Toxic Free Future.

For people who live in communities with contaminated drinking water, the National PFAS Contamination Coalition is a coalition of grassroots groups from all over the country. Often, there may be just one individual living in a community, but once they are able to share resources and strategies, they can be a force to be reckoned with.

TEO: Mariah, thank you so much for your dedication and your writing. It could not be more important. 

Read an excerpt from Mariah Blake’s They Poisoned the World here.