when you spray that roundup on the cracks in your sidewalk this is one of the things you generate;

(Common Dreams) Every child is born pre-polluted—polluted with dangerous, human-made chemicals.

So writes Mariah Blake in the preface to her important book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The United States is the place where she writes that every child is born pre-polluted, but I think merely because she's writing about the United States, not because it isn't also true of everywhere else on Earth. In fact, Blake quotes Rachel Carson as having written in 1962 that every human everywhere is subjected to dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception.

But U.S. corporations—chiefly Dupont and 3M—are the source of the problem. Well, them and the U.S. government or lack thereof. Forever chemicals, like standing armies, carpet bombings, nuclear weapons, income taxes, and so many of the things we hold dear, come from World War II, upon the end of which, as Blake notes, poison gases became pesticides, explosives became fertilizers, and military plastics became consumer goods. It's just possible that the respectable consumerism kicked off in the 1950s was a lot more reckless and damaging than any 1960s counterculture.

The origins of plastics—and of forever chemicals—goes back to research by DuPont prior to and during WWII. And the government's coverup of the dangers was part of the Manhattan Project—as was the public-relations campaign around the benefits of fluoride. The original sites that proximity to which could put cancer-causing forever chemicals into your body were Manhattan Project sites, and the Atomic Energy Commission covered up the dangers at the time, as did corporate profiteers, which have run denial and misinformation campaigns ever since. Before the first no-stick frying pan landed on the first shelf of the first U.S. store, Dupont was strategizing to minimize its financial risk for the harm and suffering expected to result. The tobacco and fossil fuel liars learned from the plastics liars, but were not as good at it............more.........