EARTH DETOX

An Australian science writer sounds a powerful alarm against the human-caused poisoning of Earth.

“Earth and all life on it are being saturated with chemicals released by humans, in an event unlike anything that has occurred ever before, in all 4 billion years of our Planet’s story.” So writes Cribb, who turns up some appalling statistics: Americans use some 100,000 different chemicals, while the EU uses 106,000 and China, a lesser but still high number. Untold amounts of plastics and microplastics are now choking the oceans, but chemicals everywhere contribute materially to human harm. At a micro level, Cribb observes, there are numerous health hazards associated with noxious substances, expressing themselves in such ailments as asthma and developmental disorders and even novel cancers. At a macro level, the author worries that chemical poisoning is leading to a steady dumbing-down of humankind, with “a civilisation becoming progressively less intelligent with each passing decade, to the point where it is no longer smart enough to take action in the face of mounting threats to its wellbeing, health, social stability and long-term survival.” This decline is already documented in longitudinal health studies undertaken from the 1970s—the beginning of the true onslaught of chemicals, especially electronic scrap or “e-waste”—that also chart such things as the rise of levels of environmentally implicated cancers and of autism. (In the 1950s, Cribb writes, about 1 in 25,000 children was diagnosed with autism; in 2013, the statistic was 1 in 50). The author offers a sensible program, if one perhaps unlikely to be put in place, given intractable political circumstances. As he writes, we must “banish known toxins from the food chain” and demand systemic solutions for and actions against what he dubs “Anthropogenic Chemical Circulation (ACC), an ugly name for an ugly thing.”

A readable, urgent argument for ceasing our profligacy and cleaning our nests.