You Are Contaminated

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.