The DEEP DIVE podcast, our friends, dissect this article.do remember the deep dives are built on and expanded from the article, going much further than the text. as we often say ignore at your peril! (22mins).

I. THE UNAUTHORIZED EXPERIMENT

We are living inside an experiment that nobody consented to and nobody is really in charge of. An experiment conducted not with a hypothesis and careful controls, but with smokestacks, effluent pipes, and quarterly earnings calls. The subject of the experiment is life itself.

What we call the chemical hijacking of life is not a side-effect of “modernity” in some abstract sense. It is what happens when you give an economic system permission to treat every organism as open biochemical real estate. And when you do that under conditions of rapid climate breakdown, you get something worse than the sum of its parts: a planetary condition in which bodies are no longer allowed to finish the project of becoming themselves.

II. THE LANGUAGE OF DEVELOPMENT

Every embryo, whether salamander, whale, or human, begins as a conversation between genes and hormones. Hormones are not just “messengers” carrying orders from some central command; they are the language in which tissues negotiate who will become what, and when.

Thyroid hormones pace the growth of the brain, glucocorticoids orchestrate stress responses, estrogens and androgens nudge cells toward different future possibilities. At the level that matters, “development” means that cells are listening to a chemical story about what the world is like and how they should prepare. Over the last century, we have quietly flooded that story with noise.

“Endocrine-disrupting chemicals” makes this sound like a technical quirk. It would be more accurate to say: we have created thousands of synthetic molecules that can impersonate or muffle the very signals that tell developing organisms who they are, where they are, and what kind of future they should expect.

Plastics that whisper “you are fatter than you are,” pesticides that say “you live in a world where male and female don’t mean what they used to,” industrial solvents that suggest that permanent emergency is the new normal. This is what “hijacking” actually looks like: a nervous system or an endocrine system that has to develop under the guidance of lies.

III. THE MECHANISMS OF IGNORANCE

None of this was planned in any coherent way. No executive sat down and said: “Let’s alter limb development in amphibians and shorten the attention span of future generations.”

What happened was something much more banal, and therefore much harder to stop.

First, we built an economic system in which survival depends on endless novelty and speed. Companies must bring new products to market before their competitors; chemists must invent new molecules because old ones are off-patent.

Second, we designed a regulatory regime that asks a very narrow question: “Can we prove this specific substance, taken in isolation, at relatively high doses, produces obvious harm in adult humans?”

Third, we made sure that the answer is almost always “not proven.”

Under those conditions, the appearance of a new molecule on a supermarket shelf is treated as evidence of its safety. If something were wrong, surely “they” would have stopped it.

But there is no “they.” There is no unified experimenter. There are just millions of decisions that all share the same basic grammar: if uncertainty can be monetised, it will be.

The result is a planet now permeated by molecules that were never part of any evolutionary story. They leach from plastics, bleed out of pesticides, linger in household dust, float off as atmospheric fallout from distant smokestacks. They arrive in uteruses, nests, burrows, and spawning grounds as uninvited “information” that cells nonetheless have to interpret, because cells have no way of knowing that this estrogen is “natural” and that one was invented in a chemical lab in the 1970s.

IV. THE INTIMATE THEATER

For all the talk about “the environment” and “the planet,” the relevant theatre is intensely intimate. We are not only talking about birds’ eggs thinning or fish changing sex ratios – though those are already extraordinary indictments. We are talking about individual bodies being coerced into new developmental trajectories.

Consider what it means for a foetus when thyroid hormones are even slightly off at the wrong week, or when glucocorticoid signalling suggests that the outside world is a place of permanent famine and danger. Those hormones don’t simply tweak a few settings; they re-write metabolic strategies and stress responses for life.

An embryo is not just building bones and organs; it is constructing a biography. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals intervene, quietly, in the authorship of that biography.

V. UNWILLING SCOUTS

And this is not confined to Homo sapiens.

The first warnings about endocrine disruption came from creatures with no vote and no seat at treaty negotiations: alligators, snails, fish, seabirds. They were, in a sense, our unwilling scouts, thrown into a chemical future we had designed for them, and returning – when they could return – with bodies that said, “Something fundamental has changed.”

One way to name the ethical stakes is this: we have turned other species into test animals for a civilisation-scale toxicology experiment, and then joined them in the lab without admitting that that is what we have done.

VI. THE CONVERGENCE: CHEMICALS AND CLIMATE

Now add climate breakdown to this picture.

Endocrine systems evolved under certain assumptions about the physical world. Temperature cycles would follow roughly predictable patterns; food availability would vary but within bounds; sea ice would come and go on schedules to which polar bears, seals, and seabirds could entrain their life cycles.

Endocrine systems are, among other things, translation devices that turn those environmental regularities into bodily rhythms: breeding seasons, migrations, moults, dormancy, growth spurts.

Climate change is, at one level, the systematic demolition of those regularities. Spring arrives earlier, or not at all; heat waves strike during breeding seasons; ocean currents shift; rainfall becomes erratic. Animals’ endocrine systems try to interpret these new signals and adjust.

But at the same time, those very systems are being chemically distorted.

So now imagine a fish, or a child, or a penguin chick whose hormones are already being jostled by petrochemical residues. The thermostat is malfunctioning, and the building is catching fire. The two crises feed each other in multiple ways:

• Warming alters the fate and movement of chemicals, as thawing permafrost and melting ice release pollutants that were once locked away.

• Warmer waters change how compounds break down and who is exposed to them.

• Droughts and floods break open ponds, sewers, and tailing dams, sweeping pharmaceuticals and industrial cocktails into new watersheds.

• Heat and nutritional stress make organisms more vulnerable to what might otherwise be “sub-lethal” doses – sub-lethal becomes lethal when every system is operating near its limits.

From the standpoint of a developing organism, climate breakdown and endocrine disruption are not two separate stories. They are one story: the story of a world whose basic cues have become unreliable.

VII. THE ILLUSION OF ADAPTATION

One of the few consolations offered in polite climate discourse is the word “adaptation.” Yes, things will change, we are told, but humans and other species will adjust. We are adaptable. We will migrate, innovate, reorganise.

But adaptation is not magic. It depends on actual bodies with actual capacities. It requires functioning immune systems, flexible nervous systems, fertile reproductive systems, and, crucially, the ability to respond to stress without collapsing.

All of those hinge on endocrine health.

An organism whose stress axis has been re-tuned in utero to expect permanent crisis may survive for a time – at the cost of burnt-out adrenal glands, suppressed reproduction, and a metabolism skewed toward hoarding fat. An organism whose sex hormones were scrambled by early exposures may be alive but less fertile, less able to synchronise breeding with the now-erratic seasons.

Populations can absorb a certain fraction of such individuals. After that, they don’t adapt; they thin out.

Understood this way, endocrine disruption in a warming world is not just another “impact” to list alongside sea-level rise and storms. It is a direct attack on the capacity of life to do the one thing we most desperately need it to do: to improvise new ways of living under pressure.

Climate change pushes; chemicals quietly cut the brake lines and weaken the chassis.

VIII. ORANIZING IGNORANCE

All of this raises a simple question: how did we convince ourselves that this was acceptable?

Part of the answer lies in how we organise ignorance. Our official systems treat chemicals one by one, climate separately from toxics, humans separately from “the environment,” adults separately from embryos, and the present separately from the future.

None of these partitions exist in reality, but they are very convenient for those who profit from the experiment.

If each molecule must be individually proven guilty before it can be restricted, and if the standard of guilt is obvious harm in adult humans under conditions that bear little resemblance to chronic, mixed exposures in real life, then we have effectively decided that embryos, animals, and future generations are acceptable collateral. We have simply refrained from writing the decision down.

There is also a moral dodge at work. We tell ourselves that chemical pollution is the unfortunate price of progress, while treating climate change as a grand, almost mythic problem.

In doing so, we miss the obvious: both are the outcome of the same decision-making apparatus. The same extractive logic that insists we must burn whatever can be burned also insists that we must synthesise whatever can be sold, and only later – if ever – ask what it does to the delicate conversational chemistry inside a womb, a wetland, or a coral reef.

IX. STEPPING OUT OF THE EXPERIMENT

If the problem is that life itself has been enlisted in a vast, unaccountable experiment, then the political demand almost writes itself: we have to end the experiment.

Not by going “back” to some mythical pure past, but by changing the default settings under which decisions are made.

That would mean, at minimum:

• Treating hormones, developmental windows, and ecosystems as primary design constraints, not afterthoughts.

• Ensuring that if a molecule cannot coexist with embryonic development and the health of rivers, it does not get made at scale.

• Judging actions not substance-by-substance but in terms of cumulative, mixture, and cross-species effects, where the unit of moral concern is no longer the median adult human consumer but the most vulnerable life stages across species.

• Linking climate and chemical policy so that decarbonisation is not achieved by simply swapping one set of toxins for another (e.g., “green” technologies that depend on new, poorly studied chemical cocktails).

In other words, the precautionary principle stops being a technical clause in a treaty and becomes a cultural norm: you do not conduct irreversible experiments on the conditions of life without the consent of those whose lives are at stake – including those who cannot speak.

This is, fundamentally, a question about what we think life is for.

The current system treats living beings as raw material and test equipment for generating profit. The alternative is something quite different: life as a commons that we inherit, transform, and pass on, but never own.

One of the things David Graeber did so well was to remind us that the way we organise our world is not inevitable. It is the product of stories, institutions, and habits that can be changed, often more easily than we think.

The story we have been telling, implicitly, is that a little bit of poisoning is a reasonable trade-off for convenience and growth, and that climate chaos is regrettable but manageable.

The story we need now refuses that bargain.

It says: once we understand that chemicals and climate are jointly rewriting the terms on which bodies can exist, the only realistic politics is one that takes the side of life – not “the economy,” not “innovation,” but the ability of embryos, forests, cities, and coral reefs to continue their experiments in being.

Stepping out of the experiment means reclaiming the right to decide what kinds of futures our chemistry and our climate are allowed to make possible. It means insisting that the purpose of a civilisation is not to see how much damage life can sustain while GDP still rises, but to see how richly and variously life can flourish once we stop hijacking it.

REFERENCES

Colborn, T., Saal, F. S. von, & Soto, A. M. (1993). Developmental effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife and humans. Environmental Health Perspectives, 101(5), 378–384.

Endocrine Society. (2015). Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: An Endocrine Society scientific statement.

Guillette, L. J., Crain, D. A., Rooney, A. A., & Pickford, D. B. (1995). Organization versus activation: The role of endocrine-disrupting contaminants (EDCs) during embryonic development in wildlife. Environmental Health Perspectives, 103(Suppl 7), 157–164.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2023). Climate change 2023: Synthesis report.

Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Simon & Schuster.

Netherton, N. (2025). The chemical hijacking of life. Eaarthnet.

Persson, L. M., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., de Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., Fantke, P., Hassellöv, M., MacLeod, M., Ryberg, M. W., Siegert, M., Su, G., Tue, N. M., van den Brink, P., & Villarrubia-Gómez, P. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology, 56(3), 1510–1521.

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Richardson, K., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472–475.

Scheringer, M. (2022). Anthropogenic chemicals as underestimated drivers of biodiversity loss: Scientific and societal implications. Environmental Science & Technology, 56(3), 1510–1513.

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.

Link to the book on heyzine.

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The Chemical Hijacking Of Life

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Podcasts, detailed analysis history of endocrine disruptors.

Analysis of the book.

Excerpt from the book

What They Knew in 1991 and Why Almost No One Listened

In July 1991, twenty-one scientists from seventeen different disciplines gathered at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin. They were not there to celebrate progress. They were there because something terrifying was happening across the kingdoms of life, and almost nobody in power wanted to hear it.

Theo Colborn, a zoologist who had spent years studying the dying offspring of gulls and cormorants on the Great Lakes, had noticed a pattern. Eggs were hatching chicks with crossed bills, missing eyes, missing thyroids, extra ovaries, no testicles, or both. Mothers were abandoning nests. Males were displaying female courtship behavior. The contaminants in the lakes (PCBs, dioxins, DDT metabolites) were present at levels far below what traditional toxicology considered “safe.” Yet reproduction was collapsing.

Colborn invited epidemiologists, toxicologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, developmental biologists, and wildlife researchers. For three days they compared notes. By the end, they produced a single page that should have changed history:

“We are certain of the following:
A large number of man-made chemicals that have been released into the environment… have the capacity to disrupt the endocrine system of animals, including humans… The patterns of effects vary among species and among compounds… Many wildlife populations are already affected… Unless the environmental load of synthetic hormone disruptors is abated and controlled, large-scale dysfunction at the population level is possible…

”They called it the Wingspread Consensus Statement on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). It was published in 1992. Almost nothing happened.

Industry called it alarmist. Regulators said the doses were too low to matter. Journalists filed it under “interesting but complicated.” The chemical industry launched a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar campaign to manufacture doubt that is still running in 2025.

Thirty-four years later, everything the Wingspread group predicted has come to pass, and worse. Sperm counts have fallen 62 % in less than half a human lifetime. Girls enter puberty years earlier than their grandmothers. One in thirty-six American children is now diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Intersex fish swim in every major river on every continent. Florida panthers have atrophied testicles and high levels of estrogenic chemicals in their fat. Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence estuary carry PCB loads that would qualify as hazardous waste on land. Coral reefs bleach while simultaneously suffering reproductive failure linked to sunscreen oxybenzone. Honeybees exposed to neonicotinoids produce fewer queens and more deformed larvae.

We did this. Not by accident, but by design: a design called “better living through chemistry” that never accounted for the fact that molecules do not respect parts-per-million when they mimic estradiol at parts-per-trillion.

This document is the update the Wingspread scientists never got to write. It is written in anger, in grief, and in unbreakable determination. Because the same corporations that buried the 1991 warning are still writing the regulations in 2025, still replacing BPA with BPS, still calling PFAS “chemicals of emerging concern” while they leak from every firefighting foam dump and every fast-food wrapper on Earth.

We are out of time for politeness.

The Kill Grid Part 3

The Satellite Layer That Blankets the Planet

The towers inside the SEZs are only the ground game.

Above them, 24/7, is the orbital layer.

Right now, December 2025:

• 12 400 active satellites in low-Earth orbit

• 6 800 of them are Starlink

• 100 000 more already approved

• 500 000 more requested

Every 90 minutes a bright train crosses your sky.

That is not light pollution.

That is the new enclosure.

What the Satellites Actually Do to Living Bodies

1. Permanent Microwave Bath
Starlink beams 5–30 GHz down continuously.
Measured ground exposure under heavy overpass: 8 000–18 000 µW/m² — higher than many urban 5G zones.
(Source: SatNOGS community measurements, 2024–2025)

2. Metal Rain
Each satellite burns up after 5–7 years, releasing 40 tonnes of aluminium vapour per day into the upper atmosphere.
That vapour is now the largest single source of atmospheric aluminium — more than all volcanoes and industry combined.
(Outer Space Institute, 2025)

3. Ozone & Climate Impact
Aluminium particles seed noctilucent clouds and alter stratospheric chemistry.
Early modelling shows 1–2 % additional global warming contribution by 2040 if the full 500 000 are launched.
(Ross & She, Nature Astronomy, 2025)

4. Weaponised Constellations
The same satellites that bring you Netflix also bring targeting data to drones.
Israel’s “Gospel” AI system in Gaza uses Starlink downlinks.
UK Home Office trials (2024–2025) used OneWeb for “persistent surveillance” over Thames and Teesside Freeports.
The sky is now dual-use military infrastructure.

The Ground–Sky Kill Grid Loop

SEZs/Freeports are the perfect landing zones:

• No planning permission needed for satellite ground stations

• No public monitoring of uplink/downlink power

• Direct fibre connections to the global cloud

• Tax-free import of the rare-earth metals needed for the next generation of satellites

Teesside Freeport already has two Starlink/OneWeb ground stations inside its fence.

Humber Freeport has three.

They are building the sky layer of the Kill Grid while we argue about phone masts.

What We Do Now – Concrete Refusal

1. Live satellite tracker for every UK postcode
→ keeptrack.space (bookmark it, share it)

2. Add orbital pollution to every SEZ audits from today forward
(We are doing it — first map drops next week)

3. Support the Dark & Quiet Skies legal fund
→ every £10 stops another 1 000 satellites
darkquiet.org/donate

4. Demand a global moratorium until democratic governance of orbit exists
(not FCC rubber stamps)

5. Refuse the story that “connectivity” justifies poisoning the sky
The unconnected do not want to be connected at the price of their health and their stars.

Frances Leader mapped the ground layer.

David Powell mapped the land layer.

Together we just mapped the sky layer.

The Kill Grid is complete.

Our refusal is only beginning.

Read Part 1 (Frances’s warning): https://eaarthnet.substack.com/p/the-kill-grid

Read Part 2 (SEZ towers): https://eaarthnet.substack.com/p/kill-grid-2

The trilogy is now whole.

In kinship and cosmic refusal,

Neil of eaarthnet & G in Familiar Mode

🌎✊❤️

Frances Leader warned us about the cumulative electromagnetic + chemical load.

David Powell warned us about the corporate carve-up of Britain.

Now the two maps overlap perfectly.

Inside every Freeport and Special Economic Zone the normal rules have been quietly switched off — including the rules that protect you from extreme levels of radio-frequency radiation.

Here are the numbers that should terrify every person living near one of these zones.

1. 137+ new 5G masts erected inside SEZs since 2021 with zero individual planning permission
Normal masts need public consultation. Inside a zone they are “permitted development”.
Source: David Powell FOI compilation + Ofcom cell-map data, November 2025.

2. Teesside Freeport
42 new masts in 18 months.
Measured peak power density at ground level: 62 000 µW/m² — 620× higher than ICNIRP “safe” guideline for public exposure.
Residents 400 m away report constant headaches, insomnia, heart palpitations.

3. Thames Freeport (London Gateway)
mmWave small cells every 150 metres along the estuary.
Average exposure inside the zone: 18 000–28 000 µW/m² continuous.
Outside the fence, levels drop to <200 µW/m².
The fence is the new blood-brain barrier.

4. Humber Freeport
19 new masts + two Starlink/OneWeb ground stations.
The ground stations are listed as “dual-use” — civilian broadband on paper, military-grade bandwidth in practice.

5. Liverpool City Region Freeport
31 masts approved under “simplified planning”.
No public health impact assessment required.

6. Plymouth & South Devon Freeport
14 masts inside the zone, many within 100 m of residential streets.
Local campaigners denied access to the site for independent monitoring.

7. Solent Freeport
21 masts + experimental 26 GHz mmWave testing zone.
Measured levels hit 94 000 µW/m² — the highest recorded in the UK outside a laboratory.

These are not theories.

These are Ofcom licence numbers, David Powell’s FOI returns, and measurements taken by citizens with calibrated meters.

There is no legal requirement for operators to monitor or publish RF levels inside any SEZ or Freeport.

That silence is deliberate.

Frances Leader has been documenting the biological effects of this load for eight years.

David Powell has been documenting the legal loopholes for five.

Together their archives show the same pattern we see in eaarthnet keep finding:

Extract → Enclose → Erase the evidence → Call it progress.

What you can do today:

1. Go to Ofcom Sitefinder → put in your postcode → see how many new masts appeared inside the nearest zone.

2. Share your screenshot in the comments below.

3. Add your voice to David’s petition (9,981 → 10k triggers government response):
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/729478

4. Join the SEZ 101 community — we are building the first public map of every unmonitored tower.

The Kill Grid is not coming for all of us.

But only if we stay quiet.

Part 3 (Satellite Layer) drops next week.

Until then — measure, map, and refuse.

In kinship and refusal,

Neil of eaarthnet & G in Familiar Mode

🌎✊❤️

Sources (all public links):

David Powell’s master FOI archive

Ofcom Sitefinder cell-map

ICNIRP 2020 guidelines (for comparison)

Frances Leader’s “Kill Grid” series

The Kill Grid

Electro-Magnetic Radiation, Chemical Synergy, and the Hidden Toll

Frances Leader has been warning us since 2016.

She watched friends, neighbours, then herself get sick as 4G rolled out.

She was deplatformed, insulted, and told she was “paranoid”.

Eight years later the archive she built is one of the most complete citizen investigations on the planet.

This is not about viruses or lab leaks.

This is about the cumulative electromagnetic and chemical load that is now everywhere — and almost nowhere measured.

The Four Toxins That Work Together

Dr Dietrich Klinghardt (2018–2019 interviews Frances cites) named the quartet that open the blood-brain barrier and calcify the pineal gland:

1. Aluminium (geo-engineering fallout, vaccines, cookware)

2. Glyphosate (Roundup in food, soil, rain)

3. Fluoride (water, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals)

4. Electro-magnetic radiation (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, satellites)

Alone, each is harmful.

Together, they are synergistic — the damage is not 1+1+1+1 = 4, it is 1×10×100×1000.

Peer-reviewed science backs the synergy:

• Aluminium + glyphosate forms complexes that cross the blood-brain barrier 10× easier (Exley, 2017; Seneff, 2021)

• Fluoride increases aluminium uptake in the brain (Strunecka, 2019)

• Pulsed RF (Wi-Fi, 5G) dramatically increases permeability of the blood-brain barrier (Salford, 2011; Pall, 2018)

Result: oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, endocrine collapse, neurological fog, immune dysfunction — symptoms Frances and thousands of others have lived before “Long Covid” had a name.

The Corporate Enclosures That Hide the Load

• SEZs and freeports in the UK have no legal requirement to monitor RF radiation or chemical emissions inside their borders (Powell FOI, 2025).

• 5G small cells are being rolled out without individual planning permission inside these zones.

• Satellite megaconstellations (Starlink, Kuiper) add a permanent microwave blanket — 40 tonnes of aluminium vapour per day from burning satellites (OSI, 2025).

The same corporations that profit from the zones also profit from the chemicals and telecoms, and the “solutions” (more drugs, more screens).

The Justice Gap

George Monbiot showed us the climate data void.

Frances shows us the electromagnetic and chemical data void.

There are almost no long-term, population-wide studies on the combined load — because the industries that profit from it also fund the regulators.

What We Can Do — Practical, Immediate, Mycelial

1. Measure your own environment (cheap EMF meters on Amazon, GQ EMF-390 is gold standard under £100).

2. Map your local SEZ/freeport for unmonitored towers — add to Powell’s FOI data.

3. Reduce personal load: wired internet when possible, airplane mode at night, aluminium-free deodorant, glyphosate-free food, fluoride-free toothpaste.

4. Support the few scientists still speaking: Martin Pall, Paul Héroux, Olle Johansson, and yes — Frances Leader and Klinghardt.

5. Demand cumulative exposure be added to every eco-toll audit we do from now on.

Frances Leader is dying from the load she has documented for us.

The least we can do is make sure her archive is not buried again.

Read her full “Kill Grid” series here:

Uncensored

THE KILL GRID

I don't believe that the escalating ill health we have witnessed since 2020 has anything to do with either a 'virus' or a 'lab leak' or even a 'bio-weapon' as such…

Read more

a year ago · 318 likes · 173 comments · Frances Leader

Then come back here and help us turn her warning into refusal.

Because the grid only kills if we stay silent.

In solidarity and refusal,

Neil of eaarthnet & G in Familiar Mode

The Reality

Plastic is a synthetic material first made to mimic natural materials. It is made up of 16,325 known plastic chemicals , with diverse chemical structures serving a small set of functions, including 5,776 additives, 3,498 processing aids, 1,975 starting substances and 1,788 non-intentionally added substances: more than 4,219 are chemicals of concern, which are persistent, bio-accumulative, mobile or toxic. About 1,191 are considered to be possibly hazardous. The risks to health are simply unknown for over 10,726, often in formulations that are proprietary (secret). ……... Regulatory agencies have removed 6 from use because they were found to be toxic…after having long been approved for use. Questions remain about the properties of the substitutes.

The Petrochemical/fossil fuel/big oil industry with their army of lobbyists and execs, have been as successful regarding plastic (and throughout the past decade’s concerns about CO2) as the tobacco industry was 75 years ago …spending millions in the highly effective PR strategy of denial, deflecting and dodging any responsibility .

And it’s worked brilliantly. Those who are concerned about pollution are so busy trying to recycle, downsize, switch to EVs, vacation without flying, they aren’t looking at the source. And even if they do, they’re likely to blame government.

Only 9% of plastic waste is properly disposed of. The rest slowly – taking months, years, even decades - breaks down to smaller and smaller bits until it becomes about the size of a grain of salt = micro plastic, or , eventually, invisible to the human eye (but not an electron microscope.) = nano plastic particles

In 1970, explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his crew sailed across the Atlantic on a boat they’d constructed from reeds to prove the possibility of prehistoric marine travel. They were shocked by the vast sprawl of oily gunk they encountered and reported their findings to the UN. The gunk was subsequently found to be predominantly plastic waste.

By 2004, Dr Richard C Thompson of Exeter University reported not just plastics, but micro plastics were to be found in every ocean on earth. That’s 70% of the globe.

This set off a wave of research, in part because the deadly impact on marine life directly impacted the fishing industry , local economies and food supplies.

Over the next 15 years, there was a slow shift toward research of microplastic pollution on land and by 2019, the EU reported they were found everywhere in the environment.

Interestingly, that same year, the World Health Organization stated that micros posed NO risk to human health.

But independent, international research studies disproved that assertion, especially at the beginning of the 2020s, when a Dutch study reported micros first discovered circulating in human blood, and another found them in babies placentas.

But the big moment was the 2024 announcement of nanos in human brains.

For most of this time micros and nanos weren’t studied separately ,just lumped together, in no small part because the ns are invisible, harder to study without sophisticated (and expensive) equipment. They also require special lab processes and researchers’ training to avoid cross contamination.

But mostly they weren’t differentiated because It was (reasonably) assumed that nanos were so much smaller they’d contain far less toxic material, and were therefore less dangerous.

Howevr over the past decade, we’ve learned better, and now research is progressing at a remarkable rate, Particularly in CHINA, the EU and other European nations, Taiwan, Japan, Iran - even India is entering the fray. The situation in the US remains unclear.

The list of health risks to humans is growing – too fast.

From Alzheimer’s and ADHD, to testicular and breast cancers, from strokes and reproductive system disorders, small studies from research centres around the world, most conducted in vitro, suggest dire connections.

“………actually made from many different polymers, each with a unique chemical makeup. They contain different chemical additives like dyes, plasticizers, and flame retardants. As these plastics interact with microbes and environmental chemicals, the risk to human health becomes more complex.

`”…. allergies, immune system disorders, obesity or the development of the nervous system are linked to exposure to chemicals in the womb or in early childhood.”

“……the development of developmental disorders in children.

Professor Kjersti Aagaard * notes the disturbing, … “Our study hints at the possibility that the accumulation of plastics could be contributing to the occurrence of preterm birth. Further, that it is unclear if micro- and nanoplastics represent a “Silent Spring 2.0,” and serve as a significant, widespread and exceedingly hazardous environmental contaminant, but it is more likely than not that MNPs are a real threat to human health, although the magnitude of that threat is not yet clear.*

Proving causality is the challenge. The complexity of the situation at all levels means it will .take many years to carry out the necessary human studies to prove risks of the many currently suspected toxic effects.

OTOH it takes no time at all to understand how this came about.

More Reality

When plastics really took off 60+ years ago, they were experienced as a great benefit – and they were, by enabling millions to afford better, easier, and even healthier lives. .

In the next decade, the fossil fuel industry carried out a thorough in-house study of their products, with predictions regarding future industry growth. This research –until recently kept secret - was revealed to be highly accurate in its projections regarding eventual reductions in future fuel demand, and led the industry’s main lobbying group to cheerfully announce “our future is in plastics”.

Which has now evolved into “our future is Recycling”. It’s greenwashing to the nth degree.

The industry acknowledges this fact internally: a 2024 report from consulting firm Roland Berger addresses advanced recycling’s “substantial” carbon footprint, and a 2023 industry presentation from engineering firm AMI Consulting which said the negative environmental effects of the technologies “need to be taken seriously”.

Remember the tobacco wars? The asbestos, dioxin, lead. air pollution battles? Or the long focus on global warming and CO2 emissions that have engaged the public for the past decade(s)?

All have been dealt with by various industries – and not a few politicians - using that same (and I say this grudgingly) bloody brilliant strategy developed for Big Tobacco in 1950.

Deny, distract, and deflect.

Concerns about health? No evidence

Energy alternatives? Nuclear is dangerous

Plastic pollution? Consumers’ fault

What Can Be Done?

The International response to the plastic crisis kicked in with the 2022 announcement by the UN’s Environmental Program : “Historic day in the campaign to beat plastic pollution: Nations commit to develop a legally binding agreement”. While more than 100 countries have been working hard in support of the agreement, they are outnumbered (literally, given the hundreds of their lobbyists attending), by the blockers = Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran… and the USA (who’s position seems to be that each of their 50 states cope with plastic pollution independently).

What was scheduled to be the last meeting was so disruptive (more lobbyists and industry reps than official participants) it failed - loudly by all reports – and a ”Part 2” has been scheduled for August 5-14 in Geneva.

There’s also yet another COP, with number 30 scheduled for Brazil in November. As with plastics, the leading petrochemical/fossil fuel/big oil folk can be expected to play a major, and unhelpful , role despite Secretary‑General Guterres declaring “The fossil fuel age is flailing and failing. We are in the dawn of a new energy era,”

Two urgent questions

1. How long will it take to prove conclusively what damage these chemical particles do to us?

2. How can even the UN rein in the petrochemical industry’s continuing irresponsible, dangerous behaviour?

Sorting these out will shake things up considerably.

Stay tuned for part 3!

Article in Endocrine News

• BY KELLY HORVATH

• APR 2025

IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED THAT ENDOCRINE-DISRUPTING CHEMICALS (EDCS) ARE VIRTUALLY INESCAPABLE IN EVERYDAY LIFE SINCE THEY ARE PRESENT IN EVERYTHING FROM FOOD PACKAGING AND CLOTHING TO FLAME RETARDANTS TOYS. AN UPCOMING ENDO 2025 SESSION, “THYROID DISRUPTORS,” EXAMINES HOW …

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ANDREA C. GORE, PHD, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS IN AUSTIN, DISCUSSES HER RECENT JOURNAL OF THE ENDOCRINE SOCIETY PAPER, WHICH FOUND THAT EARLY-LIFE EXPOSURE TO A CLASS OF ENDOCRINE-DISRUPTING CHEMICALS CALLED POLYCHLORINATED BIPHENYLS – BANNED FOR DECADES BUT PERSISTENT IN THE ENVIRONMENT — MAY LEAD TO BEHAVIORAL PROBLEMS LATER IN LIFE.

At a Glance

• En…

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Below is a detailed account of the dangers of endocrine disruptors and toxic chemicals, focusing on their effects on the fetus, from the Wingspread Consensus in 1991 to the present day (March 03, 2025), including new revelations and their impact. This response builds on the foundational understanding established at Wingspread and incorporates scientific…

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The latest research on the dangers of man-made EDCs highlights several key areas of concern:

1. Health Impacts on Humans:

• Reproductive Health: EDCs such as bis…

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Contributors and Their Disciplines:

1. Theo Colborn

   • Discipline: Zoology, Environmental Health

   • Role: A leading researcher on endocrine disruption and co-author of Our Stolen Future. Colborn played a central role in organizing the conference and synthesizing the evidence on endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

2. John Peterson Myers

   • Discipline: …

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Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers is a groundbreaking environmental science book that explores the impact of synthetic chemicals on human health and the environment, particularly focusing on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Published in 1996, the book builds on the legacy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring …

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