Cleansing a poisoned planet: chemicals, science communication and global people power

Earth, and all life on it, are being saturated with anthropogenic chemicals and wastes, in an event unlike anything in the previous four billion years of our planet's story. Each moment of our lives, from conception to death, we are exposed to thousands of substances, some lethal, many toxic and most of them unknown in their effects on our health or on the natural world. There is no escaping them. This has happened in barely the space of a single lifetime. Humanity currently manufactures around 144,000 different chemicals (ECA 2015) and releases >2000 new ones a year (US DoHHS 2015), many of them untested for safety (UNEP 2013). These are the tip of the iceberg: Humanity also releases <250 gigatonnes of fossil fuels, carbon, topsoil, hazardous wastes, minerals, materials and mineral wastes. These anthropogenic substances and their impacts are now circulating throughout the Earth system – in water, air, soil, wildlife, fish, food, trade, in people and their genes. Science has detected them in the stratosphere, in cities, water supplies, from coastal fringes to the ocean depths; from the peak of Mt Everest to remote Pacific atolls and wilderness; from the Arctic to the Antarctic. (Multiple sources cited.) Tests reveal that humans in most societies now carry a lifelong chemical burden (US CDC), that unborn babies are being contaminated with industrial chemicals (EWG 2009) and that mothers' milk in 68 countries is contaminated with pesticides and other noxious substances (UNEP/WHO 2013). WHO/UNEP (2013) estimate that one in 12 humans die from environmental poisons and around 86 million are maimed each year: this toll is greater than for HIV, malaria or car crashes. One in five cancers (<2m/yr) are attributed to environmental exposure to carcinogens.(WHO 2011) Medical scientists warn of a 'silent pandemic' of childhood brain disorders due to the global release of neurotoxins by human activity (Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014). Health officials caution that reproductive and hormonal disorders are on the rise worldwide. (WHO 2012). Above all, health researchers are concerned at the impact of mixtures of thousands of different substances combined in the human diet and living environment, which they link to conditions including developmental disorders, sexual dysfunction (including sterility), nerve and brain diseases (including autism, depression, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's), cancers and heart disease. (Carpenter et al, 2002) Regulation has so far banned 19 out of 144,000 chemicals (Stockholm Convention, 2015) and appears powerless to stem the global flood of new releases, especially as the bulk of world chemical output is now shifting to ill-regulated Third World sites. (UNEP 2013). From Minamata to Fukushima a string of toxic disasters have demonstrated the futility of legal action against individual companies as a check to global contamination. (author)