Are the Chemical Toxins that are destroying our Health Simply Nature’s Negative Feedback Loop?

All life tries to reproduce and take over the world. Fortunately any positive feedback loops that support this exponential growth in population and consumption ALWAYS creates some unintended negative feedback loops which prevent this take over from happening. Until now. Until humans came along. Or so it seemed…

Perhaps we’re just like blue green algae. We reproduce like crazy until the destroy the water that supports our population growth. Or maybe we’re more like zebra mussels which clean the water so effectively of plankton that they destroy their food supply and mostly die off. No, perhaps we’re more like deer or rabbits who eat and make babies and eat more and make more babies until they’ve pretty much eaten everything they can and starve to death. Lucky for the deer that Mother Nature has an elegant way to avoid this painful ending – wolves. What are our wolves?

Does this infer that we are behaving just like any other plant or animals does? I am afraid so. However, in spite of the evidence, I simultaneously also see that humanity has the capability of become more than a mere animal responding the stimuli without taking the future implications into account. In other words, perhaps we need to go through our current crisis to grow up and finally become truly human and not merely a human animal.

One murderous wolf is the annihilation of our ecosystems, waters and soils. Another is the climate catastrophe. Another is the 6^th mass extinction. These wolves are all outside of our bodies. I propose that the last and most insidious wolf, because it is happening INSIDE of us, are the toxic chemicals that are now in all our blood and organs. IN other words – you think that the climate disaster is our #1 problem? I propose that we are fighting a war on multiple fronts and because history informs us that countries that fight wars on multiple fronts almost always lose, we have a infinitely small chance of victory in our current self made ecological collapse and that it is possible that the battle of the toxic chemicals will defeat us before the climate defeat does. Here is what a one article from 2018 has to say – and this was before the current obsession with PFAs as the latest ultra-veil toxin was recognized:

Human fertility is declining worldwide. While much of the 50% decrease in the number of children born per woman in the past 60 years is due to choice, an increasing number of couples—now 1 in 7 to 10 in North America—are have serious difficulty conceiving.1 A significant cause of this progressive loss of fertility is increasing body load of environmental toxins in both men and women.

Environmental toxins cause infertility in basically 4 ways:

Endocrine disruption.

Damage to the female reproductive system.

Damage to the male reproductive system.

Impaired fetal viability.

This damage not only decreases natural fertility but also makes in vitro fertilization (IVF) much less likely to succeed. The worst fertility disrupters are organochlorine compounds (chlorinated pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxins), bisphenol A (BPA), and organophosphate pesticides and herbicides. However, many other chemicals, metals, and air pollutants seriously damage fertility. [1]

Just to give you a greater sense of urgency here is a small small sample of articles I recently received in my news feeds. Clearly the scientists are starting to freak out. Just like the climate catastrophe they are sounding the alarm bells. But is anybody listening?

Scientists found that “exposure during IV therapy mainly originates from infusion tubing, necessitating high concern.” One hour post-IV therapy, exposure levels of microplastics and nanoplastics in patients’ bloodstreams ranged from 5.3 to 14.4 micrograms per liter. As the analysis explains, other research indicates that microplastics (plastic particles less than 5 millimeters long) and nanoplastics (their even tinier counterparts) raise the risk of heart disease after they begin circulating in the human body. [2]

Manufacturers manipulate chemicals to escape regulations A paper in Nature Geoscience in April 2024 looks at global presence of PFAS and finds that 31 per cent of the groundwater samples tested, which were not near any obvious source of PFAS contamination, had the chemical present in levels considered harmful to human health. In an interview with one of the authors of the paper, Denis O’Carroll, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Australia’s University of New South Wales, tells why the presence of PFAS could still be an underestimation. [3]

Study finds high level of ‘forever chemicals’ in skiers from wax – Boston University research found PFAS levels were highest in ski coaches, veteran athletes and those who waxed more than 100 pairs of skis in a year. [4]

Scientists know our bodies are full of microplastics. What are they doing to us? “I would imagine we’re underestimating nanoplastics across the board, including in human tissues,” says Brander. Matthew Campen, whose team has found plastic in a variety of organs, says these can resemble “shard-like, stabby things,” which, in some cases, are smaller than a virus.”You realize, wait a minute, you could fit a lot of these inside even a single cell,” [5]

So what are we to do?

Like all the other unfolding disasters realize that our way of life is in self destruct mode and thus react accordingly. However, whatever that reaction, the routes of despair or denial, although attractive, must be avoided, because they are both self-fullfilling prophecies. We must DO something, like reducing plastic use as much as possible; like voting for candidates that will vote for laws that deal with this issue; like not working for companies that produce these nasty chemicals. But of course we all know this is a drop in the bucket and the social-economic forces that are driving the use of these chemicals are winning the battle – at this moment… So, we do our best, we never give up working against business as usual in whatever way we can, expecting no result, until suddenly we wake up one day and surprise! The leadership and/or the mass of population suddenly wakes up – probably after its so bad that everybody can see how bad it really is – and the needed changes happen. Expect a lot of pain before that happens. But that seems to be the way Nature works – there has to be enough pain to change… because deep and significant change is so hard and perceived as so risky.

A final note; some of you reading this might consider this a very pessimistic point of view – I actually consider a very optimistic point of view. Why is that? Because its realistic, and thus it could happen. I see any option that sees us changing without significant pain a bunch of fairy dust and thus not optimistic, but rather delusional as it does not accept the reality of human nature – well, at least human nature in our current culture. So, as with the climate catastrophe – move to higher ground and put on your seat belts and most importantly, if you are older, help any young people you know understand and take action to preserve both their physical health and their mental-emotional sanity by supporting any action that empowers them so they don’t feel like helpless pawns. Rather, their cumulative actions can be like the pawn pictured below which “slays” the more powerful pieces in the game of life…