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Writer's picturePaul Fenn

Surviving a Manmade World

Per Fluoryl Alkyl Substances (PFAS) are known as “forever chemicals” because they are designed not to break down, and accumulate in the blood of all people, water, soil, and living creatures, causing cancer, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, and kidney disease. The magnitude of exposure through accumulation of PFAS over the entire world make PFAS a public health crisis on the magnitude of climate change as an ecological crisis. They are present in the blood of every American, detectable in all water, huge swathes of US farmland has been contaminated with them, and a substantial percentage of drinking water is considered unsafe due to the levels of them.



Whereas we can blame climate change on our “need” for energy, it is impossible to find a “need” for PFAS. They were never needed. They were developed solely for alleged convenience, such as the convenience of a Teflon pan, one of the major sources of PFAS in human blood. There were perfectly good nontoxic alternatives for everything that PFAS replaced by being more convenient. That is all.


PFAS contamination of virtually all farm soil, all forests, all rivers, all lakes, all oceans, and all creatures proves the utter uselessness of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), just as climate change proves the uselessness of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both are hobbled by a corrupt and aggressive U.S. House of Representatives, which have used the purse to rein these agencies in, contorting them into monsters whose real function is to legalize toxic products and normalize them in American people’s minds. Ironically, people who distrust government still consume products uncritically, assuming it must be safe if it is allowed to be sold. After all, the same system that allows corporations like 3M to poison everyone also severely regulates small farmers for backward things like cheese and nut allergy safety. While wholesale fraud and assault is allowed in retail markets, severe oversight regulates the little guy. And it’s not like there is any real exit strategy: state governments like Massachusetts not only allow PFAS to be sold but allow garbage haulers everywhere to run landfill leachates full of every imaginable PFAS and other toxics to be run through municipal sewage treatment plants, which not only doesn’t remove or destroy PFAS, but chemically intensifies their breakdown and transforms them into into new, unknown chemical chains. This very day, your own town is dumping this into a nearby river. Your state continues to dump PFAS-laced sewaged as “biosolids” on farms, today! Yet you can fish? Oh yes, the state encourages that, with a few vague safety warnings. After all, the rivers are already contaminated with mercury and other “traditional” toxics from the 20th century. And you can eat it in your food.


If you stop consuming PFAS now, you will be less likely to die or get deathly sick from it. So, you will have to discard many of your possessions, or replace and dispose of them, when you can, with traditional nontoxic alternatives that PFAS were manufactured to replace. Don’t believe the hype and buy “new” plastic products. Get rid of:


1. Teflon or any nonstick pans. Use olive oil and coconut oil.

2. Fleece like Patagonia. Cotton inside wool.

3. All plastic and water proof clothes. Get the old oilcloth coats and pants like Filson’s

4. Non-organic food. All else is legally grown with PFAS-contaminated sewage. Everywhere. Try to buy organics from farmers directly, such as a farmers market or subscription. Local is better. Imported food is stupid, even organic. Learn to cook seasonally.

5. All packaged foods. All food containers are highly toxic, shockingly many with PFAS. Buy food fresh. Learn how to cook.

6. Makeup - just stop. It’s almost all contaminated, often making other people sick not just you.

7. Restaurants, nearly all of which continue to use nonstick pans and Teflon tools, and buy cheap ingredients that are more likely to contain toxics. Learn how to cook. It’s actually easier to cook if the food itself is good.

7. All plastic bags. Use paper, wax paper, cloth, etc.. The old stuff.

8. Shoes. Get leather shoes and boots, and put mink oil on them once a month. Check ingredients carefully, some have PFAS. You can ask manufacturers whether they have PFAS.

9. Cooling and heating appliances that leak: since the Ozone crisis and post chlorofluorocarbons, most new refrigerants in AC, heat pumps are so called X Gen chemicals, which are PFAS. Many of these appliances routinely leak. That means PFAS vapor in your home.

10. Plumber’s tape or Teflon tape. PFAS. Learn the old way, with hemp and grease.

11. Papers and inks. Even toilet paper! You have to shop carefully as PFAS are used to control ink drying and smudge resistance.

12. Tell your farmer to spread the word about biosolids and test the soil.


If you don’t like it, get cancer. Or get mad. Or both. Tell your state to ban sale and use of PFAS, and to sue companies like 3M for making them and paying for getting rid of 40 years of 70,000 landfills drenched with them and killing us softly.....

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