The Spectrum of Toxicity: A Brief History of Humanity Poisoning Ourselves

In the midst of the current attention on pollution and how it affects the environment, it can be easy to think that we live in the most toxic time in world history, but that isn’t true. Over the past several hundred years humanity has grown progressively better at avoiding environmental toxins and man-made pollutants, but our awareness of the dangers of these materials has grown faster than our ability to avoid them. This makes it look like the world is growing ever more dangerous, when in fact the world is growing gradually safer, but the average person is becoming ever more aware of the dangers that have existed for a long time already. This awareness is a good thing, because the more noise people make about environmental pollution, the faster solutions will be prioritized and implemented, but this increased awareness shouldn’t force people to live in constant fear.

The Industrial Age

As recently at the 1800s fatal outbreaks of dysentery and other digestive infections were commonplace worldwide, simply because people didn’t know better than to avoid pooping in the same rivers they drank from. When the industrial revolution began, it brought with it several occupation-related diseases like black lung for miners and chimney sweeps, and mad hatter’s disease (mercury poisoning) for hat-makers. The common thread to these diseases is that they are almost always debilitating and/or fatal, which makes their effects obvious and facilitates finding the cause. When these diseases were prevalent it didn’t take a doctor to understand that everyone who had a particular job was getting sick, so average people knew to avoid those jobs if they could. The horrific nature of these diseases also helped to spur public outcry and political action to improve public sanitation, improve working conditions, and ban known toxic substances.

The 20th Century

Once all of the obviously toxic substances had been banned, the world became much safer for the average person, and it freed up resources to begin investigating subtler poisons in our environment. When oil companies began adding lead to gasoline in the 1920s the hazards of lead were already well known, since lead is almost as toxic as mercury. However, since only a minuscule amount of lead was needed to produce the desired anti-knocking effect in gasoline, oil companies argued that such a small amount would be safe. They weren’t entirely wrong either. Since such a small amount of lead was being used, rather than causing horrific lead poisoning for people who breathed gasoline fumes, instead the fumes caused gradual cognitive decline in people of all ages, and significant developmental disorders in children. These effects were much more slow and subtle than the diseases from toxic exposure of the past, so it took years for the effects of leaded gasoline to be noticed, studied, then acted upon. It took so long in fact that leaded gasoline wasn’t banned until the 1990s.

The same pattern that occurred for the study and eventual regulation of leaded gasoline was repeated in the tobacco industry, particularly related to secondhand smoke. Smoking sections in hotels, restaurants, and airplanes were common until the 1990s, because rather than causing severe disease secondhand tobacco smoke instead causes higher rates of asthma and lung cancer. Both of these diseases are slow to develop, which can make it difficult to directly connect their cause to secondhand smoke rather than any number of other factors.

This trend extends beyond toxins to human health and even into the environment at large. Propellants called CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) were common in sprayed products like paint and hairspray throughout the 1970s and 1980s, until the international agreement called the Montreal Protocol in 1987 acknowledged the effect these chemicals had on the ozone layer and the risk that posed to all life on Earth. CFCs have been gradually phased out since then, and the hole in the ozone layer has been gradually healing, to the point that it is no longer considered a major environmental concern. The hole in the ozone layer was even slower to develop and even subtler than all of the diseases mentioned above, but it too was noticed and slowly the source of the problem was addressed.

The Present and Beyond

We do not live in a clean world, but we live in a cleaner world than we have for generations. In the developed world known poisons like mercury, lead, tobacco, and CFCs are all heavily regulated or outright banned, and people are living longer than ever before. Rates of cancer are on the rise, but in some ways this is also good news. Cancer is a slow-moving disease that takes years to develop in most cases, so modern people are only getting cancer so much because they aren’t being killed by a myriad of other diseases first, because those other diseases have been largely addressed. Our accumulated generations of toxicological knowledge have allowed us to live progressively safer and healthier lives, and this trend will only improve as we continue to clean up today’s environmental toxins.

A major part of why efforts have been so slow to rid the world of microplastics and “forever chemicals” is because the health effects of these materials are even more subtle than any of the toxins that came before them, so it is unclear what regulatory response is appropriate. As more information becomes available, these materials will almost certainly be regulated or banned just like the toxins of the past, but in the meantime they are not something to live in constant fear of. Yes, we are being poisoned, but so were all of our ancestors. It is a worthy goal to create a poison-free world, but while we work together to create it we can at least take solace in knowing we are safer than our parents and grandparents were. 

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