ABSTRACT
We live in a thoroughly chemical world. Chemicals, quite literally, comprise everything. This has always been the case, but perhaps now we are more in touch with this fact than at any previous time in human history. This is due, in part, to our increasing ability to exert in§uence over the chemicals available in the world, and even more powerfully, to put new chemicals of our own making into that world. Thus the knowledge of and presumed control over chemicals has created a moment in which we feel as though we have žnally mastered our environment. But if the uniqueness of this moment results in part from this new-found creative power, it is equally due to our developing comprehension of how well we understand the consequences of those actions. Molecules produced decades ago, whose production has long since ceased, continue to pervade our environments and our bodies. Compounds created in one hemisphere travel the ecological currents to arrive unannounced in distant places. Entirely new vocabularies have been invented in recent years just to begin accounting for all of the new things we now know and to mark the places of the things we still do not. These new words-biopersistence, bioaccumulation, endocrine disruption, chemical mutagenesis, toxicogenomics, and nanotoxicology-stand as historical
Overview ....................................................................................................................3 Ancient Roots/Routes ................................................................................................4 From Harvesting to Perfecting Poisons .....................................................................5 The Proto Chemists ....................................................................................................5 A “Chemical” Revolution ..........................................................................................7 Birth of an Industry ....................................................................................................7 The War Years ............................................................................................................8 Rachel Carson and the Decades of Disasters .............................................................9 At the Close of the Twentieth Century and Beyond ................................................ 10 International Cooperation on Management ............................................................. 12 Environmental Justice and Governance ................................................................... 12 References ................................................................................................................ 13
markers of our time. A century ago, a scientist would have had no understanding of, let alone familiarity with, a word like bioaccumulation not simply because of a lack of knowledge but because of an entirely different conceptual framework for thinking through the risks posed by chemicals to organisms and their environments. Just as our understanding of chemistry has evolved over the centuries (perhaps millennia, if we consider activities that existed long before the word chemistry ever appeared), so too have our understandings of the interrelations between chemicals, our environment, and our health.
