Detoxing my life, resentfully

One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to help change the way people think about environmental problems. In 2019, I felt like mainstream media was saturated with stories about individual consumer action, while the systemic forces driving ecological destruction and toxicity were barely scrutinized. So I made it my mission to try and shift the conversation away from what we consume, and toward who forces it down our throats. In many ways, I think that mission’s been successful. More than 140,000 of you are here, after all. But over these last seven years, I’ve also felt like Americans have become more and more obsessed with individualism. And I get it. When everything feels out of control, one of the easiest ways to regain that control is to focus on yourself. And in a government controlled by Big Oil puppets, it can even feel like the most practical path. If no one in power is going to act, maybe your choices can ripple outward. Maybe biking to work changes infrastructure. Maybe product boycotts shift markets. Still, I’ve found that content about individual consumer action often annoys me. I cringe when I watch or read something that treats personal purity as the goal, focusing only on what to buy, what to throw away, or how to “detox your life.” When the most visible environmental “solutions” are the ones that ask the least of the people who do the most to perpetuate the problem, it makes me want to walk into the rapidly acidifying ocean. This is the mindset I had walking into The Plastic Detox, the new Netflix documentary about how the chemicals in modern plastics are harming our health. The film was marketed to me as a story about six couples struggling with infertility as they attempt the herculean task of removing all the plastic products from their lives. Great, I thought, another prolonged advertisement for buying more shit, except now the shit’s made out of bamboo. In some ways, I was correct (the film did occasionally feel like a long subliminal ad for Grove Collaborative). But the documentary also didn’t pretend the plastic health crisis can be solved by simply buying things. It explicitly wove in the bigger picture—the fact that plastics are made from fossil fuels; that fossil fuel companies have spent decades embedding plastics into every part of daily life; that regulators have largely failed to keep harmful petrochemicals off the market, because they’re bought off by the fossil fuel industry; and that the industry has been misleading the public about recycling and chemical safety for decades. And it did all this while telling an urgent, compelling story about individuals making product swaps that had a transformative impact on their health. The film’s approach helped loosen some of the armor I’ve build up to this type of content. Talking to Dr. Shanna Swan, the renowned reproductive epidemiologist whose research has demonstrated the health harms of plastic exposure, loosened it even more. When I spoke to her last week, I tried to understand why she’s so focused on helping people make product swaps when she herself acknowledges that systemic action is necessary for real change. Very matter-of-factly, she told me, individuals just don’t have time to wait for governmental action, which can take decades. The hormone-disrupting chemicals in modern plastics—phthalates and BPA—are affecting people’s health right now, contributing to infertility and developmental harms in babies. And yes, she acknowledged: It’s completely unfair. Avoiding exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastic requires time, money, and an almost obsessive level of attention. For many people, particularly low-income and Black and brown people, this kind of “detox” is simply not on the table. But, she said, that’s the reality we’re dealing with right now. That’s when it clicked for me. I’m not actually annoyed at people who pursue individual solutions, or at content creators who try to help people make eco-friendly or non-toxic choices. I’m annoyed that individualism has become the only path toward personal and environmental safety. I’m annoyed that the government has effectively outsourced its responsibility to protect public health, biodiversity, and the climate onto individuals. I’m annoyed that avoiding existential harm has become a lifestyle choice instead of a baseline guarantee. I also think that’s why I get so frustrated when I watch massive influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman—both of whom have interviewed Swan—talk endlessly about optimization and detoxing without ever naming the systems that made all of this necessary in the first place. It’s not that they’re wrong to talk about individual choices. It’s that, with audiences that large, they have real opportunities to connect those choices to the bigger forces shaping them, and they usually don’t. And that’s a missed opportunity, because as The Plastic Detox makes clear, it’s actually not that hard to do both things at once. So instead of just critiquing that gap, I’m going to try to close it. Because the truth is, I’ve wanted to reduce my own personal exposure to plastic for a long time. I just didn’t think it was necessarily an important or interesting story to tell, and also, it’s difficult and annoying and expensive and I’m busy. But now I think there’s legitimate journalistic reason to do it. So earlier this week, I ordered the very expensive pee test Dr. Swan recommended for measuring phthalates and BPA in your body. And over the next couple months, I’m going to try to “detox my life” from fossil fuel-derived plastics that harm fertility, biodiversity, and the climate. I’ll tell you about the swaps I make, how much time it takes, and how much money it costs. But I’ll also make clear, every step of the way, how absurd it is that I have to do this at all—and who made it that way. At the top of this post is my full interview with Dr. Shanna Swan. You can listen right there, find it on your favorite podcast app, or watch the video version below on YouTube. Also: More than 140,000 people subscribe to HEATED, but less than 3 percent pay for a subscription. I could paywall more to try to change that, but I want this newsletter to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income level. If you value that—and want to support more work like this—please consider becoming a paid subscriber.