To make a point about the saturating presence of toxic chemicals in the environment, field scientists will, on occasion, leave off looking for contaminants in big cities and abandoned industrial sites and travel to some of the world’s most remote places. In recent years they have found petrochemicals—and breast cancer—in the bodies of beluga whales in Canada’s St. Lawrence River. They have found PCBs—compounds used in electrical transformers that have been banned for thirty years—in the snow atop Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Andes. They have even found flame retardants in the blubber of seals on Canada’s Holman Island, far above the Arctic Circle. Synthetic chemicals, it turns out, circle the globe like the winds.

Despite such evidence—that toxic chemicals are, in essence, everywhere—human health advocates have struggled for decades to convince the public that there may be a link between so-called environmental toxins and individual and community health. After the stir caused by the publication of Silent Spring in the early 1960s, it took a full decade for the government to pass, and begin to enforce, pollution controls in factories and hazardous waste dumps. And thirty years after that, it remains more difficult than ever to convince people that the products they rely on every day—products that are made, after all, with these same toxic chemicals—might in any way be risky to use.

It’s important to understand that your body is already full of toxic chemicals. This is true even if, as the saying goes, you were born yesterday. Long before you ever bought a flame retardant couch, or a sheet of plywood, or a can of ant spray, the chances are quite good that you absorbed toxins through your mother’s placenta, her breast milk, or both. Given the ubiquity of chemicals in our lives, the accumulation grows from there.

In Maryland, where I live, a lot of attention is paid to the health of oysters, one of many endangered species suffering from toxic runoff in the Chesapeake Bay. Oysters spend their days on the bay floor, filtering water in one end and out the other. Whatever microscopic material is in the water passes through the oyster. Most of it exits; some of it stays inside. These toxins can be measured.

What is becoming clear is that we are all oysters. We are all exposed to all kinds of toxins. Some of these we filter out; others stay inside us.

In recent years, public health groups have come up with a new tactic to make this point: the body burden study. Such studies are not, at least primarily, invested in proving that toxic chemicals are “dangerous.” This work is being done, with increasingly clear results, in scientific laboratories. What the body burden studies do is prove that these chemicals are everywhere—in the environment, in wild and domestic animals, and, with increasing frequency, in our bodies. Proving that toxic chemicals are dangerous hits people in their heads. Proving that people have chemicals in their bodies hits people in their guts. For decades, the chemical industry has been able to convince our heads that chemical harm is still in dispute, that “more research is needed.” The authors of the new body burden studies are betting that the gut is less easily persuaded.

“Our experience with persistent chemicals of the past such as DDT and PCBs has shown what happens when we wait to gather conclusive evidence of a chemical’s harm instead of acting on mounting evidence,” the Public Interest Research Group reported in 2003. “By the time the chemicals were regulated, they had spread across the globe and left a path of damage from which we have yet to recover.”

If lab science aspires to prove chemical harm, body burden studies aspire to show chemical exposure. In Europe, linking harm in the lab with exposure in the community has been enough to prompt radical changes in the way toxic chemicals are regulated. “In a court of law, a person is innocent until proven guilty,” a United Nations report on the persistence of environmental toxins says. “Chemicals suspected of bio-accumulating, persisting in the environment, and harming human beings and animals do not deserve that kind of protection. Unless precautionary action is taken to curtail exposure to these chemicals, millions of people—not to mention millions of other creatures ranging from lake trout to penguins—are likely to suffer terrible harm.” As of three years ago, chemicals in Europe are considered guilty until proven innocent. Here in the United States, it is still the other way around.

When I wanted to find out how ubiquitous synthetic chemicals had become in people, I decided to go to Maine. I wanted to meet some folks whose bodies, I had heard, had recently been tested and found to be full of plasticizers. And mercury. And stain resisters. None of these people worked in a laboratory, and they had not grown up in big industrial cities, or near the chemical corridors of Louisiana, Houston, or Delaware. One was a woman raising young children in rural western Maine. Another was a twenty-eight-year-old woman raised in one of Maine’s remotest corners. A third was an organic farmer.

How did this happen?

Lauralee Raymond grew up in Fort Kent, way up in Aroostook County, near the St. John River, on the Canadian border. This part of Maine is a paradise of rivers and lakes, where moose can seem to outnumber people and canoeists from all over New England ply one of the East Coast’s great remaining wildernesses. Lauralee’s family has lived in the north country for generations: her father’s family is from Acadia, her mother’s from Quebec. Lauralee’s great-grandfather and grandfather were both potato farmers. The family, for a very long time, has been connected to the land.

Ask a Maine native what they consider to be northern Maine, and they are likely to say, “Bangor.” But you’d need to continue another four hours north from Bangor to get to Fort Kent. “If you drive through Aroostook County, there’s so much forest, you don’t see houses forever,” Lauralee says. Since Interstate 95 stops two hours south of town, the only way to get to Fort Kent is to follow a winding road cutting through the northern woods. There are moose and deer at every turn, Lauralee says, and if you want a true adventure, drive the road at night.

Surrounded by such a wealth of natural beauty, Lauralee spent most of her childhood outside. She and her friends swam in creeks. They rode their bikes and skied cross-country. Every fall, they got a few extra weeks off to help with the potato harvest—which, for the kids, meant separating the potatoes from the rocks and the mud. Nowadays the area is known mostly as an Olympic training center for biathletes—who combine cross-country skiing and shooting—and for hosting a qualifying sled-dog race for Alaska’s Iditarod.

As she grew older, Lauralee moved downstate to attend Bates College, in central Maine, then settled first outside Augusta and later in Portland, where she now works for a women and children’s policy group. When I met her, she was sitting in a coffee shop that was festooned with signs encouraging customers to support Maine’s economy by buying local. Local food. Local music. Local beer. In one corner, a trio of women sat knitting. In another, a woman nursed a child in her lap. This, it turned out, was Lauralee’s kind of place. She is a cheerful, open-faced, energetic young woman, and fiercely proud of her state’s eccentricity, its rural character, and its independence.

But in recent years Lauralee has had this sensibility shaken. She had agreed to meet me in the café to talk about a study in which she had taken part that had made her question a great deal about her ability—and her state’s—to exist apart from the corrupting influences of the urbanized world. A couple of years ago, she had participated in a study being conducted by a public health group hoping to draw attention to the growing presence of toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products. Each participant would donate samples of their hair, blood, and urine to a research team from the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Southern Maine. Once the samples were collected, they would be sent to laboratories in Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, for chemical analysis. Technicians would test the samples for a spectrum of toxins. The lab would not offer diagnoses; there would be no attempt to link contamination to current or prospective diseases. All the volunteers would learn was what they had lurking in their bodies.

Thirteen people agreed to participate. They came from all walks of life: A furniture store owner. A teacher. A nurse. They were men and women, young and old. Several represented a group that has become a very important constituency for public health advocates: they were women of childbearing age. At twenty-eight, Lauralee Raymond definitely qualified.

Public health advocates hoped that proving the presence of toxic chemicals in a randomly selected group of citizens would cement the notion that toxic chemicals were more than a problem limited to people who lived near Superfund sites, or showed up only in residents of New Jersey. The study’s sponsors were interested in research and advocacy in equal measure: if people in Maine were contaminated, the thinking went, people everywhere were probably contaminated, and something ought to be done about it.

Before the test, Lauralee Raymond was confident, even cocky, about the relative purity of her body. She was in her twenties. She was a runner. She ate organic food. She had spent her childhood in one of the most pristine corners of one of the most rural states in the country. If anyone’s body was clean, she figured, it would be hers. To make matters more interesting, her mother agreed to be tested as well. When it came to the number of chemicals in their bodies, Lauralee felt certain that youth would be served.

“I went into this as a kind of game, or a competition with my mom,” Lauralee said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this will be fascinating, to see how much better health I am in than my mom.’ Look, my parents can’t even pronounce ‘tofu.’ I figured, maybe this will get my mom to take better care of herself.”

The organizers of the study had told her, and all the participants, that they should be prepared for a few surprises. Lauralee scoffed.

“I was thinking, like, ‘You don’t need to tell me that. I’m going to be fine. My results will be fine.’ ”

Russell Libby was also raised in a rural part of Maine. He grew up in Sorrento, outside Bar Harbor. His people were from modest means, mostly farmers or retailers; his grandmother was a drugstore clerk, his father a state trooper. As a kid, Libby worked at a golf course where they used a lot of pesticides, and then worked raking commercial blueberries, where they used still more. Later, he was trained as an economist at Bowdoin College and the University of Maine. Libby has devoted his career to studying agricultural policy. He spent a decade as research director of the state’s Department of Agriculture, and has been involved with the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association for thirty years, the last fifteen as its executive director.

He is also a published poet. Like Wendell Berry, Libby is given to lines reflecting the pressures he, and his rural state, feel from the industrialized world. One poem, “Worth,” opens with a quote from a vice president of Dow AgroSciences recommending that farmers work a piece of land “for all it’s worth.” The next stanzas raise questions that shift our attention from the economic to the metaphysical:

For how many bluebirds it’s worth?

For how many monarchs?

What price the elusive fireflies?

I pulled the early peas today,
tossing the vines in the compost bin,
then carried the sack of Tartary Buckwheat from the barn,
seed grown by Liz and Chris on their farm,
and sowed it in the same way
farmers have sowed since the beginning,
palm up,
fingers pointing in the direction the seeds are thrown.

And what is that worth?

To hear the seeds meeting the ground,
to look up and see the clouds
that will bring rain tonight or tomorrow,
and know next week the ground will be covered
with pale green, triangle-shaped leaves,
six weeks before the white flowers will carry bees.

I met Libby at the Maine Agricultural Trades Show in the middle of January. The civic center had everything you’d want in an agricultural trade show: Raffles for a new tractor. Maple-sugaring equipment. Sign-up booths for the Sheep Breeders Association and the Beekeepers Association. There were portable sawmills and a man demonstrating the strength of a plastic shovel by jumping on it. This thing is so strong, he was telling a customer, that he once ran over it with his truck and it just snapped right back. Off in one corner, I picked up a pamphlet that promised to teach me how to build an outdoor oven out of clay.

It was here that I figured out what Maine farmers grow in winter: beards. I have never seen such a fine crop in my life. And I’m not talking about the neat goatee you might find on a Boston banker, or the sideburns-and-soul-patch combination you might find on a bartender in New York. This is Maine. I’m talking about full bushes, capable of warming not just chins but chests.

I met Libby at a booth set up by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. His lively blue eyes lit up—naturally—a thickly bearded face. He wore a green corduroy shirt and hiking boots, and, judging from the number of people who came by to shake his hand, he seemed to know everyone. We walked over to a set of folding chairs beneath a podium used for product demonstrations and sat down to talk.

Like Lauralee Raymond, Libby told me he had spent the bulk of his life in rural communities, and had been unusually conscious in his choices. He hasn’t used synthetic fertilizers or pesticides on his farm since he started it twenty-five years ago. When it came time to build a house, he and a neighbor “made a whole lot of decisions to take things out of play.” They used only native woods, doubling up layers rather than using plywood, which he knew contained formaldehyde. They didn’t lay carpeting, since most of it contained toxic flame retardants. The whole project, he said, was “very low-tech.”

If Lauralee Raymond figured she’d be clean because of her youth, Russell Libby figured he’d be clean because of his choices.

The Maine study was modest in scale. It set out to test for a handful of chemicals known to be toxic: phthalates, softening plasticizers that are added to everything from baby toys and plastic shower curtains to drinking-water bottles and soft lunch boxes; flame retardants, which are mandated in everything from television sets to sofa cushions and draperies; perfluorinated chemicals, the so-called Teflon treatments that are used as stain-resistant coating on furniture upholstery and as nonstick coating for cookware and food packaging for things like microwave popcorn; and bisphenol A, a hardening plastics additive used to make baby bottles and the lining of food cans. The study would also look for a handful of dangerous metals like lead, mercury, and arsenic, which are found in everything from old paint to new Chinese-made toys, in power plant emissions (and the fish contaminated by them), and in pesticides once used in pressure-treated lumber and on roadways and golf courses.

The chemicals and metals were chosen from tens of thousands of others in wide use today in part because they are so common, in part because some of them are so long-lasting, and in part because a growing body of science is warning that they may be dangerous even at very low levels. The researchers were quite clear about the mysteries involved. Finding evidence of individual chemicals in the bodies of thirteen people would not necessarily allow them to predict that any of the study’s participants would ever develop an illness. Such direct correlations, at least at this stage, are virtually impossible to establish. While some of these chemicals (lead, arsenic, mercury) have been around forever, others (phthalates, bisphenol A, flame retardants) are relatively new formulations. Scientists, after all, have been looking into some of these chemicals for only a few short years, and are just beginning to understand their effects on human health. How do chemicals migrate from consumer products into the environment? Once in the environment, which pathway do they follow into the body—through the nose, mouth, or skin? Once in the body, how do they combine with other synthetic chemicals? What impact do they have—alone and in combinations—on our health and on the health of our developing fetuses and babies?

The truth is, we are only beginning to make connections between exposure and illness. “There is much that we do not, but should, know about a large number of widely used chemicals in household products,” writes Richard Horton, the editor of the British medical journal the Lancet. “There seem to be few incentives to study these chemicals and risk to human life. A ‘medical surveillance’ program to monitor these potential hazards is a good idea. There are too many vested interests in medical research, deflecting scientists from studying important questions of public health. And we do need to discover new ways to defeat cancer.”

Given the immense chemical and biological complexity of the human body, tracing a single chemical exposure to a precise health problem is next to impossible. A host of factors influence whether or not one’s exposure to toxics will lead to illness, including the nature and concentration of the chemicals, at what point in life a person was exposed, and how often and for how long. A person’s own genetic makeup is also important, as is their general health and their socioeconomic status. A lot of variables, in other words, both in the chemicals and in the bodies they contaminate. Nonetheless, health organizations, both local and federal, are beginning to agree. “It is the concentration of the chemical[s] in people that provides the best exposure information to evaluate the potential for adverse health effects,” the federal Centers for Disease Control reported in 2005.

The Maine study was not the first of its kind. In one 2007 multistate sampling of 35 people from Massachusetts to Illinois to Alaska, every participant tested was found to be contaminated with flame retardants, and all 33 people who donated urine were found to harbor phthalates and bisphenol A. In 2007, a “Pollution in People” study of 10 Oregon residents tested for 29 toxins and found 19, with an average of 12 per person. In 2005, an examination of “the pollution in newborns” found some 287 industrial chemicals—including 180 that cause cancer, 217 that are toxic to the brain, and 208 that can cause birth defects or abnormal development—in umbilical cord blood taken from ten babies around the United States. The blood samples, initially collected by the Red Cross, contained “pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.”

The CDC began its own large-scale body burden study in 2001, and has updated it every few years since. The first year, researchers tested people for 27 chemical compounds. Two years later, the agency tested for 116 compounds. In 2005, the number of chemicals tested for rose to 148. The goal of the study, the CDC reported, is to “determine which chemicals get into Americans and at what concentrations.” For chemicals with known toxicity levels, researchers hoped to determine “the proportion of the population with levels above those associated with adverse health effects” and to see if there were groups with unusually high exposures, especially minorities, children, and women of childbearing age.

The CDC’s most recent update noted a few encouraging signs, which are apparently the result of increased government regulation: exposure to toxic secondhand smoke appears to be dropping, as does childhood contact with lead, though children living in older buildings continue to be “a major public health concern” and African-American children have twice the chemical load of white children. Several pesticides, some banned for twenty or even thirty years, are also beginning to show up at much lower levels.

But there is still plenty to worry about.

Exposure to phthalates, the CDC reported, is “widespread.” Synthetic pyrethroids, a common type of insecticide, were “found in much of the U.S. population.” Yet the overriding sense from the CDC report was a kind of scientific (and therefore political) ambivalence. For most of the environmental chemicals in this study, the CDC reported “more research is needed to determine whether exposure at levels reported here is a cause for health concern.”

D. Richard Jackson, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, which oversees the national biomonitoring project, came under fire from industry critics. “I took a fair amount of criticism for disseminating the report without putting it through some kind of extensive risk assessment,” he said in March 2004. “But I resisted that very strongly, not because I was antiscientific, but because I wanted the larger community and the research community to have it in their hands and use this data the way a doctor would use lab data in making decisions about a patient. The complaint from chemical manufacturers was that the report was just going to scare people. No, you never scare people with real information. You scare them with no information or bad information.”

When it comes to scientific debates, few phrases are more fraught than “more research is needed.” This expression, in the mouth of an independent scientist, can mean two things: “I have come up empty—more research is needed” or “I have just made a significant discovery—more research is needed.” In the mouth of an industry spokesman or an industry lawyer the expression can mean something entirely different: “We don’t believe existing science proves that our product causes harm—more research is needed.” In other words, depending on its source, “more research is needed” can reflect diametrically opposed impulses. One is an impulse to raise a red flag; the other is an impulse to take a red flag down.

This all sounds fine when you’re talking about abstract science. But when it’s your phone that rings, and it is a physician on the other end of the line, and he is telling you that your body is full of toxic chemicals, such abstractions can seem irrelevant. Just ask Lauralee Raymond. When the doctor running the Maine body burden study called her up to discuss her results, he presented a picture of her cells that was rather at odds with the image she had of herself as an uncontaminated girl from the north country.

Lauralee was not the only Maine volunteer who was shocked by her test results. Researchers had examined thirteen people, none of whom lived in major cities, none of whom worked in heavy industry. They’d gone looking for 71 toxic chemicals. They found 46. On average, each person in the study harbored 36 different toxic chemicals in their bodies. Every person had detectable levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic. All had traces of the chemicals used to make Teflon cookware and Scotchgard treatments for stain-resistant fabrics—even though the latter have not been produced since 2001. Three women had blood levels of bisphenol A that were six to ten times higher than the national average. The highest level—ten times the national average—was found in an eighteen-year-old girl named Elise Roux. All five women of childbearing age had levels of mercury that were higher than the national average. The levels of the phthalate used in hairsprays, insect repellants, and soft plastics were higher than in 95 percent of Americans tested in a national study. Three other phthalates, used in PVC products like auto interiors and shower curtains or in vinyl flooring, nail polish, and other cosmetics, were higher in the study participants than in 75 percent of all Americans.

Hannah Pingree, a young state legislator from Down East, had recently gotten married and was planning to have children. When she got her results, she learned that she had mercury levels above the standard for protecting a developing fetus from “subtle but permanent brain damage.” Dana Dow, a furniture store owner and former Republican state senator from Waldoboro, had the highest levels of perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) and Teflon compounds in the test group. For a number of toxins, Senator Dow’s levels were more than twice the national average.

“Maine people are polluted with dozens of hazardous chemicals,” the study reported. “These chemicals are found in products we use every day: plastic containers, toys, furniture, fabric, TV’s and stereos, water bottles, medical supplies, and personal products like shampoo, hairspray, and perfume. They are in our homes and offices, food and water, and the air we breathe. That ‘new car smell’? It’s a collection of volatile organic compounds off-gassing from flame retardants, glues, and sealants.

“What is most unsettling for the project participants,” the study’s authors went on, “is that no one, not even the doctors leading the study, can explain with any certainty why particular chemicals were found in their bodies, why levels of some chemicals are higher than others, or how the chemicals are affecting their health now or in the future.”

So how were all these people exposed?

Dana Dow told researchers he often used furniture sprays in his shop and often brought treated furniture home. Maybe that was it. Bettie Kettell, a surgical nurse, who had the highest total number of flame retardants in her body, worked in a community hospital that, like any commercial building, has higher fire-safety standards—and thus, presumably, more flame retardants—than private homes. Her hospital had recently been outfitted with new rugs, drapes, and furniture. Like any nurse working in a hospital, she is also exposed to countless computers and monitors, most of which are made with flame retardants in their plastic casings.

But it wasn’t just Bettie Kettell who was loaded with flame retardants. All thirteen participants were. Including Lauralee Raymond and Russell Libby.

Lauralee Raymond had higher levels of many toxins than her fifty-one-year-old mother, despite twenty-three fewer years of exposure. She had high levels of mercury and arsenic. Somehow, as bad as these chemicals sounded, Lauralee was able to put them in a box in her head. Mercury, she figured, she got from eating so much fish. Okay, she thought. She’d give up sushi. No big deal. Arsenic? She had heard that arsenic was a common and naturally occurring mineral in the soils of Maine. Not much she could do about that. Maine was where she lived.

But flame retardants?

Lauralee said her results were especially rattling given what she had thought was a life spent making consciously healthy consumer choices. “We couldn’t figure out where this stuff came from,” she said. “It was really disturbing. We thought maybe it may have been a futon I bought a few years ago. It was the only thing I had purchased, that I had bought new, that may have had flame retardants in it. I had hardwood floors everywhere, I didn’t have any rugs. I really hadn’t bought very much.”

The study’s lead physician made it clear to Lauralee that given her age—and her desire to have children—she was at a particularly vulnerable stage. Not just in terms of new chemical exposures, but because of the load of chemicals she’s accumulated over her young life. “He kept saying, ‘Childbearing age, childbearing age,’ ” Lauralee said. “That’s what’s so astounding, how dangerous these chemicals are how and long they stay in your body.

“You kind of go through these phases. You’re in denial, then you get freaked out. Then you go through a hypervigilant phase. I got rid of my microwave, got rid of my nonstick pans. I was really hypersensitive about what was going into my body. Then I got really pissed off. My mom and I went to a number of panels; people kept asking us what it was like. I always ended up getting really angry. I don’t think it should take us five hundred years to get the science together. It’s only been sixty years that these chemicals have been around? Sixty years seems like a very long time to me. That’s what’s so hard about this stuff. People always say, ‘Show me the science. Show me the damage. Show me the evidence.’ People always put it back on you, on the individual. People come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God! I read about you! You’re toxic!’

“ ‘Well,’ I always think, ‘if I’m toxic, you’re toxic, too.’ ”

Russell Libby was also loaded with flame retardants. In fact, among all the participants, he was tied for the highest number of chemicals: 41 of the 71 tested for. He had the highest total number of flame retardants, and the highest level of individual flame retardants. Twenty years Lauralee’s senior, Libby sounded resigned, even melancholic, about his results. The way he talked, he seemed less worried about his own health than he did about the cumulative effect of synthetic poisons on his community. He is, after all, an organic farmer who has spent many years trying to convince people that chemicals sprayed on farmland ends up in food, and then in our bodies. But in recent years especially, Libby’s feelings on the issue have become distinctly personal. In the past twelve months, nineteen of Libby’s friends had died, ten of them from cancer: Pancreatic cancer. Esophageal cancer. Prostate cancer. Three more have recently been diagnosed with cancer. Some deaths are to be expected when you’re into your sixties, he acknowledges. But nineteen? That’s a lot.

“And those are just the people who have died, just among the people I know,” he said. “When I was growing up in the 1960s, it just wasn’t very common to hear about cancer. Maybe that’s because a lot of cases were missed, but to me the incidence seems to have increased greatly. It’s to be expected that you may die of prostate cancer at eighty. But at fifty-five or sixty? That, to me, is the discussion we aren’t having.”

Maine is a pretty safe place, Libby said, but when it comes right down to it, there really are no safe places. The mercury produced by midwestern power plants can be found in every higher-level fish in Maine. At this point in our collective chemical history, he said, it’s safe to assume that all of us—humans or fish—have been broadly contaminated. Proving this with high-tech body burden studies only confirms what many of us already suspect—and in any case is only another step in the march to reduce this contamination.

“It’s so expensive to do what was done with this testing,” Libby said. “It costs several thousand dollars per person. And all of us are walking around with another whole set of residues that this study didn’t even attempt to measure. It’s not my lifestyle that caused my exposure, it’s the world’s. I’ve spent my life growing good food for my family and friends, and that’s the starting point. But we all have to say ‘enough.’ ”

Libby had recently read Linda Lear’s excellent biography of Rachel Carson, and he found himself pondering just how far we have, or have not, come since Carson died in 1964, just two years after the publication of Silent Spring.

“Here she is, dying of cancer, and she gets up to testify before Senator Kefauver’s committee. She doesn’t say anything about her cancer. What she says is, ‘Don’t we have a right to be safe in our homes?’ Forty-five years later we still don’t have a broad-based consensus that we have a right to be safe in our homes. It’s all about ‘acceptable risks’ and ‘trade-offs.’ Why should we even be talking in those terms?”

As we spoke, a woman navigated the crowd at the agricultural fair to say hello to Libby. He turned away from me to give her a word and a hug. She walked away.

“It’s our duty to everyone around to not live with those kinds of problems, both as individuals and as a society,” Libby said, turning back to me. He nodded in the direction of the woman who had just left. “Her husband died of cancer two weeks ago,” he said.

It’s reasonable, of course, to question the value of a body burden study like the one done in Maine. What does one such small survey mean to anyone other than the few people involved?

The chemical industry chimed in forcefully to discredit the study’s results. “We’re living longer and better than we ever have, and I think that these sorts of studies make people worry when I don’t see a reason for that level of concern,” said Dr. John Bailey, a spokesman for the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association.

Even as they dismissed the dangers of their products, some industry spokespeople acknowledged the threat body burden studies can have on their marketing strategies. “It’s the perception of the user that matters,” said Bill Lafield, a spokesman for the Consumer Specialty Products Association, whose clients make antimicrobial cleansers, floor waxes, and air fresheners. “Even though there may not be a real risk there is a perceived risk, and if we can increase the comfort level of the perceived risk, we’ll do that.”

Such rhetoric does not sit well with Lauralee Raymond. Like a number of the other test volunteers, Lauralee has spent a fair bit of time speaking about the growing threat of toxic chemicals in front of community groups. She says she gets weary of being challenged about the evidence that, to her way of thinking, exists right inside her body.

“There’s always some in the crowd who are skeptical,” she said. “It’s like they are working for the corporations. ‘Don’t get in the way of progress!’ they say. One gentlemen I’m thinking of kept saying, ‘The study wasn’t scientific! How can we say things need to change when this isn’t evidence? You have all these personal stories. So what? What can it tell us? Not a hell of a lot.’ He left the panel halfway through.”

She added, “When you read about these chemicals, that’s where the numbness factor comes in. Sometimes I just need to check out a bit. It gets really overwhelming to think about. I get tired of being the advocate. I get tired of being the knowledgeable person, just because I have been in this study. What people need to understand is that we all have this stuff in our bodies.”

Before leaving Maine, I drove north to Farmington, a rural college town in the center of the state, to meet one more participant in the body burden study, a young mother named Amy Graham. On my way up, driving along the Androscoggin River, I marveled, as I always do, at the clarity of the air in northern New England. That was until I started smelling the sweet, slightly sulfurous scent of the paper mills, which drifted south and east through the towns of Jay and Livermore Falls.

I pulled my car over the snow in the Grahams’ driveway and knocked on the door. Amy invited me in and offered me some tea. On the kitchen counter were both books and bananas; near the sink lay a bookmarked biography of Richard Wright, research for Amy’s own series of biographies about African-American authors, designed for middle school readers. Her husband, Bill, had long since left for work. A forester, he was off snowshoeing through the woods of central Maine, tagging trees for a sustainable lumber harvest. Outside, it was fifteen degrees.

The tea poured, Amy and I sat around her kitchen table and began talking about her life. A fit brunette in her late thirties, Amy had grown up in Weld, a town in western Maine with a population of a couple hundred people. Her father was a real estate agent, her mother a schoolteacher, but they also ran a small family farm. Amy remembered having a few chemicals around, but the produce they grew was mostly organic. Like anyone who grew up in rural Maine, Amy could always smell the paper mills. In her part of the state, the mills that line the banks of the Androscoggin are the area’s biggest employers; what you smell up there, people say, is “the smell of money.”

Amy went to college in western Massachusetts. When she met Bill, he was working in the music industry in Boston, but after the wedding, he quit his job and the two set off to hike the 2,200-mile length of the Appalachian Trail. It was a yearning for a connected life—physical, rural, close to the land—that led the couple back to western Maine to raise their family.

As had been the case with Lauralee Raymond and Russell Libby, Amy Graham’s distance from big-city living did nothing to protect her from industrial chemicals. She had, for example, among the highest levels of flame retardants, a particularly troubling finding given the links between such fat-soluble compounds and developmental problems in infants—and the fact that they can be passed directly from mothers to their nursing babies. Amy had breast-fed her daughters, Phoebe and Sylvia, in part because of the well-known nutritional and health benefits of breast milk but also because nursing allowed her to avoid introducing commercial products into such moments of mother-daughter intimacy. When Phoebe was an infant, Amy’s brother showed her an article about flame retardants in breast milk. The report started Amy thinking.

“This was concerning to me, because at the time I was beginning to worry about Phoebe’s health,” Amy said. “She had severe food allergies, and awful eczema. Her skin was cracked and bleeding, she was refusing to eat. I had never seen skin so bad. When my brother showed me that study about breast milk, I thought, ‘God, even my breast milk, the one thing I’m able to give that’s healthy and is not a foreign food, maybe that’s making her break out. Maybe this is contaminating her. Who knows?’ That got me galvanized—even before I got tested.”

Around this time, Phoebe also developed asthma, and several of her playmates were diagnosed with autism. Amy was no more equipped than anyone else to connect individual chemicals to specific illnesses, but what seemed to be a growing number of diagnoses did give her pause. And the more she looked, the more she began to see toxic chemicals in every corner of her family’s life: in the kitchen, home furnishings, cosmetics, everywhere. Aggravating her anxiety was her sense of powerlessness to even know what was in this stuff—let alone what harm it might cause. She remembers that one afternoon, when a well-meaning college student painted her toddler’s fingernails at a children’s festival, she “freaked out.” She had learned enough about the myriad unregulated chemicals in cosmetics, and she didn’t want them anywhere near her daughter’s skin. The college girl gave her a quizzical look. Not her finest moment, Amy confessed, but what was she supposed to do?

Her body burden results “awakened an underlying fear,” she said. “I now had a heightened sense that my house was full of potential hazards: the carpets, food, cleaning products—everything in my day-to-day environment now seemed suspect.

“When Phoebe started having all these health issues, I felt pretty vulnerable and angry that these toxins are out of my control,” Amy said. “When you’re a parent, when you think about the future of the world and the future of your child, you wonder: Are things going to get worse or better? It just blew my mind that I could grow up here in the 1980s and not know any kids with autism, and now all these friends of mine had kids that were autistic. It’s hard to say what causes it, but this is really something that we need to look at. It makes you think about some of the decisions your parents and grandparents made, and question them. Why do I have toxins going through my breast milk? Someone made some bad decisions along the way.”

After she got her test results, Amy started shedding. She got rid of her vinyl shower curtain—which had been made with PVC and softened with phthalates—and replaced it with one made of fabric. (“I’d kind of liked the smell of new vinyl,” she admitted, “but I shudder to remember …”) She looked more closely at the label on her “natural” shampoo and discovered that its “fragrance” was suspended in phthalates. Who knew there was plastic in shampoo? She tossed it. The beloved Nalgene water bottles she and Bill had taken on their Appalachian Trail trip? They had sentimental value, but she now learned they had been made with bisphenol A, which leached into whatever liquid the bottles contained. Out they went. She looked again at the little white holiday lights she always hung in the wintertime, to light her home during Maine’s darkest months. The label said they contained lead. Out.

The more she learned, the more she purged. She started buying nontoxic detergents. Sitting at her kitchen table, I noticed a “green” household cleaner, made by the Vermont company Seventh Generation, on her kitchen counter. Is that what she meant by making better choices? I asked. Sure, Amy said. But she could do this product one better. She reached into a cupboard and showed me a small sack of laundry detergent that had been manufactured just down the road by a mom-and-pop company called O-Nature-L. The label said the stuff was made of sodium bromate, soda ash, coconut oil, clay powder, vinegar, and essential oils. It was biodegradable, safe for septic systems, and harbored no phosphates or sodium lauryl sulfate. Ah, I thought. Now, this is a local economy. Where else but Maine can you buy locally made laundry detergent? And why would this be so?

As word got out that Amy had become something of an expert on toxic chemicals, friends started coming around to ask her opinions about things in their homes. Is this safe to use? they’d ask. Will this cause my babies any harm? One friend asked if Amy had heard about a local woman who had accidentally killed a dozen exotic birds—parrots, cockatiels, lovebirds—simply by cooking pork chops in a nonstick pan. At low heat. Amy checked into the story. Sure enough, an examination done at the University of Maine revealed that fumes released from the pan had likely caused the deaths of the birds. A local newspaper noted an item on the website for DuPont, which makes the nonstick chemicals: “Because birds have extremely sensitive respiratory systems, bird owners must take precautions to protect them. Cooking fumes, smoke and odors that have little or no effect on people can seriously sicken and even kill birds, often quite quickly.”

And these are the pans we eat from?

Since it was invented in the 1930s by scientists at DuPont, Teflon has been part of our domestic vernacular. It’s not only on nonstick pans; it (and similar compounds) can also be found in grease-resistant pizza boxes, water-resistant clothing, and any personal care product listing ingredients that include the syllables “fluoro” or “perfluoro.” An FDA study has found these substances in the greasy paper that lines microwave popcorn packages at hundreds of times the concentrations in nonstick cookware, and the intense heat of the microwave oven may cause the chemicals to leach into the popcorn oil. This turns out to be something of a concern, given that Americans consume 156 million bags of microwave popcorn a year.

Which makes these chemicals a hot topic of conversation among the mothers of central Maine.

“A lot of moms I talk to want to know more,” Amy said. “Pretty much everyone can understand a mom’s concern, that your house—the space you have the most control over—is actually one of the most toxic places. That is a really scary thought. You look at cancer rates and autism rates that our kids are facing—we don’t know why they are skyrocketing. We owe it to our kids to look into that. I don’t want my kids saying to me, ‘Why do we have this legacy? Why were our parents sitting around enjoying their consumer lifestyle and not questioning it?’ ”

Just before I left, Amy showed me a handful of plastic dolls her kids recently received as gifts. A little farmer with aqua blue overalls. A little blond swimmer doll with a one-piece bathing suit. They were cute, Amy confessed. But what was in them? Since they’d been imported from China, the chances were reasonable that they had been decorated with lead paint. Since they were soft plastic, they’d almost certainly been made with phthalates, which, as they break down, can stick to household dust and be inhaled or digested, where they can compromise the functions of a body’s hormone system. The trouble with phthalates is that they are designed, in part, to make plastic pliable—and thus ideal for a curious toddler’s oral fixations. Ever since her test, Amy said, she had become much more conscious of all the plastic toys her young kids were holding and putting in their mouths. She had already either hidden the worst offenders in the back of closets or tossed them out completely.

But these little dolls had sentimental value. “I just can’t bring myself to throw them out,” she said. “They got them from their grandmother.”

For Amy, the dolls have become talismans, reminders of forces in the world that are both present and invisible. “Just the fact that there are products on the shelves that aren’t labeled, that we’re bringing into our homes—we allow chemical companies to pour out these products without any labels at all. The whole ‘Isn’t chemistry great’ thing that went on in the 1950s—what a mistake that was. Sure it did great things, but now we’re paying the price with our kids and their health issues. We need to go back and rethink those decisions.”