IN 1855, Michael Faraday , which was used both as a sewer and a source of drinking water. He had conducted an experiment in which he sank pieces of paper to see at what point they disappeared from view in the turbid water. Barely any depth at all, he found, concluding that the river had become a cesspool. “If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity,” he warned.
Parliament neglected the matter, and was punished. In 1858, the Great Stink enveloped London, necessitating vast expenditure to quell the stench. The curtains in the Houses of Parliament were soaked in bleach in a bid to keep the miasma out. It failed, and the members could no longer ignore the problem.
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Last week, scientists issued a similar, although sterner, warning. Chemical pollution is now so pervasive that we have smashed through a guard rail called a “planetary boundary “. It is now a risk to the habitability of Earth. Our habit of treating the environment as a sewer has come back to haunt us again.
“We understand that chemical pollution is probably bad for us, but we don’t really know how”
But just as in the mid-19th century, we don’t fully understand what impact the pollution is having on our health. Faraday’s contemporaries were aware of a link between filthy water and disease, but didn’t know that microorganisms, not foul air, were the cause.
We similarly understand that chemical pollution is probably bad for us, but we don’t really know how. That is the subject of an ambitious new field of science called exposomics, which aims to measure our exposure to chemical pollutants throughout our lives and decipher their effects on our health, whether these are good, bad or indifferent. From what we know already, the answer will mostly be “bad”. The pollution problem is probably even worse than we realise.
Cleaning up the Thames required a vast sewage system, which took years and fortunes to build. The scale of the waste problem we face today is orders of magnitude greater. Our political leaders may wish to hold their noses, but they, too, will soon find out that there is nowhere to hide.
