Contribution short abstract:

Is the toxic ubiquity of PFAS a chemical commons or a poisonous enclosure? Does exposure to “forever chemicals” draw communities together or sever nourishing relations to place? This paper ventures an ethnographic answer from former plastics manufacturing towns in the United States.

Contribution long abstract:

PFAS is coming into view as an unprecedented crisis of toxicity. After the briefest moment of industrial utility, PFAS comes to haunt life with diabolic immortality. These “forever chemicals” do not breakdown. Their indestructibility is joined with the ability to sail through planetary and cellular systems. Although PFAS were primarily used in American plastics manufacturing, they are now routinely detected in the deepest ocean trenches, on the highest mountaintops, and even in passing rain showers. PFAS are also found in every form of life on earth, where they trip up biological systems at a new microscopic scale of toxicology: parts per trillion. Trace exposure to PFAS is now strongly linked to developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, reproductive harm, and a growing array of cancers. PFAS are everywhere and causing harm.

Is the toxic ubiquity of PFAS best grasp as a chemical commons or a poisonous enclosure? Does exposure to these “forever chemicals” draw communities together in new ways or does it sever any nourishing relationship to place? And where exactly is the “anthropological” in a newfound toxicity that is pervasive, permanent, and without obvious remedy?

This paper draws on a decade of personal and professional involvement in the struggle for justice after the discovery of PFAS in my hometown (Bond 2021). Centering this struggle, this paper crafts a wider argument about the place of toxicity in theory and protest, the question of the commons in environmental justice today, and the radical lucidity of ethnography amidst economic desperation and ecological disarray.