My Eco-Journey with DuPont…

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 / thealiennextdoor / 1 Comment

In his 2006 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Write Stories, Christopher Booker tells us that there are seven types of plots in story. One is entitled “Overcoming the Monster,” an underdog story where the hero sets out to destroy an evil to restore safety to the land. It is a story I admire and never tire of. The evil force is typically much larger than the hero, who must find a way, often through great courage, strength, inventive cunning—and help from her community—to defeat the evil force. This is the story of David and Goliath, of Beowulf and Grendel, of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Star Wars, of Jake Sully and Miles Quaritchs in Avatar—notice, all men who, for the most part, do their hero-ing alone. I may get to that later (in another post)…

The “Overcoming the Monster” plot, whether told literally or through metaphor, reflects an imbalance in the world—usually of power—that the hero must help right.

Enter the “Monster” DuPont…

*DuPont Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia*

The true story of DuPont’s decades-long evil maleficence reflects the great power imbalance of many large corporations and the evil they enact through willful deception and mischief to increase profit, their god.

This brings me to my heroic journey. For in some terrible way, the story of DuPont is also my story. One of power imbalance, of deception and ignorance. Their deception; my ignorance:

In 1954, the year I was born, during the ramp up for the Teflon rollout at DuPont’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, toxicologist R.A. Dickison noted possible toxicity of the surfactant C8 (PFOA or Perfluorooctanoic Acid) used to make Teflon. DuPont ignored the warning and proceeded to roll it out for mass use.

*1950s DuPont ad for the Teflon “Happy Pan”*

In 1961, while I was contending with recess bullies in grade two, DuPont rolled out their Teflon-coated “Happy Pan” with the full knowledge that C8 was a toxic endocrine disruptor and caused cancer. DuPont’s chief toxicologist Dorothy Hood cautioned executives in a memo that the substance was toxic and should be “handled with extreme care.” She explained that a new study had found enlarged livers in rats and rabbits exposed to C8, confirming that the chemical was toxic. It didn’t stop the roll out.

In 1962, while I was exploring my artistic talents at school, DuPont scientists conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8. Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing. Further experiments by DuPont linked C8 exposure to the enlargement of rats’ testes, adrenal glands, and kidneys.

In 1964, I was ten years old and struggling with my Grade 5 teacher who was trying to curb my unique self-expression. I was already aware of environmental imbalance and destruction in the world. My pet peeve was littering because it demonstrated great disrespect for others and the environment. I told environmental stories. That year DuPont had already begun its great deception; having confirmed the toxicity of C8, they simply watched (and recorded) as this cancer-causing endocrine disruptor injured, maimed and killed their own workers. The company did nothing to prevent it and they told no one.

In 1965, I was in the process of figuring out my heroic self and my unique gift to the world in Grade seven: was it in fine arts and advertising? Writing and storytelling? Environmentalism and law? Internal DuPont memos revealed that preliminary studies showed even low doses of a related surfactant to Teflon could increase the size of rats’ livers, a classic response to poison.

In the mid- to late-60s, I became an environmental activist, putting up posters and writing in the school paper. I wrote letters to industry and politicians, trying to incite interest in being good corporate citizens and promoting global environmental action. I remember a well-meaning teacher chiding me for my extravagant worldview. “Stick to little things and your community—like recycling,” he suggested patronizingly. I remember the shock of realizing that not everyone felt the planet like I did. Perhaps it was a teenage-thing, or a girl-thing, or a nina-thing. I prayed it wasn’t just a nina-thing…

I started writing stories in high school. Mostly eco-fiction, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. There was no genre called eco-fiction back then. It all went under the umbrella of scifi.

In 1969, at fifteen, I wrote my first dystopia, Caged in World. The eco-novel was about a subway train driver and a data analyst caught in the trap of a huge lie. The story later morphed into Escape from Utopia. Several drafts and years later the novel became the eco-medical thriller Angel of Chaos, published in 2010. The story is set in 2095 as humanity struggles with Darwin’s Disease—a mysterious neurological environmental pandemic assaulting Icaria 5, an enclosed city within the slowly recovering toxic wasteland of North America. The city is run by deep ecologists who call themselves Gaians, and consider themselves guardians of the planet. The Gaians’ secret is that they are keeping humanity “inside” not to protect humanity from a toxic wasteland but to protect the environment from a toxic humanity.

*Lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) investigates leachate-infected cows from nearby DuPont landfill (photo from film “Dark Waters”)*

In the early 1970s, I entered university and contemplated becoming an environmental lawyer; I wrote short stories, mostly eco-fiction, and joined marches protesting environmental destruction by large corporations. DuPont confirmed that C8 not only persisted in the environment; it bioaccumulated in animals. In 1979, when I graduated with a Master of Science degree in limnology/ecology, DuPont circulated an internal memo in which humans exposed to C8 were referred to as “receptors,” describing how scientists found “significantly higher incidence of allergic, endocrine and metabolic disorders” as well as “excess risk of developing liver disease.” DuPont kept this knowledge to themselves and withheld it from EPA.

In the late 1970s early ‘80s, while I was addressing local environmental issues as a practicing limnological consultant, DuPont was dumping 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into unlined ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people.

Effects of PFOA (birth defect in Bucky Bailey whose mother was on the Teflon line without protection during her first trimester; blackening teeth from the excessive fluoride, from scene in “Dark Waters”)

In 1981, when I got my first job as a limnologist and environmental consultant in Vancouver, DuPont confirmed that C8 caused birth defects in its own workers—and did not warn its workers. A DuPont pathologist confirmed that the observed fetal eye defects were due to C8. With that confirmation the pregnancy study was quietly abandoned and a decision made not to inform EPA. Less than a year later DuPont created false data for EPA then moved women of childbearing age back into areas with C8 exposure. Many in the company coined the term “Teflon flu” to describe the ill-effects of working close to the compound. By 1982, DuPont had confirmed the high toxicity of C8/PFOA in humans.

In 1984, a year after I formed my own consulting company Limnology Services in Vancouver, DuPont staffers secretly tested their community’s drinking water and found it to contain alarming levels of C8. Deciding that any cleanup was likely to cost too much and tarnish their reputation, DuPont chose to do nothing. In fact, they scaled up their use of C8 in Teflon products and bought land to dump their toxic sludge in unlined landfills. Deaths in DuPont workers from leukemia and kidney cancer climbed.

In 1989, at 35 years old, and still blissfully unaware of DuPont’s nefarious activities, I continued consulting for my own company Limnology Services, addressing mostly local environment issues with communities and local governments. By that year, DuPont employees found an elevated number of leukemia deaths at the West Virginia plant, followed by an inordinately high number of kidney cancers among male workers. Earl Tennant, whose farm was close to the DuPont landfill at Dry Run creek, sent videos of foamy water and diseased cows to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection; state regulators documented “numerous deficiencies in the landfill operation and erosion gullies that funnelled waste into Dry Run creek; DuPont made a deal with the department: the company paid a $250,000 fine and the department took no further action against the landfill. (The official who negotiated the deal later became a DuPont consultant.)

Throughout the 90s, I started teaching college biology and university environmental education courses in Vancouver. The magazine Shared Vision Magazine published my first article “Environmental Citizenship” in 1995. Meantime, DuPont’s Washington Works plant pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA sludge, powder and vapor through stacks into the atmosphere and outfall pipes into the Ohio River.

In 1996, I was consulting for local industry and municipalities. By then, C8 was in the drinking water of Parkersburg and other communities. Despite what they knew of C8’s toxicity, DuPont kept it a secret (no one else was testing for PFOA because it was unregulated).

*Farmer Tennant and lawyer Rob Billot encounter a leachate-infected mad cow in the 2019 film “Dark Waters”*

In 1999, still serving as environmental consultant to mining and pulp mill companies, I still knew nothing about DuPont’s duplicitous environmental atrocities. 3M—troubled by its studies on C8 with monkeys—notified EPA and phased out PFOS and PFOA; DuPont started producing its own PFOA. On behalf of Earl Tennant whose cattle were dying adjacent to DuPont’s landfill site, lawyer Rob Bilott filed a small suit against DuPont to gain legal discovery and starting the decade-long process of finally unravelling the buried truth of their insidious criminality–over thirty years after DuPont knew and did nothing.

In 2003, I continued consulting as an environmental scientist in ignorance of DuPont’s misdealings, though by now much had come out in the press. By that year, DuPont had knowingly dispersed almost 2.5 million pounds of harmful C8 from its Washington Works plant into the air and water of the mid-Ohio River Valley area.

*DuPont’s Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia*

In 2004, DuPont agreed to settle the class-action suit filed by lawyer Rob Bilott. Under the terms of the settlement, the company was not obliged to pull C8 from the market. The best the EPA could negotiate was a voluntary phase-out by 2015. That same year There It Is reported on how DuPont denied poisoning consumers with Teflon products. The dangers and spread of PFOA and other forever chemicals appeared more and more in the scientific literature (see the reference list below, which is by no means exhaustive).

In 2007, Darwin’s Paradox, my eco-fiction novel about an environmental pandemic, was published by Dragon Moon Press in Calgary, Alberta. Four years earlier, the law had finally caught up to DuPont, but not before they had dispersed 2.5 million pounds of harmful C8 from their Washington Works plant into the air and water of the mid-Ohio River Valley area. It would be another twelve years before DuPont would stop making C8 (in 2015) and another four years after that when C8 would be banned from use globally (2019). PFOA is still unregulated by EPA; the best they can do is issue a non-enforceable health advisory set at 70 parts per trillion.

In 2012, shortly after I moved to Nova Scotia to write for a living (having quit environmental consulting due to disillusionment with integrity of companies I worked for), the C8 Science Panel, tasked to study the possible health effects of PFOA in a highly exposed population in the mid-Ohio Valley, determined a probable link between C8 exposure and six disease categories: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, and high cholesterol.

In 2015, two years after I began teaching writing at the University of Toronto, DuPont began a series of complex transactions that transferred its responsibility for environmental obligations and liabilities associated with PFAS (C8) onto other entities such as Chemours, Corteva, and NewDupont. A year later New York Times Magazine ran a story “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” and Sharon Lerner of The Intercept ran an in-depth series on DuPont’s duplicitous criminality: “The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception.”

In 2017, DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours agreed to settle a lawsuit with roughly 3,500 people living near the Parkersburg plant in both West Virginia and Ohio and many ailing from toxicity-related problems. The company agreed to pay $671 million. That’s one day’s sales in a $27 billion annual profit stream. The Fayetteville Observer reported that this “Discontinued chemical [was] still in well water” after DuPont agreed in 2009 to stop using C8. They noted that the company was facing a class action lawsuit from thousands of people in Ohio and West Virginia for discharging the toxic chemical into the Ohio River since the 1950s.

In 2019—sixty-seven years after DuPont knew PFOA was toxic and did nothing—this forever chemical was finally banned globally under the Stockholm Convention. Unfortunately, by 2019, PFOA was already literally everywhere on the planet in concentrations considered unsafe. Given its high water-solubility, long-range transport potential, and lack of degradation in the environment, PFOA persists in groundwater and is ubiquitously present in oceans and other surface water around the globe. It is found in remote areas of the Arctic and Antarctic (where it was not used or manufactured), no doubt transported there through ocean currents and in the air, bound on particles. NBC News ran a news piece about ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating drinking water near military bases. The Guardian ran a news article: “Companies deny responsibility for toxic ‘forever chemicals.’” In Maine, The Portland Press Herald ran a story: “Households are awash in ‘forever chemicals’.”

In 2020, NBC News revealed that DuPont was still avoiding its responsibility to clean up its C8 mess and compensate those harmed by DuPont’s negligence.

In 2022, I finally learned about DuPont’s decades-long environmental dispersal of toxic PFOA (C8) and their criminal deception throughout this life time. I’d lived through DuPont’s entire six decades of deception in ignorance.

*Poster for the 2019 film “Dark Waters” on DuPont’s criminal activities and the lawyer who exposed them*

In 2022, three years after its release, I chanced upon “Dark Waters,” the 2019 film starring Mark Ruffalo who plays lawyer Robert Bilott, the man who took DuPont to court in 2002. I found out seven years after DuPont was forced to stop using PFOA and a lifetime after they started their egregious pollution and deception in the 1950s. For over six decades, from when I was born to well into my sixties, DuPont executives chose to:

1. continue using toxic C8 despite its proven toxicity;
2. expose C8 to their own workers without telling them (and even testing their workers without telling them why);
3. dispose of C8 unsafely, releasing the toxin into the communities and the environment;
4. cover up and deny that they did, when they were caught in the act.

No one went to jail.

Below are the faces of the DuPont men and women who sanctioned–encouraged–the willful harm of other life. Despite knowing the danger posed by exposure to PFOAs to people, these DuPont CEOs chose to: 1) continue to poison the environment and people, 2) cover up their actions from authorities, and 3) fight the courts and regulators from doing the right thing when they were caught. No one went to jail. No one was fired. They just paid $$$ and shamefully kept going. These people are criminals.

DuPont CEOs from 1950-2019 who sanctioned release of PFOA into the environment then covered it up: Crawford H. Greenewalt, Lammot Copeland, Charles B. McCoy, Edward G. Jefferson, Richard E. Heckert, Edgar S. Woolard, John A. Krol, Charles O. Holliday Jr., Ellen Kullman, Edward D. Breen

It’s not over either; DuPont currently uses other PFAS compounds that are unregulated but whose toxicity is being found to be as potent. And, of course, these other ‘forever chemicals’ are finding themselves everywhere. I was ignorant of all this the whole time. Meantime, I am drinking DuPont’s forever chemicals, I am eating DuPont’s forever chemicals, and I am feeling DuPont’s forever chemicals falling on my face in the rain.

My hard lesson: Ignorance breeds complacency and hubris; both will lead to downfall.

To return to the “Overcoming the Monster” story plot and the monster archetype, I’m convinced that it isn’t the Darth Vaders or Miles Quaritchs we must overcome. Yes, they are monsters, but they serve a greater monster. For Vader it was Emperor Palpatine and for Quaritch it was the executives of the RDA Corporation. While Vader and Quaritch may be the face of evil, true evil lurks behind them, orchestrating, in the shadows. It is an evil we must fight internally, because each of us carries that potential evil inside us—in the urge to cheat on our taxes; in looking for the free ride (there are no free rides); in coveting what others have when what we have is enough; in embracing self-deception through unsubstantiated narratives and confabulation; and in choosing to remain ignorant to suit a short-sighted and self-serving agenda. I’m guilty too.

I hope some aspects of the hero that live in me, as with everyone, are helping to overcome the monster by writing about it in articles I share here and elsewhere and by presenting a different narrative—one of resistance and hope—through my fiction.

A recent example is the December 31, 2024 release of Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia, published by Exile Editions and edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and me. The anthology features over thirty eco-fiction short stories, flash fiction, and poetry that celebrate the spirit of humanity in a changing world.

In a post on The Meaning of Water, I list which CEO was on watch and responsible for each criminal atrocity enacted. The post also goes into more detail on the six decade history of DuPont’s criminal atrocities and great deception. For more detail on each decade of atrocity and deception, check out my posts by decade: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. What follows into the present day is perhaps even more atrocious, given that all is supposedly out in the open. This predatory company continues to bribe officials, lie and deny, threaten the weak, and so much more.

p.s. To understand the nature of industrial duplicity of large corporations such as DuPont, I highly recommend reading the 2023 study by Nadia Gaber and colleagues in the Annals of Global Health. The authors evaluated previously secret industry documents on PFAS to understand the significant delayed disclosure of harm posed by PFAS: from its production in the 1940s, to suggestions of toxicity in the 1950s, to irrefutable knowledge of PFAS toxicity in the 1960s, and–due to lack of transparency and suppression of scientific findings–public knowledge of this only arising in the late 1990s (mainly because of legal suits and discovery).

References:

Ahrens L. 2011. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the aquatic environment: a review of their occurrence and fate.” J Environ Monit 13: 20–31. 10.1039/c0em00373e

Barton CA, Butler LE, Zarzecki CJ, Laherty JM. 2006. “Characterizing perfluorooctanoate in ambient air near the fence line of a manufacturing facility: comparing modeled and monitored values.” J Air Waste Manage Assoc 56: 48–55. 10.1080/10473289.2006.10464429

Barton CA, Kaiser MA, Russell MH. 2007. “Partitioning and removal of perfluorooctanoate during rain events: the importance of physical-chemical properties.” J Environ Monit 9: 839–846. 10.1039/b703510a

Busch J, Ahrens L, Xie Z, Sturm R, Ebinghaus R. 2010. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the East Greenland Arctic Ocean.” J Environ Monit 12: 1242–1246. 10.1039/c002242j

Gaber, Nadia, Lisa Bero, and Tracey J. Woodruff. 2023. “The Devil they Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influenc on PFAS Science.” Ann Glob Health 89(1): 37.

McMurdo CJ, Ellis DA, Webster E, Butler J, Christensen RD, Reid LK. 2008. “Aerosol enrichment of the surfactant PFO and mediation of the water-air transport of gaseous PFOA.” Environ Sci Technol 42: 3969–3974. 10.1021/es7032026

Paustenbach, Dennis, Julie Panko, Paul K. Scott, and Kenneth M. Unice. 2007. “A Methodology for Estimating Human Exposure to Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA): A Retrospective Exposure Assessment of a Community (1951-2003)” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health

Prevedouros K, Cousins IT, Buck RC, Korzeniowski SH. 2006. “Sources, fate and transport of perfluorocarboxylates” Environ Sci Technol 40: 32–44. 10.1021/es0512475

Velez, M.P., T.E. Arbuckle, W.D. Fraser. 2015. “Maternal exposure to perfluorinated chemicals and reduced fecundity: the MIREC study.” Human Reproduction 30(3): 701-9.

Vierke, Lena, Claudia Staude, Annegret Biegel-Engler, Wiebke Drost, and Christoph Schulte. 2012. “Perflurorooctanoic acid (PFOA)–main concerns and regulatory developments in Europe from an environmental point of view.” Environmental Sciences Europe 24: 16

Yamashita N, Kannan K, Taniyasu S, Horii Y, Petrick G, Gamo T. 2005. “A global survey of perfluorinated acids in oceans.” Mar Pollut Bull 51: 658–668. 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2005.04.026

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.

Ironic Tragedy of Forever Chemicals & Growing Infertility: Are We Solving Our Own Population Explosion Through Toxicity?

October 6, 2024March 6, 2025 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

In the passage below of my eco-fiction dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water, the year is 2065 and the diarist Lynna (a limnologist at the University of Toronto) reflects on the steeply growing infertility in humans and our tenuous future. Lynna draws on the factual study published close to fifty years earlier (in 2017) by Hagai Levine and others at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who found that sperm counts among western men had reduced close to 60% in four decades:

Back in ’49, Daniel and I had several discussions about the environmental triggers and epigenetic mechanisms of infertility in humans. Daniel went on about how it was all about the men. While women showed signs of increased infertility, men’s rate of infertility was more than double that of the women, he said. Taking an inappropriately gleeful tone, Daniel cited the classic 2017 paper by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the one that started it all. Their findings were startling: men’s sperm count in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand had diminished by sixty percent in forty years, between 1973 and 2011. The scientists predicted that by 2060, virtually all men in these parts of the world would have little to no reproductive capacity.

It’s 2065 and they’re right. Only it’s worse. Before the twenties, only the developed countries seemed to be affected, but then sperm counts started to plummet in South American countries, like Argentina and Brazil, where GMO, pesticides, and solvent manufacturing were exploding.

You get out what you put into the ground. India and Asia—where endocrine-disruptive chemicals are finding their way into the water—are reporting very low sperm counts in their men as well as higher incidents of intersex humans.

You get out what you put into the water. We are over two thirds water, after all. I find it a little ironic that we’ve inadvertently produced a non-discriminatory way to control the problem of humanity’s overpopulation. Infertility. And that infertility results from defiling the environment we live in.

But now climate change is shouldering its way in. Climate change is shutting us down.

Is this the first sign of our impending extinction?

–excerpt from “A Diary in the Age of Water”

That environmental perturbations impact our ability to reproduce has been proven. In their 2017 article, Levine et al. write that:

“Sperm count and other semen parameters have been plausibly associated with multiple environmental influences, including endocrine disrupting chemicals (Bloom et al., 2015; Gore et al., 2015), pesticides (Chiu et al., 2016), heat (Zhang et al., 2015) and lifestyle factors, including diet (Afeiche et al., 2013; Jensen et al., 2013), stress (Gollenberg et al., 2010; Nordkap et al., 2016), smoking (Sharma et al., 2016) and BMI (Sermondade et al., 2013; Eisenberg et al., 2014a). Therefore, sperm count may sensitively reflect the impacts of the modern environment on male health throughout the life course (Nordkap et al., 2012).”

*This rain falling on an Ontario marsh most certainly contains forever chemicals (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Thanks to chemical companies such as DuPont and others, forever chemicals are currently in rain water globally, and in many places in unhealthy concentrations. These endocrine-disrupting and cancer-causing chemicals often end up in drinking water and include PCBs, phthalates, PFAS, BPAs (used in pesticides, children’s products, industrial solvents and lubricants, food storage, electronics, personal care products and cookware).

If you observe a terrible irony in this short list, also know that the chemical companies, such as DuPont, have known about the dangers posed by these products for decades and decided to keep it a secret.

*Heavy rain in Mississauga, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

‘Overcoming the Monster’ and DuPont’s Dark ‘Magic’

May 15, 2022January 18, 2025 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*The Ohio River at Parkersburg, West Virginia, contaminated for decades with C8 used by DuPont to make Teflon*

I write science fiction and fantasy. On occasion magic or something that stands for magic enters in.

But that’s my fiction. In my ordinary very real life, I tend to be suspicious of claims of ‘magical’ properties, particularly those that claim to provide great convenience and utility with no expenditure (except money). Perhaps it’s my half-German ethic of good old-fashioned honest work; these claims seem like a big cheat: mops that clean the floor spotless without you ever having to bend over or scrub; carpets that resist spills or clean themselves; non-stick pans where cooked food just slides cheerfully from pan to plate without sticking.

In my experience, I have often found that if something seems too good to be true—like magic—there’s a catch. And just like magic in a good fiction story, it comes with great hidden cost.

Enter DuPont and its dark magic…

*DuPont Washington Works facility at Parkersburg, West Virginia*

DuPont is one of the richest families in the United States since French aristocrat Irénée du Pont de Nemours fled the French Revolution in 1802 and built a gunpowder mill in northeast Delaware. DuPont soon expanded to bombs and poison gas and over its more than a hundred years of operation DuPont has been linked to dangerous products that have caused health problems, particularly to its own workers. By the 1930s DuPont had created leaded gasoline, which ended up causing madness and violent deaths and life-long institutionalization of workers. Certain rubber and industrial chemicals turned the skin of exposed workers blue. Bladder cancers developed in many dye workers.

Then there was DuPont’s Imprelis, an aminocyclopyrachlor herbicide to control weeds that caused widespread death of mature trees and created ‘killer compost.’ DuPont failed to submit reports to the EPA about potential adverse effects of Imprelis and sold the product with misleading labelling. When damage reports began to surface weeks after Imprelis was introduced, DuPont simply continued to sell the product until the EPA finally banned its sale and DuPont was charged for negligence and violation of FIFRA. A year after the ban, impact from Imprelis use continued to be reported throughout the northern United States for a range of trees including maples, oaks, honey locust, Norway spruce and white pine (stunted, twisted or curled new growth, bud-kill, delayed leaf-out, stem die-back). Trees that initially experienced minor affects from Imprelis later developed more severe damage (e.g. bud formation and cold hardiness).

Concerned over DuPont’s “tendency to believe [chemicals] are harmless until proven otherwise,” staff doctor George Gehrmann convinced DuPont to create Haskell Laboratories in 1935. The lab became the first in-house toxicology facility; but, due to its position within DuPont, Haskell Lab also inherited limitations on its ability to conduct and report objective science. Just as self-regulation is a ridiculous concept, self-analysis is feckless and fraught with the potential for omission and false reporting. When pathologist Wilhelm Hueper tried to share his results with the scientific community on how dye chemicals led to bladder cancer, he was gagged and fired, and DuPont went on to use the chemicals for decades after in what appeared to become a common pattern for this company.

DuPont developed many astonishing products, mostly for warfare, including nylon, Lycra, Saran wrap and, of course, Teflon—their magic non-stick compound. By the late 1940s, they were producing worldwide a wide variety of industrial chemicals, synthetic fibers, petroleum-based fuels and lubricants, pharmaceuticals, building materials, sterile and specialty packaging materials, cosmetics ingredients, and agricultural chemicals. By the early 1950s, a group of Columbia University scientists published several papers describing high rates of cancer in rats exposed to plastics such as vinyl, Saran wrap and Teflon. This did not deter DuPont from continuing its production line for these products.

*Representation of 1950s DuPont “Happy Pan”*

By 1954, during the ramp up for the Teflon rollout, DuPont’s toxicologist R.A. Dickison noted possible toxicity of the surfactant C8 (PFOA or Perfluorooctanoic Acid) used to make Teflon. By 1961, the same year they rolled out their Teflon-coated “Happy Pan”, DuPont knew C8 was a toxic endocrine disruptor and caused cancer. DuPont’s chief toxicologist Dorothy Hood cautioned executives in a memo that the substance was toxic and should be “handled with extreme care.” It didn’t stop the roll out. By 1982, DuPont had confirmed the high toxicity of C8 in humans.

*Teflon-lined Tefal (T-fal) pan made with C8*

For decades, from the 1960s into well past the millennium, DuPont displayed gross criminal negligence in not reporting their in-house findings of C8 toxicity to the EPA, and doing nothing to protect their workers exposed and working with C8 (and eventually their community when C8 leaked into the water supply). For over five decades, DuPont executives chose to: 1) continue using toxic C8 despite its proven toxicity; 2) expose C8 to their own workers without telling them (and even testing their workers without telling them why); 3) dispose of C8 unsafely, releasing the toxin into the communities and the environment; 4) cover up and deny that they did, when they were caught in the act. Was anyone thrown in jail for this criminal act? No.

Finally, in 2019—sixty-seven years after DuPont knew PFOA was toxic and did nothing—this forever chemical was banned globally under the Stockholm Convention. Unfortunately, by 2019, PFOA was already literally everywhere on the planet in concentrations considered unsafe. Given its high water-solubility, long-range transport potential, and lack of degradation in the environment, PFOA persists in groundwater and is ubiquitously present in oceans and other surface water around the globe. It is found in remote areas of the Arctic and Antarctic (where it was not used or manufactured), no doubt transported there through ocean currents and in the air, bound on particles.

*Average surface water levels of PFOA and PFOS by country in 2012 (from Kunacheva et al. 2012)*

In 2020, NBC News revealed that DuPont was still avoiding its responsibility to clean up its C8 mess and compensate those harmed by DuPont’s negligence. In 2015, DuPont began a series of complex transactions that sheltered it from responsibility for environmental obligations and liabilities associated with PFAS (C8); this included creating other entities such as Chemours, Corteva, and NewDupont. If Chemours becomes insolvent, Corteva will be responsible. Corteva does not have the funds to cover tens of billions in estimated PFAS (C8) costs to their victims.

*Timeline for DuPont’s use of PFOA (C8) to 2006 (image from **The Intercept**)*

Their Story…My Story…

In his 2006 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Write Stories, Christopher Booker told us that there are seven types of plots in story. One is entitled “Overcoming the Monster,” an underdog story where the hero sets out to destroy an evil to restore safety or order to the land. The evil force is typically much larger than the hero, who must find a way, often through great courage, strength, and inventive cunning, to defeat the evil force. This is the story of David and Goliath, of Beowulf and Grendel, of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Star Wars, of Jake Sully and Miles Quaritch in Avatar, of Rita Vrataski and the Mimics in Edge of Tomorrow. The list goes on…

Miles Quaritch and Jake Sully face off in the film “Avatar”

The “Overcoming the Monster” plot, whether told literally or through metaphor, reflects an imbalance in the world—usually of power—that the hero must right. The true story of DuPont’s evil maleficence reflects the great power imbalance of many large corporations and the evil they enact through willful deception and mischief to increase profit, their god.

We’ve now come full circle to me and my relationship with magic. For in some terrible way, the story of DuPont is also my story. One of power imbalance, of deception and ignorance. Their deception; my ignorance:

In 1954, the year I was born, DuPont discovered the toxicity of C8 in its Teflon products at its Washington Works plant in Parkersburg—and proceeded to roll it out for mass use.

In 1964, I was ten years old and struggling with my Grade 5 teacher who was trying to curb my unique self-expression. I was already aware of environmental imbalance and destruction in the world. My pet peeve was littering because it demonstrated great disrespect for others and the environment; I told environmental stories. That year DuPont had already begun its great deception; having confirmed the toxicity of C8, they simply watched (and recorded) as this cancer-causing endocrine disruptor injured, maimed and killed their own workers. The company did nothing to prevent it and they told no one.

In 1969, I wrote my first dystopia, Caged in World. The eco-novel was about a subway train driver and a data analyst caught in the trap of a huge lie. The story later morphed into Escape from Utopia. Several drafts and years later the novel became the eco-medical thriller Angel of Chaos, set in 2095 as humanity struggles with Darwin’s Disease—a mysterious neurological environmental pandemic assaulting Icaria 5, an enclosed city within the slowly recovering toxic wasteland of North America. The city is run by deep ecologists who call themselves Gaians, and consider themselves guardians of the planet. The Gaians’ secret is that they are keeping humanity “inside” not to protect humanity from a toxic wasteland but to protect the environment from a toxic humanity.

In the early 1970s, I entered college and contemplated becoming an environmental lawyer; I wrote short stories, mostly eco-fiction, and joined marches protesting environmental destruction by large corporations. DuPont confirmed that C8 not only persisted in the environment; it bioaccumulated in animals. A 1979 internal memo in which humans exposed to C8 were referred to as “receptors,” DuPont scientists found “significantly higher incidence of allergic, endocrine and metabolic disorders” as well as “excess risk of developing liver disease.” DuPont withheld this information from EPA.

In 1981, when I got my first job as a limnologist and environmental consultant in Vancouver, DuPont confirmed that C8 caused birth defects in its own workers—and did not warn its workers; in fact they created false data for EPA and continued exposing women of childbearing age to C8. In 1984, a year after I formed my own consulting company Limnology Services in Vancouver, DuPont staffers secretly tested their community’s drinking water and found it to contain alarming levels of C8. Deciding that any cleanup was likely to cost too much and tarnish their reputation, DuPont chose to do nothing. In fact, they scaled up their use of C8 in Teflon products and bought land to dump their toxic sludge in unlined landfills. Deaths in DuPont workers from leukemia and kidney cancer climbed.

Throughout the 90s, I started teaching college ecology courses in Vancouver; Shared Vision Magazine published my first article “Environmental Citizenship” in 1995. Meantime, DuPont’s Washington Works plant pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA sludge, powder and vapor through stacks and outfall pipes into the Ohio River and surrounding air. By 1996, C8 was in the drinking water of Parkersburg and other communities. Despite what they knew of C8’s toxicity, DuPont kept it a secret (no one else was testing for PFOA because it was unregulated).

In 2007, Darwin’s Paradox, my eco-fiction novel about an environmental pandemic, was published by Dragon Moon Press in Calgary, Alberta. Four years earlier, the law had finally caught up to DuPont, but not before they had dispersed 2.5 million pounds of harmful C8 from their Washington Works plant into the air and water of the mid-Ohio River Valley area. It would be another twelve years before DuPont would stop making C8 (in 2015) and another four years after that when C8 would be banned from use globally (2019). PFOA is still unregulated by EPA; the best they can do is issue a non-enforceable health advisory set at 70 parts per trillion.

*Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker face off as Palpatine looks on in the film “Star Wars”*

It isn’t the Darth Vaders or Miles Quaritchs we must overcome. Yes, they are monsters, but they serve a greater monster. For Vader it is Emperor Palpatine and for Quaritch it is the RDA Corporation. While Vader and Quaritch may be the face of evil, true evil lurks behind them, orchestrating. It is an evil we must fight internally, because each of us carries that evil inside us—in the urge to cheat on our taxes; in looking for the free ride (there are no free rides); in coveting what others have when what we have is enough; in embracing self-deception through unsubstantiated narratives and choosing to remain ignorant to suit a self-serving agenda.

I only heard of the decades-long environmental dispersal of PFOA (C8) by DuPont in 2022. I’d lived in total ignorance through DuPont’s entire five decades of deception with C8. This past year, I chanced upon “Dark Waters,” the 2019 film starring Mark Ruffalo as lawyer Robert Bilott, who took DuPont to court in 2002. I found out seven years after DuPont agreed to stop using PFOA (DuPont currently uses other PFAS compounds that are unregulated and whose toxicity is unknown).

Ignorance breeds complacency and hubris. Both will lead to downfall.

If you think you’re getting away with something … if you think you’re getting a free ride … think again. You’re being taken for one. Short cuts are dangerous. Nature is complex for good reason. Complexity builds in a diverse spider web of safeguards that interact to sustain the greater existential collaborative.

That is the real magic. And we’re not even close to understanding it.

*“Angel of Chaos” and “Darwin’s Paradox” explore human-induced environmental catastrophe*

DuPont’s Forever Weapon of Death: Teflon and C8 (PFOA)

Teflon was created in 1938, quite by accident, by Dr. Roy J. Plunkett, who was working on alternative refrigerant gases. Plunkett had stored the gas (tetrafluroethylene) in small cylinders where they were frozen and compressed. The gas had solidified into a waxy white material, which came to be called Polyetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a slippery substance that was non-corrosive, chemically stable and with an extremely high melting point. Through polymer research, PTFE was combined with PFOA to make Teflon, a type of fluoropolymer and telomere-based consumer product. For every two carbon atoms, there are four fluorine atoms attached throughout the entire molecular structure. The fluorine atoms surround the carbon atoms, creating a protective armor, preventing the carbon atoms from reacting when anything comes into contact with them—such as food in a non-stick frying pan. The fluorine atoms also decrease friction, making it slippery.

*Chemical formula for Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) also called C8*

DuPont registered the Teflon trademark in 1944, and the coating was used in the Manhattan Project’s A-bomb effort. Like DuPont’s other wartime innovations, such as nylon and pesticides, Teflon found its way into the home. In 1951, DuPont started using PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) known as C8 in its Teflon production at the Parkersburg factory. By the 1960s, DuPont was producing Teflon for cookware and advertising it as “a housewife’s best friend.” C8 was eventually used in hundreds of DuPont products, including Gore-Tex and other waterproof clothing; coatings for eye glasses and tennis rackets; stain-proof coatings for carpets and furniture; fire-fighting foam; fast food wrappers; microwave popcorn bags; bicycle lubricants; satellite components; ski wax; communications cables; and pizza boxes.

PFOA is a member of a family of over 4,500 synthetic chemicals called PFAS (polyfluorinated alkyl substances), also known as the Forever Chemicals. Due to their strong carbon-fluorine bond, PFAS chemicals don’t break down easily and persist in the environment for decades. PFAS also bioaccumulate, which means these chemicals are absorbed and not excreted and therefore buildup in the body. The higher up the food chain, the greater the PFAS concentrations. Before their manufacture started in the 1940s, no PFAS compounds were present in the environment. Now, thanks to their persistence and bioaccumulation, they exist everywhere in the environment, occupying virtually 99% of all life on the globe.

Currently, PFOA is one of only two PFAS chemicals regulated globally (the other being PFOS, which was banned in 2009, that DuPont replaced with another toxic unregulated chemical, GenX). Over 4,000 other PFAS chemicals remain in use that have not been studied and are not regulated. CHEMtrust, points out that when one PFAS chemical is regulated, “it is replaced in products and manufacturing processes by a similar, unregulated PFAS chemical. Unfortunately, the chemicals’ similarities often extend to their hazardous properties, and the replacement chemical is found to have similar harmful impacts on human health and the environment.”

*DuPont’s Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia*

References:

Ahrens L. 2011. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the aquatic environment: a review of their occurrence and fate.” J Environ Monit 13: 20–31. 10.1039/c0em00373e

Busch J, Ahrens L, Xie Z, Sturm R, Ebinghaus R. 2010. “Polyfluoroalkyl compounds in the East Greenland Arctic Ocean.” J Environ Monit 12: 1242–1246. 10.1039/c002242j

Kunacheva, Chinagarn, Shigeo Fujii, Shuhei Tanaka, et al. 2012. “Worldwide surveys of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perflurorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in water environment in recent years.” Water Science & Technology 66(12): 2764-71.

Prevedouros K, Cousins IT, Buck RC, Korzeniowski SH. 2006. “Sources, fate and transport of perfluorocarboxylates” Environ Sci Technol 40: 32–44. 10.1021/es0512475

Rauert, Cassandra, Mahiba Shoieb, Jasmin K. Schuster, Anita Eng, Tom Harner. 2018. “Atmospheric concentrations and trends of poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and volatile methyl siloxanes (VMS) over 7 years of sampling in the Global Atmospheric Passive Sampling (GAPS) network.” Environmental Pollution 238: 94-102.

Velez, M.P., T.E. Arbuckle, W.D. Fraser. 2015. “Maternal exposure to perfluorinated chemicals and reduced fecundity: the MIREC study.” Human Reproduction 30(3): 701-9.

Yamashita N, Kannan K, Taniyasu S, Horii Y, Petrick G, Gamo T. 2005. “A global survey of perfluorinated acids in oceans.” Mar Pollut Bull 51: 658–668. 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2005.04.026

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.