Dark Plastics
Esmé E. Deprez | October 2, 2023 | Bloomberg Businessweek
Kyla Bennett, an ecologist and attorney in Easton, Massachusetts, subscribes to a school of thought called antispeciesism, which considers the preferential treatment of any animal species over another, humans included, to be unethical. So she’s long railed against the use of chemicals to kill insects, specially over a 26-square-mile stretch of freshwater wetlands and soggy woodlands near her home. For thousands of years, the Wampanoag people sought refuge and sustenance in the area and considered it alive with spirits. Today it’s called the Hockomock Swamp and retains lore of the paranormal, with reported sightings of Bigfoot and UFOs, but it’s mostly a place to walk dogs and paddle canoes. It’s also home to an uncommon species of mosquito that carries a rare but highly lethal brain-swelling virus called eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE. To curb its spread, state officials have long used a pesticide named Anvil 10+10, spraying it from airplanes overhead.
Bennett is 62, with a slight frame and salt-and-pepper shoulder-length curls. She cherishes the Hockomock, not least for its vernal pools, small bodies of water that ephemerally appear every spring and dry up by fall. Countless species use them to breed; her favorite is the blue-spotted salamander. “There is something meditative about vernal pooling,” Bennett says. “Putting on your waders and scouring the pools for life. I just love it.” In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bennett was stuck in bed, recovering from surgery to remove a baseball-size tumor that had been pushing against her brain. It was the first spring in 30 years she didn’t visit the vernal pools. She’d kept working nonetheless, as the director of science policy at Public Employees for their value in the manufacturing of semiconductors, firefighting foam, smartphones, medical devices, aircraft and solar panels. They enable consumer products to better repel water (as in raincoats), fend off stains (carpets) and resist grease (microwave popcorn bags).
The persistence of those carbon-fluorine bonds, though, prevent PFAS from naturally degrading—earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” In water, soil or blood, they just keep piling up. The consequences, which can take years to materialize, can be devastating: Researchers have linked PFAS exposure to cancers, birth defects, infertility, high cholesterol and more.
In the summer of 2020, Bennett’s work on pesticides and PFAS unexpectedly converged. By then, public awareness of the dangers posed by PFAS was mounting. Researchers were finding the compounds in vastly more products than was previously understood. The film Dark Waters had just recounted the decades-long PFAS poisoning of towns in West Virginia and Ohio and the subsequent cover-up by chemical giant DuPont. Government agencies were tightening water advisories based on the latest science, showing smaller and smaller amounts to be unsafe.
