NYC Climate Week happened a couple of weeks ago and was so full of energy that it feels like I am still recovering from it (in a good way). Bill McKibben estimated that over 100,000 people had been expected to attend, a number I keep thinking about because of the political good will and power it represents. But the other interesting item that jumped out at me was one I heard on a panel and can’t stop returning to.

On Monday I had the good fortune of being invited into a conversation organized by Sian Sutherland of A Plastic Planet and Julia Cohen of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, at which one of the panelists was Jo Banner of the Descendants Project. I’ve been aware of the Project and its importance before, but Jo pointed out something to the panel that hadn’t occurred to me. She noted that the justifications for continuing petrochemical and plastic production in the United States are in many cases the very same ones that were used to perpetuate American slavery.

The 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one of the mostly densely built out petrochemical corridors in the world, and it is often referred to as “cancer alley” due to the disproportionate rates of morbidity and mortality. The Descendants Project draws attention to the fact that many of production and refining facilities occupy the actual footprints of former sugar plantations. Generations later, the descendants of those who were once enslaved there find themselves surrounded by refineries, plastics manufacturing facilities, and other polluting industries. They bear the environmental costs of industrial development. They suffer the health effects. But they experience very few of the economic benefits. It is, in many ways a continuation of the economic and racial power structures established under slavery.

I visited Wallace, Louisiana once before, and had the opportunity to take a tour of the Whitney Plantation Museum along with Jo and her sister, Joy. The experience was haunting, and generates an appropriate sense of moral unease. Unlike most historic plantations, Whitney tells the story of slavery from the perspective of the people who were enslaved. It chronicles individual human lives, each with a name, a family, and a story. In so doing, the museum makes clear that slavery was not an eruption of individual cruelty. It was an organized system, sustained by laws and by people who persuaded themselves that the arrangement was necessary, natural, or even beneficial.

I had thought I understood that well enough, but when Jo listed the common justifications for the two extractive systems — the historical one of slavery and the modern petrochemical one — I realized how shallow my comprehension was.

The economy depends on it. The harms are exaggerated. There are no practical alternatives right now.

Such arguments about “necessity” are those of an entrenched system seeking to defend itself. The longer a technology or institution exists, the more infrastructure, employment, wealth and everyday practices grow around it. Its ubiquity then becomes evidence offered for its indispensability. Plastics illustrate this especially clearly. Here is a chart of direct comparisons

The parallels in rhetoric are hard to miss. We can’t live without it. Our economy depends on it. The harms are exaggerated. The alternatives aren’t practical. Change would be ruinously expensive. And, of course, we need more evidence before doing anything drastic.

These arguments are painfully familiar. Different industries, different centuries, but a remarkably durable playbook: insist that the status quo is indispensable, minimize its human costs, and portray meaningful change as the real danger.

But ubiquity is not necessity. Entrenchment is not inevitability. And economic dependence does not make harm acceptable.

That feels particularly important for those of us working on plastics and health. History is full of institutions and technologies that once seemed indispensable—right up until society decided that their harms demanded something different. It seems to me that we are reaching that point. It seems to me that one of the best things we can do is to say it clearly, with data, as healthcare practitioners, scientists, and dedicated professionals.

The lobbyists won in New York State this week. They successfully prevented a vote on the Plastic Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA), which by every account would have passed both chambers if Assembly Speaker Heastie had allowed lawmakers to bring it to the floor.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.* 

(If I ever get a tattoo, it will be that.) 

This bill has been pending in Albany for three years now, and I honestly think it is one of the most powerful pieces of anti-plastics legislation under consideration, globally. If passed, it would have capped the production single-use packaging by 30% incrementally over 12 years, prevented “chemical recycling” (an incineration technology that melts and burns plastic into a dirty fuel) from being classed as actual recycling, and banned the use of numerous toxicants from packaging, including all PFAS chemicals, phthalates, bisphenols, lead, mercury, and formaldehyde. 

But those measures, though superb, are not really what made the bill so powerful. The true clout of PRRIA came from its positioning in New York, a state of 20 million people with a market too big for manufacturers to abandon. Adhering to the law would have forced adjustments in plastic production across a much wider region. It would have removed toxicants from food packaging for tens of millions of people, protecting the health of people far beyond the Empire State. Perhaps most importantly, it would have provided model legislation for states all over the country. 

I’m showing my pride as a New Yorker here, but let’s be real: New York is a tough nut to crack This place throws down a gauntlet of opposition that tends to work out most forseeable kinks. The cacophany of interest groups in this state is so brassy that by the time a bill can make it through in Albany, it can get passed almost anywhere. Thus, much like California, New York is in the habit of passing progressive legislation that is later picked up in other states. 

Which is precisely why the opposition could never let it pass. For the fourth year in a row, PRRIA had majority support in both chambers. Voters have always loved this bill. A 2024 Siena poll showed two thirds (67%) bipartisan support, with African Americans 81% in favor, and New Yorkers have been just as active and expressive about their enthusiasm this year. 

Enter the torrent of lobbyists. Last year opponents of the PRRIA spent approximately $9.8 million on lobbying and related advocacy efforts (compared with about $1.5 million spent by supporters), and sent 106 lobbyists to argue against the bill. It was the first and second most lobbied bill during the final two months of the state legislative session. This year, there were even more. 

The fact that industry influence was successful in preventing a vote on a bill in a blue state with a democratic governor and democratic control of both chambers — a bill that in any case had overwhelming, bipartisan voter support — is a bitter pill. It’s enough to make some of us want to throw up our hands and stomp out of the state house, determined to change tactics and take our bats and gloves someplace else for awhile. Which, in the short term, may not be such a poor use of time, and may even be good for morale. 

Why? Because we’re already using other tactics, and it is already working.

We stuck an announcement into last week’s newsletter about the Massachusetts Medical Society’s (MMS) successful passage of an anti-plastics resolution. It seemed like a piece of “cool news” at the time, but on reflection, I think we buried the lede. It’s the stuff of headlines. 

The resolution calls for the MMS to engage in all of the measures that medical societies can most effectively undertake, each and every one of which will go far to curtail the health harms of plastics. It calls for support for state-based legislation banning unnecessary (frivolous) plastics, for mandatory health testing of new chemicals developed for use in plastics production, for extended producer responsibility, for the reduction of unnecessary single use plastics from healthcare settings, and for the sharing of resources to ensure that all medical providers are informed of the long-term toxicities of plastic. 

Medical Society resolutions are a powerful tool, because they transform individual concern into institutional medical consensus. They give physicians and scientists a mechanism to convert emerging evidence into an official position of a trusted professional organization. As such, they influence legislation and regulation and provide political cover. Support from physicians can reduce political risk when lawmakers seek to act on controversial issues — or ones heavily lobbied by industry. They also shape media narratives, providing trusted expert sources for journalists, along with a signal that an issue has become important enough for organized medicine to take a position.

And they tend to be contagious. Just like legislation in New York or California, a resolution adopted in one state medical society can be copied by another. In this way, change can spiral up, moving from state societies to other professional groups with significant clout, such as the American College of Gynecologists (ACOG) or the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP). It is not necessarily a linear process (the AMA itself has a resolution addressing microplastics; did you know?), but it is a powerful one. Everywhere it happens, it inspires similar measures elsewhere. And it creates durable institutional commitments all the while.

I am rarely inclined to sit at home and stick to my knitting, but sometimes there really can be better and more efficient uses for our time — in a good way. This may be one of them. The deck is stacked in Albany and several other states, and anyway the legislative sessions are winding down for the year. But P-SNAP has members in medical societies across the country, some of them quite powerful. We have the capacity to bring forward resolutions that can change the medical conversation, highlighting their hazardous nature of plastics and calling for safer formularies and more limited use. Let’s do that. The gridlock is legislative, not scientific or clinical. Let’s lean in.

*Intentional malapropism of the Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” from The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

David Rosner, my doctoral advisor, died this past weekend. The world is a little different now. 

Often, it seems like there is no one in the world of public health who didn’t know David (and adore him). If his name is new to you, his influence probably isn’t — for one thing, it’s sitting at the core of what P-SNAP is all about. Let me tell you some things. 

David was the co-creator and director of the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. When I met him he was famous for a lot of things, but I understood his work only in the fuzzy way of a 24 year old with an indistinct passion for social justice and some ideas about going to graduate school to fix the world. The Center was where people studied history to inform policy. David and the other faculty there spoke and wrote with clarity, conviction, and a wisdom full of nuance and understanding. I signed on. 

David’s books were already impactful. They were about the industrial diseases that ground strong, hardworking people into debilitated, dead people. With titles like Lead Wars and Deadly Dust, they chronicled the fate of workers exposed to asbestos, lead, and synthetic chemicals, and the cover-ups and legal dodges of the companies that trafficked in those materials. The books were “social histories,” that described the tributaries of ideas and power that explained how such things were allowable, socially and politically, if not always by law. They explained how things came to be this way.

And they provided evidence. David and his co-writer, Jerry Markowitz, were adroit at fishing memos out of archives. They excelled at identifying correspondence that demonstrated corporate knowledge of extraordinary harm, and at exposing company efforts to suppress or deflect attention from these truths. “Rosner and Markowitz read corporate archives the way epidemiologists read outbreaks,” observes Bruce Lanphear, “searching for patterns, timelines, concealment, and consequence. They reconstructed not only what companies knew, but when they knew it and how they responded.” 

Their diligence made for good history, but it also made for good litigation. Soon they were called on by law offices, then deposed as expert witnesses. David made wry comments about the unexpected uptick in book sales, as law firms ordered stacks of his “little manuscript” about lead poisoning and built the case that would eventually hold Sherwin Williams and other pigment manufacturers accountable for $2-4 billion of lead paint abatement in Rhode Island. A win!

But not for long. The state supreme court later overturned the verdict, stating that public nuisance law on which the case had been carried forward could not be used to hold the manufacturers liable. 

The grief that lingered in David’s eyes when decisions like that came down also smoldered with anger. And resolve. 

I saw that look again and again as the years ticked by — and not because David was an angry person. To the contrary, one of the most common words used to describe him would be “warm” (though I prefer “avuncular;” my wedding photographer even mistook him for my father). The Center itself was distinctly warm. David modeled collaboration. He was cheerful and funny, and pleasantly disdainful of historians who worked in competitive isolation to write the “perfect book.” What would that be for? The point wasn’t to get tenure, it was to do something valuable. 

Which he continued to do. The expert testimony continued, as did the teaching and writing, and the interviews. I heard David and Jerry on the radio, saw their op-eds in the Times, saw their discussions with Bill Moyers, their appearances in documentaries. They digitized the documents pried loose from industry through lawsuits and uploaded them to a database, Toxic Docs, to be accessed by anyone, anytime. David and Jerry made themselves heard, and they put forward the powerful message that history matters because it illuminates choices — “choices,” notes Bruce Lanphear, “made differently in the future if we [a]re willing to learn from the past.” 

David continued to engage with the courts until the final weeks of his life. As recently as March 25, 2026, his and Jerry’s work prompted the Lancet to retract a 1977 editorial arguing that talcum powder (which contains asbestos) posed no serious health risk. David never stopped. Even so, he was distressed this past year about the need to do more, now and especially into the future. Who would step directly into these fights? Who would come forward to be an expert witness? I learned this from Jerry, who I encountered at the shiva wearing a “Good Trouble” cap, and the bewilderment of a person who has lost an intellectual soulmate. 

Who indeed? I never felt that I had managed to do David proud. Interestingly, in the wake of his death, I am hearing other former students say the same thing, in the same words. This is not because David was critical of us (he never was, even when he probably should have been). Rather, I think it is because we understood as his students how badly there need to be more rockstars in the fight. Indisputably, David was a rockstar. How does one measure up? 

But here’s the thing: all of David’s former students are in interesting and useful places now. (Social media was useful this week, and we found each other — we are journalists, academics, researchers, organizers, and more.) But the legacy is running down through P-SNAP, too. Some of us in the P-SNAP network served as expert witnesses on a plastics case this year. Many published op-eds. Some were interviewed on the radio (and many in podcasts), some popped up in documentaries, many gave legislative testimony. We are stepping forward into the fight. 

The sadness of David’s shiva reminded me of the final pages of Charlotte’s Web. I cannot reckon with his absence yet, and I thought of the passage in which Wilbur stands in the yard Charlotte once inhabited, feeling the senselessness of the loss. But then he also feels her legacy. 

“When [Wilbur] awoke it was late afternoon. He looked at the egg sac. It was empty. He looked into the air… Then he walked drearily into the doorway, where Charlotte’s web used to be. He was standing there, thinking of her, when he heard a small voice.”

“Salutations!” it said. “I’m up here.”

“So am I,” said another tiny voice. 

“So am I,” said a third voice…

“Wilbur looked up. At the top of the doorway three small webs were being constructed. On each web, working busily, was one of Charlotte’s daughters.” 

The author of Charlotte’s Web, you may recall, was that master of language and communication, EB White. This was never a story about a spider in a barnyard, at least not really. It was about friendship and inspiration, and the power of messaging. And at the very last it was about legacy. 

In spite of our immediate grief, it is clear that David had many “daughters,” who at this point have ballooned to outposts all over the world, where they are building fabulous webs. I submit that P-SNAP is part of that constellation. 

I’ll leave the last word, for now, to EB White, since David was about the cleverest and most compassionate spider many of us will ever know — and canny with the written word. 

“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of them ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

Goodbye for now, David.

On Tuesday, January 13, the Guardian ran an article alleging “bombshell doubts” about the validity of methods used to detect micro and nano-plastics (MNPs). The article cited criticism from a former Dow researcher and a scientist in Germany. Noting that seven microplastics studies had received published critique, the article questioned “what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies.”  

For what it’s worth, over 6,000 peer-reviewed articles on microplastics were published in 2024 alone, with hundreds of studies touching on human exposure and detection. This suggests a large denominator for a numerator of seven.

A flurry of push-back ensued, with physicians, scientists, and others penning letters to the editor and on social media. Authors (including this one) pointed out that microplastics are unquestionably present in the human body, and that magnifying uncertainty by elevating fringe dissent is a well-worn tactic from the Tobacco Industry Playbook. While we know normal scientific method relies on healthy debate, we also know that industry stakeholders will readily exploit it to forestall regulation.

Doubling down on doubt

The Guardian soon doubled down on its assertion that MNP science may be bunk. Congratulating its own “extraordinary reporting,” the article opened by placing concerns about microplastics in the human body in the past tense. What once seemed like groundbreaking discoveries, claimed editor Aamna Modin, have now been eroded by “a steady drip of criticism.”

For what it’s worth, the “drip of criticism” that Guardian writers have described focuses mainly on a single detection technique, Pyrolysis GC/MS, which has been used to detect plastics in human tissue – including in the brain. After dissolving the tissue in solvent, investigators identify the material that is left by heating it until it vaporizes, then identifying the molecules in the fumes. 

The trouble, some reviewers point out, is that polyethylene (PE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) molecules can look the same as those derived from fatty acids such as triglycerides. This is true, and investigators readily note that PE and PVC are likely over-represented, but not to the point of invalidating the findings. Plastics  – including an abundance of other resins beyond PE and PVC – are present in the human body and their concentrations are likely increasing over time. 

“Exactly how science works”

On the Friday after the original “bombshell” piece was published, Washington Post journalist Shannon Osaka opened the conversation to numerous independent scientists with an article interviewing several researchers in the field. While acknowledging that no method is perfect, Osaka’s interviewees emphasized that multiple detection techniques — including infrared spectroscopy and pyrolysis — have repeatedly detected a range of plastics in human tissues. 

The basic fact of human exposure is undeniable. What seems like controversy, they pointed out, is actually the normal process of science. Osaka gave the last word to developmental pediatrician and researcher Christos Symeonides: “This is exactly how science works in tackling a new problem.”

But this was not the last word, at least not yet. On Sunday, the Guardian came back with another editorial, this one chastising microplastics researchers for bringing controversy onto themselves by publishing work that could be subject to critique. 

“Given that there is immense public and media interest in plastic pollution,” opined the paper, “it is unfortunate that scientists working in this area did not show more caution.” It is worth noting that by this logic, the dust-up initiated in the press occurred because scientists working on new methods allowed room for critique. “Hopefully the spotlight trained on the field last week will prompt reflection and future caution.”

Hopefully it will, but not necessarily in the ways the Guardian editors intend. The controversy that the paper stirred may seem novel to readers concerned about microplastics, but it is part of a well-worn series of tactics deployed by industries seeking to delay regulation on dangerous materials, from lead to asbestos to opioids and hazardous chemicals. Not by accident, we refer to this as the “Tobacco Playbook,” and manufacturers have used it successfully for over a century. 

Controversy on cue

Here are a few maneuvers we can all recognize:

• Magnify or manufacture uncertainty: Emphasize limitations, variability, and unanswered questions, while ignoring converging lines of evidence.
• Shift the burden of proof: Demand impossible standards of certainty before action, despite acting decisively in other domains with less evidence.
• Promote false balance: Elevate fringe dissent to suggest scientific division where little exists.
• Delay through research: Call for more studies as a substitute for policy, even when evidence already supports harm reduction.

The logic in utilizing these tactics is straightforward and the successes for industry are dazzling: regulatory delay preserves market access, and public doubt weakens support for science and policy. The millions of lives lost to opioids, tobacco, lead, asbestos, and other products even decades after science and medicine understood how deadly they could be are testament to the tactics’ effectiveness. 

So the more relevant question may not be whether doubt is being amplified, but why now?

A few elements may be worth noting. The Guardian article emerged on the same day that a conference on Microplastics Exposures and Human Health had drawn approximately 250 researchers together in New Mexico, including reporters from national press outlets that would have covered exciting new findings. None of them did, however, focusing instead on the “bombshell” of controversy that the Guardian claimed to have uncovered. 

In a news cycle already saturated with mistrust of experts and fatigue from overlapping crises, the suggestion that microplastics might be “one less thing to worry about” was news that many were likely to embrace – and circulate. 

We know enough to act

What now? Science communicators have continued to speak out, largely with the message that the so-called controversy of microplastics research methods is not hullaballoo, but science. Scientists review each other’s work and offer insights and critique, which in turn are used to sharpen the original work, the questions going forward, and the development of better techniques. This is how science does science. 

They are also making clear that, to quote Mark Twain, reports of the death of microplastics science were greatly exaggerated. There is no question that microplastics are present in the human body. The challenge for scientists is to understand how many, and what the mechanisms of harm may be. (This charismatic messaging from the Environmental Working Group makes the point nicely.)

For the rest of us, the challenge may be how to implement the precautionary principle while there is still potential to do so. We have enough data to understand that human exposure to plastics is chronic and universal, and that many of the potential health harms are potentially catastrophic. We have enough data to act. Advocacy in this respect is not political – it is an extension of ethical practice. We cannot let manufactured doubt fill the news cycle when there is already so much clarity.

Introducing: The Merchant of Doubt Award

This award recognizes extraordinary commitment to sowing doubt, undermining consensus science, and postponing protections for human and environmental health—often while claiming the mantle of responsibility.