In the spring of 1973, my mother was twelve years old with a cloud of dark hair. She was probably sitting in science class or running barefoot across the grassy backyard of her suburban Grand Rapids home, chasing one of her five siblings.

Half a state away, an employee at Michigan Chemical Corporation was mistakenly slinging some paper sacks of polybrominated biphenyl onto a truck bound for an agricultural feed-mixing plant. At the Farm Bureau Services facility, which served dozens of Michigan livestock farmers, employees would barely glance at the scrawled labels on the brown paper sacks before heaping them alongside bags of magnesium oxide, the product they’d expected to receive.

This was a devastating error. Magnesium oxide is a cattle feed additive meant to promote healthy milk production. Polybrominated byphenyl (PBB), a crumbly white compound that looks remarkably similar to magnesium oxide, is a flame retardant. A highly toxic one.

Thanks to a messy warehouse, scribbled labeling, and general lack of supply chain oversight, an unknown quantity of PBB was tipped into batches of dairy cow feed instead of the magnesium oxide the workers thought they were adding. The first batch of contaminated feed reached only a handful of Michigan farmers. But clingy PBB molecules stuck to the mixers and sloughed off into each succeeding batch of cattle, hog, and chicken feed. Nobody at the plant noticed.

Across the state, farmers noticed. Stolid Dutchmen whose families had been farming for generations gaped as their previously healthy dairy cows withered. The herds’ hides erupted in sores; they trembled, bled, aborted calves, refused to eat, went blind, and died. Neighbors shook their heads and whispered about plagues, about mismanagement, about abuse. Vets were baffled. But this was long before the age of instant information and online support groups. Each PBB-affected farmer thought this disaster belonged to him alone.

After months of agony and loss, the afflicted farmers began to find each other. With the help of university researchers, rural vets, and lawyers, they finally tracked down the source of their misery, the accidental intrusion of a brand-new chemical even its manufacturers barely understood.[1. Journalist Joyce Egginton tells the farmers’ story in her fascinating book, The Poisoning of Michigan. Highly recommended.]

Finally, the system kicked in. Government agencies scrambled to set safety standards for flame retardant concentrations in Michigan’s beef and milk. Herds were quarantined. Thousands of animals were shot and shoveled into massive burial pits near Kalkaska, MI. Devastated farmers accepted small settlements from Michigan Chemical and tried to rebuild their lives.

But the crisis wasn’t confined to the livestock. Toxic, fat-soluble PBB molecules had spent months slipping into milk, meat, cheese, and eggs served on rural, suburban, and urban tables around the state. Entire farm families—highly exposed to their own toxic products—became riddled with cancer, skin lesions, dizziness, fatigue, depression. If similar symptoms cropped up among the general public, the patterns went undetected. However, a 1976 Michigan Department of Public Health study found that 96% of nursing mothers shopping at urban grocery stores had detectable PBB levels in their breast milk.

The media barely knew how to handle the story. Reporting loudly about the crisis would spell financial doom for Michigan’s agricultural economy. Staying silent would leave millions of Michigan consumers in the dark about the shadows on their dinner table.

In the end, economics won. The story stayed low-key, barely reaching suburban residents like my grandmother, who continued pouring glasses of Michigan milk for her family. The toxic hitchhikers—designed to keep clothing and furniture from igniting in house-fires, but capable of mimicking hormones and interfering with the body’s cellular machinery—likely built up, sip by sip, in my mother’s body. Even today, her cells could retain detectable levels of PBB. Thanks to the chemical’s solubility in breast milk, mine could, too.

I’m not one of those people who stalks down the cereal aisle at Meijer, muttering darkly about synthetic chemicals in our food. I freely acknowledge that the post-WWII chemistry boom helped make my modern life possible; clean laundry, soft green lawns, the ability to microwave leftover Pad Thai in its plastic container—I owe all these luxuries and more to the ingenuity of people who threw a bunch of molecules into a superheated vat and waited to see what happened.

But chemical research is mind-bogglingly complicated and expensive, and the pressure to perform often forces manufacturers to throw new products on the market before they understand the true nature of what they’ve made. From the insecticides that might be destroying our nation’s pollinating bees, to the cancer-causing BPA in the water bottles we’re now forbidden to buy, to the DDT still detectable in Michigan’s gull eggs, we’ve been forced again and again to confront one simple fact: we have no idea what we’re dealing with.

A few paper sacks on the wrong truck inflicted environmental and physiological damage that Michiganders are still trying to sort out three generations later. God–what else are we doing to ourselves?

My inner environmental biologist panics at this point. How many times must we realize ten, twenty, fifty years too late that something we invented is now coming back to burn us? How many billions of dollars will we spend cleaning up after herbicides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, coolants, and plastics that once promised to improve our lives? How long before our big, tough planet builds up such a body burden of our molecular inventions that its water, its soil, its air, its living creatures are as doomed as Michigan’s dairy cows?

But whispers of hope keep these fears at a reasonable volume. In all likelihood, my mother’s cells will never be forced to reckon with their polybrominated inhabitants. The natural world is blessedly resilient. Organic produce and metal water bottles exist. And as long as we bumbling humans keep making messes, good people will always be there, trying to clean them up.

Geneva Langeland

Geneva Langeland (’13) survived graduate school with minimal blood loss, escaping with her ms in environmental policy and communication. She now works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the communications editor at Michigan Sea Grant. There, she gets to hang out with educators, researchers, and communicators who love the Great Lakes as much as she does.