In 2017, as wildfires crept closer to my Northern California home, I promised myself that I would devote more of my time to addressing the root causes of climate change. That same year, I read an article by my colleague and hero, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, that described toxic chemicals and climate change as two trunks of the same tree, and a lightbulb went off in my head. I’d spent three decades of my career mitigating the effects of toxic chemicals, 99.9% of which are petrochemicals, e.g., fossil fuels.
In January 2017, my colleague Eric Toensmeier and I published Industrial Perennial Crops for a Post-Petroleum Materials Economy, (DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-48281-1_28-1) highlighting the opportunities for utilizing perennial crops to transform both industrial agriculture away from fossil fuel inputs but also as substitutes for petrochemical feedstocks to make the stuff of our daily lives.
Late in the pandemic, I found like-minded colleagues at California’s Safer Consumer Products Program and the European Environment Agency, and we began to formulate a paper. It took us several years and many tries to find a journal that would publish our cross-cutting publication, which just highlights the criticality of working across issues described in our paper. We published in February 2025, a nice complement to our colleagues’ paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in January of 2025, Manufactured Chemicals and Children’s Health – The Need for a New Law. (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2409092)
Currently, many friends and colleagues from the worlds of climate change mitigation and biodiversity are engaging in conversations about the world of “toxics”. The Grantham Foundation supported the publication of two papers, one by Deep Science Ventures, Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami and one by SystemIQ, Invisible Ingredients: Tackling toxic chemicals in the food system. We welcome their involvement, and trust that our work can serve as an initial roadmap to multisolving the wicked¹ triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution that we currently face.
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem: In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.[1] It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; “wicked” does not indicate evil, but rather resistance to resolution.[2]
