Margaret Lock

Department of Social Studies of Medicine

McGill University (E-mail: margaret.lock@mcgill.ca)

Toxic Environments and the Embedded Psyche

A discussion of the recent transition to a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene,

opens this article. The need to declare a new era has been declared necessary by geol-
ogists, together with other scientists and critical commentators due to the inordinate
amount of human-made destruction being imposed on the globe and its inhabitants.
This destruction disproportionally effects those who are economically deprived and
experience discrimination. An account of the recognition and routinization of epi-
genetics follows, in which an unexamined assumption of genetic determinism is
debunked. A move to recognize human existence everywhere as contextualized in
MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 21–40, ISSN 0745-5194,
online ISSN 1548-1387.  C 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights

reserved. DOI: 10.1111/maq.12545

21
22 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

environments that impinge on body functioning throughout life opens up a discus-

sion of the embodiment of trauma followed by six illustrative examples from the
newly recognized field of environmental epigenetics. [Anthropocene, epigenetics,
environment(s), embodiment]

As of September 2016, we have been living in the Anthropocene. Designation of this

new epoch was initiated in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and taken
up again in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen at
a meeting in Mexico. By 2013, over 200 peer-reviewed articles had been published
about the looming, epochal transition, and Elsevier had launched a journal titled
Anthropocene, followed by an e-journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.
The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights the peculiarity of the current epoch:
“The Anthropocene spells the collapse of the Kantian distinction between natural
history and human history.” He notes that we are in the first geological epoch in
which the force transforming the globe, that of human initiated activity is, for the
most part, self-conscious about what it is doing, with profound implications for the
allocation of responsibility and for the possibility of initiating social and political
changes (Chakrabarty 2009).
For a decade or more, arguments have taken place as to whether the Neolithic
revolution, or perhaps even earlier changes brought about by humankind, evinced
the beginning of the Anthropocene. The position taken by ecologist Erle Ellis and
colleagues is that when land clearance for agriculture and irrigation commenced
10,000 years ago, it brought about a global effect on vast swaths of land (Ellis et al.
2015). In recent centuries, colonization has further reduced the biodiversity of the
planet to a fraction of what it had been. Others argue that the industrial revolution
that commenced in the late 1700s, epitomized by the steam engine, was the singular
moment (Jørgensen and Jørgensen 2016). Humans have manufactured numerous
mineral compounds, including more than 500 million metric tons of pure aluminum
since World War II, much of which has sedimented into Earth’s layers. Even more
striking are “mineraloids”—glass and plastics—300 million tons of which are made
annually and are present on the Earth’s crust and in all the oceans (Mooney 2015).
Concrete, a rock of our own making, encases much of the globe today. By 2050,
plastic debris is likely to be more numerous than fish in the oceans (Kottasova
2016). Recently, a tiny South Pacific island, 5,000 km from the nearest human
habitation, was found virtually buried under layers of washed up plastic rubbish
(Lavers and Bond 2017). Our chemical footprints are everywhere, principally in the
form of CO2, nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, diesel fuel, and electronic trash that has
accumulated as toxic waste around the globe. And James Lovelock insists that today
the biggest threat of all to Gaia is overpopulation (Lovelock 2006). One hopeful
sign is that bacteria in the ocean may be evolving the ability to break down plastic
(Le Page 2017).
The environment—nature—is exhibiting all the signs of stress, trauma, toxicity,
and abuse usually associated with suffering human bodies. “Capitalistic ruins,” as
Anna Tsing puts it (2015), are all too evident in vast swaths of the globe. But
geologists need hard evidence of an irreversible transition to identify a new epoch.
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 23

Their decisions are pegged to a so-called golden spike—a marker that appears in
ice-cores, the oceans, lake sediments, and soils, where recognizable fossilized strata
appear that can be hammered, sampled, and/or dug up. Such changes are known as
a “time-rock unit.”
Following three years of heated exchanges, the notoriously conservative Inter-
national Union of Geological Sciences (IGS) convened a group of scholars in 2013
to decide if the Anthropocene should be officially recognized. In a recommendation
presented to a congress in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2016, they declared that
this was indeed the case. Geologists had shown little opposition to the position that
humans have replaced nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth, but
as to when, exactly, the golden spike—the indelible event—took place in order for
this force to be recognized as a valid geological turning point, caused dispute. The
IGS eventually agreed that July 1945, the day when the first nuclear device was ex-
ploded, leaving rare isotopes of plutonium distributed all over the globe, including
Antarctica and Greenland, constituted such a spike.
For more than a decade, we have been living with another seismic shift, one in
the biological sciences, that has come to be known as the “postgenomic” era. The
human genome is no longer understood as the origin of life, perhaps by the majority
of scientists; rather it is conceptualized as “reactive” to environments external and
internal to the body (Gilbert 2003). Moreover, the human genome is recognized as
inherently unstable (Abraham 2018). In other words, the very “nature” of what it
is to be human is being revised on the basis of accumulating knowledge initially
brought to light when mapping the human genome, with enormous consequences
for understanding human development, health, ill-health, and possibly our very
survival.
In sum, a new geological epoch has come into existence because humans are
making over nature writ large to such an extent that it is being irreparably trans-
formed. What is more, molecular science has shown that the human genome does
not determine who we are; on the contrary, the environment that we are constantly
remaking is in the driver’s seat, contributing to well-documented ever-increasing
inequalities and, for many, intensified misery. In light of these findings, I want to
suggest that the concept of psyche, a concept that I have always found troubling,
should be understood as a malleable entity, one acted on by epigenetic stimuli over
which individuals often have little control. Certain of these stimuli are, of course,
positive and/or pleasant, but others are highly toxic, with lasting negative effects on
bodily functioning, including the brain, that can persist over the life course. Hence,
when concepts such as will power, self-motivation, and individual drive are used, it
should be kept in mind that they are inevitably part of a larger schema.
What follows is a brief account of the rise of the burgeoning field of epigenetics
that possibly amounts to a paradigm shift in molecular biology. Consideration of
epigenetics in action lays bare some of the lasting effects the Anthropocene is having
on human bodies including mental functioning everywhere.

The Reactive Genome

Richard Lewontin informs us that DNA is among the most nonreactive, chemically
inert molecules in the world, with no “power to reproduce itself” (2000, 141). Even
24 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

so, following announcements in 2001 that the human genome had been mapped
(which was, strictly speaking, not yet the case) one journalist reported that it “was
like [completing] God’s own jigsaw puzzle,” although others were more skeptical.
Some insisted that the map resembled a list of parts for a Boeing 747, but with no idea
as to how the parts go together and no knowledge of the principles of aeronautics.
Furthermore, many surprises came to light, some of which scientists had predicted
prior to embarking on the human genome project but had been ignored.
Mapping made clear that humans have approximately 20,000 genes, not 100,000
as had been predicted. Numerous plants have many more genes than do humans,
and the diminutive worm C. elegans has about the same number as we do. The size
of a genome bears no relationship to its complexity, and the genome is not a template
for the organism as a whole. Only approximately 1.2% of DNA segments actually
code for proteins, and the remaining 98.8% was initially labeled disparagingly as
“junk” (Carey 2015, 5).
Non-coding sections of the genome at first appeared to have no obvious function,
and are frequently remnants of bacterial and viral genomes, but they separate out the
coding parts of the genome, thus inhibiting unwanted mutational changes during
DNA transmission between generations. Moreover, numerous non-coding DNA
sequences are highly conserved, which is to say that they may well have been
present in genomes for hundreds of millions of years, suggesting, as we now know,
that they are crucial to both the processes of life and to evolutionary change. And
it is well established that the activities of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) comprise
a comprehensive regulatory system that functions to create the “architecture” of
organisms, without which chaos would reign. To this end, ncRNA profoundly
affects the timing of processes that occur during development, including stem cell
maintenance, cell proliferation, apoptosis (programmed cell death), the occurrence
of cancer, and other complex ailments (Weaver et al. 2004).
These insights relate to the structure and function of the genome itself, but
over the past decade, the findings of molecular epigeneticists have added to this
already complex picture. Epigenetics literally means “over or above genetics,” but
its precise meaning changes as new discoveries come to light. A few years ago,
scientists in the expanding subfield of behavioral epigenetics claimed that they had
tracked the molecular links between nature and nurture, thus producing evidence
that nature/nurture is not divisible (Labonté et al. 2012). This assertion was based
on research demonstrating how environmental stimuli and stressors originating
both externally and internally to the body initiate trains of molecular activity that
modify how DNA functions during the course of individual development, at times
with life-long effects on human behavior and well-being.
The epigenetic mechanism best researched to date is methylation, a process ini-
tiated by enzymes in which DNA sequences are not changed, but one nucleotide,
cytosine, is transformed, altering the nucleotide base, thus rendering a portion of
DNA inactive. Animal research has shown definitively that methylation modifi-
cations can be transmitted inter-generationally, and research findings increasingly
support the idea that this is also the case among humans (Pembrey et al. 2014). It
has now been demonstrated that the epigenetic regulation of chromatin structure is
of crucial importance in these processes (Lappé and Landecker 2015).
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 25

This emerging knowledge makes clear that the task of the genome is to respond
to the environment that we are currently altering at a phenomenal rate, hence the
central dogma on which molecular genetics was founded has been exploded.
The majority of biologists today, whatever their specialty, accept that cellular
differentiation is governed by something akin to what the developmental biologist,
embryologist, and philosopher Conrad Waddington described in the mid-20 century
as the epigenetic landscape—a complex panorama of networks and feed-forward
loops that determine whether or not stem cells go into a lineage (1940). Many
scientists also agree that not only do these changes take place inside the body,
but that external environments interact directly with individual genomes, bringing
about epigenetic changes. Such changes are often reversible, while others apparently
are not.
As the philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller puts it, “The role of the genome
has been turned on its head, transforming it from an executive suite of directional
instructions to an exquisitely sensitive . . . system that enables cells to regulate gene
expression in response to their immediate environment” (2014, 2425). We live now
with a “reactive genome.” Furthermore, if genes are conceptualized as in effect
“real” entities, then they must be understood as composite rather than as unitary,
somewhat analogous to “the solar system, or a forest, or a cell culture,” as Barnes
and Dupré put it (2008, 53). A dynamic epigenetic network exists with a “life of its
own” that can be thought of as a context-dependent reactive system of which DNA
is just one part. Thus, contingency displaces determinism.
Gene regulation—above all how, and under what circumstances, genes are ex-
pressed and modulated is central to epigenetic investigation, and whole cells, rather
than DNA segments, are the primary targets of investigation. Effects of evolution-
ary, historical, and environmental variables on cellular activity, developmental pro-
cesses, health, and disease have, in theory, become central to the research endeavor
although, to date, this is by no means the case in most basic science investigations
(Lock 2015, 154).
Over the past decade, then, a major challenge has arisen, resulting in a profound
shakeup in knowledge about genes and how they function. The consolidation of
the field of molecular epigenetics has brought about a demotion of the gene, and
challenges the unexamined assumption held by many geneticists, researchers in
human development, certain social scientists, and members of the public, that genes
determine who we are.
Two decades ago, the neurobiologist Steven Rose argued that we must be con-
cerned above all else with the dynamics of life, that is, with process and with the
continuous interchange between organisms and their environments. Our “lifelines,”
he argued, constituted by life processes, generate our sense of self (1997). Rose in-
sists that we are defined by our histories at least as much as by our molecular
constituents, and individual histories comprise lived experience in environments
natural and social. This brings us fully into the world of environmental epigenetics.

The Embodiment of Trauma

An article published in the mid-1990s by the epigeneticist Michael Meaney and
colleagues has become iconic of the field of behavioral epigenetics. This research
26 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

made use of a model of maternal deprivation created in rats by removing young

pups from their mothers shortly after birth, thus terminating maternal licking and
grooming crucial to their development. The deprivation altered the expression of
genes that regulate behavioral and endocrine responses to stress, and hence, indi-
rectly, hippocampal synaptic development (Meaney et al. 1996). It was found that
these changes could be reversed if pups were returned in a matter of days to their
mothers. Furthermore, when the birth mother was a poor nurturer, placement of her
deprived pups with a surrogate mother who licks and grooms them enabled the pups
to flourish. Crucially, it was shown that pups or foster pups left to mature with low
licking mothers not only exhibited a chronically increased stress response but also
passed on this heightened sensitivity to stress to their own pups. Hence, variation
in maternal behavior results in biological pathways causal of significantly different
infant phenotypes that can persist into adulthood and are potentially transmitted to
the next generation.
A substantial body of work based largely on animal models, but increasingly
in humans, substantiates these findings and broadens their significance. Since the
1990s, literature has accrued showing a strong relationship between childhood mal-
treatment and negative mental health outcomes, ranging from aggressive and violent
behavior to suicide. Current investigations are gradually exposing how the “biolog-
ical embedding” of childhood maltreatment comes about. The overall conclusion
drawn from this research is that the “epigenome is responsive to developmental,
physiological and environmental cues,” resulting in so-called epigenetic marks, also
described as disregulation (Monk et al. 2012, 1361).
Given that epigenetic markers have been shown to play important roles in learn-
ing and memory that may be transmitted inter-generationally, these findings suggest
how the trauma associated with events such as colonization, slavery, war, displace-
ment, and abuse may be transmitted through time. They may well also bring about
insights in connection with resilience to such events.

Environmental Epigenetics
The concept of environment, having been rendered of little importance in hard-
line deterministic genetics, has taken on singular importance in the subfield of
“environmental epigenetics”—a term used to gloss investigations into the lasting
effects of toxic exposures, malnutrition, abuse, social isolation, and other troubling
events on the mental health and behavior of individuals and their families.
Disagreements among practitioners in this subdiscipline are evident, and the
presumption that one or more teams of researchers represent the entire field would be
a mistake but, even so, findings in environmental epigenetics are of singular interest
to social scientists and psychologists. Debates about the locus of responsibility for
malaise and disease, policymaking relating to human well-being, and discussion
about social justice in connection with health care are increasingly taking epigenetic
findings into consideration, a move that is beginning to have wide-ranging social
and political consequences.
We must now ask to what, precisely, is the genome reactive? This forces us to
consider the concept of “environment.” Epigeneticists usually understand environ-
ment as, in theory, both external and internal to the body. In practice, however,
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 27

the majority “miniaturize” environment to achieve standardization in their research

projects.
The field known as the developmental origins of health and disease focuses on
research into the fetal environment. Research projects have shown repeatedly that
lasting effects on infant development associated with psychopathology later in life
are initiated by what is described as “maternal stress, anxiety, and depression.”
A review of nearly 200 articles based on research with animals supplemented by
a small amount of human research concluded: “There is emerging evidence that
the placenta is highly susceptible to maternal distress and is a target of epigenetic
dysregulation” (Monk et al. 2012, 1361). Added to which another well-known
body of research strongly suggests that postnatal maternal care induces further
disruptions (Jawahar et al. 2015).
Such findings are based on correlations, although researchers are beginning to
map segments of pathways whereby epigenetic marks are linked directly with behav-
ioral outcomes pre- and postnatally. In other words, the environment in this type of
research is effectively scaled down to molecular activity inside a single organ of the
body—the uterus and its fetal contents: Maternal bodies have become “epigenetic
vectors,” in Sarah Richardson’s words, and a mother-to-be who is anxious and/or
depressed is the source of this so-called dysregulation (Richardson 2015).
As epigenetic changes in utero become increasingly understood as being involved
in so-called normal neurodevelopment and brain structure, as well as being im-
plicated in medical conditions ranging from autism to diabetes, the womb and its
environments will be monitored ever more closely. A warning sent out to its mem-
bers by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011 cautioned about the harm
caused to children by toxic stress that will result in damaged “biological memo-
ries,” added to which is the well-substantiated evidence that poor diet, smoking,
and excess alcohol consumption in pregnant mothers negatively affects the fetus.
Medical and social support for childbearing women is to be lauded but, as the an-
thropologist Ilina Singh has written, the poverty and often-violent living conditions
of many women are liable to be ignored, and attention lights almost exclusively on
the pregnant belly and its contents (Singh 2012).
The contribution of the environment writ large to human development, health,
and illness is not denied by epigeneticists. But a real danger exists that miniaturiza-
tion, while it exposes what has taken place at the molecular level with respect to
epigenetic marks, supposedly as a result of the behavior of pregnant women, misses
most of the story. Focusing exclusively on proximate variables, scientifically valu-
able though they are, has grave limitations, as the following discussion illustrates.

Poverty and Neurofunctioning

The behavior of children and their cognitive abilities have long been associated
through correlation studies with socioeconomic status, particularly for those who
are among the very poor. Reasons given for these findings range from stressful
home environments, poor nutrition, lack of access to good education, and exposure
to industrial chemicals, notably lead. Over the past decade, research on this problem
has moved in an important new direction in which neuroimaging is used to monitor
brain development closely.
28 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Charles Nelson, a cognitive neuroscientist, formerly worked in Bangladesh and

reported that the level of poverty is “mind-boggling” (Hamzelou 2016). A family of
five often lives in a single room; kitchens and bathrooms are communal for an entire
compound; latrines flood during the monsoon; people cook with wood or coal; and
the pollution is, as Nelson puts it, “unbelievable.” Dirt blows everywhere from
unpaved tracks and the sewers are open. Nelson states emphatically: “The polite
way to put it is that stool gets into everything, which spreads disease. Virtually all
the children have chronic diarrhea, which makes them malnourished and up to 30%
of the mothers are visibly depressed.” High levels of domestic violence exist. Nelson
said he and his team had never seen anything like this anywhere else in the world.
He made a rule that his team must not cry in front of the children. Nelson argues
that the deprivation the children were suffering from the moment of birth on was
extreme. They witnessed babies left to cry in their sodden cribs and were told that
they were rarely moved or held for a whole year or more (Hamzelou 2016).
A team headed up by Kimberley Noble, professor of neuroscience at Columbia
University, and Elizabeth Sowell, from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, undertook
a singularly important neuroimaging project that commenced 15 years ago involving
over 1,000 children and adolescents (Balter 2015). They found that children from the
lowest income bracket in the United States, less than $25,000 a year, had up to 6%
less surface area in their brains than did children from wealthier families, regardless
of their ethnicity. The parts of the brain involved with language development and
decision-making skills were particularly affected. Their conclusion was that poverty
has the potential to hijack normal brain development. This research did not account
for cause and effect and must be duplicated. Ideally, a randomized trial should be
conducted, but clearly the ethical concerns would be enormous.
In the interim, Noble and Sowell decided to give small cash transfers to families
rather than counseling or offering childcare (Balter 2015). Projects such as this are
related to the idea currently fermenting in WHO that families everywhere should
have at least a universal basic income. Noble and Sowell will be scanning the brains
of those children in families who receive these income supplements to track the
effects, if any, on brain development.

Eliminating Stunting
Along a similar line, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, a physi-
cian/anthropologist, recently announced that he will “name and shame” countries
that fail to tackle the malnourishment and poor growth of their children. Kim is
clear that “stunting” (i.e., children with height considerably below the average for
their age), is not only a humanitarian disaster but also an economic one. His posi-
tion, similar to that of Charles Nelson, is that fetal malnutrition during pregnancy
and early childhood leads to serious neurological deficits, particularly in toxic envi-
ronments, where recurrent infections are common, most particularly when infants
are given little or no stimulation. Kim stresses that stunted women frequently give
birth to children who become stunted, with the result that: “Inequality is baked
into the brains of 25% of all children before the age of 5” (Bosely 2016). Crude
estimates suggest that the amount of stunted children in India approaches 40%,
in Pakistan 45%, and in the DRC 43%; hence, Kim insists: “the most important
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 29

infrastructure we can invest in is grey matter” (Bosely 2016). He seeks to rid the
world of stunted children by 2030 by donating conditional cash transfers to mothers
of stunted children, thus enabling them to feed and stimulate their children through
play. It is reported that a trial in Peru worked well.
Jim Kim plans to repeatedly bring up “this stain in our collective conscience”
at world economic forums in the coming years and did so in January of 2019. His
project, focused on mothers and their offspring, is an important intervention, as is
that of Noble and Sowell, but key socio–political variables, other than income, have
been set to one side including, in the case of Peru, distribution of land resources,
effects of climate change, increasingly toxic environments, and the violence and
counterinsurgency so evident in that country, ably documented by the anthropolo-
gist Kimberley Theidon (2013).
These preceding illustrations highlight unexamined assumptions about deficits in
maternal behavior due to chronic stress or alternatively due to in-bred deficiencies
of mothers. But clearly the situation is more complex than this, although chronic
stress is more often than not in play. In 2004, epidemiologists Nancy and George
Davey-Smith cited the classic 1854 Engels text on this matter: “common observation
shows how the sufferings of childhood are indelibly stamped on the adults” (Kreiger
and Davey-Smith 2004, 2). In other words, the effects of extreme poverty have
generational histories. Social epidemiologists have made such arguments repeatedly
over the years; their quantitative research has shown robustly the effects of poverty,
inequality, social discrimination, lack of social support, and racism on the health
of individuals and populations. See, for example, the work of Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett (2009). These findings demand that bodies be situated in context
to account for the vagaries of disease.
Krieger has also pointed out that certain researchers have hypothesized that ge-
netics, rather than social variables, account for racial/ethnic disparities in infant
mortality. She is highly critical of this argument for two reasons: First, genetic vari-
ability is overwhelmingly greater within, rather than among, so-called racial groups;
second, the many changes related to the health of immigrant populations have taken
place too quickly to be accounted for by genetics (Kreiger and Rowley 1992). Krieger
argues that what must be investigated is “how people, as both biological organisms
and social beings, literally embody—via processes that necessarily involve gene
expression—the dynamic, social, material and ecological contexts into which we
are born, develop, interact, and endeavor to live meaningful lives” (Krieger 2006,
3) approach raises questions about what conditions should be held accountable for
producing health inequities, and she and her colleagues have worked to demon-
strate this specifically with respect to the subjective experience of racism during
pregnancy.
Regardless of their socioeconomic level, African Americans who reported expe-
riences of racial discrimination in three or more situations while pregnant proved
to be at more than three times the risk for preterm delivery as compared to women
who reported no experience of racism (Mustillo et al. 2004). Krieger’s conclusion
from this finding and others is that “biologic expressions of race relations” appear
to be at work in producing low birth weight, and she cautions that human biology
should never be studied in the abstract; the milieu in which people live must be
given due attention. This particular example makes strikingly clear that individual
30 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

women cannot be held fully accountable for the outcomes of their pregnancies. The
manner in which racism “gets under the skin” is a striking example of how social
and political forces transform biology. Furthermore, a persistent commitment to
the assumption of a universal biology, coupled with an unexamined assumption of
genetically driven causality, means that observed biological differences in health and
illness are all too often accounted for on the basis of genetics alone, and continue
to be attributed by many researchers to racial differences.
Findings into the so-called Glasgow Effect highlight dramatic class differences
in disease incidence and life expectancy within that one city, among many. Epige-
netic changes are also associated with these findings (Ash 2014). In summary, we
begin to see how behavioral epigenetic research, coupled with epidemiology and
ethnography, can be used to substantiate deeper and broader accounts of malaise
causation, in which the contribution made by historical, social, and political vari-
ables are made all too apparent, and not merely the poverty of individual families.
This is not to deny, of course, the huge impact that extreme poverty makes on infant
development.

Mismatch Theory
The next illustration, on a broader scale, highlights increasing pernicious Anthro-
pocenic changes involving differential epigenetic effects in certain vulnerable popu-
lations. At the present time, globally, nearly 2 million children die from malnutrition
each year, a number that is rising. Research has revealed remarkable findings about
biological differences between infants who suffer from marasmus (severe malnour-
ishment) as opposed to those who have kwashiorkor (severe protein-energy malnu-
trition with edema) (Forrester et al. 2012). An investigation has been carried out
in Jamaica that commenced in 1962 and continued for 30 years. During this time,
over 1,100 infants with severe, acute malnutrition were admitted to University Hos-
pital, Kingston, Jamaica. It was hypothesized that when the maternal diet is low
in nutrition, fetal metabolism in utero in effect anticipates a postnatal environment
of scarcity, and low birth weights are evidence of this. The research in Jamaica
showed that those infants diagnosed with kwashiorkor had considerably higher
birth weights than did infants diagnosed with marasmus, but more often die very
young, whereas those with marasmus endure greater wasting of flesh, but many
survive to adulthood.
These researchers characterized marasmus as “metabolically thrifty” and kwash-
iorkor as “metabolically profligate” and concluded that mechanisms associated
with physiological “plasticity” are operative Their findings are assumed to be direct
evidence of “anticipatory responses” in utero, and the distinctly different pheno-
types of children with kwashiorkor and marasmus are interpreted as endpoints of
environmentally driven epigenetic activity on different genotypes (Forrester et al.
2012).
This striking example of nutritional epigenetics is just one in a field attract-
ing a great deal of attention because it is hoped that it will throw light on the
so-called obesity epidemic currently affecting many countries, whether affluent or
not. Based on a hypothesis known as the “mismatch pathway,” it is posited that
“evolved adaptive responses of a developing organism to anticipate future adverse
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 31

environments” can have maladaptive consequences if the environment is not what

has been “biologically anticipated” (Gluckman and Hanson 2008). In other words,
the bodies of fetuses and young infants exposed to nutritionally deprived diets may
be epigenetically prepared to deal with deprivation, but this can cause havoc in
energy-rich environments resulting in obesity, especially if they are overfed.
Given the inordinate rate of human displacement across the globe, it may well be
that mismatches will become increasingly evident between environments to which
human populations are biologically adapted and the lived environments in which
millions of people are now forced to exist. The following examples focus on just two
of the ubiquitous epigenetic effects on local populations created by human-made
toxic environments.

Permeable Bodies and Toxic Living

For a decade or more, researchers have been working to elucidate the effects on
neurodevelopment of exposure to neurotoxins in utero and early life. Recent work
has highlighted epigenetic effects and an apparent intergenerational aftermath of
such exposures. A 2006 review of an array of 201 neurotoxins, ranging from arsenic
to benzene and PCBs, concluded that exposure to hundreds of industrial chemicals
are potentially damaging to the developing brains of children worldwide, although
it is noted that both timing and the amount of exposure are significant (Grandjean
and Landrigan 2006). A 2011 review notes that every year more than 13 million
deaths are due to environmental pollutants. Evidence links environmental pollutants
to epigenetic marks associated with a range of disease endpoints. It is emphasized
that many of these changes have been shown to be reversible and hence preventive
measures are feasible (Senut et al. 2012). Lead is the most closely researched toxin
to date; it has been shown repeatedly that there is no safe level of exposure during
the early years of human development and that it causes many epigenetic effects.
Decreased brain volume is recognized as lead-related brain atrophy and is most
pronounced in males. Research has also shown negative effects of lead exposure on
language function (Yuan et al. 2009).
Markowitz and Rosner (2013) graphically describe the ongoing lead paint scan-
dal in the United States that has steadily unfolded for more than a half-century.
Over the years, millions of children have been exposed in their homes to potential
lead poisoning, although reliable numbers are not available. It is estimated that
today over 500,000 children between one and five years old have lead levels above
that which policymakers currently regard as a safe level. Reminiscent of the infa-
mous Tuskegee experiments conducted on African Americans, 100 children, mostly
African American, some less than a year old, living in poor family dwellings where
lead paint had been used, have been systematically studied for the effects of lead ex-
posure on their development. A judge who presided over a lawsuit described these
young research subjects as “canaries in the coal-mine” (Markowitz and Rosner
(2013).
It has been shown that lead released from a woman’s bones during pregnancy can
increase the risk for preterm deliveries and low birth weight and, further, affect gene
expression in infants involving changes to DNA methylation that may well have life-
long effects. One researcher is quoted as stating: “lead exposure, rather than a poor
32 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

social environment, is a key contributor to . . . subsequent cognitive and behav-

ior problems” (Radiological Society of America 2009). Such a claim prioritizes one
variable over another, causing a distortion. It is highly likely that lead exposure does
irreparable harm to all humans, but individuals who are at the greatest risk of being
exposed are almost exclusively economically deprived. In 2014, in the impoverished
city of Flint, Michigan, with a population of 100,000, nearly 60% of whom are
African American, a water crisis erupted. It became clear that between 6,000 and
12,000 children had been extensively exposed to lead contamination when, to save
money, the Flint water source was changed from a safe source to one involving use
of aging pipes linked to the Flint River that leached lead into the water supply. See
an extensive report in Wikipedia titled “Flint water crisis” for a thorough account
about this incident of lead poisoning that caused a federal state of emergency to be
declared.
Thanks to the intrepid battle fought by Rachel Carson, DDT was banned in the
early 1970s, first in the United States and then worldwide, although it continues to
be used in certain malarial regions. And use of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) is
banned or severely restricted in most countries today, but about 10% of the PCBs
produced since the late 1920s remain in the environment today. They are released
into the environment primarily from incinerators and build up in the fatty tissues of
animals living in water or on land and are passed along the food chain to humans.
Michelle Murphy writes with heart-breaking clarity about this with respect to the
massive contamination of the Great Lakes that she describes as “chemical violence”
(Murphy 2017).
Dioxins are found throughout the world and accumulate in the food chain,
mainly in the fatty tissue of animals. They are highly toxic and cause reproductive
and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones,
and cause cancer. Dioxin enters the environment primarily from incinerators; of the
419 types of dioxin-related compounds, 30 have significant toxicity.
An article in The New Yorker about Tyrone Hayes, a biologist working at the
University of California, Berkeley, told a very disturbing story about one of the
world’s largest agribusinesses, Syngenta (Aviv 2014). Sales of the herbicide atrazine
made by Syngenta are estimated to be around $300 million a year. Hayes’s research
findings about the toxic effects of atrazine resulted in what appears to be a systematic
effort on the part of Syngenta to debunk his findings and destroy his career. And the
American chemical industry attempted to quash the findings of biologist Frederick
vom Saal on bisphenol A. And the present government in Canada refuses to legislate
effectively against asbestos, although it is the top workplace killer. Clearly, efforts
to rid the environment of such chemicals are fraught with dangers other than their
toxicity. Rachel Carson encountered great opposition to her work 50 years ago, and
it seems that little has changed.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Toxins

An illustration of toxic local biologies is furnished by the mercury contaminated
Grassy Narrows’ Wabigoon River system in Ontario, Canada. The government
claims that defilement of the river stopped 40 years ago when the paper mill was
forcibly shut down, after dumping about 9,000 k of mercury into the downstream
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 33

river. Today, mercury levels in the fish near Grassy Narrows are 15 times the
safe consumption limit, and 40 times the limit for children, pregnant women, and
women of child-bearing age (Mosa and Duffin 2016). The Grassy Narrows people
have fought for 45 years for a clean-up of the river, but the Ontario Minister of
Environment reiterated in May 2016 that there is no need for this. Further pressure
apparently made the government temporarily change its position, but in late 2016,
once again, the provincial government backed down, claiming a lack of funding,
despite an official report by mercury experts stating that the river remains badly
contaminated (Mosa and Duffin 2016). Two generations of people from Grassy
Narrows and Wabaseemoong First Nations today exhibit symptoms of mercury
poisoning, including loss of muscle coordination, numbness in the hands and feet,
hearing loss, speech damage, and tunnel vision. Fetuses are particularly vulner-
able to cognitive damage. Extreme cases result in paralysis, insanity, coma, and
death.
In the mid-1950s, mercury poisoning was detected in Japan. First, the local cats
appeared to go crazy and some “{committed suicide” by “falling” into the sea.
Thereafter, humans started to report numbness in their extremities, tremors, and
difficulty walking; some appeared to be seriously mentally ill. By 1959, it had been
established that mercury poisoning was causing the symptoms, and the condition
was labeled Minamata disease, drawing on the name of the fishing village where it
had first occurred. A large petrochemical plant in Minamata, Chisso corporation,
was immediately suspect. Chisso denied involvement, even though it was clear that
an estimated 27 tons of mercury compounds was present in Minamata Bay. Protests
began in 1959, but it was 1968 before the company finally stopped dumping. Close
to 3,000 people contracted Minamata disease, more than half of whom have died
(Mosa and Duffin 2016). Japanese scientists, experts in mercury poisoning, have
been summoned to Grassy Narrows and state that up to 90% of the people show
signs of mercury poisoning that may well be inter-generationally transmitted (Mosa
and Duffin 2016).
Further examples of locally created toxic biologies include the setting of fires to
numerous oil wells and a sulphur plant in Mosul, Iraq, by Islamic State supporters,
resulting in several deaths and causing hundreds to be exposed to toxic fumes, the
effects of which are likely to cause lasting damage and, once infants are born to
women presently pregnant, are likely to affect a second generation. Chlorine gas
attacks by government troops in Syria are equally devastating and may well have
intergenerational consequences.

The Legacy of Colonialism

It is evident that to come to grips with changes brought about by human activity
on Earth we must take history into account, long before the newly declared era.
This final illustration is a greatly truncated narrative about the experience of First
Nations in Canada.
Canada is home to roughly 1.2 million individuals who endorsed the category
Aboriginal in a recent Canadian census. Well over half live in communities that
continue to contend with the devastating legacy of settler colonialism, including
entrenched poverty, toxic and septic environments, and invidious discrimination,
34 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

manifested as so-called mental health problems including substance dependence,

depression, violence, and extraordinarily high rates of suicide, especially among
young people, estimated in some Inuit communities to be six times the rate in other
parts of Canada (Kral 2012).
Mental health professionals and individuals living in First Nations communities
explicitly associate these remarkably high rates of pathology with toxic exposures.
In addition to tons of plastic, residues of dioxin and PCBs drift toward the Arctic
and accumulate there, making it one of the most contaminated places on Earth. The
body fat of seals, whales, and walruses hunted for food is highly contaminated, as
is the breast milk of many Inuit women. A politically active Inuit grandmother said:
“When women have to think twice about breast feeding their babies, surely that
must be a wake-up call to the world” (Johansen 2003). The effects of PCBs, dioxin,
and other toxins in the Arctic are more devastating than elsewhere. The situation
is exacerbated because the cost of store-bought food is beyond the reach of many
Arctic residents.
But First Nation leaders are also acutely aware that colonization of their lands
that commenced five centuries ago has had an enduring effect. Independently, men-
tal health professionals and individuals living in First Nations communities have
consistently associated these high rates of pathology with colonization. The concept
“historical trauma” has been adopted to call attention to the collective, cumulative,
and intergenerational psychosocial effects resultant from past colonial subjugation
that persist in abated form to the present (Niezen 2013). Among the early traves-
ties was the introduction of infectious disease. TB has been documented as present
throughout the Americas before the arrival of the colonists, and numerous other in-
fectious diseases were also present, but populations were isolated so epidemics could
not take hold. With colonization, population density increased considerably along
the major trails created for the transportation of goods for exportation, facilitating
the rapid spread of disease. Measles, to which Indigenous peoples had never been
exposed, was transmitted and proved deadly, but the claim has long been made that
smallpox was deliberately spread by means of contaminated blankets distributed ex-
plicitly to assist with “the extirpation of this execrable race” (Haida Laas 2009, 4).
This history is contested (Houston and Houston 2000), but the cumulative evidence
is impressive.
Amherst College in Massachusetts recently disposed of its century-long icon,
Lord Jeffrey Amherst, together with its rouse song that calls on his name. Among
other highly questionable activities, Amherst was known as a perpetrator of “germ
warfare and implicit suicide against the Woodland Indian tribes of the eastern Great
Lakes” (Fernandez and Herzog 2014, 8). He is on record as stating that Indians
“are more nearly allied to the Brute than to Human Creation,” and he expressed
the hope that they be “extirpated root and branch” (Long 1933, 186). Amherst had
blankets infected with the smallpox virus handed out to Indigenous populations
(Haida Lass 2009, 15).
The mortality rate from infectious disease between the years of 1700 and 1900
was extraordinarily high. Smallpox, measles, dysentery, TB, influenza, and other
communicable diseases wiped out many thousands of people. The Haida Nation,
among whom Franz Boas worked, went from an estimated population of 20,000
prior to 1770 to less than 600 by the end of the 19th century. The effects of
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 35

population decimation are rarely fully appreciated: Given the climate and an econ-
omy based on hunting, the ability of those who survived to procure sufficient food
was effectively destroyed, hence individuals “with the dubious good fortune of living
through the initial sickness die of hunger” (Daschuk 2013, 12).
Population decimation was followed by extensive efforts to “whiten the Indians,”
among which was the establishment of residential schools created expressly to “kill
the Indian and save the child.” These schools, over 130 in all, mostly run by religious
orders, were found from Alert Bay in British Columbia to Nova Scotia in eastern
Canada, and many were also in what is today known as Nunavut, a province
founded in 1999 where the population is approximately 85% Inuit, that has an
Inuit-headed government, and the principle language of which is Inuktituk.
School administrators, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and
agents attached to the despised Bureau of Indian Affairs, rounded up young chil-
dren to be sent great distances from their homes in order to be housed in institutions
where they were not permitted to speak their own languages or participate in any-
thing regarded as cultural practice (Carr 2013). Today, the residential schools, the
last of which were closed only in the 1990s, are regarded among First Nations
and Inuit communities as the primary source of their current malaise. As part of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that met from 2008 until
2015, it came to light that repeated sexual abuse took place in these schools, one
of which was characterized by an investigating Supreme Court justice as practic-
ing “institutionalized paedophilia” (Carr 2013, 19). Systematic nutritional medical
experimentation was also carried out on some of the students, resulting in malnu-
trition in many and death for many more. TB was rampant and few attempts were
made to curb it (Stevenson 2014). In one notorious school, the death rate of children
was apparently 75% during the first 16 years of the school’s operation (Carr 2013;
Neizen 2013). The majority of individuals who grew up in these conditions, now
middle aged and older, have until very recently been unwilling to ruminate about
their younger lives but freely admit to being unable to adequately parent their own
children.
Despite major changes for the better in recent years, racism and discrimination
against First Nations continue to be blatantly evident. Shocking poverty persists
on many reservations where 40% of First Nations live, a good number of which
have no running water and where serious toxic contamination is evident. Schools
on reservations are poorly provided for compared with those schools elsewhere in
Canada, and the education gap has increased in recent years between First Nations
children and other Canadians (Friesen 2013). Increasing concern about this situation
is being voiced in the media where it has been claimed that Ottawa continues to fail
Indigenous children (Picard 2017, 13). Alcohol and drug abuse and violence against
First Nations women and children is extraordinarily high. Indigenous people make
up less than 5% of the Canadian population but they comprise 26.4% of federal
prison inmates. Among female prisoners, 37.6% are Indigenous, and those with
mental health problems are routinely incarcerated in prisons without facilities to
care for them (Stone 2017). Moreover, no First Nations persons have ever been
selected for potential appointment as a jury member (Friesen 2018).
Two points must be noted: First, not all reservations exhibit high rates of illness
and suicide, and the majority of First Nation individuals live today in metropolitan
36 Medical Anthropology Quarterly

areas where some fare well but many do not. Some survivors of residential schools
report that they enjoyed school, among them individuals who became devout
Christians—a conversion that apparently assisted in their survival. Clearly, ac-
counting for differences among First Nations are of the utmost importance when
attempting to explain malaise. Second, ongoing land claim settlements have im-
proved the lot of a few First Nation communities, but settlements have not been
made with the majority, among them, notably, those where oil reserves have been
found. And, third, the establishment of healing programs and suicide prevention
gatherings conducted by First Nations themselves that make use of both Indigenous
healing practices and biomedicine are governmentally supported in certain commu-
nities. These programs are regarded as a positive form of empowerment by many
First Nations leaders but are not as yet broadly entrenched (Niezen 2013; White
and Jodoin 2007).
The former prime minister of Canada delivered a formal apology in 2008 to
all First Nations. However, since then, the budgets of 12 government-funded pro-
grams have been cut, and nine of these programs are now closed (Bennett 2015).
Suicide rates, substance abuse, and the disappearance and death of young First Na-
tion women continue to be extraordinarily high (Galloway 2017; Leblanc 2014).
Twenty-five percent of homicide victims in Canada are from First Nations, who
make up 4.3% of the total population, and one in four is imprisoned.
Recent reports make clear that First Nations women undergo extraordinary
abuse at the hands of provincial police, notably in the province of Saskatchewan, a
situation documented by Human Rights Watch (The Globe and Mail 2017). Sexual
abuse and victimization of young Indigenous people continues at a shockingly high
rate, much of it carried out by foster parents and/or fostered children preying on
younger ones. Two in every three victims of sexual abuse in Canada are Indigenous
girls (Picard 2017). These children have usually been removed from their homes due
to what is described by social workers as neglect, while the impoverished environ-
ments in which their families live remain unaddressed. There are more Indigenous
children in state care today than there were in residential schools at their peak (Pi-
card 2017). Despite claims by Canada’s current “sunny” liberal government that it
is addressing First Nation problems, the list of missing and murdered adolescents
grows ever longer as investigations intensify. This sad state of affairs is not confined
to the young. In 2016, the highly acclaimed Indigenous artist Annie Pootoogook,
who exhibited internationally, was found drowned in the Ottawa River. The cause
of death, which has never been definitively established, sent shock waves across
Canada.
If the concept of historical trauma is to be taken seriously, then a great deal more
than an apology and a reconciliation commission is needed to counter the crudely
racist attempts to obliterate the Indian—the effects of which are being played out
among 3rd- and 4th-post-colonial generations.
It is not known if inter-generational transmission of DNA modifications has
contributed to this situation. But it is likely that at the very least such modifications
are re-created anew in each generation, given the extent of the involved trauma
and toxicity. Understandably, there has been reluctance on the part of many First
Nation individuals to donate tissue for analysis, although this is changing.
 Toxic Environments and the Psyche 37

Summary
In this article, I have set out a brief account of the rise of epigenetics and argued that it
may well furnish a gateway for a paradigm shift in molecular biology. Consideration
of epigenetics in action lays bare some of the lasting effects of changes on human
bodies, including mental functioning, but what has been left largely implicit in this
article due to space limitation is the extent of the destruction caused by massive,
ever-increasing, human inequality. Half the world’s wealth lies in the hands of
1% of the world’s population, and it is primarily this 1% who are creating the
environmental destruction that is wreaking havoc on the well-being of everyone
else, although those who are impoverished and marginalized are disproportionately
affected. Rigorous bio–ethnography is called for with respect to this most pernicious
form of toxic environment—that of inequality.
Acknowledgments. A visit to the Haida Museum, Saahlinda Naay, at Kay Llna-
gaay on the island of Haida Gwaii, which included discussions with several local
woodcarvers, greatly facilitated the writing of the final section of the above arti-
cle. In addition, the insightful comments of an anonymous reviewer proved to be
invaluable.

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