[Part One] [Part Two]
by Ian Angus
“The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible.” — Rachel Carson[1]
One of capitalism’s fundamental characteristics is a drive to innovate, to find new ways to generate profits and accumulate capital, as quickly as possible. The system’s defenders typically present that as an unalloyed good, but different is not the same as better. All too often those profitable new products have deadly side effects that are only discovered (or only made public) after they are in widespread use.
As the Marxist philosopher István Mészáros wrote, capitalism is “capable of adopting corrective measures only after the damage has been done; and even such corrective measures can only be introduced in a most limited form.”[2]
This problem has accelerated in the 20th and 21st centuries, as industrial laboratories have developed ever more chemicals, compounds and products that have no natural counterparts. In most cases, we have no idea what damage they might do in the short- or long-term, or in combination with other substances, because they’ve never been properly tested, if they’ve been tested at all.
How many might there be? We don’t know. There is no international database that lists all chemicals currently in commercial production, or what they all do — and the various national databases have different requirements for registration and for the information provided.
A study published in 2020 found over 350,000 different chemicals and mixtures of chemicals in 22 government inventories in 19 North American and European countries. Of those, the chemical identities of over 50,000 registered substances are claimed as trade secrets, and in another 70,000 cases the information provided was insufficient.[3] So we know nothing about the possible effects of more than a third of the commercially registered chemicals!
Those figures don’t include Asia, where total chemical production is 2.5 times larger than in Europe and North America.[4] Even allowing for a great deal of duplication between regions, there might be over half a million different chemicals in active production, and there is little or no public information about most of them.
How likely is it that those numbers include chemicals that are dangerous to life? It’s absolutely certain.
In the first place, the registered chemicals include thousands of pesticides, which by definition kill living organisms. In the United States alone, about 390,000 kilograms of pesticides are applied to farms, lawns and elsewhere, every year.[5] You don’t have to actually use them to be at risk: in 2023, the US Department of Agriculture found pesticide residues in over 60 percent of the food samples it tested.[6] The UN estimates that 200,000 people die from acute pesticide poisoning every year, almost all of them in poor countries where regulation is weak or non-existent.[7]
Pesticides aren’t the only registered chemical killers. In the U.S., the Toxic Substances Control Act requires industries to register any substances they make, distribute, use or dispose of that “may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” In 2025 the registry included 86,862 such substances of which half— 42,578 substances—are known to be currently in use by U.S. companies.”[8]
That’s far too many to track, but at least those substances have been registered. Even more frightening is an unofficial category that may be much larger: substances that present an unknown or deliberately concealed risk of injury to health or the environment.
[1] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Hughton Mifflin, 1962), 6.
[2] István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (Monthly Review Press, 2008), 383.
[3] Zhanyun Wang et al., “Toward a Global Understanding of Chemical Pollution: A First Comprehensive Analysis of National and Regional Chemical Inventories,” Environmental Science and Technology, January 2020.
[4] UNEP, Global Chemicals Outlook II: From Legacies to Innovative Solutions, United Nations Environment Program, 2019.
[5] Pesticides, US Geological Survey, https://www.usgs.gov/centers/ohio-kentucky-indiana-water-science-center/science/pesticides.
[6] USDA, Pesticide Data Program Annual Summary Calendar Year 2023, U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service, 2024, 19.
[7] Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, UN Human Rights Council, 2017.
[8] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Now Available: Latest Update to the TSCA Inventory,” press release, August 14, 2025.
This article is a great description of selfish behavior – people benefitting themselves at the expense of others in their own society. This isn’t just a capitalist problem – feudalist, socialist, and communist nations have all had profound selfishness, were a few very wealthy and powerful people profit at others’ expense in their own nation.
In any nation where a few people choose the law and choose how it’s enforced, and rest submissively obey, you wind up with this deep selfishness, as well as corruption, greed, discrimination, child abuse, and many other problems. There are healthy nations without these troubles, where trust, sharing and solidarity are normal because qualities like integrity and generosity are widespread and normal too. This is how humans normally live when there is no ruling class. In other words, this is what freedom looks like. I got to spend time with one such healthy nation in 2015 and it was utterly magical.
The free-to-download book The Deepest Revolution explores how healthy nations can live without corruption and greed indefinitely, and offers lessons to help the rest of us free ourselves from the endless selfishness we’re stuck with. I believe healthy nations point the way to deal with all our worst societal troubles, very much including the profitable poisons in this article.