One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to help change the way people think about environmental problems. In 2019, I felt like mainstream media was saturated with stories about individual consumer action, while the systemic forces driving ecological destruction and toxicity were barely scrutinized. So I made it my mission to try and shift the conversation away from what we consume, and toward who forces it down our throats. In many ways, I think that mission’s been successful. More than 140,000 of you are here, after all.
But over these last seven years, I’ve also felt like Americans have become more and more obsessed with individualism. And I get it. When everything feels out of control, one of the easiest ways to regain that control is to focus on yourself. And in a government controlled by Big Oil puppets, it can even feel like the most practical path. If no one in power is going to act, maybe your choices can ripple outward. Maybe biking to work changes infrastructure. Maybe product boycotts shift markets.
Still, I’ve found that content about individual consumer action often annoys me. I cringe when I watch or read something that treats personal purity as the goal, focusing only on what to buy, what to throw away, or how to “detox your life.” When the most visible environmental “solutions” are the ones that ask the least of the people who do the most to perpetuate the problem, it makes me want to walk into the rapidly acidifying ocean.
This is the mindset I had walking into The Plastic Detox, the new Netflix documentary about how the chemicals in modern plastics are harming our health. The film was marketed to me as a story about six couples struggling with infertility as th
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