It’s In Our Blood: Communities vs Forever Chemicals
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are chemicals in your blood that weren't there fifty years ago. They are in the products you use, the water you drink, the food you eat - and for years, almost nobody was told the full truth about the risk.
This week, Christiana speaks to two women who found contamination in their communities and refused to accept it.
Emily Donovan and Sarah Alexander have spent decades fighting for greater regulation of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’. Through their work, and the work of many others, some progress has been made on regulation, and on supporting the communities most impacted. But this story is far from over. Because these chemicals don't break down. They move through soil, through water, through the food chain and through us. And the impacts on our health and on our ecosystems are only beginning to come to light.So, with environmental protection rollbacks at the US federal level, can progress endure? And can community action take on the big companies and the big money behind this scandal?
This episode is about what happens when institutions fail, what accountability actually requires, and why the clean energy transition is incomplete if we trade one toxic system for another.
🔗Follow the work of Clean Cape Fear
🔗Learn more about the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
🎬 Watch Dark Waters (2019) - the film that brought the DuPont PFOA story to a wider audience
📋Read the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Our communities have been contaminated. Our soil and our water have been contaminated. It's a highly unregulated, highly unfair. It is a justice issue. |
| 0:11.0 | There were no state guidelines. There were no federal guidelines. These chemicals could exist in our tap water and our local leaders and our water utilities could look us in the face and tell us that the water met or exceeded all state and federal guidelines because there were no state and federal guidelines. |
| 0:30.2 | Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Tom Rivikarnikhanik. I'm Christiana Fierrez and here we. Second week in a row with No Dickinson. |
| 0:39.4 | If anyone sees him, please send us a note on social media. |
| 0:42.5 | Where in the world is Waldo Dickinson? |
| 0:45.7 | Where is full? |
| 0:46.6 | I promise we'll find him. |
| 0:47.7 | Nothing bad has happened to him. |
| 0:49.1 | And in his absence, we are going to talk about something slightly different. |
| 0:52.6 | We're going to look at what happens when toxic forever chemicals seep into the most basic systems of life. And we hear from two women |
| 0:59.2 | who've led the charge to protect their own communities. Thanks for being here. So today we're going |
| 1:04.8 | to look at a form of pollution that is often invisible. Of course, greenhouse gases are invisible, |
| 1:09.1 | but this is a different kind of pollution, and we're discovering it's everywhere. |
| 1:12.6 | Tom, do you know that I have, have I shared with you that I've often wanted to paint every molecule of greenhouse gases? |
| 1:20.6 | Like literally, paint them, you know, like green, blue, pink, you know, purple, so that we can see them. |
| 1:29.0 | This is the problem with so many forms of pollution that we can't see it. |
| 1:32.9 | And just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. |
| 1:35.8 | I'm very frustrated with that fact that pollution is so often invisible and is invisible in this case also forever chemicals. |
| 1:47.1 | Forever chemicals, which we're going to get into. |
| 1:48.6 | I'm just going to do a quick shout out to my good friend Anthony Turner, who runs an organization |
| 1:51.9 | called Carbon Visuals, who has been on this trip for 20 years. |
| 1:55.5 | So anyone who wants to explore that point you just made, have a look at carbon visuals. |
... |
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