Mercury is toxic. It is delivered most potently as methyl mercury (also called organic mercury). The reason is this…

Methyl mercury is readily absorbed in the digestive tract. Once in the body, it happily combines with the amino acid cysteine. The body treats this new molecule as if it were the essential amino acid methionine, making it possible for mercury to be delivered to any tissue in the body and most importantly to cross the blood brain barrier.

Methyl mercury is heavily implicated not only in a wide variety of neurological damage, but cardiovascular, immune, kidney, and liver damage as well.

Our exposure to methyl mercury is created in two ways.

In nature, anaerobic bacteria (that is, bacteria that do not use oxygen for energy production) convert inorganic mercury into methyl mercury. These bacteria are aquatic: they are in the waters of lakes, rivers, and oceans as well as in the soil. Other creatures consume these anaerobic bacteria including their methyl mercury load. In their turn, those creatures are consumed in volume by yet other creatures—along with their load of methyl mercury. And so the methyl mercury accumulates up the food chain in what is called bioaccumulation—for obvious reasons. Since humans are at the end of many food chains, we get a load of trouble in the form of bioaccumulated methyl mercury.

The other source of methyl mercury is fossil fuels, especially coal. Fossil fuels, of course, are mostly carbon. Fossil fuels also contain other elements, including inorganic mercury. When fossil fuels are burned, a very little bit of carbon forms a methyl group (one carbon, three hydrogens) and reacts with the little bit of inorganic mercury to form methyl mercury. The exhaust of fossil fuel combustion excretes methyl mercury into the air (and, of course, a whole lot more) where it is carried everywhere, inhaled and ingested by creatures (including us), and in that way enters the food chain.

Not that this will come as a surprise to you, but a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that since 1880, the concentration of methyl mercury in Pacific seabirds increased by five times. The findings were based on an analysis of albatross feathers stored in natural history museums—which is a good argument to support such institutions. The albatross is more or less at the top of its food chain. The factor the researchers found to be most strongly associated with how much methyl mercury a particular bird had in its feathers was how high up it was in its particular food chain: the higher, the more methyl mercury.

The point of all this is not to encourage eating as far down on the food chain as possible. The point is that it is pretty obvious that industrial civilization powered by fossil fuels has, at the very least since the 1880s, increased the damage we suffer to our health through the effects I mentioned earlier: nerve, cardiovascular, immune, kidney, and liver damage; all of which have grown in scope and scale over the past century and all of which are associated, one way or another, with the common plagues of our age—including cancer.

However, my point is also not to point to fossil fuels and methyl mercury as THE cause of the chronic diseases from which we increasingly suffer. It is instead to point to the fact that the damage done by mercury is in the company of other factors that scientists have tried to single out as THE cause of our maladies. These factors include ionizing radiation (and more recently non-ionizing radiation), sugar and fructose, endocrine disrupting chemicals used in agriculture and industry (petrochemicals that are the offspring of the fossil fuel economy), and on and on. All of these are the result of particular social arrangements that control how we produce things.

My point is that we really don’t have a good way to grasp how these social arrangements cause the spewing of and exposure to methyl mercury and radiation and sugar and endocrine disruptors and all the rest of it. Instead, our social processes and our very way of thinking leads us to look for the elimination of that one thing that puts us at risk, that one thing that has our attention. At the moment.

This isn’t a defect in us personally. It’s a defect in our governance, a defect that is exploited by those who have money to be made and power to be maintained and like things just the way they are and can’t imagine social arrangements being any better. These people—the captains of industry and their minions; the officials of our governing institutions; and the activists of nominally public interest organizations—actively prevent the following question from being asked in a meaningful way. Isn’t there a better way to live? A way that doesn’t put us and our children and our descendants at risk?

I’ve said before that the new way of thinking in environmental health is not one toxin to one disease or even one toxin to many diseases but many toxins to many diseases. Science, on a wide variety of fronts, is moving in this direction. However, what I want to bring to your attention is this question. Isn’t it time to ask what social arrangements—the many to many relationships of our life together—what social arrangements both protect us and create the good life we deserve?