They Poisoned the World

A landmark investigation of the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis

In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals—used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing—had known about their hazards for decades.

In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake tells the astonishing story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being. By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases. At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by our government’s appallingly lax regulatory system—a system that has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment.

Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and tens of thousands of documents, Blake interweaves the secret history of forever chemicals with the moving story of how a lone village took on the chemical giants—and won. From the beloved local doctor to the young mother who took her fight all the way to the nation’s capital, citizen activists in Hoosick Falls and beyond have ignited the most powerful grassroots environmental movement since Silent Spring.

Humane and revelatory, this book will provoke outrage—and hopefully inspire the change we need to protect the health of every American for generations to come.

“Riveting and horrifying. . . . Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time [is] a book that none of us can afford to miss.”—The Washington Post

“A crackling David vs. Goliath story . . . [Blake’s] impressive research provides damning evidence of PFAS manufacturers’ callous indifference. Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly

“Impeccably researched and outrageous both in the scope of [corporate] malfeasance and the efforts of those who support it, the narrative never strays from its relentless documentation of the generational price paid for our decades of lax regulation. A must-read.”—Booklist, starred review

“A sharp-edged report on the world that toxic chemicals—and their manufacturers—have made.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The insidious compounds we now call ‘forever chemicals’ deserve a forever chronicle, and this is surely it. Mariah Blake has written the definitive account of a slow-motion catastrophe and the everyday heroes who fought to bring it to light.”—Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Toms River

“They Poisoned the World is a brilliant and damning investigation of the global chemical industry and the devious methods it employed to promote its risky products. While it is often an enraging book, it is not a despairing one. People in this story stand up, fight, and make a difference. In this troubled moment in our environmental history that makes this book something exceptional—not just insightful but inspiring.”—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad

“The story of a small town struggling with the global disaster that is ‘forever chemicals,’ They Poisoned the World is at once fascinating, enraging, and heartbreaking.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky

“This book is equal parts infuriating and inspiring—as always, it takes the extraordinary commitment of ordinary citizens to overcome the reckless greed of corporations. It’s a tale that badly needed to be told, and now it’s been told well.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“They Poisoned the World is a powerful and bighearted book about the hunt for an invisible killer that lives in your kitchen, your water, your clothes, and all around you. Reading it will scare the plastic out of your life. It will also fill you with awe for the courageous residents of a small town who fought against a corporate polluter and took on a powerful industry that is turning our world into a toxic synthetic stew.”—Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First

“In They Poisoned the World, Mariah Blake brilliantly overcomes one of the core challenges of environmental journalism—making everyday readers care about the invisible. The result is a poignant and pressing account of one of industrial society’s great secrets. We would do well to pay attention to the evidence that she has marshalled—countless lives are at stake.”—Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University.

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