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The Book



Toxic Bodies explores why our environment has become saturated with synthetic chemicals that disrupt hormones, and asks what we can do to protect human and environmental health. Since World War II, these chemicals have penetrated into every aspect of our bodies and ecosystems, yet our government has largely failed to regulate them.

Toxic Bodies explores how scientific uncertainty has been manipulated to delay regulation, and shows how we can use history to make better policy.

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The History After World War II, pesticides such as DDT, pharmaceuticals such as synthetic estrogens, and plastics all became extremely popular in America. Scientists warned of risks from these chemicals, but consumers and environments received little protection.

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Take Action Learn about things you and your community can do to reduce exposure and clean up the environment.

Toxic Bodies

Toxic Bodies: 
Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES 


Toxic Bodies explores why our environment has become saturated with synthetic chemicals that disrupt hormones, and asks what we can do to protect human and environmental health. Since World War II, these chemicals have penetrated into every aspect of our bodies and ecosystems, yet our government has largely failed to regulate them. The industry and the federal government knew as early as the 1940s that these chemicals caused cancer and disrupted sexual development. Yet they were approved by regulatory agencies and widely marketed to producers and consumers. Toxic Bodies explores how scientific uncertainty has been manipulated to delay regulation, and shows how we can use history to make better policy.

praise   for  toxic  bodies

"Nancy Langston has given us a deeply disturbing analysis of government neglect of synthetic hormones. This is a wonderful history, woven together by deep insight into both public health and ecology, one with many lessons for modern precautionary policy.You owe it to your children and future generations to pay attention to this book.  And we all owe Langston a debt of gratitude for illuminating a global hormonal chemical experiment that is wildly out of control." --- John Wargo, Yale University
"It jars the reader when Nancy Langston declares the bodies of American women to be toxic waste sites, but that is precisely what she does.  Since World War II, the United States has saturated foods, ecosystems, and bodies with endocrine-disrupting chemicals, with little regulation. These chemicals haunt American landscapes like ghosts. Langston knows these ghosts all too well, and a frightening personal story also haunts these pages. Toxic Bodies masterfully weaves the historical with the personal, forcing the reader to wonder what is mutating in his or her own body."--Brett L. Walker, Montana State University

THe  Author

Nancy Langston is an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Past-president of the American Society for Environmental History and Editor of Environmental History, she is also author of Forest Dreams and Where Land and Water Meet.