When Humanity Left the Natural World

From Plants, Wool and Resins to Nylon, PFAS and Synthetic Fragrance

For thousands of years, human beings lived in a world made largely from materials they could recognize. We wore wool, linen, cotton, leather and silk. We built with stone, clay and wood. We burned beeswax and oils for light, made soaps from fats and alkaline substances, and colored fabrics with dyes obtained from plants, minerals, roots and even insects. When people wanted fragrance, they turned to flowers, woods, spices, gums and resins such as frankincense, myrrh, cedar, rose, cinnamon and nard.

This does not mean that the ancient world was perfectly safe or that everything natural was harmless. Nature itself contains poisons, allergens and powerful chemical substances. But the material environment surrounding human beings was fundamentally different from the one surrounding us today. Most of the things people touched, wore, burned, smelled and brought into their homes originated relatively directly from plants, animals, minerals and other naturally occurring materials.

Then humanity learned to do something extraordinary. Instead of simply extracting and transforming substances found in nature, scientists learned how to manufacture new substances on an enormous industrial scale. Chemistry began to change civilization, and many of those changes were enormously beneficial. Modern chemistry gave us medicines, sterile medical equipment, electrical insulation, refrigeration, automobiles, aviation, inexpensive clothing and countless other technologies that improved and saved human lives.

But another transformation was taking place at the same time. Human beings were beginning to surround themselves with materials and molecules that previous generations had never encountered in anything resembling today's quantities. Within a remarkably short period of human history, the chemical environment of everyday life began to change.

The Synthetic Revolution

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, chemistry moved from the laboratory into industry on a massive scale. Coal tar became an important source of dyes and chemical compounds. Petroleum became not only a fuel but also an enormous chemical feedstock. Scientists discovered how to manipulate carbon-based molecules to manufacture materials with properties that could not easily be obtained from traditional natural sources.

Plastics, synthetic rubber, synthetic dyes, detergents, artificial fibers, preservatives, solvents and synthetic fragrance materials gradually entered everyday life. This was not simply the invention of a few new products. Humanity was creating an entirely new category of material culture.

One of the great symbols of this transformation was nylon. Developed at DuPont during the 1930s through the work of Wallace Carothers and his research team, nylon demonstrated something revolutionary. A useful textile fiber no longer had to be grown in a field or obtained from an animal. Human beings could manufacture the fiber itself.

For thousands of years, clothing had depended primarily upon materials such as wool, linen, cotton, leather and silk. Suddenly chemistry offered another possibility. A laboratory and factory could create a fiber with carefully engineered characteristics and manufacture it in enormous quantities.

Nylon was an extraordinary scientific achievement. But historically it represented something even larger. The physical world surrounding humanity was beginning to be redesigned through industrial chemistry.

From Nylon to the Age of Plastics

Once industry demonstrated that useful materials could be engineered rather than simply harvested, the possibilities seemed almost unlimited. New plastics and polymers could be designed to be lightweight, flexible, hard, transparent, waterproof, heat-resistant or inexpensive. Polyester and other synthetic fibers transformed clothing. Plastics transformed packaging, kitchens, furniture, toys, automobiles, electronics and medicine.

Within only a few generations, materials that would have seemed extraordinary to our great-grandparents became so ordinary that most of us stopped thinking about them.

Look around an average modern home. Synthetic fibers may be in the carpet, curtains, sofa, mattress and clothing. Plastic surrounds food, beverages, cosmetics and cleaning products. Synthetic coatings may be found on cookware, furniture and fabrics. Artificial fragrances may be released from laundry products, candles, plug-ins and air fresheners.

The transformation was so successful that we barely noticed how completely our environment had changed.

Then Came Fluorochemistry

Another remarkable branch of chemistry was developing alongside the plastics revolution. Scientists discovered that compounds involving extremely strong carbon-fluorine bonds could possess unusual resistance to heat, water, grease and chemical degradation.

From the wider history of fluorochemistry came fluoropolymers such as PTFE, famously associated with Teflon, as well as the enormous family of substances now discussed under the term PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

These chemicals offered industry extraordinary properties. Materials could resist stains. Surfaces could resist grease and water. Certain products could tolerate extreme chemical or thermal environments.

But the very characteristic that made some of these substances so useful created another problem: persistence.

Many PFAS resist breaking down in the environment. This persistence is why they became widely known as “forever chemicals.” Certain PFAS have now been detected across the environment, including in water, soil, wildlife and human blood.

There is something profoundly important in that history. Humanity had become extraordinarily good at asking, “Can we make this?” We were not always equally good at asking, “Where will this material be fifty years from now?”

A chemical's ability to resist nature can be commercially valuable. But if that chemical escapes into nature, the same resistance can become an environmental problem.

When Industrial Chemistry Entered the Home

The chemical revolution did not remain inside factories. Eventually it entered almost every room of the house.

It entered our kitchens through plastics, coatings, cleaners and food packaging. It entered our bedrooms through synthetic mattresses, fabrics and carpets. It entered our bathrooms through cosmetics and personal-care products. It entered our laundry through detergents, fabric softeners and fragrance products. Eventually, industrial chemistry even changed something as ancient and intimate as the way our homes smelled.

For much of history, fragrance came primarily from actual aromatic materials: flowers, woods, herbs, spices, fruits, gums and resins. Frankincense smelled like frankincense because the aromatic material came from a tree. Rose fragrance came from roses. Cedar came from wood. Citrus fragrance came from fruit peels.

Modern perfumery changed that world dramatically. Chemists learned to identify molecules responsible for particular smells and then manufacture or modify aromatic molecules themselves. This gave perfumers an extraordinary palette. They could make fragrances stronger, more consistent and often much less expensive. They could reproduce scarce smells, extend fragrances far beyond what many natural materials could accomplish and even create scents that did not exist anywhere in nature.

Today that technology extends far beyond the bottle of perfume. Fragrance is added to air fresheners, plug-ins, reed diffusers, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, room sprays, fragrance oils, scented candles, wax melts, shampoos, lotions, cleaning products and countless other consumer goods.

This means that fragrance is no longer necessarily something we deliberately apply once in the morning. For some people, fragrance can be part of the environment throughout the day: in their clothing, bedding, bathroom, car, office and the air inside their home.

The Question Is Not Simply “Natural or Chemical?”

This is where the conversation can easily become dishonest in either direction. Saying that something is natural does not automatically make it safe, and saying that something is synthetic does not automatically make it poisonous.

Everything is made of chemicals. Water is a chemical substance. Frankincense contains many chemical compounds. Rose oil is chemistry. The human body itself is an astonishing chemical system. Some naturally occurring substances are extremely poisonous, while some synthetic substances have transformed medicine and saved millions of lives.

So the real question should never simply be, “Is it natural or chemical?”

We should be asking better questions. What substance is this? How much are we exposed to? Does it enter the body through the lungs, skin or food? Does the body eliminate it quickly, or can it remain for long periods? Does it persist in the environment? What happens when it is heated or burned? Can it irritate the respiratory system? Can it trigger allergies? Does it interact with hormones? What happens during pregnancy or childhood, when the developing body may be particularly sensitive to certain exposures?

There is another question that is even more difficult. Modern people are rarely exposed to only one substance at a time. We live inside complicated mixtures of chemicals originating from food packaging, clothing, furniture, cosmetics, cleaning products, traffic pollution, plastics, building materials and household fragrances.

The question facing modern science is therefore not only what one chemical does in isolation. It is also what a lifetime inside this enormously complicated chemical environment means for human health.

The World Changed Faster Than We Realized

The Industrial Revolution and modern chemistry gave humanity extraordinary power. I do not believe the lesson of this history is that chemistry itself was a mistake. That would ignore enormous advances in medicine, sanitation, transportation, agriculture, communication and technology that modern chemistry helped make possible.

The deeper question is whether our ability to invent sometimes moved faster than our ability to understand the long-term consequences of what we invented.

For most of human history, people lived primarily among materials taken relatively directly from the natural world. Then, over an astonishingly short period, humanity created nylon, polyester, plastics, synthetic rubber, artificial fragrances, fluorinated materials, industrial solvents, preservatives, surfactants and thousands upon thousands of specialized chemical compounds.

Some have proved enormously beneficial. Some appear relatively benign when properly used. Others were eventually restricted or abandoned after previously unknown problems emerged. Still others have become environmental contaminants that future generations will inherit.

That should make us neither terrified of chemistry nor blindly trusting of it. It should make us curious.

We should know what is in the things we put on our bodies. We should ask what we are breathing inside our homes. We should understand what happens to the materials we manufacture after we throw them away. And when a substance persists for decades, accumulates in living organisms or interferes with important biological processes, we should be willing to ask difficult questions about whether convenience was worth the cost.

Humanity has performed an extraordinary experiment over the last century. We have transformed not only our technology but the material environment in which human beings live.

Our grandparents witnessed the beginning of that transformation. Our children are inheriting its results.

The question now is not whether we can return completely to the world that existed before industrial chemistry. We cannot, and in many ways we would not want to.

The question is whether we have learned enough to choose more wisely.

Because after a century of asking what chemistry can make, perhaps it is time to become equally serious about asking what humanity actually needs.