When you live in a Brooklyn brownstone all the materials in the house slowly give off dust and gases. This mixes into the air. It goes into your lungs, your skin, under your finger nails, the souls of your feet, your very bones.
Over time you literally ingest the house.
This is constantly happening wherever we are. We are permeable creatures designed to communicate physically with our surroundings.
People forget this. Or ignore it at their own risk.
What are you surrounding yourself with? Because no matter how inert it appears to be it will eventually end up inside your body. That limestone counter? The porcelain sink? The metal banister? No matter how solid they appear to be, on a molecular level they wear down. Often you can clearly see the wear. Other times the dust is too small to see with the eye.
But it is there and you are ingesting it.
What about the 200 plus chemicals in the paint on your walls? Or the petrochemicals seeping out of the plastic shower curtain? Or the cancer causing fumes in the glue under the counter top? Or the hormone disruptors in the vinyl window frames.
Nobody who is self respecting would ever knowingly consume these deadly chemicals. Yet your average Brooklyn brownstone has thousands of these chemicals. And you are consuming them.
People scratch their heads at the overload of cancer and neurological illnesses we are plagued with. We like to find an easy scapegoat. But the truth in my opinion is a barrage of millions of chemicals we are exposed to over the years.
The culprit is mostly a misguided idea that humans can play god by creating all these synthetic materials without harmful side effects. The 1950’s “miracle of plastic” was meant to save us from all sorts of ills….how wrong we were.
For over two thousand years people have done things using organic building and in fifty years we decided we can do it better. This is human arrogance at its best.
Luckily there is a backlash to this arrogance and the sickness it created. We are humbled. The bio mimicry movement is a great example of a better direction to take. Instead of forcing nature to our will, lets let nature teach us the best way.