The environment we inhabit — air, water, soil, consumer products, workplaces — carries chemical, biological, and physical exposures that influence health in ways that are cumulative, often invisible, and distributed unequally across class and race lines. Heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and particulate matter have documented health effects at exposure levels common in many communities worldwide. Understanding your exposures — and the structural factors that shape them — is the beginning of addressing them, though individual action is never sufficient where collective and political responses are also needed.
Each step builds on the last.