Bigelow Laboratory Research Technician Hannah Sterling collects water samples from Casco Bay in Maine. Her testing was part of an intensified effort to monitor levels and track sources of PFAS following the spill of the chemicals in August 2024, when 50,000 gallons of firefighting foam was accidentally released from the former Brunswick Naval Air Station. (Christoph Aeppli)
Inescapable: Facing Up to Forever Chemicals (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) by F. Marina Schauffler reminds us that rural communities, often overlooked, can lead the way in confronting the defining environmental challenges of our time.
People across the country have been poisoned by PFAS, also called “forever chemicals,” for decades. But one state has responded like no other. Farmers and communities in Maine—one of the most rural states in the country—have demonstrated unparalleled leadership in the forever chemical crisis.
Bigelow Laboratory Research Technician Hannah Sterling collects water samples from Casco Bay in Maine. Her testing was part of an intensified effort to monitor levels and track sources of PFAS following the spill of the chemicals in August 2024, when 50,000 gallons of firefighting foam was accidentally released from the former Brunswick Naval Air Station. (Christoph Aeppli)
The first per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were made in a DuPont lab in the 1930s. By 1950s, DuPont and 3M were manufacturing thousands of these chemical compounds for military and industrial uses. Even when the companies knew PFAS were extremely harmful to human health at very low concentrations, they hid this information from the public and ramped up production, which remains unabated. Before long, even the rain had measurable PFAS in it.
PFAS pollution is widespread, but its hotspots have an impact orders of magnitude greater than elsewhere. Such hotspots include military bases where PFAS-rich firefighting foams (aqueous film-forming foam or AFFF) spilled into ground and surface water, where landfills disgorged their toxic leachate, where chemical plants spewed airborne PFAS, and where sewage treatment plants discharged PFAS from their pipes and dispersed the chemicals by spreading the leftover solids (sewage sludge) on farmland.
(Johns Hopkins University Press)
Despite the known presence of PFAS in Maine, the state did not take decisive action until 2019, three years after dairy farmers Fred and Laura Stone learned sludge spreading had contaminated their farm with PFAS. The Stones and other farmers raised their voices and said the contamination on their farms revealed a much larger problem. Instead of turning away from the pollution, Maine responded with integrity, transparency and urgency.
No one is positioned better to tell this story than Schauffler. She is a top-notch science writer and journalist; Inescapable feels like a dramatic play and distills her reporting for The Maine Monitor and other publications. Its 156 pages move fast, built on dozens of interviews conducted from July 2022 to August 2024. Schauffler includes over 100 additional pages of appendices, notes and other resources, including advice on minimizing PFAS exposure and the monetary cost of PFAS pollution on rural areas.
Rural readers will find this book especially powerful because it centers people who act and sound like their neighbors. Dairy farmers like Fred and Laura Stone, who spoke out, at devastating personal cost, when they discovered PFAS had contaminated their land and cows’ milk. Young organic growers like Johanna Davis and Adam Nordell, who refused to hide the truth from customers when they learned that decades before they bought their farm, PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge was spread on it, poisoning their soil and well water. Or retired water district superintendent Norm Labbe, who shut down a well when he wasn’t required to because ethics mattered more than profit from selling the water at the water utility where he worked. These are conscientious rural Americans doing right by their communities.
This is a book that wouldn’t exist without insidious corporate culprits like chemical manufacturers 3M and Dupont, but you don’t have to be a chemist to understand how PFAS have contaminated our land, water and communities. Schauffler does not overwhelm the reader with scientific jargon—nor does she parrot industry terms like “biosolids” used to whitewash sewage sludge. From its opening pages, set along the Kennebunk River in southern Maine, Schauffler explains what needs explaining—that PFAS are persistent, dangerous and widespread. She presents the science, but it never overshadows the people that bring the story to life.
Why are PFAS so insidious? Humans evolved in environments full of naturally occurring toxic compounds. Over time, we developed sophisticated biological detoxification systems to help metabolize venom, poisons in plants and other toxins that can enter the human body. We have not evolved to handle synthetic chemicals like PFAS whose carbon-fluorine bonds are nearly impossible to destroy. Instead of being metabolized and quickly excreted, PFAS bind to proteins in blood, circulate in the body for years and accumulate with repeated exposure. They can cause kidney and testicular cancer, high cholesterol levels, preeclampsia (life-threatening high blood pressure) in pregnant women, immune dysfunction, thyroid problems and other serious health troubles. They are called forever chemicals because they don’t breakdown into less harmful compounds.
While it chronicles the harm suffered, Inescapable also provides a blueprint for an organized response. Maine not only listened to the farmers who spoke out—it showed how a state can confront the PFAS contamination crisis while taking care of those most affected. The state coordinated task forces, soil and water testing, blood serum tests, mental health services, emergency funds for farmers and legislative action. The story is rooted in solidarity: neighbors showed up for neighbors, farmers stepped forward to protect customers and other farms, state agencies and researchers put public health before economic interests, bipartisan lawmakers responded to testimony from farm families, and nonprofit groups stepped in to provide advice and financial assistance to farmers.
Moreover, Schauffler observes, many of the scientists, doctors, regulators, and nonprofit and academic leaders shaping Maine’s PFAS response are women. Just as farmers chose to come forward, these women chose transparency, collaboration and action.
Both the men and women who animate this book fit into the Schauffler’s larger argument about moral leadership and grassroots action. She weaves their stories together with such skill that the book can be hard to put down. Rarely, if ever, do we see environmental regulators, lawmakers, scientists, tribal leaders, physicians and ordinary citizens face problems, seek answers and collaborate so effectively. We meet Department of Environmental Protection hydrologist Chris Evans as he traces contamination through groundwater; legislators like Bill Pluecker and Stacy Brenner—both organic farmers—who take evidence-based, decisive action to ban the land application of sewage sludge; Suzanne Johnson assumes “the worst, thankless job” as a citizen volunteer at a site polluted from PFAS use at a military base; Jan Paul of the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources investigates PFAS in fish and game central to tribal sustenance and sovereignty; and Dr. Rachel Criswell, a family practice doctor and researcher who cares for patients harmed by PFAS while advancing research on childhood exposure.
The book leaves no quarter for fatalism. “The story of PFAS and agriculture is not always about disaster,” says Nancy McBrady, Deputy Commissioner of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. “There are glimmers of hope, and if we’re going to tackle this on a national scale, we can’t lose sight of that.” At the same time, officials like McBrady make clear the need for broader engagement: “No one has called us up asking for help to build out an ag-specific PFAS program, but we’re ready when they do.”
This emphasizes one of Schauffler’s core themes: PFAS contamination is not just a scientific problem. It is a problem of trust, care and responsibility. This is put into striking relief when one looks over Maine’s border to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and across the nation, where denial and obfuscation thwart meaningful action.
The contamination of 70 million acres of American farmland by forever chemicals is not one state’s issue. It is a problem that requires people across the nation willing to confront the power of industry lobbyists and the political recalcitrance of their elected representatives and to prioritize public health, food integrity, water quality and rural livelihoods.
That is Maine’s blueprint for responding to PFAS—and let’s hope, someday soon, our nation’s.
