The Impermeability of Boundaries

I just came across two stories that defy common sense.

One claims that DDT levels in human breast milk are elevated across the world, but are falling wherever the chemical has been banned. The study's authors apparently forgot that people don't eat DDT. It is sprayed into the air, not into peoples' bodies. So how could the chemical get into human bodies and breast milk?

A similar story claims that human pharmaceuticals are showing up in drinking water supplies all over the world. But we put medicines into our bodies, not into rivers. How could an entire watershed get human pharmaceuticals in it?

Both of these stories make it sound as if there is almost no boundary between our bodies and the earth. As if what we put onto the earth will eventually flow through our own veins, and the things we put in our bodies will flow through the veins of the earth. As if the boundary between our bodies and the earth is mostly imaginary and permeable. Is this some kind of creeping eco-mystical religion?

I am right now looking at a perfectly intact boundary between our bodies and the planet: it's called skin. My body doesn't need a thing from the earth, and the earth gets nothing from me. If we suddenly started thinking that our bodies were somehow connected to the earth--as these two studies suggest--the logical conclusion would be for us all to become environmentalists and take on some kind of spiritual approach to the connection between our own bodies and the earth!

Studies like this only contribute to the dangerous idea that our human fate and the planet's fate are ecologically linked. In the interest of the economic well-being of industries like mine and many others, we should think long and hard before publishing misleading studies like these.