I agree with Biss and Chen that the discourse of toxicity attempts to secure a rhetorical space for individual purity that would allow us to imagine that we can succeed in not being altered and shaped by the world. The practices that come out of this -- in the overdeveloped world including all the filtration money can buy -- replicate the redistribution of externalities away from some bodies and toward others. Rich people have an easier time enacting the kind of redistribution or avoidance of poison in their bodies than poor people. But, as Chen and Biss help us understand, these practices are temporary and illusory; we cannot in the end be separate from the world that constitutes us. Corporeal exceptionalism cannot be sustained because interabsorption is the way things actually are.

Where do we find normative guidance for orienting ourselves toward meeting the future organisms we are becoming in constitution with complex ecological situations that range from pH-altering elements in the rain to the slag heaps of nickel mines to endocrine-disrupting compounds in our waterways? What approaches might we take that do not revert to antidisability or human-centric political orientations? Whatever answer we give, it cannot rest with some wholesale approval of pollution, contamination, or toxicity. Whatever answer we give, it has to reckon with the differential distribution of harm. Whatever answer we give, it should not treat frogs and toads as mere indicators, or as mattering only because of human concerns.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 106 - 107)