Environmental Health Geographies: Absorption and the “New Abnormal”

Introduction

Environmental health geographies (EHGs) are at an important juncture. At first blush, the sub-discipline invites a relatively simple extension of geographical concerns with the spatial distribution of health and illness. In traditional guises, EHG refers to “how local environments are involved in experiences of health disparities, vulnerabilities, and systematic inequalities with population health” (Luginaah, Oiamo, and Armah 2014, 494, emphasis added). But in recent years, geographers and others have given greater critical attention to these “involvements” (Mansfield 2008; Guthman and Mansfield 2013; Landecker 2013; Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Shattuck 2021b), to the changing natures of environments (Haraway et al. 2016; Clark and Yusoff 2017; Lorimer 2017; Meloni, Wakefield-Rann, and Mansfield 2022), and to what or indeed where constitutes the local (Massey 2005; Brown and Kelly 2014; Pain and Cahill 2022; Senanayake 2022). Shifting understandings of body–environment interactions, alterations to industrial materialities and chemistries, accelerated environmental changes, shifts in health provision and knowledge generation, and spatialized as well as decolonial thinking have generated what might be termed a “new abnormal.”

To render this new abnormal tractable, this article utilizes and develops the term absorptive geographies. While absorption may evoke a relatively simple process image of matter moving into bodies and across boundaries, I use it here to signal a material as well as epistemological shift from a concern with consumption and exposure (wherein ingression follows contact with a pollutant, contaminant, food stuff, and so on) towards interest in the ways in which bodies and environments intra-act (on the ontology of intra-actions, see Barad 2007). As such, absorption is a term that emphasizes mutual involvement, where all “sides” in an absorbing relation are subject to alteration. As Solomon (2016, 5) used it, absorption suggests “the possibility for bodies, substances, and environments to mingle, draw attention to each other and even shift definitional parameters in the process.” Unlike the consuming or exposed body, absorption unsettles crude distinctions between bodies and environments, emphasizing mutual adjustments and shared materials. It is, as a result, less concerned with borderlines between organisms and environments and more interested in contiguous body–environment borderlands (Hinchliffe et al. 2013). The implications of these shifts for research and action will be teased out throughout the article. Four challenges will inform the arguments.

First, absorption implies a shift from considering environments as merely the backdrop to, or in the service of, human health. Instead, and as geographers have long argued, environments are active players and intrinsic partners in embodied and living processes (Whatmore 2002; Hinchliffe 2007). So much so that environmental matters and processes are folded into or implicated within health and well-being (Guthman and Mansfield 2013). Absorption signals the intradependence of people, landscapes, and more-than-human lives of all shapes and sizes. It highlights shared biologies and chemistries that do not respect the boundaries of “skull and skin,” cell walls, or epithelia (Shantz and Elliott 2021; Rose, Birk, and Manning 2022, 131). The result is that the public in public health starts to expand — it can no longer refer only to people (Lemke 2015; Rock 2017; Hinchliffe et al. 2018), and the population of population health becomes less straightforwardly subject to probabilistically defined norms. The damage-oriented, safety-conscious, or protectionist aspects of institutionalized environmental health, or even environmental justice, require supplementing with finding better ways of environmental living.

Second, these environments, species, bodies, substances, and cells, which are involved in and intrinsic to health, are themselves biologically and chemically marked by the Anthropocene. They are industrial and postindustrial beings and environments, conditioned by and incorporating novel chemicals and materials (Barry 2017; Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018; Landecker 2024b). They involve processes that are adjusting to new social and material relations, to extreme weather and climate fluctuations, and to new ways of being and living. The more-than-human population of population health is an industrialized one.

Third, body–environment intra-actions are not something that happen only in the here and now. There is temporal and spatial complexity. Things can happen slowly (Nixon 2013), with latency affecting the expression of events that may have occurred years or generations earlier (Murphy 2013). Sub-lethal or sub-toxic doses (Murphy 2017), critical points in the life course (Pearce 2018), and gradual weathering effects of industrial living (Geronimus 1992) indicate some of the temporalities at play (Davies 2022; Pain and Cahill 2022). Meanwhile, the slow and the unseen can, by virtue of accumulations and interrelations, become manifest in various forms, often in ways that traverse as well as deepen already existing inequalities. Slow emergencies mark the need to raise the profile of the accumulation, duration and temporal sequencing of insults that are lived with (or differentially absorbed) by a majority of minoritized people (Anderson et al. 2020).

In a similar vein, multiple spatial relations trouble any singular sense of a local environment. Localities are meeting places that fold together other places and other times (Massey 1991, 2005). Colonial, plantation, and industrial geographies inflect and condition lives, bodies, cells, and places ostensibly separated by continents and oceans (Moran-Thomas 2019; Barua 2024b). Meanwhile, the ubiquity of industrial compounds and of globally altered microbial lives and the pole-to-pole presence of particulates provide a further dimension to thinking about locality and inequality (Hinchliffe 2021; Werner, Berndt, and Mansfield 2022). There is a need for an EHG that can deal with both slow-paced accumulation and contemporary acceleration, geographical disparity and ubiquity (Shum 2024). The slow, slow, quick (cf. Collard 2018) of environmental health, the spatially extensive and intensive (Allen 2016) qualities of industrial production and absorption, require a time–space imaginary to match.

Fourth, and finally, this expansion in what counts in public and environmental health has occurred alongside changes in health service provision (Goodair and Reeves 2024) and in the production of scientific knowledge (Frickel et al. 2010; Porcelli 2022). Important in this respect are the widespread privatization and commercialization of health services, shifts in scientific funding (Whitley, Gläser, and Laudel 2018), changes in data availability (Kitchin 2013), and a demise in conventional and state-based sources of authority on health. Some nation-states and their legislatures have reduced their role as welfare-led assurers of health and safety (Dassah 2025). Global health and international organizations have received large cuts in public funding (Kentikelenis and Stubbs 2022). Absorptive geographies are produced in and help to generate conditions of scientific as well as health service uncertainty.

I will start with a brief exegesis of mainstream EHG, drawing attention to its toxic and therapeutic lineages. I then review work that has challenged the assumed passivity of environment–body relations and link this to emerging work on biocides and metabolic geographies. I finish with some possible directions for working on novel geographies of environmental health.

EHG's Bodies in Environments

In a disciplinary history marked by environmental determinisms (Livingstone 2011), EHG inherited and is marked by residual human/environment dualisms. Environmental impacts on people and the effects of people on those environments, no matter how recursive and cyclical the descriptions, remained, at base, accounts of people in their environmental settings (Guthman and Mansfield 2013). Medical geographies tended to treat environment as a spatial modifier to disease risk factors. Concerns focused on patterns of illness and disease, inequalities in service provision, largely within a biomedical tradition. Even when augmented with studies of movement and duration, and the adoption of Hägerstraand's time–space diagrams, the result was largely an aggregation of environmental effects on health (Rainham et al. 2010; Morris, Manley, and Sabel 2018; Campbell, Marek, and Hobbs 2021). The resulting epidemiological diagram of human agents moving across surfaces and between environments remained within what Breilh (2021, 139) referred to as a Cartesian health space.

Health geographies, which diverged from medical geography towards the end of the last century (Kearns and Moon 2002; Rosenberg 2016), challenged narrow accounts of disease, well-being, and health (Parr 2002; Rosenberg 2014; Herrick 2016). Shaped in large part by poststructuralist and feminist critiques of the normalized world of biomedicine and the abstractions and aggregations of population health, the data points of biomedical research and epidemiological models became the living, breathing, racialized, gendered, experienced, and heterogeneous subjects of health (Andrews 2018). Nevertheless, health geography's demedicalizing move, as Greenhough (2011) had warned (albeit in relation to the neglect of biomedical materialities), tended to circumscribe the materialities and delineate the bodies that entered analyses. To be sure, bodies were now imbued with lived experience, but there was a tendency to draw the line at the skin and at the human, with everything else treated as external matter. As a result, there was little or no engagement with the multispecies and mattering worlds that made living bodies able to live. Partial exceptions were to be found in the environmental justice and therapeutic environment literatures with their focus, respectively, on the toxic and remedial.

Environmental justice (EJ) work has highlighted the social, economic, and racialized drivers of locational and material disadvantage and their relationship to environmental degradation (Brown 1995; Walker 2009). In health-related EJ research, the focus has been the willful or negligent exposure of often marginalized and vulnerable groups to pollution of air, land, and water, especially in the United States and in lower-income settings where concentrated forms of environmental despoilation combine with systematic social marginalization and weakened or barely existent regulation (Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton 2016). Justice, in turn, has involved reparation and recognition for groups who have experienced violations of their somatic rights through exposure and being made invisible (Lowe, Barajas, and Coren 2023; Mitchell 2024). Access to due process, access to services, empowerment of injured and vulnerable parties, superfund site remediation, and epistemic and hermeneutic justice (Fricker 2007; Neely 2021a) have become the mainstays of an important movement (Davies 2022). Even so, alongside merited concerns with EJ's residual dualisms, the tendency to work within existing scientific frameworks and state-centered forms of jurisprudence and to focus on exceptional sites at the expense of broader accounts of change are worthy of attention.

Symptomatic here is the tendency to work with conventional legal and scientific frameworks that set acceptable and safe levels of environmental despoilation and human tolerance. State governments, regulatory agencies, international organizations, private companies, and industrial lobbyists negotiate and sanction allowable pollution and exposure within specific environments. As has been well documented (Carson 1962; Beck 1992; Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018), maximum acceptable levels are often based on single chemical, laboratory characterizations of harm to model organisms and can be poor surrogates for actual or potential effects in the “wild” (Wynne 1992; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). Controlled titrations of pure chemical may be tenuously related to industrially produced impure forms. Target chemicals are treated as fixed entities having unique, universal properties, with little or no account of how context or conditions of production (Richter, Cordner, and Brown 2018), use or disposal (Balayannis 2020), or the sequence of exposures affects material properties and absorptive potentials. Licensing can contain its own misdirection. For example, active ingredients subject to toxicity testing may not be the most toxic component of a product. The active chemical in the herbicide glyphosate may be less toxic than some of the surfactants used in the commercial compound (Bradberry, Proudfoot, and Vale 2004). The proliferation of compounds, uses and disposals, generates a chemical multiplicity. Administrative fixing of the chemical form becomes a license to pollute up to scientifically (rather than socially, environmentally, politically, or culturally) acceptable limits (Liboiron 2021), a legitimation process that rubber stamps a fog of anthropogenic chemistries. And as this fog expands, it is matched by a “swirl of normative science [as chemicals] disrupt not just cells, microbes, and genes, but also scientific efforts to establish facts by persistently arbitrating them and refusing to let them settle” (Adams 2023, 103).

This swirl of materials and sciences meets justice-led accounts and subsequent jurisprudence that struggle with the range of social and material relations and forms of evidence. The focus is on acute damage rather than the more difficult notion of healthy lives (in turn reducing attention to chronic illness, latency, cultures of health, other than human lives, toxic shadows, and liminality [Senanayake 2022]). The synergisms and intersectionality of racialized and other forms of stress become, partly as a result, difficult to draw into legal analysis. It is a form of abstraction, making some matters visible while making others disappear. The dynamics of places, differential absorption, and chemistries can become lost in translation. It took 18 months and a partnership of family and activists as well as legal support to compile the evidence that air pollution was a causal factor in the death of 9-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah in London, United Kingdom (Patterson et al. 2022). This was the United Kingdom's first official death certificate that was amended to include toxic air exposure. Notably, however, the process declined to record the absorptive contributions of historical legacies of racialization, impoverishment, and other stressors faced by Windrush generations and their descendants in the United Kingdom.

State-centered accounts of justice rely on state policing and implementation of rules and rights, which themselves may be exclusionary. Burdens of proof are often onerous and difficult to meet once science becomes increasingly privatized such that so much of the relevant science can go unseen or in fact undone (Frickel et al. 2010). Industries employ lobbyists and tried and tested means to manufacture uncertainty and ignorance (Henry et al. 2021), a field of study that has become known as agnotology (Proctor 2008). And as states withdraw from direct involvement in environmental monitoring and governance, environmental degradation becomes a matter of moral outrage, media attention, and private interests protecting brand reputation rather than a site of official redress and action. The result is a tendency for industrial manipulation rather than a secure basis for reparative or restorative action (Patterson et al. 2022).

The frameworks provided by scientific, administrative, and case law approaches to external pollutants not only tend to inappropriately “fix” the chemicals, they also fail to interrogate shifts in absorption. As epithelial surfaces change as a result of new mucosal arrangements, social stress, a depleted microbiome, or redistributions of adipose tissue (Landecker 2025), so too do the ways in which bodies and environments mingle. As a result, the focus on remediation of toxic landscapes can neglect the accumulations of stigma and toxicity, the mix of stressors that produce ill-health, and resulting shifts in absorption (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts 2017). Moreover, in focusing on exceptional sites, there is an implication that conditions of morality and fairness exist elsewhere (outside industrial sacrifice zones). While there is no denying the violence of deepening inequities and inequalities, there remains a need to supplement these exposés of the exceptional with exposés of the normal (Blanchette 2020), and even interrogations of the new abnormal.

The therapeutic arm of EHG is, in many ways, the mirror image to this circumscribed human exposure model. Instead of morbidity and foreshortened life expectancy, the focus is on the life-affirming qualities of restorative, recreational, and healthy environments. Studies proliferate on the relationship between access to and uses of open spaces (often labeled green for countryside, or the nonurban, or blue for coastal [Rosenberg 2017]) and their associations with well-being, mental, and physical health (Bell et al. 2018; Fitzgerald 2022) and with social cohesion and integration (Singleton 2021). While there is always a suspicion that the mores of metropolitan, Anglocentric, nationalist, and antiurban mindsets are being reconfigured as normative health values (Philo 2016; Rosenberg 2017; Singleton 2021; Fitzgerald 2022), epidemiological as well as qualitative associations of health and the time spent in beneficial green and blue environments abound (Bell, Wheeler, and Phoenix 2017; Chenoweth et al. 2018). Cases for retaining urban and rural green space, improving access, and providing green infrastructures are, as a result, permeating national policies alongside terms like natural capital (Office for National Statistics 2022). They are shaping official discussions of walkable, habitable, and living cities and underpinning social and environmental prescribing and a growing industry in green well-being services. Even setting aside the ideology critiques and recognizing that there are progressive impulses and material relations in play, there is a tendency to treat environments as settings and to imply dose response models where a cluster of aestheticized environmental and public goods provides services to human health. In a world of competing claims, there is also room for greenwashing projects that may be marginal in terms of repairing health and well-being in the new abnormal. In effect, EJ damage narratives are joined by green redemption and healing, while interrogation of the new abnormal is left undone.

In its medicalized and extended (EJ and therapeutic) forms, EHG has tended to retain a sense of a good life as one that has access to better environments. This may be self-evident, and important, but it also tends to assume that current accounts of the normalized body, of standard scientific and industrially compromised metrological versions of toxicity, and of somatic damage and remediation are sufficient for the task at hand. In its more epidemiological manifestations, it adds measurable external risks to internal inherited risks, each conditioned by life stage, lifestyle, and behaviors. This additive model does little to interrogate human–social–environment interrelations, while lending itself to ideologies of consumer choice and individual responsibility for health (Glasgow and Schrecker 2015). It has reinforced disciplinary dualisms and failed to engage with the growing work in geography and elsewhere that has emphasized health as an always more-than-human achievement (Mansfield 2008; Nading 2013; Franklin 2023; Hinchliffe 2024; Lorimer and Hodgetts 2024) and as an issue that is thoroughly interwoven with planetary changes (Whitmee et al. 2015). As health geography followed a postpositivist, cultural, and humanistic turn, there was a missed opportunity to understand health as a transspecies achievement. Indeed, health geography's experiencing bodies were also holobionts, extrovert organisms made up of and with many others, the majority of whom were of different species (Gilbert 2017) and of course constituted through and with earthly materials (Clark and Szersynski 2023). They were composed through and with others who were living with altered, anthropogenic biologies and chemistries, awash with endocrine disruptors, emulsifiers, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and antimicrobial compounds (Landecker 2023). In this sense, health geographies were missing the active and increasingly anthropogenic social, biological, and chemical associations that made health more, or less, possible.

Environmental Bodies — Epigenetics, Exposomes, Syndemics, and More-than-Human Health

Challenges to passive and dualistic versions of environment and health are not new, and resources for thinking and action have existed within and outside of the Anglocentric canon. By way of example, Davies’ (2019) engagement with the Latin American, anticolonial geography of Josué de Castro (1908–1973) demonstrates often overlooked insights of non-Anglophone traditions. Starting from his clinical work with the crab men of urban Recife, where impoverished workers survived on mangrove forest–dwelling, human detritus–eating crustacea, Castro was able to connect human, nonhuman, and landscape metabolisms. His later work with unaccredited female researchers traced the interagencies of metabolic change. Taking examples of sugar production on Latifundia and the politics of what now would be called double malnutrition, he charted how environments were actively involved in shaping cells and bodies as they adjusted to the colonial monopolies and degradations of cash crops. In 1946, Castro wrote, “As excess sugar in the diet unbalances metabolic exchanges, so, in a deeply toxic way, sugar cane unbalances the region's economic metabolism. It is as if the earth is revenging itself on men [sic], making them suffer its own illness — the whole organism saturated with sugar” (cited in Davies 2019, 843). While the unsettling of society–nature dualisms is clear, it is the figure of an avenging earth that provides an opening to a more active sense of environmental health. This is a social and biophysical world of absorption that draws attention to the “attritional lethality” (Anderson et al. 2020) of socioenvironmental changes and the requirement for combined analyses of political ecology and political biology.

Within anglophone literatures, Guthman and Mansfield and coauthors provided a key frame for the reassessment of active environments and their role in configuring embodied processes (Mansfield 2008; Guthman and Mansfield 2013; Guthman 2015; Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Romero et al. 2017; Meloni, Wakefield-Rann, and Mansfield 2022). Engaging critically with emerging life sciences research in epigenetics, they emphasized the ways in which conditions like obesity were more than a matter of inherited genetic fate or a result of uninformed dietary choices. In contradistinction to clinical individualism, it was the environment, how it got under the skin, and what it did there that mattered. Rather than a blueprint for life, genes were malleable nodes within processes that involved biochemical signals and methylation processes that could suppress and activate “coding.” The biological dogma of DNA making RNA making proteins was no longer sufficient. To put it too briefly, epigenetics suggested that socioenvironments activated genes, and so-called “junk” DNA, to do their labor. Genes, in effect, shifted from prime movers to intermediaries in the making of life and health. Environments, cells, and many other things besides were simultaneously elevated from being the passive outcomes of genetic processes to becoming “curiously agentive” (Solomon 2016, 10).

This postgenomic displacement (Davies 2013) was similarly present in work that focused on the vast array of matters and experiences to which people were exposed in their life course. If epigenetics highlighted the ways in which environments were involved in gene expression, attention turned to the range of social and environmental “exposures” that shaped genetic and cell processes. Springing from cancer studies, the idea was to complement the genome with the exposome and to embark on a similarly grand exercise to the human genome project with a data-intensive mapping of the multiple exposures that people encountered in their lives (Wild 2005). The latter would include not only the toxic compounds familiar from studies of environmental injustice but also the social stresses associated with, for example, racialization, sexual inequality, economic precarity, and the cocktail of sub-lethal (taken in isolation) exposures to radiation, chemical irritants, and so on. This was, then, another life science–driven attempt or gesture towards an -omic profile, where exposure results in distinct patterns of gene activation and transcription, and shapes the metabolome (or the set of chemicals in and around a cell), different configurations of which have implications for health (Wild, Scalbert, and Herceg 2013; Rose, Birk, and Manning 2022).

Medical geographers have seen value in this work, potentially revitalizing quantitative environmental health geography, making use of large and open data sets as well as Geographic Information Systems to formulate temporal and spatial associations between variables and generate new epidemiological models (Prior, Manley, and Sabel 2019). Adopting terms like allostatic load, or the measure of wear and tear on a body that is induced through chronic exposure to stressors, they are starting to build a quantitative account of “weathering.” The potential is exciting and may provide much needed work that aims to generate understanding of the effects, for example, of racialization on metabolic syndromes and cardiovascular diseases that do not have recourse to spurious racial categories (Hatch 2016). There are overlaps too with accounts of syndemics, an understanding of disease outcomes as a combination of challenges rather than as a simple function of exposure to a pathogen or toxicant (Singer 2009; Hinchliffe et al. 2016). This multifactorial picture of health and illness became ever more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, as regional differences in age structure, economic precarity, obesity rates, racialization, and living conditions became critical in understanding disparities in disease outcomes (Bambra et al. 2020; Andrews et al. 2021; Landecker 2025). Exposomes and syndemics can inform public and environmental health geographies by expanding the list of variables used to explain health outcomes, but their radical potential may lie in further interrogation of body–environment interactions (or intra-actions), highlighting the ways these multifactorial relations reconfigure the health milieu.

There has also been growing appreciation of human–nonhuman interdependencies and the health costs that develop once relations are disrupted. Once humans are understood as holobionts, as materially and biologically extrovert, then health becomes a shared trait (a matter variously and imperfectly captured by terms like One Health, Ecohealth, and Planetary Health [Hinchliffe 2015, 2022; Anderson and Dunk 2022; Braverman 2022; Anderson et al. 2025]). For example, “low-level” chemical pollution or radiation may have sub-toxic and therefore “acceptable” effects on human cell lines but is nonetheless deleterious to commensal microbial communities (who do much of the heavy lifting involved in being and staying healthy) (Brown 2019). As Tsing et al. (2017) noted, it is a logical step to suggest that holobionts, including human beings, suffer the ills of others. Industrial dysbiosis (or deleterious changes to microbiomes) is arguably a driver of ill-health in people as well as in domestic and livestock animals, with effects on wildlife and wider environments (Hinchliffe et al. 2024; though for a more circumspect view, see Anderson 2024). Altered microbiologies and reconfigured cellular processes have become the new abnormal, while new environmental/body assemblages are a response to new extracellular substrates, like microplastics and particulates. These, in turn, encourage opportunistic development of protective biofilms and coselection of formerly suppressed microorganism lineages, some of which are resistant to existing pharmaceutical and biocidal treatments (Parthasarathy et al. 2019).

More positively, recognition of gut and other microbiomes in producing physical and mental well-being is becoming culturally mainstream (Lorimer 2016; Greenhough et al. 2020), even if the clinical efficacy of these insights remains no more than promissory (Hooks and O'Malley 2017; Anderson 2024, 99). Despite the somewhat inevitable confounding of standardized medical proofs, health is nevertheless widely understood as a collective and transspecies or postspecies condition. While this interest in more-than-human health is often framed in an instrumental and anthropocentric manner (where relations are nurtured for humans) and can reproduce naturalized, racialized, and gendered tropes of healthy microbiomes and environments (from natural birthing to microbiome mining in “remote” communities [Núñez Casal 2024; Rawson 2024]), there is some optimism that posthuman and Indigenous cosmologies can inform more biocentric stances (Anderson et al. 2025).

Relational notions of health are also becoming marked within decolonial accounts of health practices and social medicine (Neely 2021b). Neely's (2021a) ethnography of witchcraft in South Africa is one example that emphasizes the embeddedness of health practices with assemblies that link people, nonhumans, and lively landscapes. In practice, health is a syncretic pursuit, combining knowledge systems and practices (Law and Lin 2017). Understanding the relational ways in which people practice health is key to working with groups as they seek to improve health outcomes but can also usefully generate new possibilities for living well. This is not a license for relativism, but a commitment to refusing forms of reductive essentialisms and universalist, monotheistic versions of truth (and health). Engaging practices like witchcraft is not a matter of sorting the good from the bad, in an absolute sense (Mol 2021). It is to allow for other things to be remarked upon and other ways of doing to receive due attention.

Assembling Environments of Health

Despite the promise of relational environmental bodies and geographies of absorption, there are immediate problems associated with the sheer range of possible contributions to healthy lives, the ways in which these contributions are formatted within analytical approaches, and the degree to which additive models are sufficient to the multiple knowledges, agencies, and relations involved in health-making. Indeed, EHG is hampered by issues of extent, formatting, and assembly.

Regarding extent and despite the recent expansion of data sources and analytical capabilities, full accounting of the myriad of health relations will always be infeasible (DeBord et al. 2016). Even with promises of machine learning and artificial intelligence, EHG will continue to involve imperfectly sampling from the flows of body–environment relations and prioritizing some relations over others. Making those relations commensurable to analysis implies continuous problems with formatting data. There is a tendency to reduce biosocial relations to risk factors, “molecularising” complex social phenomena (Senier et al. 2017). The difficulties of doing so may mean that social and environmental matters are simplified, with analyses focusing on diet, exercise, or other easily measurable or surveyable matters that individualize risk. Where the social does appear, the tendency is to bundle together approximate measurements or indices and group them into coarse categories. As Adams et al. (2019, 1385) noted, even when class, race, gender, and power enter (global) health discourse, “they are often taken as self-evident entities that exist in the world like trees or stones when, in fact, they are mutable, synergistic and variable concepts that have a complex role in helping us understand people's lives.” Crucially, in an absorptive paradigm, these relational matters do more than add another set of risk factors; they mediate and radically alter environment–body borderlands.

This formatting of the social is also out of sync with twenty-first-century living. As Adams et al. (2019) suggested, a host of social and environmental relations remain outside conventional determinants of health literature. They include reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism; philanthropic capitalism and the economization of life; the economy of attention; the challenges of anthropogenic climate change; and the geopolitics of North and South (or indeed, the multipolar world that now overlies this configuration).

Deciphering lines of accountability for provisioning care for mutated bodies, for a life with rashes and allergies, for early deaths and childhood diagnoses of cancer is not so easy, but surely a global health that attends to these problems needs to consider how our current notions of the social, on which our political engagements have rested up to now, may have outlived their utility in helping us through these predicaments today. (Adams et al. 2019, 1392)

In terms of assembly, this is not a simple expansion of the social, it engenders a shift in how we conceptualize biosocial lives. The shift involves recognizing absorption not only as a body–environment ontology (in which the body absorbs and is absorbed by the world [Solomon 2016]), but also as a challenge to the epistemics of health research in the new abnormal. Instead of adding social and nonhuman factors to medical risk calculations, we need careful analyses of the ways in which altered socioenvironmental arrangements condition health prospects, including engagement with the material as well as scientific “swirl” in which lives are currently lived. The ubiquity of “‘pollutants,” or the sheer scale and everywhere-ness of shifts in planetary chemistries and biologies, as manufactured materials reach deep into ocean trenches and into the core of species’ being, changes modes of attention and demands different and innovative forms of relation, or making kin (Balayannis and Garnett 2020). As Landecker (2023, 59) noted, this everywhere-ness raises “new questions about the systemic rather than the overtly toxic impacts of these hidden practices.” It requires investigation of “the practical chemical economy” and the “new forms and scales of biochemical transaction between microbes and animals, between plants and microbes, and between petroleum and animals” (Landecker 2023, 70). Geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists have embraced this immersion in a world of chemical alteration and aftermaths (Murphy 2017; Adams 2023; Landecker 2024b) in order to raise the ontoepistemic stakes. While the slow, quiet, and ubiquitous may not look so post damage to communities who are at the frontline of precarious living (Davies 2022), there is a strong case to be made that the analytical frameworks inherited from nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of the social and of health are no longer sufficient to the range of matters with which environmental health geographies contend. Indeed, as Davies (2022, 422) went on to suggest, in this uneven accumulation of harms, new forms of engaging are needed, new ways of seeing and acting, that can provide testimony to normalized forms of violence. And, one could add, beyond this preoccupation with the slow and with time, there are also spatial matters to be addressed. It is at this point that some new directions in EHG offer promise.

New Directions — Biocidal and Metabolic Geographies

In the following, I will highlight two broad areas, biocidal and metabolic geographies, where geographers and others are generating new insights, before finishing with some potential research directions.

Environmental Health Geographies in the New Abnormal

In absorptive geographies, environments are no longer settings for human health, but fully intricated in living processes. Those living processes are industrialized, as well as spatially and temporally composite. In this maelstrom of relations, health is clearly a composite matter. It is a commonplace, of course, to call health multifactorial. Perhaps less common is the realization that once we focus on body–environments, health itself starts to shift. It is no longer one clear outcome or approximation to a norm. Instead, health is a process of continuous adaptation to (body–)environments (the distinction is Canguilhem's 1991 [1966]). Engaging with this compositional account of health requires an EHG that is expansive (engaging with the dizzying array of the matrix called health), public (engaging the swirl of knowledge claims and vernacular practices that seek to adapt to those compositions), and just (finding normative routines in a world marked by multiple normativities). I will end by briefly commenting on each of these demands.

First, an expansive EHG requires methodological heterogeneity. As I have noted, there is a life science tendency to widen the scope, rather than change the form, of research. The very term environmental health is almost scripted to add in more variables, to enumerate more and more of the world. The obsession with enumeration (and quantitative evidence) may offer weak associations and little else (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts 2017; Rhodes and Lancaster 2019). The result is not so much a geography of absorption, but a methodologically driven reframing of health as an approximation to a norm — with all the violence and stigma that are entailed with statistical and cultural normalization — and a tendency through damage-related research to underestimate how the normal is itself subject to continuous change. In place of this additive model, we need methods and a recommitment to genuinely interdisciplinary working that can cope with spatial and temporal complexity and that can deal with the compositional nature of industrial health.

Second, and following on from this expansion of concerns, environmental health is a public matter, riven with multiple concerns and associated issue publics that can initiate the process of raising emerging concerns, tracing hidden relations, developing adaptations, and building alliances to generate environmental health actions (Marres 2005; Hinchliffe et al. 2018). In this respect, work that engages communities and citizens in generating environmental health data is promising (Gabrys 2014; Calvillo and Garnett 2019), particularly if groups do more than “collect” data but instead engage with the process of designing research questions, curating the materials that are produced; engage critically with organizations to improve data circulation; and generate possibilities for epistemic emergence (Shattuck 2021b) and biological citizenship (Petryna 2002). Even so, these data publics are hounded by issues of quality and assurance, as well as research processes that can easily reproduce hierarchies of knowledge power (Shapiro, Zakariya and Roberts 2017). Curating publics is a fraught process, numbing citizen groups as they are channeled through established evidence routines or risking a proliferation of overhyped and difficult-to-navigate claims (Rose, Birk and Manning 2022). In increasingly polarized societies characterized by misinformation and disinformation, environment and health have become part of the culture wars (from antivaxxers to raw-milk drinkers, from reproductive health and transgender care to mental health). Some campaigning groups mobilize progressive ideas around collective immunity, human rights, and equalities to generate libertarian claims to individual freedoms, to self-exclude from public health, and to deny rights to others (Klein 2023). In doing so, they add considerable caution to the notion that more data, or indeed popular movements, will produce greater insight. The danger of appropriation of health claims is a key issue for absorption. In an absorbing world, not only do more and more matters become health relevant, there are also increased means through which they can draw attention to one another or be made public.

This expanded and increasingly contested health landscape brings me to the third demand for EHG. Compositional accounts of health require a form of compositional politics (Stengers 2005; Latour 2013) that can deal with multiple goods or normativities (Mol 2024). If health contains multitudes (Yong 2016), adjudicating on what matters can be fraught. And despite the rhetoric, there is no easy way to square the demands for human health, ecohealth, one health, and planetary health. In biocidal geographies, the planetary health gain of carbon-limiting, zero-till cropping needs to be considered alongside the accompanying expansion in herbicide uses and their contested roles in soil, animal, and human health. In metabolic politics, the need to improve accessibility to low-carbon dietary protein points towards the benefits of expanding global poultry production, while the costs in terms of animal welfare, feed inputs, antimicrobial uses, and potential pandemic risks require consideration. In these examples, it is difficult to settle on singular forms of “good,” of justice or indeed a clear basis for a universal solution or consensus-based agreement.

If environmental health is not amenable to singular norms, neither is it the case that anything goes. The shared materialities of environmental health demand that normativities are addressed and just outcomes are pursued. One pragmatic possibility is to critically engage with justificatory processes (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), as a means to map out as well as engage with environmental health publics. For Boltanski and Thévenot, all groups and organizations engage in practices of justification, mobilizing core principles to inform notions of the “good.” In this sociology of critical practices, the authors outlined a set of specific “orders of worth,” or modes of justification, each of which is accompanied by characteristic principles. For example, civic orders emphasize collective welfare, market orders economic efficiencies, and so on. Each has characteristic measuring devices, routines, materials, and other tools that are used to “test” their strength (on their own grounds and against other orders). In the new abnormal, where environmental health relations frequently fail to satisfy conventional standards of proofs, this focus on the practices of justification may be particularly apposite. It offers possibilities for interrogating practices that are intent on business as usual, unpacking justificatory claims posed by the more powerful, while also inviting researchers to lend their skills and knowledge practices to subaltern groups. The latter may need assistance to generate data; design tests; analyze, curate, and choreograph evidence; and so on. In this sense, it can borrow from work in environmental geography that has mobilized “competency” groups to engage with environmental processes like flooding (Whatmore and Landstrom 2011). Only here we may need to move beyond the idea of shared competency, and any assumed unity of purpose, to consider how to live, diplomatically, with radical difference and seek forms of complementarity across diverse social groupings and human as well nonhuman lives (Stengers 2011; Morizot 2022).

If environments and health are not what they were, then we need new terms to grasp twenty-first-century predicaments. I have mobilized the term absorption to emphasize the ways in which lives of all kinds are actively shaped by their worlds. These absorptions make for new kinds of agentic assemblies, as tissues, metabolites, and other matters, previously considered as passive end products, alter the very basis for living, for health, and for future environmental relations. In doing, so they start to shift the emphasis of EHG away from environments as settings for human life, and away from accounts of the overtly toxic, to geographies that can address the systemic if uneven weathering of life and environments. In this, I have highlighted biocidal and metabolic geographies as emblematic of work that embraces the distributed agencies of bodily and environmental processes, as well as offering possible frameworks for an exposé of the normal (or the new abnormal), addressing the uneven distribution of ubiquitous health challenges. The consequences of this work are demanding. They may involve relaxing the hold of abstract forms of criticism and justice on the discipline and embracing work that engages empirically with systemic forms of material change and with processes and contestations of justification.