Infertile Environments

Janelle Lamoreaux's book examines how epigenetic studies of toxic exposure define and shape the idea of environment. Its core is fieldwork in a toxicology laboratory in Nanjing, China, where researchers study how pesticides and other pollutants affect the reproductive and developmental health of men.

Following the lab's everyday procedures, Lamoreaux shows how several kinds of environment come to exist, among them those defined by nation, hormones, diet, mothers, and the laboratory itself. She places this work within China's longer history and its present moment, when falling birth rates, reproductive policy, and fertility technologies have become pressing public concerns. She also treats toxicology in China as a cross-border undertaking, tied both to conditions on the ground and to global research priorities and infrastructures. These connections reveal how many different scales epigenetic environments operate across.

Written at a time of heightened anxiety about toxins, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and climate change, the book argues that the growing number of environments in epigenetic research gives rise to new forms of toxic relationship, with effects that can reach several generations of people.