We reap what we sow.

It seems the seeds of our nation’s nonchalant chemical legacy are generating more fruit than at any other point in our history – the kind of toxic produce that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will live with.

Or at least we seem to know more now than in the past about the results of our haphazard treatment of our environment.

Thanks to somewhat active efforts by our state’s environmental regulators Michiganders have reasonable access to maps of known, historic pollution from industrial sites. Those disclosures aren’t always at the front of our mind, but they certainly persist beneath our feet, often surfacing where we draw groundwater for drinking.

Probably the most notable in northwest Lower Michigan is the trichloroethylene plume that stretches from Mancelona to Shanty Creek and has contaminated more than 1,400 water wells along the way. That contamination emanates from a now-shuttered manufacturing operation in Mancelona that ceased operation in 1967.

Nearly five decades later, long after the companies that operated the plant went out of business, we are left with the bill for cleanup and a chemical catastrophe stretching 10 miles west from Mancelona.

We can find examples like that peppered throughout our state and, in fact, nationwide – places where we likely will spend generations paying the price for our chemical negligence.

But our view would be disastrously myopic if we convinced ourselves such pollution is the remnants of a bygone era. Sure, the days of rivers aflame with volatile, toxic sheen are long past, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t creating new contamination every day.

In fact, on Friday, state officials announced they found toxic “forever chemicals” in beef from cattle at a downstate farm where the herd was fed crops grown with fertilizer made from contaminated biosolids.

Those PFAS chemicals – used in everything from firefighting foam to nonstick cookware to water-resistant clothing – are new, ongoing pollution that reaches our environment everyday in a variety of places. In the case of that downstate farm, the unsuspecting farmer in the past spread biosolids from the city of Wixom’s wastewater treatment plant on fields. Unfortunately, state regulators later learned the facility received water laced with extraordinarily high levels of PFAS chemicals from a chrome plating operation in the city.

Last year, Michigan banned the use of biosolids containing more than 150 parts per billion of PFAS on farm fields, and requires testing before such uses. But by that time, the damage was done – the term “forever chemicals” is used toward PFAS for a reason. They are a family of compounds that simply don’t break down in the environment, and they accumulate in living organisms, including human tissue, causing a number of health conditions.

And that inspection of the chemicals transferred through biosolids doesn’t account for any contamination caused by treated water discharged by the plant that no-doubt was rife with the chemicals.

Thankfully, Michigan has become one of the most proactive states in terms of addressing the chemicals, and attempting to curb new sources of pollution. Still, experts consider a mapping project that pinpointed 58,000 potential PFAS contamination sites nationwide to be an underestimate of the problem.

In fact, many say the only reason we haven’t found more is because most states simply aren’t looking hard enough.

That’s why we hope both federal and state regulators and lawmakers will take meaningful action to curb this ongoing legacy. At some point soon our nation needs to stop planting seeds of future environmental catastrophe.

Otherwise we shouldn’t be surprised when it comes time to reap what we sow.