BALTIMORE (Map, News) - We cannot even begin to count the ways we poison ourselves, much less name them. But Examiner reporters recently identified two of the worst.

One is the ongoing self-inflicted wound of partially treated sewage sludge applied to land as what the ignorant believe is the final stage in our flush-and-forget society.

The other is millions of tons of trash flooding the Chesapeake Bay from its vast watershed.

Both ultimately end up inside us, where nobody knows the health effects of long-term exposure to the witches’ brew of toxins we produce in our Industrial Age.

The dozen sludge neighbors who marched on the Washington headquarters of the Carlyle Group on Wednesday may not know for sure their chronic health problems are related to the company spreading it near their homes.

But what we all do know is more than 70 million Americans, the first humans ever to endure a wide array and myriad combination of toxins, are reaching that age when the accumulated health insults of a lifetime manifest.

America’s baby boomers are Earth’s guinea pigs of environmental science. But, unlike guinea pigs, boomers can protest. And vote. And demand. At about 30 percent of the population, if they are even a little bit sicker than they would have been if not poisoned, they could tip an already overburdened health care system and fragile economy into collapse.

Of all creatures, we are the only ones with the capacity to know what we are doing to ourselves and how to stop it.

We know our cheap and easy ways with waste actually are not savings, but deferred costs that accrue and compound, and — as any true conservative can tell you — ultimately shall be paid.

We pay those bills in kind, our own kind. Ask Lin Eyer of Havre de Grace and other neighbors of Susquehanna State Park, one of 314 permitted sludge disposal sites in Maryland. After a mere horseback ride through a freshly “sludged” field, she entered health care hell. Officials say there is no proven health impact.

Yet, though considered safe enough for spreading, the sludge is so “safe” no one is allowed on the land for a year. (This involves the 440,000 tons spread in Maryland each year, not the fully treated Orgro compost widely used on lawns and gardens, or in a Johns Hopkins lead abatement experiment in Baltimore six years ago.)

The other big if is what happens to ground and surface waters from sludge-treated percolation and runoff?

It all goes downhill. If you doubt that, follow the trash.

Earth Day efforts to clean 150 streams feeding the Chesapeake give a stark, visible account of how things really work. The 64,000-square-mile watershed is home to almost 17 million people. We’re killing it, even though we eat out of it, play in it and drink out of those very tributaries and their associated ground waters.

No big deal? Check the growing reports of mutant amphibians and inter-sex fish in our rivers and lakes. Check the recent Associated Press investigation of pharmaceutical residues in watersheds.

If we think we can filter it all, we are delusional. Anyway, forget drinking water. What about breathing it in as steam and shower mist?

If we think that somehow we are immune from “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” invoked by our founders, we are in for a shock. All species consume and excrete themselves into crashes until achieving equilibrium or extinction.

The fact is, we can fix this. We can pay a little now to reverse our shortsighted, irresponsible ways. Or we — and our children — can pay a huge amount later.

Those few who enjoy incomprehensible wealth and security must understand that the only threat to their well-being is chaos, and that billions of people around the world shall not suffer and die docilely. Rely on governments to save us? Remember that governments certainly shall abuse any rights and powers surrendered to impose draconian solutions.

That leaves only universal, responsible small-scale action — one person, one business, one agency, one foundation, one church, one project at a time — as our salvation.

Each of us knows what we have to do. The only open question is whether we have the collective will to do it.

Frank Keegan is editor of The Baltimore Examiner. fkeegan@baltimoreexaminer.com