Shooting oneself in the foot

That’s what we do when we release toxic chemicals in the environment, because it looks like they come back to us on our dinner plates, sooner or later.
From Raw Story:

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.
A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.
"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.
"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.
Ultimately, he said, the contaminants could jeopardize seafood, a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people.
"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.
Though it was impossible to know where the whales had been, Payne said the contamination was embedded in the blubber of males formed in the frigid polar regions, indicating that the animals had ingested the metals far from where they were emitted.
"When you're working with a synthetic chemical which never existed in nature before and you find it in a whale which came from the Arctic or Antarctic, it tells you that was made by people and it got into the whale," he said.
How that happened is unclear, but the contaminants likely were carried by wind or ocean currents, or were eaten by the sperm whales' prey.

Now, the real question is, Didn’t the people in charge of all the factories that produce those chemicals and dump them in the ocean or the atmosphere -- without catching them first and cleaning them up -- think that they’d eventually be ingested by the same animals that later on would be eaten by them, their families, and their employees?
I wonder if all those chemicals (and pesticides) will actually end up altering our DNA so that in hundreds of years our bodies will function in radically different ways.
In the meantime though, a lot of people will get cancer or other illnesses that will kill them.