BIOCONURBATION
The geographical migration of toxic substances between ecosystems. Patrick Geddes coined the term conurbation to describe the migration of regional cities into a centralized metropolis1. In the utopian sense, self-sufficient regional cities were undermined by the parasitic nature of the metropolis2. Local industry thus became national industry and cultural assimilation caused a hybridized folk of multiple dialects. We propose the addition of bio to its root word of conurbation to describe the instance when local toxins and waste begin to cross-geographical boundaries into foreign ecosystems. The ship breaking industry, for example, releases lead and arsenic into the Bangladeshi seaboard that may have been created in an entirely separate hemisphere3. Those toxins then leach into the ocean and contaminate local species that, in turn, geographically extending the toxic impact through the processes of bioaccumulation and biomagnification. As much as Bangladesh relies on the steel broken down in shipbuilding, they also rely on fishing as a major export, potentially bringing the system full circle as the same toxins are then exported within the tissue of the fish.4