Carson is often referred to as the mother of the modern environmental movement and is credited with raising an alarm that resulted in (among other things) a ban on the pesticide DDT and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In re-reading Silent Spring to prepare for my presentations I was struck by the sense that it is as fresh today as it was then. Unfortunately we haven’t yet truly heeded her call.

A few months after my college graduation I first learned about the fact that there are no safeguards ensuring household products are free from toxic chemicals and I found that hard to believe. I wrongly assumed that if something was on the shelf someone must have approved it.

Carson wrote about this false assumption I grew up with in Silent Spring, more than a decade before I was born.

“I think until very recently the average citizen assumed someone was looking after these matters. That some little understood but carefully relied upon safeguards stood like shields between his person and harm. We’re experiencing a rather rude shattering of those ideals.”

Somehow 50 years later the average citizen still (wrongly) assumes someone is looking after these matters (they aren’t) and safeguards exist (they don’t).

She felt the public was being asked to take a risk that they didn’t understand, and we still are today.

So, what do we do?

We demand that we have a right to know what’s in products and that a process is created to ensure that unsafe chemicals don’t end up in the stuff we use everyday. In recent years some momentum has begun to build up again- 50 years after Rachel Carson first got the ball rolling.

When parents found out that plastic baby bottles were made with BPA we passed laws and put manufacturers on notice that we wouldn’t accept it- so in the four short years since my daughter was born the entire baby bottle market has phased out of the use of BPA. Yay!

One small example, among many, that when we realize the risks we’re being asked to take and reject them our laws will improve and the market will move. Let’s keep it up!

So in honor of Earth Day and Rachel Carson and Mother’s Day too do something more than you planned on doing to heed the call of the mother of the modern environmental movement- join us on a bus trip to D.C. to support the Safe Chemicals Act, write a letter to the editor supporting BPA free food cans, make a donation to support our work. Don’t wait for someone else to do it or another 50 years may pass before we see the change we need.

If you’ve hesitated until now to get involved take heart, so did Rachel Carson. She looked for two years for someone else to write the book that became Silent Spring. After it’s publication she said she didn’t want to write it because “a book about pesticides would be a book about poison and death, and I wanted to write about life”.

As the mother of two young children I understand that sentiment. I want to be caught up in life all the time not thinking about poisons, but to protect the life we love there is a need for many more of us to embrace the role of mothers of the modern environmental movement by joining Rachel to demand safer chemical policies.

my baby boy, Forrest

They’re widely used to soften plastics and as fragrances in products we all use everyday.

More than a year ago the US EPA drafted a rule to simply list phthalates and two other groups of chemicals as chemicals of concern under the federal Toxic Substances Control Act. The chemical industry has been working to hold up the rules and the White House Office of Management and Budget has seemingly played along, not formally proposing the rule for public review and comment. The message from industry has been clear- don’t even THINK about regulating phthalates.

Learn more about the troubles with phthalates, the White House holdup and tips for avoiding phthalate exposure  in this post from our national campaign allies Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.

You can help me protect our baby boys by sending this along to your friends with a request to become a fan of the Environmental Health Strategy Center on Facebook so we can inform and engage more people in our efforts to prevent harm from phthalates and other unsafe chemicals.

Sandra Steingraber is a biologist who knows in her body what it means to be poisoned by chemicals. When she was just twenty, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer, which she says is “a quintessential environmental cancer.” In fact, 60% of cancers are environmentally based. Sixty percent.[1]

I first discovered Steingraber’s book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, in the process of researching my own book-in-progress, One Canary Sings. I was thrilled to have found someone else who was using her bodily experience of illness to sound the alarms about the damage toxicants are doing to our environment and our bodies. When I learned that Steingraber would be teaching a 5-day workshop in environmental writing at a Vermont retreat sponsored by Orion magazine, of course I had to go.

You can read here and here if you’d like to see some samples of the writing that emerged from that workshop. But what I am more eager to share is my experience of Steingraber the activist. Because she inspired me. Steingraber is a woman on an urgent mission. Here is how she sees it: “We’re living in a time of ecological holocaust…. We can either be good Germans and ignore the signs of atrocity all around us, or we can be the members of the French Resistance and act on what we know.” And what we know, she says, is that one in every four mammals is headed for extinction. And the plankton—which we need for oxygen—is dying. And certain cancers are rampant. “So as a writer I feel a kinship with the 1930s writers who were writing about the horror that was beginning to happen. I feel called to heroism, and I want my writing to call others to heroism.”

So she puts on a johnny and allows a film crew to follow her as she places her feet in the stirrups for her annual bladder exam. And she passes her own breast milk around in a jar to make the point that breast milk is contaminated with over 100 chemicals, including pesticides. And she travels 100 days a year so that she can stand in front of audiences large and small, receptive and not so receptive, to tell them what she knows about how we are degrading the very environment we need to support life. She wants to move people to act. To resist. Because at this point, only large, brave, collective action will be enough. To save the plankton. To save the polar bears and the blue whales and the ocelots. And to save another mammal: Ourselves.

This is what Sandra Steingraber taught our small, intrepid band of writers. And then she told us to go forth and write.

-Jennifer Lunden

[1] Verkasalo PK, et. al., “Genetic Predisposition, Environment and Cancer Incidence: A Nationwide Twin Study in Finland, 1976-1995,” International Journal of Cancer, 83: 743-49, 1999, and Lichtenstein P, et. al., “Environmental and Heritable Factors in the Causation of Cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine 343:78-85, 2000, as cited in Yvonne Marie Coyle, “The Effect of the Environment on Breast Cancer Risk,” Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 84: 273-288, April 2004.

So, the past two and a half weeks have been a frenetic blurr of activity fending off Governor LePage’s rollback attack.

Here’s a recap:

The Governor released his rollback proposal

EHSC released a statement outlining our opposition to the rollbacks that threaten public health

Several hearings have been held throughout the state by a Legislative committee working to identify regulations that are bothering Maine businesses (BTW they’re not the ones LePage is after, & outrage at LePage’s proposals has been the focus of most people at the hearings)

No Maine business has claimed any interest in LePage’s rollbacks of the Kid Safe Products Act or Maine’s new BPA rule but lots of information has surfaced about where those proposals came from-  lobbyists representing out-of state chemical industries.

Which brings us to today.

As I’m writing this there’s another hearing happening in Bangor and Mike (EHSCs Executive Director) is testifying about what Maine legislators should do to encourage economic growth in Maine namely invest in development of new, clean technologies (like locally made plastic from Maine potatoes) and eliminate exposure to chemicals that cost us $380 million per year in preventable health care costs.

On Monday the committee is having a hearing on the Governors environmental rollback proposals- this is the most important of all of the hearings that have happened so far and we’re hoping lots of people turn out to make it clear (on Valentine’s Day no less!) that we love Maine and we love our families and want to keep them healthy.  Please join us at the State House for that hearing it will likely last all day long so come whenever you can!

In the midst of all of this it’s actually been really wonderful to hear all of the support there is for laws that keep us safe from toxic chemicals.  It seems that only Governor LePage and the people who are paid to speak for him disagree.

I just have to share one more link to a column by George Smith, who I think is widely considered to be a fairly conservative political junkie in Maine. Here’s a bit from his recent column about the Governors rollback proposals:

“Every Republican Senator voted for the Act that requires Maine to adopt a list of priority chemicals of high concern, forces manufacturers to disclose the toxic chemicals they add to products, and authorizes the state to require safer alternatives whenever they are available.

Under this Act, BPA is the first chemical that the Maine Board of Environmental Protection decided should be phased out in reusable food and beverage containers including baby bottles and sippy cups. Governor LePage may be drinking from the wrong cup on this one.

Defense of the ban on BPA was the first of five issues that were unveiled last week as the 2011 Common Environmental Agenda. These folks aren’t stupid. Take an issue that every Maine Senator supported, mix in conservative House members like Dana Dow, and what have you got? A big defeat for the governor.”

Let’s hope he’s right!

It was impressive!

Governor LePage heard from a panel of 28 diverse speakers compelling stories of why a healthy environment is necessary for healthy people, a healthy economy and a strong quality of life.   The panel included businessmen like the Presidents of Deering Lumber, Oakhurst Dairy, and the Homebuilders and Remodelers Association of Maine, people who make their living off the land like fishermen, clammers, lobstermen, loggers, hog farmers and apple growers, and innkeepers and guides whose businesses depend on the reputation Maine’s environment has far beyond our borders.

I was particularly impressed with the story of Corky Ellis Chairman and Founder of a software company called Kepware Technologies.  He told the story of living and working in New Jersey and coming up to visit Maine as a tourist.  He always found himself talking with his wife about how wonderful Maine is and they asked themselves “if we love it so much why don’t we live there?”.  He said Maine’s environment is what spurred him to start his business here rather than New Jersey and now they’ve created 50 jobs here.

Several people included the need for safer chemicals in their comments.  Megan Rice, a mom from China, Maine,

did a wonderful job advocating for safer products noting that parents shouldn’t have to be chemists in order to know which products are safe to buy and that toxic chemicals just shouldn’t be in everyday items used by children.  She encouraged the Administration to continue effective implementation of the Kid-Safe Products Law EHSC has been championing.

Governor LePage adressed the panel at the end.  He thanked everyone and offered his assurance that he doesn’t intend to decrease any of our existing environmental protections just to review them to make sure all are as efficient as they can be, aren’t overly burdensome to business, and are based on sound science.  On the face of it that all sounds like common sense, so on the one hand that’s pretty good and it was nice to hear him say it.  On the other hand the devils in the details so it’s safe to say we’re going to be spending alot of time during the next few years debating what is and is not burdensome to business and whose science is “sound science”. So stay tuned!

For more on the forum check out this video from WCSH6.

One can see where the anger comes from right, I mean what parent when faced with the litany of health effects related to exposure to BPA wouldn’t be infuriated at the idea this was being added to the stuff our babies eat and drink from?

As a first real test to the power of Maine’s Kid Safe Products Law (passed in 2008) the BEP is currently considering the proposal on the table- to designate BPA as a priority and phase out the sale of reusable food and drink containers that contain BPA, things like baby bottles and sippy cups.  This is a good thing but it’s largely already been done (by the angry moms- see above!).

What still needs to be done is to get the packages that carry our babies food to lose the BPA.  Maine’s law authorizes the BEP to do this but the rule before them today just fails to take that opportunity.

In my testimony today before the BEP I asked them to use the power they have in the law to regulate food and drink packaging “intentionally marketed or intended for the use of children under 3 years of age”.  This would include formula cans, baby jar lids and plastic baby food containers, toddler foods and foods marketed to toddlers (like the spaghettios pictured here that my 2 1/2 year old daughter Chloe vainly wishes I would break down and buy for her).

Why should they expand the rule?  Well, it’s not all that valuable to be using a BPA free bottle for formula that’s been sitting on the shelf for several months in a BPA laden can.

So I ask you to join me as one of the “hopeful moms” (or Dads, or grandparents, or aunties, etc) gaining strength from the successes we’ve had shifting the market away from toxic baby bottles so quickly and expressing your hope that the BEP will take the opportunity of this rulemaking to get BPA out of our kids food too.

The BEP is accepting comments until August 30th, you can comment here.

You probably already know all you need to to write compelling, important testimony- your sentiment that kids food should be safe is really the gist of it- but if you want more details we have some resources on our site.

EHSC’s testimony from our director Mike

the draft rule

A chart with an outline of the changes we want to the rule

today’s press release about the hearing

and if you haven’t already please “like” EHSC on FaceBook so you can keep informed about developments that are helping us Prevent Harm.

Thanks,

Amanda

The chemical industry says publicly that it supports reform, but behind the scenes they have launched a relentless attack on Congress’s reform efforts. By releasing this video, we are hoping to expose the industry’s contradiction and urge people to tell Congress to get tough on toxic chemicals.

First Lady Michelle Obama releasing the findings of the Childhood Obesity Task Force report May, 2010. (official White House photo by Samantha Appleton)

First Lady, Michelle Obama has been in the news a lot for her Let’s Move initiative to tackle childhood obesity.  This week she released the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report to the President which is an action plan for tackling the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.

I was really happy to see that the report goes beyond recommendations for individual behavior change and addresses many root causes and systemic changes needed, including researching chemicals that may promote weight gain and obesity.  These chemicals are called obesogens and they are found in everyday products like plastics and nonstick cookware.

The report notes that ”such chemicals may promote obesity by increasing the number of fat cells, changing the amount of calories burned at rest, altering energy balance, and altering the body’s mechanisms for appetite and satiety   Fetal and infant exposure to such chemicals may result in more weight gain per food consumed and also possibly less weight loss per amount of energy expended. The health effects of these chemicals during fetal and infant development may persist throughout life, long after the exposures occur.”

The recommendations from the report don’t amount to much, basically a nod in the direction of more research into these chemicals, but the inclusion of chemical exposures is a real step in the right direction.

For more on the topic you could check out the Newsweek article  Born to Be Big:  Early Exposure to Common Chemicals May be Programming Kids to be Fat.

We’re planning to use this blog as a place to share everything from recipes detailing how to make your own safe products to reflections on why the latest emerging environmental health science is relevant to Maine families. We also want you to get to know us through videos and updates from the trenches and for us to get to know you by hearing your feedback as comments and by inviting our activists and supporters to share their stories in guest blog entries.

We’re looking for people who are interested in being regular blog post contributors. You’ll work with our Outreach and Organizing Director to generate ideas for topics to cover and share your insight into how to improve environmental health and build a sustainable economy. If you’re interested let us know by emailing Kristine.

To be alerted to new posts to this blog click on the “Subscribe with RSS” link in the top right of this page. You can also stay in the know by becoming a fan on our Facebook page. Whenever you read something here that you think your friends or family would be interested in click on the share link and send it along to them. We appreciate you spreading the word about the good work we’re doing!

Thanks again,
Amanda & the rest of us at EHSC