The 30th National Pesticide Forum
Healthy Communities: Green solutions for safe environments
http://www.beyondpesticides.org/forum/index.htm

Yale University, New Haven, CT
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
March 30-31, 2012
The 30th National Pesticide Forum, Healthy Communities: Green solutions for safe environments, will be held March 30-31, 2012 (Friday evening and all day Saturday) at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The conference will focus on organic landcare, urban/ suburban pesticide use, organic food, and protective national, state, and local policies.
Registration: Register online.

Chemical Exposures and Obesity and Diabetes

The UK nonprofit organization CHEM Trust (Chemicals, Health and Environment Monitoring Trust) just released a report on the links between chemicals and diabetes/obesity. The CHEM Trust report, entitled Review of the Science Linking Chemical Exposures to the Human Risk of Obesity and Diabetes, focuses on endocrine disrupting chemicals in both obesity and diabetes. Exposures to these chemicals in the womb, at other critical periods of life, and in adulthood may be linked to obesity and disruption of the normal functioning of insulin in later life. Evidence of the role of hormone disrupting chemicals comes from both laboratory studies and studies on human populations.
The report can be found at http://www.chemtrust.org.uk/documents/CHEM%20Trust%20Obesity%20&%20Diabetes%20Full%20Report.pdf

Low Doses, Big Effects: Scientists Seek 'Fundamental Changes' in Testing, Regulation of Hormone-Like Chemicals

Small doses can have big health effects. That is a main finding of a new report, three years in the making, published Wednesday by a team of 12 scientists who study hormone-altering chemicals. Dozens of substances that can mimic or block hormones are found in the environment, the food supply and consumer products, including plastics, pesticides and cosmetics. One of the biggest controversies is whether the tiny doses that most people are exposed to are harmful. Researchers led by Tufts University’s Laura Vandenberg concluded after examining hundreds of studies that health effects “are remarkably common” when people or animals are exposed to low doses. "Fundamental changes in chemical testing are needed to protect human health," they wrote.

Environmental Healthy News [Author Marla Cone]

Report 

11th Wege Lecture - Fostering Environments to Sustain Our Children's Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Speaker: Marie Lynn Miranda, Monday, March 26, 2012, 5 p.m., Rackham Auditorium
 
Lecture is followed by question-and-answer session. Public reception follows in the Rackham atrium.

Marie Lynn Miranda, dean and professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, delivers the 11th Annual Peter M. Wege Lecture on Sustainability. Her address is titled "Fostering Environments to Sustain our Children's Health." Miranda became SNRE dean Jan. 1. She also holds an appointment as professor in the Department of Pediatrics, which is part of C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.

Lecture abstract: Although it is widely agreed that child health and well-being are determined by multiple forces, surprisingly little is known about the interactions of those forces. For example, elevated environmental exposures often occur in communities facing multiple social stressors like deteriorating housing, inadequate access to health care, poor schools, high unemployment, high crime, and high poverty, all of which may compound the effects of environmental exposures. This phenomenon is especially severe for low income and minority children. Her talk will focus on how advanced information technologies can be used to determine the impact of combined social and environmental stressors on children, and how these same technologies can and are being used as the basis for deploying interventions that effectively create more protective environments for children.

More information, including location, at http://www.snre.umich.edu/assets/speakers/miranda.html

Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson 

There is shocking footage of children happily playing about in the wake of DDT-spraying vehicles trolling the new suburban streets of postwar America. If it weren’t for work by pioneering environmental activists like Rachel Carson, such government programs would have left far more devastating wreckage in their callous path than they did.

It was 50 years ago that Carson first published her seminal treatise Silent Spring, chronicling how an industrialized society’s broad and indiscriminate use of chemicals and pesticides can cause irrevocable health and environmental damage. Such brave work eventually led to lasting changes in U.S. law, strictly governing the use of such substances. For its 17th-annual symposium, the Wallace Stegner Center will take an in-depth look at the lasting legacy of both Carson’s work and the environmental movement that followed in the wake of her eye-opening labors. (Jacob Stringer)

Mar 9, 2012, 8 pm   Download the brochure
10 Fort Douglas Boulevard, Salt Lake City, UT 84113, United States (801) 587-1000, Salt Lake City, 84102, 801-587-2980
Where: University Guest House & Conference Center

Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson @ Fort Douglas Ballroom, 110 S. Fort Douglas Blvd., 801-585-3440, March 9-10, $100-$175. www.Law.Utah.edu/Stegner
Download the brochure  Speakers include: Susan Avery, President and Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Terrence Collins, Senior Institute Member, The Institute for Green Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Robin Craig, Attorneys’ Title Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs, and Co-Director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Program, Florida State University College of Law; Paul Holthus, founding Executive Director, World Ocean Council; Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall and other books; Priscilla Murphy, Author of What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring; Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego and author of Merchants of Doubt; Sandra Steingraber, Ecologist and author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment and other books; Wendy Wagner, Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor, School of Law, University of Texas at Austin, and the production of “Air Tight,” a play by Aden Ross.

From Silent Spring Institute 3/8/2012:

• Consumer Products Contain Potentially Harmful Chemicals Not Listed on Labels
• Tips Card: Top 12 Tips for Greening Your Cleaning and Personal Care
• Fact Sheet: Hormone Disruptors and Asthma-Associated Chemicals in Consumer Products
• Video: Highlights of the consumer products study 
• Table: Consumer products tested for endocrine disruptors and asthma-associated chemicals

Fifty years ago....Rachel Carson Was Right

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962, Chapter 14: One in Four

… as we pour our millions into research and invest all our hopes in vast programs to find cures for established cases of cancer, we are neglecting the golden opportunity to prevent, even while we seek to cure….

The task is by no means a hopeless one. In one important respect the outlook is more encouraging than the situation regarding infectious disease at the turn of the century. The world was then full of disease germs, as today it is full of carcinogens. But man did not put the germs into the environment and his role in spreading them was involuntary. In contrast, man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the environment, and he can, if he wishes, eliminate many of them…

It would be unrealistic to suppose that all chemical carcinogens can or will be eliminated from the modern world. But a very large proportion are by no means necessities of life. By their elimination the total load of carcinogens would be enormously lightened, and the threat that one in every four will develop cancer would at least be greatly mitigated.

The most determined efforts should be made to eliminate those carcinogens that now contaminate our food, our water supplies, and our atmosphere, because they provide the most dangerous type of contact – minute exposures, repeated over and over through the years…. For those in whom cancer is already a hidden or a visible presence, efforts to find cures must of course continue. But for those not yet touched by the disease and certainly for the generations as yet unborn, prevention is the imperative need.

Farmers face tough choice on ways to fight new strains of weeds. A hot debate has erupted over whether farmers should adopt a new generation of genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant crops or turn away from chemical herbicides altogether. Morning Edition, NPR.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/03/07/147656157/farmers-face-tough-choice-on-ways-to-fight-new-strains-of-weeds

Newest Silent Spring Institute Board Members:  Ellen Calmas and Ellie Goldberg
Newest Board Members Bring Passion and Dedication

Children At Risk...Again!

Contacts: 

• Jerome Silbert, M.D., Executive Director, Watershed Partnership, Inc 203-453-8537,  WaterPartnership@SBCglobal.net
•  Nancy Alderman, President, Environment and Human Health, Inc  203-248-6583
•  Doug Wood, Associate Director, Grassroots Environmental Education 516-883-0887, daw@grassrootsinfo.org
•  Louis Burch, Program Coordinator, Citizens Campaign for the Environment  203-503-1314,  lburch@citizenscampaign.org

Press Conference

When: Thursday, March 8, 2012  1:00 pm

Where: Legislative Office Building, Hartford, CT  Rom 1A

Why: Connecticut's landmark law banning the use of toxic pesticides on elementary and middle school fields in Connecticut is in danger of being eliminated.  Pro-pesticide forces have introduced legislation that would roll back protections for children's health and once again permit the use of even the most toxic pesticides on school fields.

Speakers: Senator Ed Meyer, Co-chair, Environment Committee

        Representative Dick Roy, Co-Chair, Environment Committee

        Public health experts, medical professionals, and landscaping professionals

        Representatives of sponsoring organizations

Sponsors: The Watershed Partnership, Inc., Environment and Human Health, Inc., Citizens Campaign for the Environment, Grassroots Environmental Education and twenty other non-profits, associations and health organizations

THE PUBLIC MUST BE TOLD THAT THIS PROTECTION FOR CHILDREN AT SCHOOL IS IN DANGER OF BEING ELIMINATED!