KUFM Commentary - March 2010 --------------------------------------------------------- "Celebrating the Environmental Human Rights Movement" This year, Women's Voices for the Earth, or WVE, is celebrating 15 years of engaging women to advocate for the right to live in a healthy environment. We're excited to bring Dr. Sandra Steingraber to Missoula to celebrate with us on Friday, March 5, with a showing of her new film Living Downstream at the Wilma Theatre. Dr. Sandra Steingraber, known as the poet laureate of the environmental health movement, recently wrote, "I am betting that my children—and the generation of children they are a part of—will, by the time they are my age, consider it unthinkable to allow cancer-causing chemicals, reproductive toxicants, and brain-destroying poisons to freely circulate in our economy. They will find it unthinkable to assume an attitude of silence and willful ignorance about our ecology." It is these words that I keep in mind WVE marks fifteen years of existence. We'll be celebrating fifteen years of empowering women to fight for their right to live in an environment free from toxic chemicals that invade our bodies and the bodies of our children. Fifteen years of educating women about the health impacts of these chemicals and giving them the tools they need to protect themselves. Fifteen years of giving women a voice in a movement that, aside from legendary figures like Rachel Carson and Lois Gibbs, was historically lacking in female leaders. Traditionally, the environmental movement has widely been seen as one of conservation, wilderness preservation, and wildlife protection. But what about the environment in which we live everyday, the environments in which we eat, drink, breathe, and play? Women's Voices for the Earth is part of a new movement that fuses environmentalism with women's health and empowerment. This movement resides in the connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our environment, and works to combat the threat of toxic chemicals that impact our lives. I'm talking about the chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, children's asthma, fertility problems, learning disabilities, and a host of other illnesses. There are tens of thousands of chemicals on the marketplace today, and because I work in this movement to protect our bodies from the impacts of these chemicals, I find it my duty to help break the silence around them. People are generally shocked to discover that manufacturers don't have to prove that a chemical is safe before including it in our shampoos, household cleaners, or cosmetics. In my experience in this work, most people are horrified to learn that if the average woman's breast milk were bottled for sale, it would be so contaminated with chemicals that it wouldn't pass FDA regulations. And they're shocked to learn that the government isn't protecting them from potential carcinogens, reproductive toxins, and endocrine disruptors in the products that we bring into our homes and use everyday. This is how the threat of toxic chemicals affects everyone—not only are we exposed to them through our own use, but we're exposed to them when they enter the environment as well. For example, USGS studies show that 70% of waterways tested contain detergent chemicals, while 66% contain disinfectants. Imagine what happens when we drink that water—those chemicals enter our bodies, and if we're women, we can then pass them on to our children in the womb and through breast-feeding. The good news is that, right now, there is a groundswell of energy to fix our broken chemical regulation system. The current framework, called the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, is supposed to regulate the 85,000 chemicals on the market today. However, in the three and a half decades since TSCA was enacted, only 200 of those chemicals have been reviewed for safety and only five have been restricted. This system is horrifically insufficient, considering that new research emerges daily on the serious health impacts of certain chemicals, like phthalates, flame-retardants, parabens, and numerous others. WVE believes that US chemical policy must change to require evaluation of chemicals for safety before they are allowed in products. WVE also believes in the urgent need to immediately phase out the most dangerous chemicals, and require safer alternatives. The surge of support for this kind of reform is coming from what Dr. Steingraber calls the environmental human rights movement. She says this "movement will take up with equal fervor the task of divorcing our economy from its current dependencies on chemical toxicants that are known to trespass inside our bodies, without our consent, thus violating, as some have argued, our security of person." Women's voices will be pivotal in this movement. Women have a tremendous amount of social, political, and economic power to change government policies and corporate practices that wreak havoc on our ability to keep ourselves safe. When we join our voices, federal lawmakers and corporations listen. Because of the power of our voices, corporations are beginning to make their products safer. Cleaning product companies, nail polish companies, and baby bottle companies have all recently announced the removal of toxic chemicals from their products. And this is only the beginning. Visit the WVE website to join your voice with ours and begin making a difference. WVE invites you to join us in celebrating fifteen years of educating and empowering women to protect their health and the environment on March 5 at 7:00PM at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula. Dr. Sandra Steingraber will kick off this one-night-only screening of Living Downstream with an introduction to the film, take questions afterwards, and will close out the evening with a book-signing.
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