I promise to update you on my goings on in New Orleans, including my new big pimpin' yellow cruiser I can now be find riding around Bayou St. John. It's amazing and you will be jealous when you see it. I'm currently on the search for a matching fedora. Because every cruiser riding lady needs a matching fedora.
Here is my latest Momsrising blog post. Turns out the Carson-Gore Academy for Environmental Sciences was built on contaminated land. Yes, you may recognize the names Carson and Gore from Rachel Carson and Al Gore. Cheers from a hot, humid, and spicy New Orleans.
A new school year, a new article on our country’s lack of safe school siting policies. More evidence that a tidal wave of debate over why building schools on top of contaminated land is a bad idea has washed over our country. In fact, that’s exactly what The New York Times article entitled, “Tainted Al Gore School Poster Child For National Toxics Debate”, states. The author, Elena Schor, described the latest in school siting scandals, this one with the just opened Al Gore school in Los Angeles. This school’s contamination is so well known that Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller have both mentioned it and its ironic connection to pioneering environmentalists on their shows.
EPA, mandated by Congress in 2007, to create and release voluntary national guidelines on how to safely site a school without exposing students and staff to a cocktail of toxic chemicals in the summer of 2009. Guess what, folks? It’s the summer of 2010 and there are still no such guidelines in the hands of school board members and parents alike. EPA, who was notoriously on permanent vacation during the Bush years, had a late start. Last summer they enlisted a large and diverse stakeholder group to help them craft these guidelines and we have all been waiting patiently since those recommendations were sent to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
The Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences, named after lauded environmentalists Rachel Carson and Al Gore, has been built on toxic land. What I find a more important piece of the conversation is that California actually has the toughest school siting regulations and mechanisms in place to prevent such things from happening in the country. The state has been at the forefront of this issue. Just this past weekend, contaminated soil was removed from the school prior to its opening on Monday. But I wonder, with mechanisms in place, why did it take until mere hours before students arrived for their first day of school to remove contaminated soil?
As we know from No Child Left Behind and cross district busing, anything related to school districts is much more complicated than meets the eye. Often times, school boards are gifted cheap land by residents or businesses to build a new school. This gifted land is often cheap for a reason. It’s undesirable. Sometimes, many times, that reason is because of past contamination or proximity to a highway or under power lines. All things that can cause life long health problems for the students and faculty that spend so many hours there.
Sometimes nobody in decision making authority even knows that the land has been contaminated. But more often, decision makers simply do not know what to do or how to remediate or have any power to raise enough money to do so if they did know the answers to these questions. EPA’s guidelines are an important step in providing the right tools to those that are in charge of building our nation’s schools. With the average age of our nation’s schools reaching 50 years old, we need these tools more than ever. But what we need more than voluntary guidelines are laws. We must prevent exposing our children to toxic chemicals just by going to school.
Please urge EPA Administrator Jackson to hurry up, release these guidelines and get them in the hands of those that need them. You can leave her a message on her facebook page or you can call her office and leave this simple message “Administrator Jackson, please release the voluntary national guidelines to safe school siting today.” 202-564-4700
For a toxic free future,
Renee Claire
Showing posts with label toxic chemicals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toxic chemicals. Show all posts
Friday, September 17, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Preventing Toxic Contamination by Getting Local
Check out my latest post on the Momsrising blog.
CNN’s Dr. Gupta is hosting a series on toxic chemical contamination around the country called Toxic America. This past Saturday, Dr. Gupta’s story focused on pregnancy and toxic chemicals by following a couple who had difficulty getting pregnant only to realize some troubling information. Women are carrying a body burden of toxic chemicals being released from things found in our homes and places of work.
Dr. Gupta stated: “Scientists at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health in New York City have been following hundreds of pregnant women over the past 12 years to measure chemicals entering the womb during pregnancy.
The women trudge through the city for 48 hours wearing special backpacks, each with a long tube that is slung over the shoulder. The tube, resting inches below the pregnant mom’s mouth, sucks air into a special filter, giving an approximate measurement of the air that she is breathing. The backpack is designed to measure ambient toxics spewed by vehicles, pesticides, and chemicals from common household products.”
Dr. Landrigan from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine states, “”For 80 percent of the common chemicals in everyday use in this country we know almost nothing about whether or not they can damage the brains of children, the immune system, the reproductive system, and the other developing organs. . . It’s really a terrible mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
The failure of corporations and our government’s action to set up safeguards that protect our most vulnerable populations against harmful impacts of the chemicals in everyday use is astounding at best. To continue to do so even after the release of hundreds of studies on chemicals found in flame retardants to tin can linings to pvc plastic school supplies is . . . well its just disgusting. And it’s one of the many reasons why people are losing trust in large corporations and are frustrated with our nation’s government agencies.
Organizations around the world are fighting to pass state, national and international laws to prevent this from continuing and we should support them when and where we can. But what I find particularly inspiring are the local community organizations that are working to stop pollution while mobilizing those that live in their own neighborhoods to take a leadership role in preventing harm in the first place.
This Saturday, August 14, in Oakland, CA there is a celebration called Fresh Fest 2010. It’s a celebration of East Bay area youth getting active to protect our environment and our health through education and community engagement. It is being hosted by a large Oakland collaborative, including the Toxic Triangle Coalition. West Oakland is often called the Toxic Triangle because of its long list of toxic contamination. Fresh Fest is one way to get educated, have fun, and get involved. And it is something that can be replicated all over the country.
As Dr. Gupta has stated in his Toxic America series, chemical contamination isn’t just about what toxic chemicals are turning up in our bodies and in the environment, it is also about the lasting impacts this contamination has on our children’s ability to learn and our economy.
Communities hit by chronic chemical pollution suffer higher financial losses due to higher rates of health problems such as development and neurological disorders and reductions in future generation’s IQ points and thus earning potential. Eliminating the use of toxic chemicals from our homes, schools, and places of work isn’t just good policy, it’s a way to protect our individual communities from greater societal harm.
It is only through our individual action will we move closer to preventing toxic pollution from happening. As we begin to better understand the true impacts of the thousands of chemicals being used everyday, we are increasingly in need to stand up and participate.
One way to stand up is by participating in events like Fresh Fest 2010 and volunteering for organization’s like the Community Rejuvenation Project. Here are a few other groups that can help you find a way to raise your own voice:
Get Fresh
Women’s Voices for the Earth
Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
For a toxic free future,
Renee Claire
CNN’s Dr. Gupta is hosting a series on toxic chemical contamination around the country called Toxic America. This past Saturday, Dr. Gupta’s story focused on pregnancy and toxic chemicals by following a couple who had difficulty getting pregnant only to realize some troubling information. Women are carrying a body burden of toxic chemicals being released from things found in our homes and places of work.
Dr. Gupta stated: “Scientists at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health in New York City have been following hundreds of pregnant women over the past 12 years to measure chemicals entering the womb during pregnancy.
The women trudge through the city for 48 hours wearing special backpacks, each with a long tube that is slung over the shoulder. The tube, resting inches below the pregnant mom’s mouth, sucks air into a special filter, giving an approximate measurement of the air that she is breathing. The backpack is designed to measure ambient toxics spewed by vehicles, pesticides, and chemicals from common household products.”
Dr. Landrigan from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine states, “”For 80 percent of the common chemicals in everyday use in this country we know almost nothing about whether or not they can damage the brains of children, the immune system, the reproductive system, and the other developing organs. . . It’s really a terrible mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
The failure of corporations and our government’s action to set up safeguards that protect our most vulnerable populations against harmful impacts of the chemicals in everyday use is astounding at best. To continue to do so even after the release of hundreds of studies on chemicals found in flame retardants to tin can linings to pvc plastic school supplies is . . . well its just disgusting. And it’s one of the many reasons why people are losing trust in large corporations and are frustrated with our nation’s government agencies.
Organizations around the world are fighting to pass state, national and international laws to prevent this from continuing and we should support them when and where we can. But what I find particularly inspiring are the local community organizations that are working to stop pollution while mobilizing those that live in their own neighborhoods to take a leadership role in preventing harm in the first place.
This Saturday, August 14, in Oakland, CA there is a celebration called Fresh Fest 2010. It’s a celebration of East Bay area youth getting active to protect our environment and our health through education and community engagement. It is being hosted by a large Oakland collaborative, including the Toxic Triangle Coalition. West Oakland is often called the Toxic Triangle because of its long list of toxic contamination. Fresh Fest is one way to get educated, have fun, and get involved. And it is something that can be replicated all over the country.
As Dr. Gupta has stated in his Toxic America series, chemical contamination isn’t just about what toxic chemicals are turning up in our bodies and in the environment, it is also about the lasting impacts this contamination has on our children’s ability to learn and our economy.
Communities hit by chronic chemical pollution suffer higher financial losses due to higher rates of health problems such as development and neurological disorders and reductions in future generation’s IQ points and thus earning potential. Eliminating the use of toxic chemicals from our homes, schools, and places of work isn’t just good policy, it’s a way to protect our individual communities from greater societal harm.
It is only through our individual action will we move closer to preventing toxic pollution from happening. As we begin to better understand the true impacts of the thousands of chemicals being used everyday, we are increasingly in need to stand up and participate.
One way to stand up is by participating in events like Fresh Fest 2010 and volunteering for organization’s like the Community Rejuvenation Project. Here are a few other groups that can help you find a way to raise your own voice:
Get Fresh
Women’s Voices for the Earth
Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
For a toxic free future,
Renee Claire
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