What we don’t know about beauty products will kill us.

I thought that I was in the clear. That I dodged some bullets. I had two healthy pregnancies, during which I tried to do all the right things: I avoided gas stations and mainstream cleaning products. I didn’t color my hair, polish my nails or smoke.  Now nine years later, I have two healthy and thriving little girls, and we try to create a healthy home together.

But then I found myself at the 20th Anniversary celebration of the Breast Cancer Fund in May. The Breast Cancer Fund fights to get scientists, the medical establishment and policy makers to pay as much attention to the cause of breast cancer as the cure. During the evening, I was reminded once again how vulnerable women are to environmental exposure to chemicals, how our breast tissue is particularly sensitive. And most importantly, how puberty is a crucial window of vulnerability for girls, opening up channels of influence to chemicals much like those months in-utero. Only now our kids are older, a little more out of our grasp and control than when they were babies. Her speech shook me to the core. Suddenly, it feels like that bullet is coming right at me again.
My older daughter is on the cusp of puberty at 9 years old, my younger just a few years behind. All of those potent feelings I experienced during my pregnancies and their babyhood came flooding back. The momentary and false sense of control – if only I can buy the right sunscreen/feed them the right foods/clean with the right products, I can avoid unwanted exposures to environmental toxins like mercury, bisphenol A, phthalates, or flame retardants.  But now we know that exposure to these chemicals is beyond the control of any of us alone.

We as a society, for reasons complex yet unfolding, are foisting young girls into the turmoil of puberty long before they are developmentally ready. In 2010, researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center published a report on the effects of chemicals found in products we all have at home, like nail polish, cosmetics, perfume, lotion and shampoo. The results show a direct relationship between use of these products and early puberty development in girls. Studies have also linked early onset puberty to common household items, and foods like dairy and fish.

If only we collectively decided to honor their bodies’ natural trajectories and let them remain little girls for as long as was meant to be. Now, history is apparently a moving target, as implied by the title of a recent New York Times magazine article on the topic of early puberty: Puberty Before Age 10: A New Normal? An article that unfortunately failed to mention any solutions to the problem of early puberty, like changing the way our country regulates the use of chemicals.

Which brings me to policy change, which is more imperative than ever. We know that changing our personal eating/cleaning/makeup/chemical use habits will only get us so far.  As consumers, we should push the personal care, household products, and agricultural industries in the right direction. But at the same time, our legislators need to act to reform the outdated and broken 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act and pass the new, updated Safe Chemicals Act of 2012, which focuses on children’s health as a benchmark for chemical safety. Authored by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and co-sponsored by 16 Senators, the Act will increase the safety of chemicals used in consumer products, and protect those most vulnerable to chemical exposure, like women and children.

Take action today to let your elected officials know there is strong public support for changing the way we regulate chemicals in the United States.

Lena Brook has advocated for environmental health and justice for over ten years with organizations like Clean Water Action, Health Care Without Harm and Physicians for Social Responsibility. She’s currently a strategic communications consultant with HavenBMedia in San Francisco. You can follow her on Twitter: @Lena_Brook

Image: J Ronald Lee, Lena Brook

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The White House is going solar (again). Two weeks ago, Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced at a “GreenGov” symposium plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the executive residence next spring. This, they say, is “a project that demonstrates American solar technologies are available, reliable, and ready for installation in homes throughout the country.” Nice. But while the Obama administration’s promotion and support of alternative energy is encouraging, if not exactly aggressive, I’m reading these greening of the White House stories and am not sure whether to be encouraged or depressed. To be sure, this solar panel installation is a good thing. Likewise, it was a good thing four presidencies and three decades ago – when we did it the first time.

Maybe it’s because we’re staring down the barrel, so to speak, of a 1994 redo; a tragic, almost identical backslide to the one that took place on the Hill in the midterms of 15-plus years ago. With this history repeating itself right now, the idea of traction on issues like solar power seems so fleeting. To wit, I bring you Jimmy Carter, who installed similar panels on the mansion to much fanfare in 1979.

It was a move supporting his energy policy, which he discussed in a famous televised speech a few years prior: “Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.” he told us. “It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.”

Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy put an end to that nonsense – immediately and completely. “The budget for the [Solar Energy Research] Institute – which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation – was slashed [under Reagan] from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work [on the project] were given two weeks’ notice and no severance pay,” Arthur Allen wrote in Mother Jones back in 2000, just months before another Big Oil president would take office. “By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded”¦ Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt.”

In 1986, when work was done to fix a leaky roof, President Reagan took down the panels. “By ripping the solar thermal (aka solar hot water) panels off the White House roof in the mid 80s to make a “˜statement’ against alternative energy – and for oil – Reagan was instrumental in killing the U.S. solar thermal industry,” says Lisa Margonelli, Director of the Energy Productivity Initiative at the New America Foundation. Sadly, she also informs us that the Virginia company that made the White House panels was out of business by 1991.

So here we are again, more than a quarter of century later, and Obama’s repeat of Carter’s gesture leaves us to wonder where we would be today “if only.” Think about 30 years of intensive, subsidized investment in solar power – or wind, for that matter. How different would our world be today? I’m not just talking about global warming and environmental issues here. I’m talking about jobs. I’m talking about geopolitics. I’m talking about war and peace.

Ironically, as recent as last month, in an effort to avoid comparison to the ill-fated, one-term Carter administration, the Obama White House looked like it was about to balk at installing the panels. So the turnaround (albeit symbolic) this close to election time does indeed show some alternative energy chops.

I hope they’ll still be there in 2015.

Image: Beverly & Pack

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In a state which owns the role as largest agricultural exporter in the country, how its largest city deals with food policy is important, not only for the state, but the nation as a whole. Such is the case with Los Angeles, California, a place where local produce runs abound. The problem is, it’s not only support for local food production that’s integral for regional food policy, but it’s the distribution of it.

According to the 2005 LA County Health Survey, only 14.6 percent of adults eat over five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Add that to a population over half (55.5 percent) of which is either obese or overweight, and it’s easy to posit the correlation between good food and improved health.

This week the Los Angeles Food Policy Task Force, established last year by the L.A. Board of Public Works, released a its report, “Good Food for All Agenda: Creating a New Regional Food System for Los Angeles.” The report focuses not only environmental concerns related to the LA food system, but also the political and social side of things. With studies showing that there is a direct correlation between income and health, these are the issues that local, and national, leaders have to start taking a serious look at, and it’s good to see one of the nation’s most abundant agricultural regions starting to do so.

In the land of plenty, the report paints a grim picture of the reality for many LA residents:

A block from backyard vegetable gardens whose vitality could make you gasp, displays of cheap-calorie, high-profit, chemical-laden snacks, and vivid, sugary sodas all but crowd out the produce sections of neighborhood markets. Children eat prepackaged school lunches designed to ease the problems of distribution rather than nutrition. Billions of consumer dollars that could go towards sustainable, fairly priced locally grown food goes out of the region and out of the country. Improbably, even here, many thousands of Angeleno families go hungry each day.

Local food can’t just be a trend or a movement, it has to be practical, affordable and accessible, and when we’re talking about environmental, social and political issues, this is something that all cities across the country should be considering.

The report also calls for the city to establish a Good Food council, which would aid in connecting the dots between all the groups within the city that are doing work that’s related; focusing on local food means strengthening the community around it. University researchers can work with soup kitchens and activists can work with industry professionals.

You can read the full report here.

Image: djjewelz

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