Fetus Origami, Endocrine Disruptors and You...

a Report from VPIRG Environmental Action Conference

I enjoy going conferences. It’s like an intense college immersion experience, minus the binge drinking and the tests. At the Vermont Technical College on Nov. 15th, VPIRG held their annual Environmental Action Conference. This Vermont’s biggest and best environmental conference, a sort of bio-regional Bioneers Conference. I came away with a head full of ideas of ideas that I’d like to share.

The highlight for me was learning from keynote speaker Sandra Steingraber, author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologists look at Cancer and the Environment. She said so many interesting things and here are some.

- The human fetus is folded together as with origami, flat sheets of tissue folding into the emerging body. The fetus starts growing head first, then downward, and center first and then outward. So if the baby has webbed feet, the toxic exposure was likely in the 11th week, when the outer stuff had started.

- The worst time to get hit with toxins is when you are really, really, really small. “Exposure during the opera of embryonic development can multiply exposure effect,” Steingraber said. After implantation on the womb wall, the egg is very vulnerable and after conception too.

- We should be thinking about pollution from the human rights perspective, Steingraber said. We have a right to live in a world without getting cancer. We have a right to be fertile and have children if we want them. We have a right to not get poisoned by Roundup’s Atrazine, no matter how much it would impact the economy to take it off the market. Lawyers from the Vermont Law School are pursuing this, and articulate this view in an article (available on-line) called “Law for An Ecological Age.”

- There is a massive movement to protect people from chemicals. Here are some resources in that movement. A blog called Nontoxic kids. A ‘Safe Cosmetics Campaign”. An European Union program called REACH, which will document all the chemicals that are on the market. Also, check out Rivernetwork.org, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Alliance for Clean and Healthy Vermont.

- Canned food is a major source of exposure to Bisphenol-A (pronounced: biss-fee-n’all-A). The cans are lined with a plastic that contains the Bisphenol-A and it leeches into the food. I always knew canned vegetables were nasty! Now I know they contain a “endocrine disruptor.”
Endocrine disruptors happen because the body mistakes certain chemicals for natural hormones and then everything gets out of wack. The body uses hormones to get jobs done, in minute amounts, parts per trillion. When we take in tiny microscopic chemicals from the canned pineapple or the old Nalgene bottle, our bodies get confused.
In an issue related to endocrine disruptors, girls are getting their breasts about 3 years earlier than they used to, at 10 years old instead of 13. The menstruation start times are about the same, only a month ahead of where they were in 1970. This long window between breasts budding and menstruation is not good. Girls are at risk for breast cancer later in life because the body has a long window of increased estrogen levels connected to the breast development, but without progestrerone, a menstrual hormone that balances out the effects of the estrogen.

- Steingraber compared the economy and the environment as twin ecosystems with many parallels. Both were global and integrated. “Only there are no bailouts for the environment if we hit a major tipping point.” She said her 7 year old child ran into the room saying “the Dow dropped 500 points” not knowing what that meant. Perhaps we don’t mourn the ecosystem’s decline as much because we don’t have metrics to count it. We need numbers that document the rise in carbon parts per million, so that TV anchors can grimace and say “the Carbon Index rose today to a new high of 388 parts carbon per million today, making our air the most carbonated since the Age of the Dinosaurs.”

- In an exciting note from the activist perspective, the California environmentalists have found a delicious, elegant leverage point upon industry. California legislators passed a law that says companies must say on the label if there is something in the product that is illegal in Belgium. Companies have to identify everything that doesn’t meet the higher standards of the EU. Thus, they will probably just start importing products safe for the European market rather than relabel. They might just do the switch all across the country, thus bringing America into de facto harmonization with the E.U.’s more sensible and stringent laws! Brilliant!