Is it an exaggeration to urge you to
“March for Science to Save Your Life”?

It is not.

Anti-science agendas and policies are being forced on the American people by politicians and corporations that intentionally choose to deny the very scientific principles upon which our entire civilization is based.

Rather than work in good faith to protect us, many companies actively oppose laws, regulations and initiatives that would keep us safe from toxic chemicals, protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, and stop the climate change that threatens to send the entire planet into a tail spin.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the internationally renowned astrophysicist, says in this compelling 4-minute video that when people who deny science rise to power, they concoct a “recipe for a complete dismantling of our democracy.” He is right.

Science has allowed us to build our economy. Stop disease. Grow food. Put a man on the moon. Invent electric cars.

You can read this digital article thanks to computer science. Binge on Netflix. Facetime with your friends and family.

You can buy organic food because soil scientists and the scientists who study pests and plant disease have figured out how to grow our fruits and vegetables without spraying them with cancer-causing chemicals.

You have clothes to wear, furniture to sit on, deodorant to keep you smelling sweet, and coffee to drink, all because some inventor somewhere along the way used science to create them.

Basically, any service you value, any health care you receive, any medical emergency you’ve survived, any work you do, are all possible because science made them possible.

And yet – the Trump Administration is now destroying
the science-based programs and projects that society desperately needs.

It started with one particularly symbolic move: the Administration eliminated the word “science” from the mission statement of its Office of Science and Technology Policy. Whaaa?

But it didn’t stop there. Whole programs that reduce pollution and rein in climate change are coming under attack.

Don’t Miss: Pope Francis Calls for “Revolution” to Stop Climate Change

Writing here in the Los Angeles Times, Denis Hayes, who convened the very first Earth Day in 1970, describes Trump’s insidious plan to defund scientific research and the agencies that are doing the most to protect the planet and human health.

Specifically, the Trump budget would:

• Decimate the ability of the National Institutes of Health to continue to come up with ways to fight the spread of infections diseases like ebola and zika.
• Cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research by 50%.
• Eliminate the Sea Grant Program, which helps us protect and sustain coastal ecosystems and restore the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay and other waterways.
• Kneecap the U.S. solar energy industry, even though, says Hayes, in 2016 solar energy was America’s largest source of new electricity-generating capacity and the U.S. solar industry employs 260,000 people, more than three times as many workers as the coal industry.

We cannot let attacks on science – and on the ability of the United States to benefit from scientific advances – go unchallenged.

And we won’t. On April 22, millions of people will March for Science in hundreds of cities all over the world. The March, say the scientists who are organizing it, is

“the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays
in our health, safety, economies, and governments.”

I hope you’ll march, too. You can find your local march right here.

Join the #MarchforScience.

The post March for Science To Save Your Life appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Everyone has their own reason for joining the Women’s March on Washington.

My reasons are pretty simple – but they matter to me.

√ I want to demonstrate with my physical presence that I oppose the hateful rhetoric and destructive intention of the new administration to dismantle the laws that
protect our health and the health of the planet.

√ I want to stand up for the progress we’ve made on protecting our environment.

√ Especially, I want to affirm my commitment to stopping climate change
and reducing pollution.

The new president and his nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency intend to roll back the progress we’ve made reducing our use of the fossil fuels that cause climate change.

They show no interest in safeguarding the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Shielding our bodies from exposure to toxic chemicals is not a priority for them.

It is for me, and I want my presence at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. to make that clear.

But perhaps most of all, I’ll be at the Women’s March on Washington because I know that I can’t fight the battles that need to be fought – and won – alone.

Being surrounded by 500,000 other concerned citizens who also agree that we need to protect ourselves and our world will give me the virtual shot in the arm I need to do the work that lies ahead.

How do I know?

Last week, I was on Capitol Hill with Moms Clean Air Force meeting with Senate staffers about the EPA nominee. After two months of post-election blues, it felt great to be working with smart, passionate, and committed people who share a common vision for a better, safer, healthier, cleaner world.

For the first time since the election, I felt like “I can do this. I can get up every day and do something that makes a difference.”

That feeling of hope, and empowerment, and ENERGY came from being with others who feel the same way and who are also taking action!

That’s the feeling I expect to get in spades during the Women’s March on Washington. It will be like taking a great big psychic vitamin – only more empowering, more sustaining, and probably a lot more fun!

If you’ll be at the March in Washington, maybe I’ll see you there. I hope so.

But you don’t need to be in D.C. to march. Similar events are happening all over the United States, and around the world, too. Go to WomensMarch.com to find a march you can join.

Remember: As we said over and over during the presidential campaign, we are stronger together. The March is just the beginning of that show of strength – not the end.

The post The Women’s March on Washington: Better Than Taking a Great Big Vitamin appeared first on Big Green Purse.

I’ve just returned from a seven-day trip to Beijing, China’s capital, and Xi’an, the country’s cultural heart and soul and home to its famous terra cotta soldiers. In that entire time, I never saw the sun or sky. Nor was I able to drink the water that came out of any tap.

Why? The sky was cloaked in grey smog so thick it obscured the tops of buildings, not to mention the heavens above. The air, while not exactly putrid, smelled dank and dangerous — a result of massive numbers of polluting cars on the road and regional industrial plants that spew contaminants into the air.

I could have worn a surgical mask like many of the city’s permanent residents. Instead, I opted to be a “guinea pig” and see how much the smog would affect me as I went back and forth to various business meetings and tourist destinations.

After just three days in Beijing, I developed a sore throat and itchy eyes, and lost any desire to explore the city’s beautiful parks. I could have easily walked distances of a mile or two. Instead, I took the subway to avoid breathing the outdoor air unnecessarily. Back at my hotel, I kept the windows closed, choosing a stuffy room over a polluted one.

The water coming out of my faucet looked cleaner than the air — but I would have been a fool to drink it. Water treatment anywhere in China is thoroughly inadequate. The country’s drinking water is tainted not just by household waste but from relentless industrial run-off.

Some government figures estimate that over 70 percent of the nation’s rivers have been contaminated by the discharge of heavy metals and other toxins directly into streams and tributaries that feed into China’s waterways. Water treatment facilities remove a smattering of contaminants but never clean up the water to the point where it is drinkable. And this creates another problem.

Independent companies are privatizing the water, purifying and bottling it, and selling it to the public by the tons. What happens to all the empty plastic water bottles? They end up back in the rivers and streams when they’re trashed.

Why is China so polluted?

In short, because it has neither a power federal environmental protection agency nor adequate laws for such an agency to enforce. Yes, the government gives lip service to reducing pollution and protecting public health. But local activists in Beijing told me that given the physical size of the country, a population of more than 1 billion people, and tens of thousands of “renegade” manufacturing facilities, neither air nor water quality will improve significantly until the government makes a real commitment to strengthen and enforce its environmental laws.

This is not to say that air and water in the U.S. are perfect, or even good enough. A recent study by Environment America, using data provided by the American Lung Association, reported that nearly half of all Americans — 48 percent — live in areas plagued by unhealthy smog pollution. A water quality analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that 22 million Americans may be drinking water that contains excessive levels of poisonous arsenic, among other chemicals.

Still, the same Environment America study notes that “air quality has improved significantly in the last decade as a result of policies at the state and federal level.” Likewise, the non-profit Environmental Working Group found over 90 percent compliance by water utilities in applying and enforcing standards that exist. Their recommendation: that EPA set even more effective standards so water quality will continue to improve.

We can continue cleaning up our air or water. Or, we can abolish the EPA and look a lot more like China. I suggest Michele Bachmann go to China before she decides.

Follow me on twitter @dianemaceachern.

(NOTE: This article originally appeared at Huffington Post.)

The post Michele Bachmann Wants to Crush EPA. First, She Should Go to China. appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Why don’t we ask the eleven people who were killed when the oil rig they were working on exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico?

Or the fishermen whose livelihoods are about to be destroyed by the oil slick, now bigger than the state of Rhode Island and growing by 42,000 gallons every day, that’s inexorably moving toward land?

Or how about BP, the company running the drilling operation, that can’t figure out how the heck to cap the leaking oil well that once fed the rig because it lies 5,000 feet below the surface of the sea?

Or President Obama, who recently announced his (misquided) support for even more offshore oil drilling?

Maybe we should just ask ourselves. After all, we’re the ones driving the gas-guzzling, oil burning cars and trucks and SUVS that make it easy to turn our heads and look away. We’re the ones who keep voting for politicans who put petroleum before people. We’re the ones who convince ourselves that, if environmental disasters don’t happen in our backyard, they’re not our problem.

Wake up and smell the burning oil fumes. At any given time, oil is either a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster we’re watching happen. There are over 8100 oil spills of some magnitude in the U.S. every year, more than 22 every day. The amount of air pollution and water pollution and habitat destruction caused by our addiction to petroleum is not just unsustainable. It is shameful.

Yes, we can all “conserve.” We can drive more fuel efficient cars, and carpool, and insulate our homes and office buildings, and pump up our tires…the list goes on.

But that is not enough. It will never be enough because oil is so toxic: one drop can contaminate a gallon of water. Burning it is creating the climate change that has put the entire globe at risk.

No, we can’t just use less oil.

We have to use no oil.

It is time to shut this industry down.

NOW.

The post Oil has got to go. Now! appeared first on Big Green Purse.

We’re spending way too much time debating “whether” we should rid our culture of plastics.

We should. 

Now.

NOTE: These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. Says Chris Johnson, “On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

“To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way.

“These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.”

Take a look at the rest of Chris’ photos, then take stock of how much plastic you use. Do you see how many bottle caps are in the birds’ stomachs? If you’re still drinking water, soda and juice from plastic bottles, isn’t it time, at the very least, to switch to reusable water bottles and drinks in cans? Get more suggestions to live life plastic-free at FakePlasticFish.

The post The Environmental Tragedy of Plastic appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Just scan the front pages of this week’s New York Times if you need to be convinced. “Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells,” documents instances of children contracting serious ear infections, some requiring surgery, from bathing in polluted water.  “Toxic Waters: Clean Water Laws Are Neglected at a Cost in Suffering” focuses on scabs and rashes being inflicted on children because their tap water contains barium, lead, arsenic and many other toxins that cause cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system. A Fight Grows Over Labeling on Cleaning Products addresses consumer concerns that the chemicals in common household cleansers are giving people asthma, acne, nervous disorders, and more.

Maybe it’s time fror Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to put their heads together and realize that America could reduce health care costs significantly if we focused on cleaning up the planet. And get some of those polluters to help foot the bill. The cleaning products industry alone is a $14 billion/yr enterprise.

The post Protecting the Environment is a Health Care Issue appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Chances are great that our daughters will pass on to our grandchildren some of the same chemical molecules they inherited from us. The estimated age by which a daughter will purge 99 percent of the inherited chemical varies depending on the chemical. It will take a day to excrete the phthalate plasticizers that soften up cosmetics, paint and plastics, but a year to dump mercury. Our daughters will be at least teenagers but perhaps senior citizens before they’re rid of the common flame retardants and stain-proofing chemicals we pass along. They would be 166 years old before they’re free of their inherited lead.

Meanwhile, their own body burden continues to increase. According to EWG’s test results, chemicals that persist in the body were found at higher levels in mothers than daughters, showing how chemicals can build up in the body over a lifetime. Mothers had an average of 1.5 to 5.2 times more pollution than their daughters for lead, methyl mercury, brominated flame retardants, and the Teflon- and Scotchgard-related perfluorochemicals PFOA and PFOS.

The EWG study, which was done on four mothers and their daughters, found that each of the eight women’s blood or urine was contaminated with an average of 35 consumer product ingredients, including flame retardants, plasticizers, and stain-proof coatings. These mixtures of compounds found in furniture, cosmetics, fabrics, and other consumer goods, have never been tested for safety. The mothers and daughters in this study join 64 other people tested in six EWG biomonitoring programs conducted between 2000 and 2006. In total, EWG biomonitoring has found 455 different pollutants, pesticides, and industrial chemicals in the bodies or cord blood of 72 different people — including 10 newborn babies with an average of 200 chemicals in each child.

“EPA studies show that children from birth to age two are 10 times more sensitive to cancer-causing chemicals than adults,” said Jane Houlihan, EWG’s vice president for research. “Scientists have found that chemicals’ toxic effects can be passed down for four generations, by causing permanent genetic changes that can be inherited. A stew of toxic chemicals is not the legacy mothers want to hand down to their children.”

We monitor the pollution in our air, our water, and even our fish. Isn’t it time we started paying attention to the pollution in our bodies?

Related Post: What’s in YOUR body, Mom?

The post A Mother’s Day Question: What Do You Have in Common with Your Daughter…or Your Own Mother? appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Not any more.

These days, we women have the whole world in our purses – or we could, if we’d only change the way we spend our money.

Big Green Purse contends that women who shift their spending to environmentally-friendly products and services could have a faster, bigger impact on protecting the planet than most of the legislation and regulations environmentalists are trying to pass on Capitol Hill or in statehouses all across the country.

Why the shift, and why women?

Industries – the planet’s biggest polluters – fight laws and public policies with a ferocity that’s every bit as strong as the category five hurricanes that wrecked the Gulf Coast in 2005. Yet as much as manufacturers oppose environmental legislation and regulation, they embrace what happens in the marketplace. They have to. Consumer dollars are their lifeblood.

Corporate need for profit gives women power. And because women spend $.80 – $.85 of every dollar in the marketplace, we’ve got a whole planetful of power.

Or we would have, if we focused it so that it made a difference.

Unfortunately, until now, women’s spending on “green” products has been haphazard and diffuse. Sure some women are buying organic food, non-toxic personal care products, water-saving appliances, and other eco-friendly commodities.

But overall, do our purchases match the serious level of concern we have for the health of the planet and its related impact on us and our families?

Not by a long shot.

In part, that’s because there’s still a supply and demand problem.

Despite the ballyhoo about organic produce, only 4 percent of food sold int he U.S. is pesticide-free.  Less than 1 percent of vehicles in the marketplace are highly energy-efficient. Only 2 percent of coffee purchased in the U.S. is “shade grown,” meaning it’s raised in natural rainforest habitat, rather than in rainforests that have been clearcut and doused with pesticides.

But there’s something more critical afoot.  Amazingly, few women understand that their demands for greener products can actually help increase the supply – that if a woman intentionally used her purse as if it were a bright green ring threaded through the nose of the big black manufacturing bull, she could pull polluting manufacturers in a greener, more eco-friendly direction, and do it far more quickly than most laws and regulations.

“I can buy wind power not just to meet my energy needs,” she’d say, “but also to protect my kids from asthma and ecnourage other utilities to transition away from fossil fuels that cause air pollution.”

“I can buy toxin-free cosmetics not only for their exceptional quality but to assure my own personal safety and force other companies to clean up their incredients.”

“I can buy no-VOC paint not only so my family won’t have to breathe nasty chemicals for a week or more after we paint the house, but to encourage other paint manufacturers to eliminate VOCs from their products.”

In other words, “I can get what I need… and get what I want, too.”

Does the “big green purse” idea work?

Stay tuned…

The post Leading the Bull appeared first on Big Green Purse.