More from St. Louis

Over the past 48 hours, LCV interns Courtenay and Michelle have been whizzing around St Louis driving to community colleges to collect signatures for the renewable energy ballot initiative, and to post flyers requesting help from volunteers.

Poor Michelle. Courtenay is probably the worst map reader in history. She'd struggle if you asked her to find a McDonalds on the highway. Nevertheless we managed to find the colleges and collect almost 100 signatures. Yes! We're really enjoying seeing St Louis, a laid-back city full of Mom-and-Pop sandwich shops, college kids soaking up the sun, and cool coffee shops like "Meshuggas" (located below the Coalition for the Environment office) where the regulars sport dreadlocks and flipflops and stroll about with laptops under their arms.

Gotta run- we're heading to a Santana Concert at the Scott Trade Center to get signatures from the people lining up outside!

On the Road in St Louis

After a fun afternoon of volunteering at the Earth Day event on the National Mall (which, fortunately, was neither blown away nor electrocuted in the stormy weather LCV interns Michelle, Spencer and Courtenay leaped over puddles that would intimidate Moses, onto a train and towards Baltimore to catch flights to Kansas City (Spencer) and St Louis (Michelle and Courtenay.) Our aim: to head to the mid-west to help "Renew Missouri" with a signature-signing initiative to put clean energy on the ballot in November.

At the airport, after an enthusiastic "Go team!" the interns parted. Due to the storms Courtenay and Michelle's plane was delayed, so that we arrived at our hotel at 1:30AM, sleepy but excited for the day ahead.

The next day we drove via rental car to the Coalition for the Environment office in St Louis, where we met its friendly and energetic staff. After a warm welcome we started working. Michelle and Courtenay drove to Meremac Community College to collect signatures for the afternoon, then came back to the office to work the phones until 9pm.

People -particularly students- have been very obliging with their John Hancocks. We're optimistic about the week ahead!

Don't you know that we're toxic?

Last night, LCV staffers Charlene, Elizabeth, Michelle and Spencer bravely attended a lecture given by Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), who spoke about toxins in Americans’ bodies.

EWG recently took blood samples from ten umbilical cords after they had been removed from babies in American hospitals. Tests revealed that the babies had an average of more than 200 industrial chemicals in their bodies. Like alcohol and drugs, toxins are passed to fetuses via the mother’s bloodstream and many of the chemicals discovered by the EWG are common in household products and food that has been treated with pesticides.

Of the 287 chemicals detected in the babies’ blood, studies showed that 180 are cancerous, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 caused birth defects or abnormal development in tests on animals.

Chemicals that can have harmful effects on the development of infants and children often exist in seemingly innocuous products. For example, the chemical used in Teflon, Perfluorooctanoic Acid, was recently labeled as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board. Yet the current legislation regulating what products chemical companies are allowed to put on the market, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), has not been updated in thirty years.

Ken Cook discussed EWG’s study on umbilical cords to draw attention to the Kid Safe Chemical Act, a bill that has been introduced in both the Senate (S1391) and House of Representatives (HR 4308). The act would require chemical makers to disclose the safety of their products to the EPA before being allowed to release them into the market.

The complete Environmental Working Group report on contaminants found in umbilical cord blood is found at http://archive.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/.

Brookings Institute hosts Climate Change forum

Today at the Brookings Institute here in Washington, Johan Eliasch, Special Representative on Reforestation and Clean Energy for UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, gave a talk entitled "Climate Change: the Next Global Security Threat."

Eliasch stated that deforestation contributes to 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, more than transportation or even agriculture. However, indigenous people often level forests out of necessity for wood, which they either use or sell. So he co-created Cool Earth, a company that allows people to invest in forest conservation based on the premise that "trees must be made more valuable standing than logged." Eliasch has personally purchased 400,000 acres of Amazon woodlands, meaning he pays indigenous people to preserve the land and keep loggers away.