Archive for September, 2008
Erin Brockovich to hold forum in Cameron
Posted on Sep 30, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment, Susie Collins
Missouri Town Sees High Number Of Brain Tumor Cases
Let’s follow this story as it unfolds. Erin Brockovich is a hero in my eyes (I hope everybody has seen the movie!!); let’s see what’s happening with this tumor cluster in Missouri. I’ll follow up on Oct 14 and see what’s released about her visit to Cameron.
CAMERON, Mo. — The high number of brain tumors reported in Cameron is in the national news again.
KMBC has learned that Erin Brockovich, the woman portrayed in the award-winning movie starring Julia Roberts, will fly into Cameron next month to hold a public forum with concerned residents.
Brockovich, who grew up in Lawrence, Kan., is famous for her crusade to help a small town in California find out what was causing so many residents to get sick.
Her investigation led to an historic $333 million settlement from a utility company that was blamed for toxic chemicals leaking into the residents’ groundwater.
Brockovich now crusades for other communities and has been following the reports of brain tumors in Cameron.
Brockovich will be in Cameron on Oct. 13 at Goodrich Auditorium for a public forum.
Thanks, Marti! (Link to Marti’s website.)
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October 1st is World Vegetarian Day
Posted on Sep 30, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Home & Garden, Susie Collins
I struggle all the time with the issue of eating meat. I do not want to eat mammals, not for health reasons, but for ethical imperative: I love animals and cannot bear the suffering endured by mammals meant as food, especially those grown in commercial feed lots destined for an inhumane slaughter.
So I eat mostly fish, but I know even fish are sentient beings as well, with distinct personalities and the desire for happiness (yes, this is Buddhist teaching). I see the fish in my ponds and I know they are extremely aware of their beingness: they are curious, social, delight in play, and are very unhappy when sick. So it’s also hard for me to eat fish!
So I was interested to discover that October is World Vegetarian Month, with the kick off on Oct. 1st.
Here’s some food for thought from Myriam Black at The World is my sOyster Weblog:
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This evening’s walk
Posted on Sep 29, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Leisure, Media/Videos, Susie Collins
This is the park where I walk most evenings. We go at the very end of the day just as it gets dark. It’s a county park about a mile from my home–it’s an old baseball field chock full of history in our community from the days when sugar was king and every plantation community had a baseball team. The oldtimers tell some great stories!
My newest fascination is with the bats that join us in the evening just as it darkens too much to see well. How I wish I could catch them on film! They dart and flutter catching bugs way up high. They are my new favorite animal.
Anyway, here are three snaps: one of the park when we first arrived, then one toward the ocean (the direction we call makai), and one toward the mountain (mauka) as darkness fell. I should go get some photos in the full light one day so you can see how much prettier it is than these show!
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The Real Dirt on Farmer John
Posted on Sep 29, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Food, Home & Garden, Media/Videos
If you haven’t seen it, rent this movie!!!
THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN follows Farmer John’s astonishing journey from farm boy to counter-culture rebel to the son who almost lost the family farm to a beacon of today’s booming organic farming movement and founder of one of the nation’s largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms. The result is a tale that ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the soil and revealingly mirrors the changing American times.
Link to clip from the movie
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Chicago’s toxic air
Posted on Sep 29, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment
TRIBUNE WATCHDOG REPORT: Chicago-area residents face some of the highest risk of getting sick from pollution, but the EPA isn’t making it widely known.
What I admire most about this story on the toxic air in Chicago can be found in the video (at bottom of post): Leila Mendez, who had the chance to move away from the problem, chose to stay and fight for clean air for the sake of the area’s kids. Brava!
People living in Chicago and nearby suburbs face some of the highest risks in the nation for cancer, lung disease and other health problems linked to toxic chemicals pouring from industry smokestacks, according to a Tribune analysis of federal data.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spent millions of dollars to assess the dangers that air pollution poses but has failed to fulfill promises to make the research more accessible to the public. So the Tribune is posting the information on its Web site, where users can easily find nearby polluters and the chemicals going into their air.
Those who look up Cook County will see it ranked worst in the nation for dangerous air pollution, based on 2005 data. The Tribune also found Chicago was among the 10 worst cities in the U.S.
The factory with the highest risk score in Chicago is a steel mill on the edge of upscale Lincoln Park, a neighborhood where it isn’t uncommon to find people buying organic dog food.
In Will and DuPage Counties, six factories rank in the region’s worst 50, though residents of the collar counties generally face much lower risks than people who live in Cook. Nearby Lake County, Ind., has nine of the worst polluters in the region.
So how much danger does a person living near these factories face? The EPA didn’t try to answer that difficult question. Air pollution is just one factor that can affect the chances of developing health problems.
Link to full story.
Video: Click on pic of video below and you’ll be taken to page, scroll down for vid.
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The sorrow of isolation
Posted on Sep 29, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, MCS, Susie Collins
CatherineWO, at Breathez, posted about Sisterhood yesterday, lamenting the loss of getting together with other women as much as she’d like since developing Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. While she’s found some comfort with online blogs, she makes a very valid point about the need for personal interaction.
She recently attended a jewelry party at her daughter-in-law’s. She writes about the gathering: “…even more important to me was the opportunity to just sit and talk with other women. It was a small group, but they all knew I would be there so had come fragrance free. It felt good just to relax and enjoy the company of others.”
But she has a much harder time being able to participate in her church activities. I wrote about CatherineWO’s successful activism at her church, where she lobbied church elders to make all church buildings fragrance free. But she still has some problems with more casual gatherings with women friends, which causes her deep sorrow.
We all suffer losses in our lives for which we must grieve and then move on, hopefully filling the gap with something else of value. But I am not sure how to fill this gap in my life. In moments of selfishness and self-pity, I rail at the women in my own local group who refuse to change their behavior so that I can participate. Yet, such wallowing is so unproductive. I can’t change the behavior of other women, and railing on them to myself only makes me more angry. And I don’t want to become just an angry old woman.
One place I still feel sisterhood is through online blogs. There are some wonderful LDS group blogs that reach out to women, such as www.feministmormonhousewives.org , http://segulah.org/blog and http://the-exponent.com (my favorite). Blogs cannot replace the intimacy we get associating in person with other women, but they do offer a free exchange of feelings and ideas that helps to fill the gap.
Perhaps my greatest resource for sisterhood is with my own daughters and daughter-in-law, four truly amazing women who reach out to me on an almost daily basis. I love them and really appreciate them, but it is unfair and unrealistic to expect them to fulfill the bulk of my social and emotional needs.
So I continue to seek new ways to conpensate for the loss of sisterhood I feel in the isolation of chemical sensitivity. Even introverts need a little socializing once in a while.
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Fashionable MCS terrorist goes for a bike ride
Posted on Sep 29, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Leisure, MCS
Lou Cheese, at Living w/ Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, catches his reflection in a bus window while taking a bike ride in Cleveland.
Too bad you couldn’t see the bike. I’ve started wrapping the respirator ensemble in a color-matching silk scarf for bike rides. I can only imagine what the people inside the bus were thinking, probably something like “Well, it’s nice to see the terrorists are making an effort to be a little more fashionable now.”
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New homes showcase environmental features
Posted on Sep 28, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Healthy Living, Products, Susie Collins
Man, if I only had $2.45 million! Wanna go in with me on it? You can pick which house. We could make it Canary Central. C’mon!
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Seattle company promises nontoxic dry cleaning
Posted on Sep 27, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Healthy Living, Products
Machines use environmentally friendly pressurized carbon-dioxide and wet-cleaning technologies.
Multimillionaire Mark Callaghan [left], who made his money investing in new-line technology companies, now wants to dominate Seattle’s old-line dry-cleaning business.
Next week, Callaghan’s Blue Sky Cleaners begins targeting downtown Seattle condo dwellers, office workers and hotel visitors with a pickup-and-delivery service promising environmentally friendly, nontoxic cleaning methods.
Callaghan and his business partner, InfoSpace Chief Executive James Voelker, have spent more than $1 million renovating and equipping a large warehouse on Elliott Avenue West near Seattle’s Magnolia Bridge.
The warehouse holds three machines that use pressurized, reclaimed carbon dioxide, as well as two water-based wet-cleaning machines.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers both technologies preferable to perchloroethylene, or “perc,” the longtime solvent of choice for many dry cleaners.
Photo by Steve Ringman/Seattle Times
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Vog is coming my way on Sunday
Posted on Sep 27, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment, Susie Collins
Trade winds to ebb by Sunday evening; weekend may end amid vog
Great. The wind is going to bring the vog to Hamakua tomorrow. Well, it was a good break while it lasted.
For those of you who haven’t been following the local air drama, our vog situation here on The Big Island got very bad earlier this year when the volcano started spewing especially nasty, toxic chemicals, the worst in historical memory. This did not bode well for my health. Although I cannot prove a causal trigger, at the height of the toxic levels this past spring, my breathing became difficult in general and my multiple chemical sensitivity heightened to an absolutely exquisite level. It got so I couldn’t even go into Hilo for shopping and chores, and I started going north to Waimea.
So this next week may be difficult for me. I can hardly wait!
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Sewing with local organic cotton
Posted on Sep 26, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Products, Susie Collins
Leslie (left) at The Oko Box Blog practices what she preaches about the importance of organic clothing, caring for the environment, and taking care of your health. I’ve become a big fan of Leslie’s. She runs The Oko Box, a fabulous online shop featuring hip, beautiful clothes made from natural & organic fabrics.
The Oko Box Blog is an extension of the shop, “an eco-friendly interactive commentary on organic clothing, environment, pollution, health, organic food, fair trade and organic farming,” an inspiring weblog that shows Leslie’s creative flare in every post.
Yesterday she wrote about sewing a dress from a beautiful blue organic cotton fabric. Is she a cutie or what? It’s the sheer guts of tackling a free-form dress pattern, combined with the addition of those darling patches on the sleeves, that make this dress a work of art.
This is the first time I have sewn sleeves, and they made me so nervous I actually had sewn one of them inside out at first and had to rip it back off and re-sew it on again. Never-the-less sleeves are not as hard as I had imagined – I just made the dress sleeveless then made two tubes which I added in after the body was finished.
To make the body of the dress, simply take your exact measurements and make a tube going up and then form a tank top sleeve line. Continue the neckline upward by keeping the fabric very wide and long, like a giant cylinder that comes almost to the end of your shoulder.
The elbow patches were something given to me by a creative friend, who had a big collection of appliques she’d collected & made. These are handmade drawings of stripper playing cards printed on fabric, and I hand sewed them on, very tightly.
Yay for local & organic!!!
Soon I’ll tell you more about a contest I won on The Oko Box Blog and about how Leslie has offered The Canary Report readers FREE SHIPPING for any purchase at The Oko Box!!!!
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The dirty truth about cleaning products
Posted on Sep 26, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment, Products
Author says that cleaners may be worse for your health than the germs
It’s really nice to see this type of reporting in mainstream media. The Today Show reports on Sloan Barnett’s book “Green Goes with Everything: Simpler Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet.” Here’s an excerpt that goes right to the heart of the problem of everyday chemicals in the products we use in our homes.
What does being “green” actually mean? In her new book “Green Goes With Everything”, Sloan Barnett shares several simple steps you can take to live a healthier life while helping keep the planet clean. In this excerpt, Barnett writes about the dangers of some of the most common household cleaners. Who knew being clean could be so dirty?
Have you ever considered how odd it is that there are warning labels on cleaning products? I mean, think about that: they’re supposed to be ridding your home of bad stuff, not adding to it – much less potentially making you sick! A good stand-up comedian could build an entire act out of this one bizarre fact.
Only it’s not funny.
And here’s something even less amusing: The labels on cleaning products don’t even tell you about most of the really nasty stuff that’s inside them. If these products are as safe as they’re claimed to be, why don’t the companies tell us what’s in them? Call me suspicious, but I honestly don’t think it’s because the recipe is top secret. If it was, there wouldn’t be so many competing products with identical ingredients.
Don’t look to the government for help on this one. The government only requires companies to list “chemicals of known concern” on their labels. The key word here is “known.” The fact is that the government has no idea whether most of the chemicals used in everyday cleaning products are safe because it doesn’t test them, and it doesn’t require manufacturers to test them either.
Actually, under the terms of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which administers the act, can’t require chemical companies to prove the safety of their products unless the agency itself can show the product poses a health risk – which the EPA does not have the resources to do since, according to one estimate, it receives some two thousand new applications for approval every year. How tough is their review? You decide: In 2003, according to the Environmental Working Group, an agency watchdog, the EPA approved most applications in three weeks, even though more than half had provided no information on toxicity at all.
UPDATE:
Link to SFGate for another article on Sloan and her book
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New brochure on climate change and chemical safety
Posted on Sep 26, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Environment
The Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical Safety has published a new brochure entitled: “Managing chemicals in a changing climate to protect health.”
The changing climate is likely to bring along some changes in the ways chemicals are developed, used, distributed and broken down. The brochure wants to draw attention to the implications these changes might have for human exposure to chemicals.
One way in which climate change can affect exposure to chemicals is through its effect on how chemicals move and transform in the environment. For example, increased temperatures may cause volatile chemicals to disperse more quickly in the air, thus possibly leading to higher exposures. Higher exposures can also arise because of a more frequent use of certain chemicals in an effort to combat the consequences of climate change (eg. increased use of pesticides because of falling crop yields).
Aside from higher and different exposures, climate change may also make exposure more dangerous, as there are indications that chemicals are more harmful in warmer temperatures.
Some groups of people are more vulnerable to these changes in chemical exposure. Inherent characteristics, like age, or circumstances, like poverty or malnutrition, can result in an impaired ability to withstand harm.
In the brochure it is emphasised that in developing climate adaptive strategies, attention should be paid to the management of chemicals and the need to improve systems to ensure chemical safety. Countries that do not yet have adequate capacities and capabilities to soundly manage chemicals are encouraged to develop these, as climate change will probably create new and expanded problems.
The brochure can be downloaded here. Available in English, French and Spanish.
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Overwhelmed by mold
Posted on Sep 26, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Disability Rights, MCS, Social Justice, Susie Collins
Costs top $19M, more Board of Equalization workers being moved
At left, state employee Wendy Schroeder, now homebound, keeps a plastic film over her eyes to keep out debris.
I’m amazed at how many stories there are about people getting sick from toxic mold. We’ve been following Missy Gluckman’s story since early summer about her nightmare working in an old building at a community college in New York.
Now here’s a story from the west coast about a woman who got sick from toxic mold at her workplace in a California State building.
As I’m sure you know, toxic mold exposure often triggers chemical sensitivity; in fact, I have yet to hear of a case where someone who’s been made sick from mold hasn’t developed hyper sensitivity to synthetic chemicals.
Wendy Schroeder began working at the California State Board of Equalization headquarters on April 1, 1996 – April Fool’s Day. It was no laughing matter.
She’s been on disability leave since March. Now, recovering from sinus and tear-duct surgery, she says toxic mold and other hazardous substances in the building made her sick. Even working on files that have been stored in the building makes her break out in a rash.
Although state officials took steps last month to relocate dozens more workers to new offices, more than 2,300 people still work at BOE headquarters at 450 N St. in downtown Sacramento, despite overcrowded conditions and ongoing problems with water damage and mold. The problems raise questions about whether staying in the building over the long term is viable as costs climb.
“(That’s) my question daily,” said Bill Leonard, a Republican who served in the state Legislature for 24 years before he was first elected to the board in 2002. “If we weren’t in a budget crisis, I’d be looking for a legislative sponsor to buy us a new campus.”
Photo: Noel Neuburger | Sacramento Business Journal
And also in the news today:
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Welcome to The Canary Report!
The Canary Report is a blog and social network about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
We compassionately bring you unfiltered and uncensored news and information you can trust directly from the source: people who have MCS. Dedicated to sharing, supporting, and inspiring with the Aloha Spirit, The Canary Report gives all canaries a voice. Come join us!
Aloha,
Susie Collins
Founder and Contributing Editor
Hilo, Hawaii
Let’s Connect on the Social Web
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International Multiple Chemical Sensitivity awareness project is launched
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