By Cindy Luppi, New England Director
May is here and for many, the top thing on our minds is spring and whether the Celtics can continue their tear in playoffs (Rondo!) or if the Sox will ever turn it around in the Valentine years (and, if you’re not from New England, feel free to insert your own sports teams/metaphors here).
For me, Spring always reminds me of my grandmother, Aubine. She was born in early April, over 100 years ago in a small town in northern Maine.
She taught my sisters and me many things over the years, but the single over-riding lesson was crystal clear: you take on the hard jobs, and you don't shy away from the things that most need doing. That's how she lived her life, from start to finish—including working as a young girl with her family to carve a fishing camp out of the Maine wilderness. That lesson reinforces my commitment to keep on
pressing for the updates to our laws that will protect us all from exposure to toxic chemicals. This campaign has been tough at times.
It has effectively united a diverse cross section of the U.S. public from health groups to forward-thinking businesses to environmental justice advocates, all pressing for a bill introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg, the Safe Chemicals Act. Whenever we collectively take a step forward, though, it sometimes seems like the chemical industry is relentless in battling back. We help release new peer-reviewed studies that reveal solid evidence that toxic chemicals are damaging our health; the chemical industry lobbyists claim the research is unpersuasive. We deliver over 100,000 petition signatures from concerned families across the country urging reforms; partisan legislators turn a blind eye because they don't want to give the Environmental Protection Agency the tools they need to assess the safety of chemicals.
Some days it can seem like it's simply taking too long or that our efforts aren't making enough headway. On those days, when it would be easier to throw in the towel out of sheer frustration, my grandmother's lessons eventually kick in and I can reconnect with my core motivation to stand up for disease prevention and for the smarter laws that will protect our health.
There’s one simply thing we can do today –
join more than 76,000 Americans who have already signed the petition for safer chemicals. It’s time for us to take Aubine’s lesson to heart – don’t shy away. And, if I might add something, get loud about it. Help us make as much noise as possible for safe chemicals.
Sign the petition today and tell our elected officials that it’s time for us to know what chemicals are in our lives!
By the way, do you wonder how my grandmother's story played out? She and her family not only established their fishing camp but it was so successful that she and her siblings were sent to college on the proceeds--something very rare in rural Maine in the early 1920's. I have no doubt that our collective efforts to pass the Safe Chemicals Act nationally will ultimately be just as successful.
