Episode 39 

Maya is the Senior Market Campaigner at Defend Our Health.  Defend has just released a research report called Hidden Hazards: The Chemical Footprint of a Plastic Bottle: How the Beverage Industry's Addiction to Plastic Bottles May Prolong the Climate Crisis, threaten Human Health and Promote Environmental Racism.  

Maya discusses strategies for leveraging power to influence soda companies to demand cleaner plastic from the bottle producers.  She also shares stories of impacted people living in communities on the fence lines of plastics manufacturing plants, suffering ill health.  

One resource consumers can use to check the safety of everyday products is through Green Screen Certification. 

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Mike Belliveau is the Founder, President and Executive Director of Defend Our Health, which is a national organization, based in Maine, that has advanced public health, environmental justice and clean production since 2002.  For over forty years, Mike has led chemical policy reform and worked with corporations to phase out toxic chemical use. 

Defend Our Health has just released an innovative study, Hidden Hazards: The Chemical Footprint of a Plastic Bottle, which illustrates the comprehensive cost of a plastic bottle, from creation to waste.  Many of the dangerous chemicals used to make PET plastic bottles are either migrating out of the bottle into the food and beverages they contain, or are polluting the waterways upstream, where the plastic is produced.

Belliveau doesn't despair because he sees solutions. He says, "There's a better way of doing things, so let's put those in place. We have an obligation to future generations to make a difference."

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 Episode 34

Dianne Kopec is a Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability at the University of Maine. Her biological research documents toxic contaminants in wildlife, such as mercury in fish (and the animals that eat them, like birds and harbor seals). 

Because of mercury contamination in Maine's waters, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has a posted fish consumption health advisory. Since all 50 states have such advisories, the EPA also offers safe eating guidelines for fish consumption, especially for pregnant women, as exposure can cause behavioral problems and decreased cognitive performance.  

For decades, mercury contamination in Maine freshwater fish has denied members of the Penobscot Nation their legally protected sustenance fishing rights. Currently, Dr. Kopec's research is helping to minimize mercury exposure to tribal members. 

With an eye on the future, Dianne Kopec says, "We don't have to accept mercury pollution as a given."  She discusses how legislation today can protect all of us from toxic exposures tomorrow, so that we might be able to fish with our grandchildren...and eat the catch.  

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Episode 31

​Dr. Susan Smith talks us through her faculty art exhibit called Radical Gardening: practice-based research, 2022,  which is on display in Lord Hall at the University of Maine until March 17, 2023.  Her mobile lab display unit is focused on soils, water and plant matter gathered from known sites contaminated with PFAS or "forever chemicals," from Maine to Texas.  
Inspired to stop using toxics in her artwork, Dr. Smith strives to creating her art with sustainable materials from the earth, found, grown and recycled.  
Susan Smith, is an Associate Research Professor of Art and serves as the Coordinator for the Graduate Art Program in Intermedia at the University of Maine in Orono, ME.  Find her on Instagram@slsmithstudio.

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Episode 30

Mike Garfield is the Director of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, MI.  Established in 1970, the Ecology Center works on ending lead poisoning, air quality, climate action and energy equity.  It is also the home of the Healthy Stuff Lab.  

Mike discusses "greenwashing" and how it relates to the plastics industry.  Presently, the oil and petro-chemical industries are promoting the idea of "chemical recycling" (aka catalytic pyrolysis of plastic waste or "depolymerization") which means melting plastic and making it into solid, liquid and gaseous fuel products. Twenty states have already changed laws to relax regulations against pyrolysis and gasification, even though such incinerators create huge amounts of toxic pollution and a substantial carbon footprint.  

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Episode 28

Adam and his wife own Songbird Organic Farm, in Unity, Maine which became central to the PFAS deliberations last winter, after they learned that their organic farm was in fact heavily contaminated by PFAS, from historic sludge spreading. With great courage and integrity, they immediately curtailed their food production and spoke up about this growing problem.  This spring (2022) Maine passed a law (LD 1911) that banned the spreading of sludge.  As awareness grows about there being no actual safe level of exposure we have to make other choices about what to do with "bio-solids." 

Adam is now the Campaign Manager for Defend Our Health, working to organize impacted farmers around the state of Maine.  Adam describes the process underway to allocate the $60M PFAS aid package.  (LD2013) The aid will most importantly offer a safety net for impacted farmers, as well as medical monitoring/care and research.  Recently, Senator King introduced a similar bill to support farmers,  at the federal level, called Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act. 

​In the meantime, Adam talks about slowing down, becoming aware of our sense of place, and using the precautionary principle whenever possible, as a way to protect Mama/Mother Earth.

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Episode 26

Frederica Perera, PhD founded Columbia's Center for Children's Environmental Health and is a professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.  Recently, her book Children's Health and the Perils of Climate Change was published by Oxford University Press, (2022).  

Dr. Perera wrote this book as a wake up call, a call to action.  From her research, she knows that children are particularly at risk from air pollution, mostly caused by fossil fuels.  This book is timely because the cures for children's health are the same as the ones we can employ for climate health, which is considered to be in Code Red Alert, by the UN.  

This book is a resource and a reference for both children's ill health (eg: SIDS, Asthma, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, anxiety/depression, loss of IQ, mental health) and the more hopeful solution-focused examples that have been demonstrated effective, around the globe. 

Governments have a large role to play in the fix, but Dr. Perera recognizes that individual choices influence others and make a real difference.  Organizations that she recommends:
Fridays for Future
Sunrise Movement
International Youth Climate Movement,
Zero Hour
Earth Uprising
Extinction Rebellion
Moms Clean Air Force
The Society of Fearless Grandmothers
The Elders

Dr. Perera says, "Now's the time" to act.  Our actions can alleviate suffering, costly medical treatments, and death.  Positive changes will benefit us by slowing climate change, making green jobs, recovering human potential  and a creating healthier population/planet, for all species. 

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Episode 25

​Dr. Roopa Krithivasan, recently published a 68 page report called Problem Plastic: How Polyester and PET Plastic Can Be Unsafe, Unjust and Unsustainable Materials.  Dr. Krithivasan is the Director of Research for Defend Our Health and has a background in social, ecological and conservation research.  

Dr. Krithivasan discusses the hidden health hazards from the hundreds of chemicals used to make plastics.  For instance, antimony is a chemical used in the plastic finishing process for PET and polyester (plastic bottles, clothing, stuffed animals, packaging), and it is toxic to the liver and heart.  More than 99% of PET and polyester is made from non-renewable fossil gas and oil and is very often created in plants located next to "fenceline communities."  Serious environmental justice issues have been created In these exposed communities.  Often young children and people of color face the greatest harm  to the chemicals used in the plastic plants next door.

Roopa Krithivasan calls for greater corporate responsibility with regard to reducing and/or eliminating the toxics used in plastics production.

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Episode 23

​Mindi Messmer is an environmental and public health scientist (Clinical and Translational Science, MS) so other parents reached out to her when local families began experiencing a tragic pediatric cancer cluster in Rye, NH 2014. Her empathy for their terribly scary situations led her to become involved as a local activist, leader, and public servant.

Mindi Messmer was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives (2016-2018) where she worked to protect public health through bills on PFAS, arsenic and lead poisoning prevention. She remains committed to cancer prevention and environmental and drinking water protection.

Mindi is the author of Female Disruptors, Stories of Mighty Female Scientists (2022), which she discusses in this interview. 

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Episode 22

Corey Hinton is a lawyer at Drummond Woodsum in Portland, ME.  He is the leader of the firm's Tribal Nations Practice Group.  Recently, he represented the Passamaquoddy Tribe in a fight for clean drinking water.  
Maine Legislation LD 906:  Clean Water For Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik was successfully passed and signed into law on April 21, 2022.  After living with unreliable, odorous and toxic drinking water for decades there is finally movement toward several short, medium, and long range solutions.  Regarding toxics in the water supply, he believes we simply must reduce our toxic inputs into the natural world, which benefit only a select few people's short term gains. 

Additionally, Hinton discusses environmental and social justice issues that have been gaining some recent traction.  These ideas are not new, however, he can reference Maine Legislature notes from the 1870's in which Passamaquoddy leaders were seeking many of the same measures around social justice and respectful environmental stewardship which the still seek today.

FMI:  www.wabinakialliance.org.

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