Episode 16

Laurene Allen is a clinical social worker who also became a citizen activist in 2016 when she and her community of Merrimack, NH learned they had been exposed to PFAS in their drinking water for 15-20 years from the Saint-Gobain factory (formerly called Chemfab).  Laurene co-founded Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water as they sorted through the sad realities of what extended exposures mean to public health. 
  
The scope of the problems with PFAS far exceeded her small town and Laurene joined other community leaders around the nation to co-found the National PFAS Contamination Coalition, to help people learn to use the available resources to learn about PFAS and protect themselves, with the support of others who understand and can share their roadmap.  

It is traumatic for communities to learn they have been exposed, and are sick or waiting for worried about getting sick and protecting their loved ones.  Laurene recommends that each household get a reverse osmosis water filter for drinking water, and directs people to these resources:
For stress: ATSDR
For community support and solidarity: NPCC
In the Merrimack area: MCFCW
And on this site's page: WMW Resources

Merrimack's PFAS water contamination story was documented, along with three similar towns, in the 2019 movie called Bad Water. Small Towns. Deaf Ears.  Director Victor Pytko says it's "Everything you need to know about PFAS, but don't know how to ask." Laurene is one of the featured activists in the film.

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Episode 14
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​Jaime and Ayesha, best friends since college, started the Nantucket PFAS Action Group after learning that Ayesha's husband, Nate Barber, had contracted testicular cancer, likely from workplace exposures to PFAS.  Their desire to better understand how firefighters were being impacted led them to create a study, funded by TURI, to measure PFAS levels in fire service professional's turnout gear.

Ayesha and Jaime may be new to the PFAS activist roles they have assumed, but they are unstoppable and have some recommendations of good places to start learning more about PFAS.
Start here:
1. The PFAS Exchange. Community driven resources backed by excellent research and links. And it includes a tool for water testing comparisons regarding PFAS exposure.
2. Green Science offers PFAS research and policy advocacy. 
3. PFAS-Free PPE Turnout Gear for firefighters. 

​Play audio, below:

Episode 13

Patrick MacRoy is the Deputy Director of Defend Our Health, a national non-profit, based in Maine, that builds a grassroots movement to drive toxics out of our food, water, homes and packaging.  
This past legislative session, Defend Our Health helped pass a first-in-the-nation ban on the spreading of sludge (Maine's inadvertent way of introducing PFAS and other chemicals into the soil of farmer's fields).  Patrick talks about this win, along with others.  He explains why Maine has been able to be so successful and highlights the courageous efforts of farmer Fred Stone, who was the first to speak up about the PFAS disaster in Maine farming.

Patrick, with his breadth of policy knowledge around all things PFAS, was able to also explain how the federal government (including the EPAand FDA) and the Chemical Industry (spearheaded by the American Chemistry Council) figure into our everyday realities around PFAS contaminated water and soil.

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Episode 10

Lori Gramlich represents Old Orchard Beach in the Maine Legislature, where she has introduced numerous bills to support the health of children and clean drinking water.  

Lori uses her skills as a social worker and advocate to protect Mainers from toxic harms that come from PFAS in firefighting foam and household products, arsenic in our residential well water, and keeping glyphosate away from developing children.  

Lori Gramlich shines as a champion of the environment on the Environment and Natural Resources committee. Her reverence for the natural world, and the health of the people who live here, is what motivates her actions and leadership.  
Some of Rep. Gramlich's sponsored bills have become laws, making Maine a national leader in the control of the spreading of PFAS products and holding corporate polluters responsible. 

Bonus: Before the Deluge -- A favorite Jackson Browne song that underscores the relationship between earth health and "the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power." 

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Episode 9
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Sarah Nichols serves as the Sustainable Maine Director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine and is a nationally recognized policy expert on the subject of waste management.

Sarah leads local and state efforts to reduce waste, encourage reuse, while increasing recycling and composting in Maine. Some of her notable accomplishments include policies that banned the distribution of plastic shopping bags and foam food containers in Maine.  More recently, she helped pass the nation's first Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Packaging law. It is now Maine's policy to move to a “polluter-pays” model, like Canada and the European Union have already implemented. 

​Closing the out-of-state waste loophole was another big win for Maine this past legislative session.  LD 1639 stopped allowing private construction companies to dump their demolition waste, which included lead, arsenic, PFAS, mercury, and other toxic materials, into Maine's Juniper Ridge landfill. 

​For more information on programs to safely dispose of toxics, visit www.NRCM.org. 

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Episode 8

Sarah Woodbury is the Director of Advocacy at Defend Our Health.   As a lobbyist, she works closely with legislators and coalition partners to advance Defend’s mission of fighting for safe products, food, and drinking water.  Her team has had some first-in-the-world success in a law to ban non-essential uses of PFAS by 2030. To read about Defend Our Health's accomplishments this legislative session, click here.  For more information on assistance for residential well water testing, click here. 

Sarah's  job is to get government to act, and she enjoyed a productive legislative session this spring, doing just that around firefighting foam, farmland biosolids ban, and  testing where sludge has already been spread, PFAS water standard at 20/ppt, water testing, and support on Penobscot and Passamaquoddy safe drinking water. 

Sarah has done similar lobbying and communications work, in DC, for the Anti-Defamation League and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, using her Master’s Degree in Applied Politics, from American University and her B.S. in Political Science, from Portland State University.  She was just born persuasive!

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Episode 7

Mark is the retired Bureau Director for Maine Department of Environmental Protection.  He worked to clean up  Superfund 
sites in Maine.  He speaks of many acronyms, CERCLA and the devoted and brilliant people he had the pleasure to work with through the EPA.  Since 1980, our government has been working to clean up toxic chemicals from air, water and soil in many different settings. 

Mark wants people to realize that they have the right to know if they are living near toxic chemicals so they can prepare and plan, as needed.   The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) is a great resource.

Mark thinks Mama Earth would want us all to pay closer attention to what we are buying (such as PFAS products) and using, (including our water).  He recommends comprehensively testing residential well water every two years.  For information on financial assistance to test well water in Maine, click here. 

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Episode 6

Jeff Gearhart is the Research Director at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, MI.  He has product tested over 100,000 everyday items, including artificial turf.  

Artificial turf is an environmental health issue on a large scale, with around 13,000 artificial turf fields in use today, while we add about 1,500 more a year.  

Artificial Turf as a Public Health Concern:
Releases toxic chemicals including lead, PFAS, phthalates.
Causes environmental warming to air and waterways, crumb rubber infiltrates soil and water. 
Increases head and non-contact injuries.
Exposes children to toxic fumes and contacts and can cause endocrine disruption, metabolism, liver and thyroid issues, cancer, immune dysfunction. 

Jeff also underscores the expense of artificial turf (roughly 1M raised through community campaigns) for fields that require maintenance and only last 8-10 years.  And then they have to create toxic dumps for artificial turf waste (40,000 tires per field).   Jeff Gearhart says using organic grass fields is a matter of, "Reclaiming, our heritage of having natural, safer, healthy playing fields.  And I think it's about reclaiming the joy of sports and the joy of  the community."

Jeff Gearhart has co-authored many peer-reviewed articles on toxics in consumer products and suggests learning more about artificial turf from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Siani and the Toxic Use Reduction Institute.  

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Episode 5

​ Stoneridge Farm, in Arundel, ME, was the first farm in the state to learn it had high levels of PFAS "forever chemicals" in its water.  The toxic chemicals built up from spreading sludge, as a soil amendment, year after year.  The Maine Department of Environmental Protection assured the Stones that the practice was totally safe, so he helped to spread this form of fertilizer on many area farms, as well. But it was not safe.  The chemicals were in the water and feed given to their cows, who then produced milk with very high levels of PFAS.

Farmer Fred Stone, and his team, chose to notify their milk distributers as a matter of integrity and food safety, though it caused financial ruin, for them. 

Fred was recently quoted in the Beacon saying, "My moral compass so far has cost me $1.5 million.  That is what it costs to have a moral compass." It has also cost them their health and the ability to keep their family farm alive, with the value of the land now ruined by toxic chemicals left from years of sludge spreading. 

Fred Stone thinks telling his story is a lot like fishing, "you never know what you are going to catch."  And after the painful loss of their herd, their livelihood and their health, he wants to do what he can to spread the word on toxics in farming.  Telling his story has helped. Presently, the state of Maine is about to have the first law in the country banning the spreading of sludge on farmland (LD 1911, currently awaiting the governor's signature).  Likewise, a newly established $60 million dollar trust in Maine is intended to offer relief to farms like Stoneridge. 

"So God Made a Farmer" by Paul Harvey was played in this interview to highlight the powerful connection farmers have to the land and thus underscore the inconceivable loss farmers experience when their legacy is cut short by toxic ruin.

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Episode 4

Andrea Amico is an occupational therapist who also became a serious activist when she learned, in 2014, that her husband and young children were impacted by drinking highly contaminated PFAS water at the former Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH. 
Andrea Amico is a co-founder of the community action group called Testing for Pease which is responsible for a blood testing program and two health studies.  Andrea is truly passionate about raising awareness about PFAS and has presented on the TED stage, before the US congress, at national and international conferences on PFAS.

For more information on Testing For Pease, click here for their Facebook page, and here for Twitter. Resources such as PFAS Exchange, the New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance,  and the National PFAS Contamination Coalition can be found here and on the Resources page of this website. 

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