On April 20, the Gulf Coast remembered the day two years ago that changed our lives. The BP Oil Disaster may no longer be headline news but it's not over for the thousands of Americans who have lost their livelihoods, suffered health consequences, and greatly fear the decades long fight ahead. In case you haven't recently read about the continuing impacts along the Gulf Coast here are some refreshers: Gulf Future Coalition releases two year update Congress Falls Short on Oil Spill Safety Gulf Monitoring Consortium - Gulf Coast monitoring organization launch investigations into ongoing oil...

This blog is written by Marylee Orr, Executive Director of Louisiana Environmental Action Network. Her sons Paul and Michael Orr have been testing seafood along the Louisiana coastline in the wake of the BP oil disaster. Today communities from Texas to Florida who were directly impacted by the BP oil disaster released the report “ State of the Gulf: A Status Report from the Gulf Coast Waterkeepers in the Wake of the BP Oil Disaster” . My son, Paul, is one of seven Waterkeepers on the Gulf who are releasing the report. We live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and have been actively working to hold BP...

As we learned from the BP oil disaster, the full cost of an oil spill is more than the price of some boom and a good PR person. It also includes lost income from local fishermen, health care for children who inhale dispersants, and long term testing of both marine life and human life. Oil spills happen in the Gulf of Mexico all the time, but it isn’t everyday that people pay attention. It’s time we start. It’s time we stop having to react to environmental disasters. It’s time we start building a more sustainable economy, creating a safer energy industry, and protecting what we have left while there’s still time.

A new school year, a new article on our country’s lack of safe school siting policies. More evidence that a tidal wave of debate over why building schools on top of contamination land is a bad idea has washed over our country. In fact, that’s exactly what The New York Times article entitled, “Tainted Al Gore School Poster Child For National Toxics Debate”, states. The author, Elena Schor, described the latest in school siting scandals, this one with the just opened Al Gore school in Los Angeles. This school’s contamination is so well known that Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller have both...

I’m starting to feel like a broken record, but I guess that’s what happens when you really care about something. Children are a vulnerable population. They eat more food, breathe more air, and drink more liquids per pound than adults. They are also more curious exploring the world around them in more tactile ways than the rest of us. This all means that children are more susceptible to the impacts of toxic chemicals. While all of this is happening in our own communities, our nation lacks important laws to prevent children from going to school on, near, or inside sources of pollution. The...

Government is here to do the things we can’t do for ourselves, like provide resources and mechanisms to clean up a gigantic oil spill or maintain traffic lights. In order to continue to flourish as a functional society, we need to prevent economic and environmental disasters from occurring in the first place and not simply continue to spend resources and money mitigating the impacts of their aftermath.

Today is National Healthy Schools Day. A day to learn, discuss, and implement healthier and safer practices in our nation’s school. Eliminating toxic chemicals and taking on more environmentally friendly standards isn’t always simple, but there are several ways to get started. Here are three. (1) Get your children involved: Our kids are pretty damn good detectives and like to ask a lot of great questions, so make sure they play a lead role in developing goals and making changes at their school. A good first semester goal is to survey all the cleaning products used throughout the school and...

The Texas PTA passed a resolution demanding safe school siting policies throughout the state at its annual convention this February. This isn’t the first time PTA has shown leadership on this issue. In Fall of 2009, Alabama PTA passed a similar policy when a railroad company proposed building a transportation hub 150 feet away from an elementary school . Parents and teachers are showing leadership when our elected officials are not. In 2008, a group in Texas called the Clean Schools Initiative helped introduce a state bill that would require school districts to assess the environmental...

Forty years after Our Bodies Ourselves was first published, we are finally starting to see a larger societal understanding that to care for our girls and women is to directly nurture our community at large. As we see a greater movement towards gender equality, we are also understanding that toxic chemicals are impacting our health, specifically our reproductive system, making this nurturing needlessly more difficult.