childhood

I’d start with the National Children’s Study. You can check out the details here. But essentially this is a project that would follow 100,000 kids from birth to age 21 in order to find out how environmental factors (pollution, chemicals, etc.) affect childhood health and development. It’s a great idea. Long overdue. Desperately needed.

So naturally it’s been totally de-funded. The 2007 White House Budget includes exactly $00.00 for the NCS. If you’ve got a couple of spare moments, the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition is asking us all to sign a message of support for the project asking Congress to add a $69 million appropriation to the budget that would allow scientists to continue working on the study, which has been in the planning stages for the last few and is getting ready to start in earnest.

Even prior to joining the Seventh Generation team last fall, the term “environmentalist” left me feeling unsettled. It may be a moot point to many, but, as I reflect on the germination of my discomfort with the word, I hope to confirm that my foreboding instincts about its unfortunate evolution began, for me, not as an employee of an eco-responsible company, but as a regular-old citizen of the planet.