Biologist-Mother Challenges Parents to Become Climate Heroes

I just listened to a fascinating interview with Sandra Steingraber on CBC Radio's The Current. Steingraber is a biologist, mother, and writer. Her most recent book is Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. During the interview, Steingraber talked about how North American regulatory systems fail its most vulnerable citizens: children. New chemicals are "considered innocent until proven guilty," she noted. (In the European Union, on the other hand, the precautionary principle is the universal standard.)

Young children are particularly vulnerable to environmental toxins because they tend to breathe through their mouths (and therefore miss out on the filtering that occurs when we breathe through our noses). They are shorter than adults: they are more likely to breath in environmental dust. They put their hands in their mouths a lot (9.7 times per hour, on average).

Steingraber says that well-informed futility syndrome (when intolerable guilt or fear causes someone to dismiss the evidence for harm) explains why more parents are not actively engaged in the environmental movement. The solution, she says, is to admit that the problem is big and to offer a solution that is just as big. She is calling on parents to become "climate heroes." She notes that our children's anxiety about the future of life on Planet Earth can be reduced if they see us witnessing our activism.

Other notes from this fascinating interview, which I would urge you to listen to when it becomes available on podcast early next week:

• The sounds that musical instruments made from wood make may be changing because of changes to the cells of wood.
• The facts of life talk we have with our kids may no longer be the most difficult talk parents have with our kids. The story of de-creation -- the disappearance of life from our planet -- is now a talk parents need to have with their kids.