I held a town meeting on environmental health and environmental justice in my district last April, and last May I organized a symposium on environmental justice with the Congressional Black, Hispanic, and Progressive Caucuses. The overwhelming public response to these events spoke eloquently to the awareness in our minority communities of the challenges of environmental health and environmental justice issues. This is necessary because the federal response to environmental health is uncoordinated, with a variety of efforts being led by different agencies. This report will be released on May 2 nd to coincide with our environmental health hearing. The urgency of environmental health concerns demands that we move on many fronts simultaneously.
New technology is needed to better evaluate the presence of human exposure to toxic substances.
Additional research is critical as we try to understand the interaction of the environment and human disease. Thorough implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act and other laws is needed, as are new laws that warn consumers about the presence of toxic substances. The concept of environmental justice and the truly international nature of these issues must inform all our work on environmental health. Funding is needed to implement endocrine disruptor screening and a full scale biomonitoring program. Yet Lerner sees hope, writing that a A significant and critical segment of humanity is awakening to the profound threat that this Age of Extinctions poses both for human health and all life on Earth.