That said, I just wanted to say that I really admire what Chelsea Green is trying to accomplish. I try to live a healthy organic life and in recent years I have tried to make sure that I am being as "green" as I can, but I know I still have a long way to go.

Keep up the good work, I particularly like the array of books on different topics that you recommend. Thanks for helping this World to be that little be "Greener".

I would be interested to know what the one most important thing is that you would recommend the average person do to make themselves and their homes just that one little bit "Greener".

I went to law school with the idea that I wanted to use the law to help protect the environment. But what job would allow me to do that in the way that I envisioned? Once I got to law school, I learned that many so-called “environmental lawyers” actually represent corporations trying to avoid environmental regulations. Many other environmental lawyers work for government agencies, doing the best they can to enforce regulations with limited resources. Other environmental lawyers work on behalf of public interest groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the World Wildlife Federation. None of these jobs seemed exactly right for me. All of these types of lawyers are working on behalf of big organizations. Plus, all of these lawyers also have to fight over mind-numbingly detailed environmental regulations, all in front of judges and administrative agencies – but not juries.

I wanted to represent real people – actual individuals whose lives had been affected by harm to the environment – and I also wanted to try to tell their stories to other real people – the women and men who sit on juries. To do that while also working toward environmental justice, I needed to help people who have directly been harmed by poisons in the workplace or in their broader environment. So, I decided to follow the “Erin Brockovich” path of justice (well, I started before she did, and she’s not a lawyer, but you get the idea…).

I’ve been representing people poisoned by toxins for 16 years now. During that time I’ve had a wonderful career working on cases that I believe made a real difference to real people and to the environment. But it’s only been over the last three years that I’ve finally had the opportunity to work on a group of cases that perfectly captures why I became a lawyer: I now represent a group of several hundred people who have developed a type of cancer called Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (“NHL”), and one company is responsible for poisoning the entire planet with a man-made chemical that led to my clients’ cancers. The company is Monsanto, and it made more than 99 percent of all of the polychlorinated biphenyls (“PCBs”) ever used in the United States. A large group of recent scientific studies show that high levels of PCBs in the blood can cause Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and my clients have both high PCB levels and NHL.

The readers of this blog know that I am very concerned about the hazards of PCBs, because they are everywhere in our environment, including in our food. Unfortunately, even at these environmental levels to which all of us are exposed to PCBs, they are causing terrible harm to many thousands of people, and they put all of us at risk.

Before the 1930s, when Monsanto began to sell PCBs commercially, you would not find them anywhere on the planet outside of a laboratory. That all changed dramatically in only a few decades. Monsanto began to sell PCBs for use in hundreds of different types of products. Monsanto sold many PCBs for use in electrical power equipment, like transformers and capacitors. However, Monsanto also marketed PCBs for use in a huge variety of other industrial and consumer products, including: paints, caulk, glues, inks, plastics, carbonless copy paper, hydraulic fluids, deep fat fryers, car wax, furniture polish, and even dental appliances. Over the years, both Monsanto and its customers dumped PCB-containing waste into streams and landfills. PCBs also made their way into the environment during the use of the products that contained them – for example, thousands of pounds of PCBs were found in paints used to coat the inside of grain silos. Those PCBs contaminated the grain, which was fed to the cows, which were then fed to all of us.

Meanwhile, unlike almost all other chemicals that had been produced up to the time that PCBs were invented, PCBs do not break down in the environment. By design, Monsanto created PCBs to be virtually indestructible. Once they travel to the air, water, and soil, most PCBs stay there for many years, keeping the same chemical form that they started in. Similarly, when PCBs enter the bodies of animals and people, they travel to the fat tissues, and set up residence almost permanently. Like it or not, we’ve all got them in our bodies. But some people have considerably more PCBs in their bodies than the rest of us. For that unfortunate minority, for whatever reason, PCBs stick around even more stubbornly than they do in the rest of us. Worse yet, Monsanto’s PCBs are putting those people at significantly increased risk for developing a long litany of horrible chronic diseases, including Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

Through this litigation, my co-counsel and I are trying to hold Monsanto accountable for making a product that has polluted the entire world, and which is causing tens of thousands of people each year to get sick. And the issue of global environmental pollutants is becoming more and more important with each passing day.

PCBs are not the only ubiquitous, persistent, global pollutant. Our bodies are all filled with other persistent pesticides and industrial by-products, like DDT, dioxins, PFOA, and BPA. You should check out the Environmental Working Group’s excellent, but frightening, video – “Ten Americans” — which documents the growing chemical body burden that we all absorb from the time we are in the womb. http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6431545

I’ll be sharing more details with you over the coming months about the Monsanto PCB/Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma litigation and its progress. I hope that you will agree with me that it is long past time that a company be held accountable for the harms and losses it has caused by poisoning people and the planet.