[music] alan eustace: so hello everyone,i'm alan eustace, and i have the great pleasureof introducing arlene blum, who will talk about her newbook "breaking trail." you know, it's a big pleasurefor me. i was telling her the highestpeak i've ever climbed is 14,500 feet or something likethat, but i read her book very early on, and it was veryinspirational on annapurna, and i like severalthings about it.
later, i found out thatannapurna is the hardest and most difficult of all the 8,000meter peaks, but the other thing was inspirationalwas the fact that it was an all women's expedition. and i felt like it reallyshowed both the planning ability, the creative genius,the athletic ability, the sense of adventure that ithought was kind of-- there weren't married many rolemodels in mountaineering for women, so i was really,really happy to see it.
and also, i thought the bookgave a prospective. women writing books, i think,bring a different passion. it's less conquering, and it'smore communing with nature in ways that i think are reallygood, and it showed both the tragedy and the triumph that'sinvolved in mountaineering. later, when we talked earlier, ifound out that she obviously likes challenges that arepractically impossible, because she also spends time, asyou'll hear today, working on legislation to protect peoplefrom the environment,
and you'll hear a lotabout that today. and i think i her definitionwas, in many ways it's even more challenging, because it'sa fight against the chemical industry, and billions ofdollars, and trying to find ways to actually protect people,costs them less money, and make them moresafe overall. so with that, i'd liketo introduce arlene. thank you very muchfor coming. oh, let me say one otherthing on this book.
i looked on amazon. this book has 41 reviews. of those 41 reviews, 37 are fivestars, the maximum, and three are four stars. it is probably the highest ratedbook i have ever seen, and the reviews are amazing. and i already bought mine, ijust want to let you know. this is the first author thati've ever paid money for their book, so i want youto know that.
arlene blum: and if youever need a job as my marketing manager. and actually, the mountain thathe talked about, even though it's 14,000 feet, northpalisade is one of the more challenging and beautifulmountains i've ever climbed, so being 14,000 feet can stillbe quite an accomplishment, so i recommend north palisaderight, good mountain. so as we said today, i'm goingto talk about mountains and molecules, and youmight end up--
we'll see at the end. how many people here came tolearn about mountains? how many came to learnabout molecules? oh, ok, a lot of moleculespeople here, that's good. so my career of both mountainsand molecules began in my freshman chemistry labat reed college, and this is in the '60s. my professor was a 23 year oldwoman with a phd in chemistry from mit, and you can imaginethat was pretty
unusual in the '60s. she thought chemistry was thecoolest subject on the planet, and there were four girls in myfreshman chemistry class, and we all got phd's inchemistry, which says something about the importanceof role models. my lab partner was a veryhandsome young man from portland, oregon, and we studiedchemistry till late one starry night, andhe said, do you want to climb mount hood.
well, i was from chicago. i'd never done anything physicalin my life, had been raised by an overprotectivefamily where i wasn't even allowed to ride horses,but he was very handsome, so i said sure. and so we drove up to timberlinelodge, he put a big pack on my back, andwe started up, and i started gasping. he said he didn't think i wasgoing to make it out of the
parking lot, because i wasgasping so loudly, but he was very handsome, soi persevered. and when the sun rose, i was inthe most beautiful place i had ever been, high above theclouds, and i fell in love with him, and with mountainclimbing, and with chemistry, and kept doing mountain climbingand chemistry until i was a grad studentat uc berkeley. and i just passed my qualifyingexams, and wanted to go on an adventure, and oneof my lab partners said,
there's an expedition to denaliand i'm going to go. do you want to go? and i said, great, wheni pass my qualifying exams i'll go to denali. and i wrote for the informationand it said women can go on a denali trip at areduced price, as far as base camp, to help withthe cooking. so i called the guy who isleading the trip and i said, i want to go to deanli, buti want to climb it.
and he said, women aren'tphysically strong enough or emotionally stable enough toclimb mountains like denali. and i said, i was climbing withmy friends from reed in peru, and we climbed higherthan denali in the andes. and he said, were youthe only woman. and i said, yeah. and he said, did you really doyour share of the leading. and i said, no, i probablydidn't, but i thought i participated.
and he said, you are probablyjust carried up the mountain. so i realized as long as iclimbed with all guys, and in those days most of the climberswere guys, people, and maybe even me, wouldquestion had i done my share. so i thought, i wonder if wecan organize an all women's team to deanli, and that wasa very revolutionary idea back in 1970. so we organized the denalidamsels, and here we are on the mountain.
and nowadays, people carry theirloads on the low slopes on sleds where they pull them,but we hadn't thought of that back then, and to climb denaliyou need about 200 pounds of food and gear, 30days of food. and so the reason people thoughtwomen couldn't do it is because they thoughtwomen couldn't carry-- you saw that big packwe're carrying-- but we could, and we headedup the mountain. it was a beautiful place.
we got up to our high camp. i was the deputy leader. i'd organize the trip. i was 25 at the time, but theleader was a 50 year old woman who was one of alaska'sleading climbers. but most of the peaks in alaskaaren't very high, and it turned out she had analtitude problem, so she was really strong up to about 14,000feet, but she didn't do very well above 14, anddenali is 20,000.
so we're at the high camphere at 17,000 feet. it's summit morning, she has aheadache, she hadn't actually been carrying her load. she'd been feeling really badly,and i said, grace, maybe you shouldn't try forthe summit when you have a migraine and youfeel terrible. but she was really determined,and so we headed up. she was going slowly, butit was a gorgeous day. we reached the summit-- she'sthe person slumped down to the
right of the flag. she wasn't eating, drinking. we weren't so happy. we were very happy, because wehadn't even know if women could climb denali. every step of the way it waslike, can we actually do this, and we did it. we were on the top, but wesaw thick clouds coming. we heard a big arctic stormwas forecast, and she was
really ill, and so we sort ofsupported her down a little way below the summit, shecollapsed unconscious. and i was now the expeditionleader at age 25, with six people, an arctic storm comingin, and a unconscious person near the summit of denali. so we put her in a sleepingbag with a pack frame as a structure. we wrapped a climbingrope around. we kind of made a stretcher, andwe hauled and lowered her
down the mountain. and i think you can see theplace where the summit is, the place where grace collapsed, andthen we hauled and lowered her down that slope to whereit says bivvy site. i can't quite see in the back. and then another woman and istayed up with her on the bivvy site watching the cloudsmassing, this big storm coming in. it was getting dark, and i'llalways remember that moment,
thinking if the storm comes,what do we do. do we stay here? do we leave her? it was a horrible moment, andthen fortunately she got a little bit better, and we wereable to get her down the mountain before the storm reallyhit, and we're down now at 14,000 feet. you can see the amount of snowon our snow shoes, and we were going out every three hours toshovel the snow off the tent,
but i was a different person. that happening gave me somuch more self esteem. if you read "breaking trail"you'll see i had a really tough childhood where i wasalways said pretty negative messages, and really never feltvery good about myself, and i do remember a long timeago though, sitting in that tent thinking, i'm notsuch a bad person. i got grace down alive. we climbed denali.
i'm actually ok. and it really gave me a lot ofconfidence to have had such a challenge, and to beable to have gotten her down the mountain. so by the time we flew out, ifelt like i'd gone from being a 25 year old girl from chicagowho climbed some mountains, to a woman who couldlead expeditions, and dream up impossible things. so my next big adventurehappened when i was back at
grad school, hard at worknot writing my thesis. has anybody engaged insuch an activity? so i went to the movies, northside theater if any of you know it, berkeley, and "theendless summer" was playing. it was the beach boys goingaround the world with big surf boards looking for the perfectwave, and i watched them and i thought, when i got my phd iwant to go around the world and find the perfect mountain. so i told my adviser, whothought this would not be good
for my career as a chemist,and i said, don't worry. i was studying a moleculecalled transfer rna. i said, i'll make a flag thatsays trna, and i'll fly it on all the summits. i'll think about my research. so we planed to climbin europe for a summer, in africa. by going up and down acrossthe equator, we could have five climbing seasons in 15months, so it was europe,
africa, asia, australia, newzealand, back to being a chemist for the rest of mylife, one adventure. so i'll go quickly. we missed europe, because mythesis was late, but we started in ethiopia where weclimbed, in the background, the highest peak ras dashen,which is 15,000 feet. and then we went to thesemountains, the rwenzori. would you believe you'relooking at uganda and the congo?
they're on the equator on thecongo-uganda border, and they're the sourceof the nile. ptolemy said a long time ago,the nile came from snowy mountains on the equator. and the weather is so bad therethat nobody hardly knew they existed, and we actuallyclimbed about all the peaks in the rwenzori. here i am on the summit at17,000 feet on the equator, and you see my flag says trna.
i was thinking aboutmy research. this is mount kenya, which isabout a five eight rock climb, about 18,000 feet. kilimanjaro-- i have now a unique slide thati've only shown a few audiences, but i actually acouple months ago gave the big lecture for the american alpineclub dinner in new york, and at the lecture was aguy i had met on kilimanjaro that i hadn't seen sincekilimanjaro.
this was 1972, and at thattime we said no money. we were poor students doing thison no money, carrying our own packs up kilimanjaro. he was part of a guided party,and the day we climbed kilimanjaro it was snowing, andthe guided parties went to the crater rim and turned back,but we didn't have a guide so we walked around thecrater rim to the real summit. anybody climbed kilimanjarohere? yeah, so right there's a couplemiles, i think, you
walk up high where you hit thecrater to the high point. but anyway, when we were goingby, i don't know how this happened, but i said somethinglike, i think i'm going to sun bathe in my bikinion this summit. and he said, i'll give you$10 for a picture. well that was a lot of moneyfor us in those days, so i hadn't seen this guy since 1972,but there he was at the alpine club dinner, and i wasable to squirrel through all my slides quickly and addmy summit picture from
kilimanjaro. it was fast. it was cold. it was a very fast picture. so he gave me the $10. it's not it's worth asmuch as it was 1972. so we carried on to mountdamavand, which is the highest peak in iran, and thenwe went to kashmir, so we were so lucky.
we went to all these places youcan't go to now, and we joined up with the localkashmiri mountaineering and hiking club, who knew aboutall these mountains that they'd tried to climb but nevercould, because they didn't have the techniquesand the gear. and mostly the idea of gettingup at 3:00 in the morning when the-- they would get up at 8:00 andmake chapatis, and not get up and we would get up at 3:00and cook over our little
primus, and be up at the summitwhen the sun rose. anyway, so they told us aboutall these mountains that had never been climbed, and thenwe climbed them all. so here i was at age26 doing first ascents in the himalayas. it was a long way from chicago,and i wasn't that good a technical climber, buti was really determined. so when there was really deepsnow and everybody said, the snow is too deep, let's justnot bother, i would sort of
break trail through the deepsnow to the face of the ice cliff where the guys whowere the good ice climbers would take over. so my specialty was indeedbreaking trail, plodding through snow, and as you'llhear, doing science policy is just like breaking trail. does anyone do anything in yourwork where you feel like you're plodding throughdeep snow? these were some peaks in kashmirwe did not climb that
were really hard, but we wereso lucky to be at all these places that we were practicallythe first westerners. then we went to afghanistanand did an expedition, and again, i felt so privileged tohave this wonderful time in afghanistan at a very happytime for that country. there was a king, it wasmodernizing, and in fact, after september 11, i showedthis slide show about afghanistan, which led tofounding the society for
preservation of afghanarchaeology. from having climbed there, havebeen involved with things around afghanistan. so here i am at 20,000 feet inafghanistan, thinking about my trna research, right. but this was a verymemorable day. at this point it was 1973. all the world's highestmountains of 8,000 meters or higher had been climbed by men,but no woman had ever
climbed to 8,000 meters, andwe were climbing a mountain that was 7,500, and there wasa polish expedition there. we're heading up to the summit,and we met coming down wanda rutkiewicz, who went on tobecome the world's leading moment mountaineer. she was the first woman to climbk2, the third woman to climb everest. but meanwhile, we were on noshaqand she had just come down from climbing, it's like24, five, 7,500 meters, and i
was heading up, and she gaveme a big hug, and said, we will climb annapurna together,all women. and so that moment inafghanistan was where the idea came to climb annapurna. meanwhile, i did lots of otherexpeditions, i got my phd, i post doc'ed at stanford inbio-chem, and alternated climbing expeditions,research. i was studying intermediate inprotein folding, and i went on an expedition in indiathat changed my life.
and it was an easy mountaincalled trisul, but it was, again, high, over7,000 meters. it had been climbed back in1890, very easy, and on it was bruce carson, who was at thattime america's leading young rock climber. he had pioneered climbing thehardest faces in yosemite without pitons. people used to drive pitonsinto the rock, now bruce pioneered putting chalk stonesin that don't scar the rock,
and he had led people likeyvon chouinard and royal robbins, if you know thosenames, up the first grade sixes ever done in the valleywithout pitons. and so we were on thiseasy mountain. i'm a slow walker. he was ahead with someof his friends. i got to the summit andhis friend said, we think bruce is lost. i don't think i havea pointer.
i don't have a pointer do i? we're going to imagine. so you see those footprintson the left? do you know what a cornice is? a cornice is where the windblows, like you have a rocky place, and the wind blows, soyou can have snow over air. it's like a big wave of snow,and so bruce got to the top with his friends. he was very careful climber,always roped, but he unroped.
he thought that point that yousee there was a higher summit, and where his footprints areon the left, he went out on the point, but he was on acornice and fell to his death. and you can see, this is fromthe other side, that big cornice on the top, and we hadno idea that there was a-- india was very secretive inthose days about maps. we had no real map. we didn't know there was aface, and so bruce was 23 having done all this, andfell to his death.
and i was really depressed, andi came back to stanford, and i didn't really want tostudy protein folding. i wanted to do somethingfor the world, for the environment, because brucehad been an early environmentalists, like he didthe first big cleanups in yosemite valley, gettingrid of all the trash. he was very much, and so a guywho had been on my phd orals committee called bruce ames-- anybody here ever heardof bruce ames?
if you're in biology, but he hadsomething called the ames test, where you could takea chemical, put it on a bacterial plate, if it changedthe bacteria it was likely to cause cancer. it was a cancer screeningtool that was kind of revolutionary, and so i went tosee him and i said, i don't want to do proteinfolding anymore. it's not important. it turns out protein foldingis really important, how
proteins fold, forlots of things. but i want to do somethingenvironmental, and he said, you know, i'm kind of worryabout this flame retardant in kid's pajamas. it looks like it's a carcinogento me, and it's actually 10% of the weight ofall the kid's pajamas in the country, and i think itgets inside the kids. do want to study that? he said it's so practical,even the undergraduates
won't-- you know scientists liketo do theoretical things, nothing too practical. he said, nobody willlook at it. would you look at it? i was sufficiently depressed. i said sure. so i found a child who-- and the chemical is calledbrominated tris. all the pajamas pretty muchkids in america were
wearing were 10%. i found a mom who'd bought herchildren's pajamas in england, so they'd never wornthe tris pajamas. so we put a child inthe tris pajamas, collected their urine. the next morning there were trisbreakdown products in the child's urine, which meant thetris was going from the pajamas into the child. and then we ran a screen to seeif it was a mutagen, did
it change dna, and it wasone of the strongest mutagens we'd ever seen. and i thought, oh my goodness,we have to write a paper. we have to alert theparents of america. this is a disaster. and then i got invitedto this mountain. do you know what mountainthis is? anybody know? big mountain.
everest, mount everest, and atthat point, everest had been climbed once by americans. 1963, and this is the 50thanniversary of the first american ascent of everest. and if anyone's interested, i'mon the honorary committee for the 50th anniversary party,which is in richmond, california in theend of february. if anybody wants to go,see me afterwards. i'll give you an invitation.
so there's a 50th anniversaryparty for everest. so everest was climbedby americans in '63. this was '76, the bicentennialyear, and no american woman had ever eve tried everest,and so i had this terrible choice. did i write the paper about thecancer causing pajamas, or did i climb mount everest. so how many of you wouldclimb mount everest? how many of you would writethe paper about the cancer
causing pajamas? so i did both. so here is our team, and weclimbed in beautiful places like the khumbu icefall, riggedladders, but every night i would get tocamp and i would write more of my paper. and here we are in the greatkhum, and when i reached my high point, now my flagsays the mutants. that petri dish has no tris,the one with only two
colonies, and you can't seeblowing in the wind the one with lots of tris where thereare lots of mutations. but i'd finished my paper. i sent it by mail runner back toberkeley, and we did reach the summit of everest on october15, 1976 for the bicentennial, and then the nextjanuary our paper was published in "science." and i always include the titleof this paper in my talks, because it really says what ourinstitute is now doing.
so the subtitle, which i can'tread back there, "the main flame retardant in children'spajamas is a mutagen and should not be used." for thoseof you read scientific papers, is that an unusual title? what do all scientific papersrecommend as the next steps at the end? more research, and that'spretty much all they recommend, and we went, oh mygod, every kid in the country is wearing toxic pajamas, and sowe really recommended that.
we did media, and three monthsafter the paper came out, tris was banned from kid's pajamas. so some of you might havebeen those kids. it was only used for a coupleyears, '74 and '75, or maybe those were your parents whodidn't wear the tris pajamas for that long. and it made me realize thatit's really important for scientists to, at some point,go from saying more research is needed, to taking a stand andsaying there is a problem
here, and something needs tobe done about it, and so we now have the green sciencepolicy institute. our mission is to bring the bestscience to change policy in the public interest. so brominated tris was banned,and when something is banned, industry likes to keep thingsas similar as possible. so what do you thinkthe replacement for brominated tris was? chlorinated tris, and so weran mutagenicity tests.
it also changed dna. it was also banned from kid'spajamas, but chlorinated tris turns out to be the number onechemical in furniture, and other baby products today. so anyone here havea couch from ikea? what year did you buy it? audience: just this year. arlene blum: oh, this year. well, it's maybe not too bad.
what about yours? audience: who knows. arlene blum: ok, so if youbought your couch between 2005 and 2011, it containschlorinated tris, all the ikea couches, and pretty muchall the couches. but basically anyone incalifornia who has a couch has tris or a related chemical init, so it was banned from baby pajamas, but notfrom furniture. but we didn't knowthat back then.
we though, yay, we'vesolved the problem. and i thought, it's time to givewomen a chance to climb an 8,000 meter peak. i'd met wanda in afghanistan. she said, let's climbannapurna. it seemed like agood mountain. it was the first 8,000 meterpeak ever climbed. on my way back from everesti got a permit for it. we put together a team whoranged in age from 20 to 50.
actually, there is dan. irene is not here, is she? dan's wife irene was the firstwoman to climb annapurna. sorry if i'm embarrassingyou, dan. anyway, so there's irene andthe rest of our team. thank you for coming again. i'm sure dan has seen-- the later part's different,you'll see. so we're all still friends.
we have reunions. we had to raise $80,000 to fundour expedition, and we raised it selling theset-shirts, and if anyone wants it, you just google annapurnat-shirts, and you can get them from our website. so i'll quickly go through-- see how we're doing on time-- some of the beautiful pictureson annapurna. it was one of the most gorgeousplaces i've ever
been, but one of themost dangerous. we didn't know it then, butannapurna has the highest fatality rate of any ofthe 8,000 meter peaks. it's really high precipitation,so there are these huge avalanches, reallyamazing steep slopes. it's considered the mostdifficult and the most dangerous of the 8,000meter peaks. not the best choice, but wepersevered, broke trail, and reached the summit.
there's irene in the center,and two sherpa teammates. two of the women onour team, two sherpas reached the summit. we unfurled a nepali flag,american flag, women's place is on top flag, allheld together by a save the whales pin. headed down there was a secondsummit attempt, and the two women on that fell to theirdeaths, so climbing mountains like this can be very,very dangerous.
so after annapurna-- there's irene in frontof annapurna-- i wanted to do an expeditionto a safe, quote, "easier" mountain, and we did a hardfirst ascent in india with an indian american women's team. we're congratulatedby indira gandhi. i said i'd always dreamed ofwalking the whole length of the himalayan mountain range. it's a thing, once you get adream or a vision in your
mind, you kind of haveto make it happen. so i thought, walk across thehimalayas, but the borders were closed to westerners, butmrs. gandhi said she thought she could help, and we gotpermission, and we started in bhutan and walked all the wayacross bhutan, india, nepal. i turn out to not have a verygood sense of direction, but hugh swift, who i was walkingwith, had just finished writing a guidebook, so he knewhow to find the way, and i was pretty goodat the politics.
and so we crossed 19,000 footpasses, and drop down, down, down terraced valleys. everywhere we came it seemedlike a very auspicious day. this was the annual archeryfestival in bhutan. most places, almost the wholetime we were in places, there had never been a westernerbefore, so we were greeted like visitors from the godsby the local people. the one day we were in[inaudible], the dalai lama was there giving atalk in english.
yeah, it was like auspiciousday all the way. every day was anauspicious day. we entered nepal on the day ofthe dog when dogs were given little marigold wreaths,and little tikas and special treats. we funded out trip by havingtrekking groups that met us, and brought us supplies, andwalked with us for a few days. and i still lead treks, one ortwo a year, and indeed we have sign up sheets.
this is a cue to passout sign up sheets. if anybody wants to be on ourmailing list, we'll pass out sign up sheets, and basicallyyou'll hear for me if we have trips. i think i'm doing a trip-- now there's a scientific meetingin switzerland, so then i'm going to do a tripfrom charmonix to near the matterhorn, along the hauteroute in august. so i do one or twotrips a year.
we're really lucky last year. we did a great trek in burmaright when it opened, so starting from this-- and then you actually get tohear a lot about flame retardants if you sign the list,so if you don't want to hear about flame retardants,write adventures only. so we send out flame retardantmessages once a month, and adventure messages aboutfour times a year. so we took pictures of thebeautiful women who lived in
the himalayas as we walkedacross, who did a lot of work. and namaste, the greeting, irespect the spirit in you. from that trip, i came back andwanted to share all these auspicious days in the himalayaswith my friends back in berkeley. we started to berkeleyhimalayan fair. has anybody here been tothe himalayan fair? sorry, i can't read the dates. i'll turn around.
yeah, so next may 18th and 19th,if you want to come to berkeley live oak park, we'llhave a big himalayan party, food, dancing, and all thehimalayan people from the west coast come. it's a great match-makingthing. nepali people in differentcities, they all come and they meet their husbands andwives and things at the himalayan fair. and i have the best boothsince i founded it.
come say hi. i'm under the big tree rightacross from the stage. everyone's invited to hangout at my booth. so my most recent adventureswere with my daughter annalise, and i rightfullyfigured she might not like walking, so when she was a baby,her dad and i decided we'd have a last big adventure,and we carried her across the alps from yugoslaviato france in her cute, gor-tex baby suit.
anyway, and then here's annaliston her gap year teaching english in guatemala. annalise, she's an environmentalengineer. she doesn't like hikingand camping. she complains bitterly aboutsleeping on the ground, but she's an environmental engineerwho studies water and sanitation in developingcountries, so i'm proud of her. she cares about the world.
and meanwhile, i wrotetwo books. "annapurna," which tookabout a year to write. anybody here read "annapurna?"some of you. a few people, yeah. and then after that i thought,well i'll spend another year and write a book about how icame to annapurna, and wrote "breaking trail," which tells alot of stories, and it ended right before my daughterstarted college. it took me 20 years to write"breaking trail"-- not an easy
book-- about my childhood,and it was a tough book. but i wrote it, and then iactually hadn't done science for 26 years. i'd been a mom. i'd done leadership traininghere in silicon valley, and i thought, i want to go back toscience, but i really don't know anything. and that was six years ago, andthis six years have been the biggest adventure of mylife, much harder than
climbing annapurna, andway more important. and the problem-- before i do that,maybe just ask. how many people here think ifa product is in your shampoo or your toothpaste, someone'smaking sure it's safe for your health? ok, and how many people thinkthere can be cancer-causing, harmful chemicals in an everydayproduct, and the epa knows about it and are powerlessto do anything?
and unfortunately, the second istrue, and the reason is we only have one law-- so in america, foods, drugs, andpesticides are regulated. all other chemicals areregulated by something called the toxic substances controlact of 1976, and when that passed, it wasn't a very goodlaw, and it has no authority. so asbestos, which killsthousands of people every year, the epa tried and triedand cannot regulate. so chemicals can be reallyharmful, the epa can know, and
they can be in yourtoothpaste. and indeed, if anyoneuses colgate total. anybody use colgate totaltoothpaste here? my daughter did. it has triclosan init, which is a potentially harmful chemical. it's banned at kaiser. there are really only a handfulof these real horror stories, and we can learnthese horror stories and
protect ourselves, so don'tget too depressed. there really aren't tensof thousands of evil chemicals out there. there's a small number, and wecan say what they are, and we can be healthier. but the epa has no authoritybasically to regulate. when they passed the toxicsubstances control act, all the chemicals then weregrandfathered as being ok, and with new chemicals they haveno authority to require
information, so there'sno information on most of the new chemicals. so the thing that i havebeen working on, and i've come to realize-- maybe you've heard that i workon flame retardants-- but i've come to realize theproblem really isn't flame retardants. and flame retardants arechemicals that are used at really high levels, like 5% ofthe foam in your couch is a
flame retardant. but the problem is flammabilitystandards, and back in the '70s, severalflammability standards were passed where no on reallythought about do they provide a fire safety benefit, andis there a harm from the chemicals that are usedto meet them. and the chemicals arevery profitable. the companies that make them doa lot of lobbying to make new laws that require more ofthe use of their chemicals.
and this is a very major healthproblem, but a solvable health problem, and we're goingto talk about in the '70s, there was a furnitureflammability standard passed called technical bulletin 117. there was a code for foamplastic insulations in buildings passed with somethingcalled the steiner tunnel test, and theirflammability standards for electronics, and we're goingto say the most about technical bulletin 117.
if you go home and look at yourcouch, they're all going to have a sign sayingit meets tb117. that means the foam inside won'tburn for 12 seconds with a small flame, but the realityis if you drop a candle on your couch, the fabricburns first. you have a large flame, the foamburns, and there's really not much benefit. the chemical used to protect allthe furniture uses a flame retardant until it was bannedglobally in 2005.
in that picture of chemicals,the top one is pcbs, which are carcinogens and harmful. the center one is that flameretardant, and then the bottom ones are dioxins and furans,which are really harmful, so it's a chemical that'shalfway in structure between a pcb and a dioxin. when i asked a chemist what doyou think about students at berkeley being exposedto this chemical? he said, only in a fume hoodwith full protective gear.
but that's what's in yourfurniture if you have furniture from before 2005. so why is this important? we're exposed to these flameretardants in our homes, in our office place, in cars, andthey're slowly making their way into the food chain. right now, about 90% of theexposure is in our homes. if you look at levels in dust,on the left you have outside the us very low levels, otherstates in the middle.
california has the highestlevels, because we, uniquely, have a furniture flammabilitystandard. no other state has a standard. sadly enough, toddlers havethree times the level in their bodies compared to adults,because they get their mothers level through the placenta. the chemicals are lipophilic,fat loving, so they go into breast milk, and then toddlerscrawl in the dust and put their hands in their mouths.
so a woman who has a higherlevel of this flame retardant-- this is the onethat was banned, but is in older furniture-- it takes longer for her to getpregnant, and then there are a number of neurologicalimpairments. and these are actually epidemiology studies in people. there's maybe 20 or 30 studiesshowing harm in people, and then this is the numberof studies in animals.
this is well studied. there's an industry ofscientists around the world studying these flame retardants,but yet this information never reachesdecision makers. so there's this many peerreviewed papers, and if you go to a typical hearing insacramento, you will hear from the chemical industry there isno valid science showing any harm for many flame retardant. so this is a huge disconnectthat we're trying to bridge
and can bridge, bringing goodscience to decision makers. so to give you an example ofwhat happens, remember back with the children's sleepwear,we had brominated tris, it got banned. we got chlorinated tris,it got banned. in our furniture, we had[? penta ?], it got banned. then we got chlorinated tris,and it is on the way out. chlorinated tris been listedas cancer causing, and we stopped making it in the us.
most of the furniture from 2005till now has chlorinated tris, and the replacement issomething called firemaster. the manufacturers will not giveout samples to study, but colleagues of mine got onesample, and it looks like it causes obesity and anxiety, soit's an obesogen, so this is the newest flame retardant. so i got my dust tested. i had some of the highest levelsin the world, very high levels of this toxic flameretardant, 97 parts per
million in my dust. so i got rid of my couch. that's my couch going into thedumpster, and then three years later my level was down tothree parts per million. so getting rid of toxicfurniture works, but where does the couch go. into a landfill where it canleech out into wildlife, and all these top of the food chain carnivores have high levels.
so is there a fire safetybenefit, and the answer is not much. if you compare the blue, thefurniture without flame retardants, to the red, with,you can see there's a few seconds delay in ignition,three seconds longer, but twice as much smoke, five timesas much carbon monoxide, and 80 times as much soot. so that means you delay yourfire three seconds, but you get lots more of the smokeand toxic gases.
let's just skip tothe next one. so what about legislation? we have tried in californiafor six years. there's been four bills tochange our furniture standard to have increased fire safetywithout toxic chemicals. doesn't that's soundlike a good idea? who do you think mightnot like that idea? right, this is part of a $6million campaign from citizens for fire safety, andwho are they.
albemarle, chemtura, israelchemicals limited, the manufacturers of the chemicals,and why do they spend $6 million, because thechemicals are so profitable. i don't think they do pressreleases like this anymore now that i've put them on myslides, but i found in chemical and engineering newsalbemarle proudly announcing a 377% increase in their profitsfrom their sale of brominated flame retardants. and then chemtura announcingthey're raising their prices
25%, in part to pay forglobal advocacy. 25%, that's pretty good. so these three companieshave a global monopoly. they can charge anything theywant, and people have to get their products to abide withlaws, so then they have huge money to make laws, whichused to pass. but if someone happens to bringa little bit of good science into decision makingthey don't pass, and that's what we've been doing, and we'vehad some recent help.
the chicago tribune, if anybodywants to know all the dirt, this is one of about 20front page stories in the chicago tribune. and again, i can't quiteremember it, but the subtitle, "a deceptive campaign byindustry brought toxic flame retardants into our homes andour bodies, and the chemicals don't even work as promised."and this is a total front page, four more pages, issueafter issue of the tribune exposing the duplicity of thisindustry, and that's been a
huge help to our science toinform policy, which led to, after six years of failedlegislation, last may the governor directed the stateagencies to change our flammability standard toincrease or maintain fire safety without toxicflame retardants. and that process ismoving forward. it's a yearlong process. february 1st there'll be apublic comment period. if any of you signed my mailinglist-- has it made it
all the way around? anyway, if anyone hasn't gottenthe mailing list, if you raise your hand itmight come your way. if you sign it, you will geta chance to comment in the public comment period that youmight like a couch without and if the process moves, andit's moving well, the foam industry, everybody's in favorof the change except the three chemical companies. so by next june you should allbe able to buy safer furniture
without flame retardantsthanks to the governor. this is a paper where we lookedat what was in 100 baby products, and 80% of them hadtoxic flame retardants at levels up to-- there wasa changing pad that was 12% tris by weight. and it was funny when we submitthe paper, it was first turned down for not being novelenough, and then it was the top paper of the yearin this journal, had the most readers.
right, anybody with a childread the paper. and indeed, based on that, threebaby products have been exempt from requiring the flameretardants, and when the standard passes all the restwill be, so the chemicals will not be in our furnitureor our baby products. just to say something aboutbuilding insulation, all these plastic foam insulations thatmake buildings energy efficient are treated withsome of the worst flame there have only been 21chemicals globally banned,
which include several flameretardants, and the hbcd, which is a-- polystyrene is going to be the22nd globally banned chemical. this is a form of tris that'sused in blow in and spray insulation. but again, you don'treally need it. the insulation materials arebehind fire block wall, so before you hit the insulationyou have to burn through the wall, and then at that pointthe insulation doesn't make
much of a difference. so we wrote a paper, "flameretardants in building installation: a case forreevaluating building codes," which is free onlineuntil january 26th if you want to copy. we got them to make itfree for two months. but based on this paper there'sa code change proposal for the 2015 residential code,that plastic foam insulations behind fire block walls orbelow grade will not be
required to have flameretardants. oh yeah, and thiswas supported-- these are the proponents, whichis the us green building council, the cancer firefightersorganization. you can see these are all thesponsoring organizations who are sponsoring the code change,so we have a lot of great organizations. and nancy skinner, our localassembly woman, to my great surprise on monday releasedab127 to change california law
so that we are not requiredin our codes to have flame retardants in buildinginsulation, so this is great news, and her staffers thatthey plagiarized from our paper for their wholelegislation. so this is a case directly, youwrite a good scientific paper, it can be usedfor legislation. and to have green buildings,having good water and all that is important, but if you'regoing to have flame retardants in the insulation it's nevergoing to be totally green.
so i'm going to put in a wordfor our newest thing i'm planning, is the blue mountaintoxics reduction retreat. we'd like to get leaders ingovernment industry, business, nonprofits all together to talkabout the big picture. what are the biggest toxicthreats that we can solve, because i think there are ahandful of things like flame retardants, stain repellents,triclosan in toothpaste, that are known to be harmful, butthings we just don't need. so it's not how do we replaceit, it's like let's just not
use it, and so i'm hopingsomeone from google might attend our retreat. so when i spoke here lastyear, [inaudible] said make a slide on how googlecan help solve the flame retardant problem, and sothese are some suggestions. support california code changesand legislation for fire safety without toxicity,and so we have the governor's initiative, which the chemicalindustry maybe $100 million to spend to try to defeat it, sowe're all waiting to see what
they're going to do. i've heard that people aregetting phone calls sort of saying, do you know the governoris going to get rid of this good standardthat saves lives. are we going to go backto the bad old days where we all burn. so if you get any of those phonecalls, take notes, let us know, but support thegovernor nancy skinner's legislation.
specify no flame retardantsif you can in purchasing. there are products that useflame retardants where it's not required. hopefully you don't use flameretardants in google products if you can. we don't have much time, butthere are a couple minutes. are there other things? ok, i'm almost done, and let'scome back to what other things google might be able to do.
so if you want more information,you already got a chance to sign our list,or leave a card at the basket outside. if you want to know more aboutus, google green science policy, and there's lots andlots of information about how to have less flame retardants,safer and healthier products, and i am optimistic. i think the toxic chemicalproblem is solvable. we can reduce toxics and havea healthier world, and it's
just like mountain climbing. you just have to put one stepahead of the other, and we can reach the summit of a worldwith less toxics. thank you. do you have a question? audience: hi, i was wondering ifyou can talk about how you went about organizing theexpeditions, at the same time having, i assume, a lot ofwork to do at school and everything to followup on that.
as well as, how did you goabout writing the paper without having allthe materials and everything there. how did all of that work outabout being at everest? arlene blum: by multitaskingbig time. i am a hard worker,and it was hard. in graduate school i probablyslowed my progress a bit, because i get pretty focusedon these different climbing expeditions.
but it's a good question. somehow when you're young youhave a lot of energy, and i think on everest it waspretty much written. i was in the editing. i had the figures an the data. i just had to do a bit moreand do some editing, so i didn't really writeit from scratch. audience: but in terms ofplanning the expeditions, was it just you didn't sleep, andyou just did the planning, and
then going to school in the daytime, or were there some days that you would just planthe expedition, not care about school, and then go back. how did you juggle that? arlene blum: the whole time iwas in grad school, i would climb a lot, every weekend, soi think it really cut into my climbing when i was planningan expedition. i probably did less climbing,but i kept doing my school work, kind of.
audience: so when you had theslide up about the tsca act, one of the bullet point saidthat there's 20,000 chemicals roughly, and 85% we haveno health data about. but you also said that of allthese chemical, there's really only a few that arereally bad. arlene blum: really bad and athigh levels in our homes. a lot of them are industrialchemicals. they're used in processes. we have a lot of chemicals inour home, but flame retardants
are 5% of the weight of thefoam, maybe even 10%, so you have pounds of flame retardantsin your home. audience: i guess my questionis, we don't even have data about 85% of that chemicalinventory, so how do we know that there's not a lot morechemical stock out there and in our products thatdoes provide, or put us close to harm? arlene blum: one of theinteresting things that we're talking about now is lookingat classes of chemicals, so
similar chemicals have similarproperties so you can sort of generalize, so the class i workon, organohalogens where you have carbon bonded tobromine, chlorine, and fluorine are super persistent,and they stay around a really long time. so anything that stays arounda really long time and is at high levels in your home isgoing to be a big problem. so if you're a chemist,you can kind of look at a chemical--
not always-- but youcan kind of guess. and there's a lot of-- certain metals are problems. we sort of know what the thingsare in our homes that are the biggest problems. there could be others, buti'm saying is that there are these obvious-- like your red list. there's kind of low hangingfruit, toxic things that you
know are bad, and in many casesyou don't need them, so why don't we just get ridof the really bad things we don't need. flame retardants, becausethere's an industry, they're profitable. most of them, the reason we'reusing them is because they're profitable, but i think thatthat can be solved. audience: i have atiny question. i think i saw one of thesenotices on a backpacking tent.
are they also treated withflame retardants? arlene blum: they are,unfortunately. and again, that might be atime you might want flame retardants, and there are onesthat are safer, and there are ones that are less safe, andit's a problem that because the epa can't regulate. one of the projects we haven'tdone is to just give the outdoor industry a list of whatthey really harmful flame retardants are, and maybe theycould move from the harmful
ones to the less harmful ones. and maybe they're already doingthat, i haven't looked into it, but lots of industriesare trying to move from more harmful to lessharmful flame retardants and other chemicals. and i'm sure at google whenyou're doing your products, you're trying to move-- there's something called thegreen screen, where you can compare chemicals.
so for backpacking tents youmight want flame retardants, maybe your stove's going toexplode, but you want to try to have the safest possibleflame retardants, or use materials that are inherentlyfire resistant. so there are lots of ways youcan solve the flammability problem without puttinglots of toxic chemicals into things. audience: in terms of affectingpolicy decisions, what's the step betweenpublishing the paper and
actually talking to the peoplethat are making the decisions? arlene blum: that's a greatquestion, because in this field of flame retardants, i goto meetings with hundreds of scientists who do paper afterpaper about the harm and how their accumulating ineverything in the environment, and i'm like, write a"scientific american" article, do something. and they're like, well it's onour website, or they can read it in the journals.
but scientists have to realizepeople aren't going to read it in the journals, and they'renot going to go to your website, and scientists haveto take the trouble to put their science in a formthat's accessible. i've been working withepidemiologists who do studies showing harm in humans, whichis big news, and if they can effectively tell the press, atleast people can find out. so i think not all scientists,but a small number of scientist, if they could makethat part of their mission,
and that's what we'retrying to do. there are some scientists whocare about this, and we're helping do some communicationscourses, facilitating scientist talking to decisionmakers, because scientists have a lot of credibility. in other words, in addition towriting the peer reviewed paper, write the white paper,write the public article. and the problem is, at leastacademic scientists are not rewarded for this.
it's almost looked down on. but what i think, in the olddays in academia it was considered bad formto make money, and bad from to do policy. nowadays, making money is great,and i think we have to make it so the doing policy isgreat too, that there's a reward system for taking yourscience and using it in the public interest. because scientists are paid bythe public, and i think they
have a responsibility to taketheir information and bring it to the decision makers, and itis a huge vacuum, and very effective when people do. so, other questions. yes. audience: as a former gradstudent, how were you able to fund your expeditions? arlene blum: we funded ourannapurna expedition selling those t-shirts, the woman'splace is on top annapurna.
the title got a lot ofattention, and when we walked across the himalayas, we fundedit by having people come trekking with usand supporting it. so i think nowadays people getsponsorships from companies a lot, like the north face andstuff have sponsored athletes, and in those days we reallydidn't, so we kind of, as i said, sold t-shirts or treks. we had support treks. it was not easy.
before annapurna, i thoughtthat the mountain of t-shirts-- the t-shirt business,remember we sold 80,000 t-shirts, the businesswas in my house, and i thought that was even harderthan climbing the mountain, but i was wrong. the mountain was harder. audience: about a month ago, iread a few places, including your newsletter, aboutbrominated vegetable oil showing up in gatorade and afew other sodas, and i was
wondering what should we beavoiding, and also what's being done since then to tryand get those removed? arlene blum: yeah, i'm gladyou brought that up. that is one of the dumbestideas around. back in the '70s, europe andjapan all banned brominated-- we're like the wild west interms of regulation of chemicals, sadly enough. anyway, so brominated vegetableoils are used-- but it's very specific--
in certain orange sodas, likeorange fanta, mountain dew, certain kinds of gatorade. just look on the label. it'll say brominated vegetableoils, and they are metabolized, stored in our fat,and i actually was like a referee for a paper from germanyon how bad they are, calculating that if a kid livedon orange fanta they'd get a pretty high dose, and wecan't seem to regulate it. we do not have a will toregulate chemicals, and it's
really sad, because preventionis the old thing, but prevention is so much cheaper. there's a limited number ofreally bad chemicals in our homes that end up in our bodies,and they are causing a lot of our cancer, infertility,neurological problems, and i feel like weknow what they are, and they could be regulated. and i think that's an example ofa thing that we don't need. it makes it look like theorange fanta has fruit
floating in it. it's kind of a density thingthey put in brominated vegetable oils. so i actually sent out a pressrelease about that about a year ago, and it got some mediaattention, but it's nobody's business to regulateit, i guess. so you read my newsletter, buti think if people knew that, orange fanta wouldfind something. in germany, they have orangefanta without brominated
vegetable oil, so that's thekind of perfect example of something that if we haveinformation we can solve, and where scientists can sharethat information. i have to say, i reviewed thepaper, gave it high scores, and it was not published becauseit was not novel enough, so how science measuresthings is not-- the people measuring it aren'tmeasuring it in terms of public health. the analytic techniques probablyweren't novel enough,
so somehow there's got to besome points in paper review and in funding for things thatimpact public health, and i'm afraid there isn't yet. i guess last question. audience: i was wondering, isthere an easy, cheap tool that anybody can put-- i understand for differentclass of chemicals it's a different things-- but thatanybody can put some kind of a chemical, or the dust in theirhomes, and easily measure
levels of certain toxins? arlene blum: thatwould be great. maybe someone coulddevelop that. but when we did ourstudies of-- we just did a study of what'sin america's couches-- we were using gc massspec, which is very expensive and difficult. no, there aren't, and peoplewant to know what's in their couch, and i say, if you live incalifornia, you don't need
to bother measuring it. but it's expensive, so there'sno easy way, and the other part is we don't reallyhave labeling. there's no requirement, andthat's a very simple thing, and i don't know if you guysknow that google has made a huge contribution totransparency in what's in buildings, so the us greenbuilding council has had a big effort just to say what'sin a building. shouldn't we know, and theamerican chemical council
completely squashed it in anugly way, and google gave $3 million to the us green buildingcouncil to increase transparency. am i saying that right? ok, and i guess some of thepeople in this room-- thank you-- were, in part, responsible forthis, so you guys are really contributing, and it'sreally important. when someone builds a buildingto be able to know what's in
it, and say-- and i think the example i alwaysgive is, one of the most persistent chemicals aroundare stain repellents, like they put on carpets. and i always think, if you sayto a mom, so you can have a stain repellent carpet, but whenyour baby crawls on it, chemicals are going to go intotheir body that they're going to be there for the rest oftheir life, and they're harmful, or you can not havesuch a good stain repellent.
what would a mom pick, butwe're not given that information, so transparencyinformation, those are things we really, reallyshould demand. and maybe they're thingsgoogle can help with. you're so into free information,so maybe that's the connection of whyyou gave $3 million. really great, i hadn't thoughtabout that before, but i think with information-- that's really smooth--information,
we can all be healthier. so anyway, the world thanksyou for that $3 million, the usgbc. well i think we're out of time,but does anyone else have any ideas of howgoogle can help? that was my question in myslide, just since you're all here with information. well send me an emailif you have one, arlene@greensciencepolicy.org,and i hope some of you will be
on our list, and come to thehimalayan fair, come on a trek, or write in the commentperiod that you want furniture without flame retardants. so thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment