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Commonweal Newsletters

Newsletter | Letter from Michael Lerner

December 2007 Commonweal Newsletter Contents:

Download the orignial PDF of the December 2007 newsletter »

December 2007

Dear friends,

In David Steinhart's report on the Commonweal Juvenile Justice program, he announces the signing into California state law reforms that Commonweal first proposed 20 years ago. David describes the passage of SB 81 as a "huge if bittersweet victory."

I realized, reading David's report, that so much feels huge and bittersweet at Commonweal these days:

As Michael writes, Waz is beginning to end his long service to Commonweal. The only Commonweal I know is Waz's Commonweal, and I cannot imagine what life will be like in this Art Deco building by the sea without the presence of Waz Thomas.

Long time Commonweal board member and extraordinary Bolinas artist Arthur Okamura is leaving the board but beginning a new relationship with Commonweal as the drawing teacher of The New School's first regular class. Cynthia Loebig, The New School Coordinator and office manager is moving on to a wonderful new opportunity as a Program Officer at the Kalliopeia Foundation.

Of course, fabulous people are stepping into these large shoes. CHE's Frieda Nixdorf will become the new New School Coordinator. The amazing Adaora Ikenze-Lindsey has joined Commonweal's staff as our first Program Manager. And Kate Holcombe, as Michael writes, is a tremendous choice for the Coordinator of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.

So most days are more huge and sweet than bitter. As you'll read, Rachel Naomi Remen is being celebrated as a Pioneer of Integrative Medicine at what the invitation describes as "an elegant black tie dinner event" of the Bravewell Collaborative in New York. It is a fitting tribute to Rachel's extraordinary body of work.

As I write, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is getting an amazing amount of coverage for its lead in lipstick report http://www.safecosmetics.org. Stacy Malkan, who served as the primary spokesperson for the report just learned that her new book, Not Just a Pretty Face, the Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, is going into its second printing. Stacy's book tells the inside story of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and its five-year effort to pressure the U.S. cosmetics industry to use safer ingredients. I am very proud of my role in this small, feisty and incredibly effective effort.

On Sunday, I am giving one of the plenary speeches at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael. I'm calling my speech "The Sea Around Us, the Environment in Us." It begins by telling the story of Rachel Carson, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this year, and moves on to describe my growing concern for our society's inability to recognize problems and create timely solutions. I thought I would share with all of you a portion of my remarks:

Is this just a story of K Street lobbyists and politicians who are beholden to the industries that fund them? In part, but I want to say out loud to all of you that I also think we are being seduced and harmed by the linear. By the myth that neat, mathematical formulas to determine risk are superiorly scientific even when they leave out more data than they include. I want to ask if it is really so scientific and mature to have scientific conclusions and public policy based on the ideas that warnings in the evidence don't matter until there is proof, that emotions and suffering have no place, that intuitive actions to reduce harm based on common sense are trifles to be belittled and condemned? Isn't real discovery messier, layered, more like a labyrinth? On behalf of Rachel, on behalf of Alice, on behalf of all the DES daughters, I think we need to ask the defenders of proof: Is it really good science or is it just the most profound and embedded kind of sexism.

What kind of evidence is being ignored? I could talk about the doubling of asthma rates. Or the stunning increase in autism. Or the statistics on childhood cancers. But just to be thematic let me keep the focus on sex:

Fewer baby boys are being born, especially in places where contamination is the highest. A study of a First Nations Community who live surrounded by chemical plants in Sarnia, Ontario, revealed that male births have dropped from over 50% to 35%. A study released last month of Arctic villages in Greenland and Eastern Russia found that twice as many girls as boys are being born. In one village in Greenland only girls are being born.

Even where baby boys are being born, there is strong evidence that chemicals, which at extraordinarily small levels of exposure act like estrogens, are harming the male reproductive system.

Hypospadias and undescended testes at birth are going up, testosterone and sperm counts are going down and testicular cancer is on the rise. Every month there is another study that suggests that this all may be different endpoints of the same problem, now being called testicular dysgenesis syndrome or TDS, which is increasingly linked to prenatal and early life exposures to chemicals that act like female hormones.

And female hormones, when they come from chemicals rather than from our bodies, aren't so good for the female of the species either. Premature puberty, breast cancer, infertility, spontaneous abortion, and endometriosis are all being linked, in part to exposure to chemicals that interrupt a girl and a woman's own hormonal signaling. A fine new study in the October, 2007 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives by Barbara Cohn and Mary Wolf and others found high levels of DDT before they were 14 years old had five times the rate of breast cancer than women with lower levels of exposure.

DDT, Bisphenol A, Phthalates, Dioxin, PCBs. As the mother of sons, I want my sons to be in touch with their feminine. But not like this. Not because my placenta and my breast milk were contaminated with feminizing industrial chemicals. Not because the chemicals that I was exposed to, ended up exposing them.

We are learning from the new technology called biomonitoring that the chemicals around us, are in us. That small doses once thought safe can do harm. That exposure to chemicals is one of many factors—diet, stress, access to health care, genes, infections, poverty, racism—in a non-linear but ecological mix that can combine into chronic disease. Or if we can reduce the number of stressors (less stress, less infections, less racism, safer chemicals) we can have more resilience and greater health.

The impact of what we are learning from biomonitoring, from low dose impacts, from chemicals that act like hormones, is beginning to be acknowledged in laws and corporate policies to reduce exposures.

A new multi-state coalition called SAFER has formed to move policy in the same direction as Canada and the European Union who have both taken steps to reverse the burden of proof so that in our children's lifetimes, if not in ours, chemicals will need to be proven to be safe before they are put into the products we use every day, rather than people having to prove that a chemical is causing harm before it can be removed from commerce.

But the question of what that proof will mean is still up for grabs. So, in closing, I want to ask for your help in preserving the male of our species and other species by embracing the feminine.

By sticking up for the cult of the balance of nature and raising up the knowledge of indigeneous people's understanding that linear systems of equity and justice, individualism and autonomy, and hierarchical structures of thought and organization have to be balanced. They have to be balanced in our own lives and in public policy by the feminine qualities of intuition and a prioritization of relationship and connectivity. They have to be balanced by what Carol Lee Flinders refers to as belonging rather than being identified by belongings, and by what Carole Gilligan called "an ethic of care" and empathy. They have to be balanced so we can create public policy that is less about filling in all the blanks in the linear calculation that proves harm and more about the availability of solutions that are inherently less dangerous.

So how do we do this? Well, we start with where we are. We recognize how much we have siloed and hierarchically sorted and ranked ourselves. We quit focusing on the distinctions and start looking for the connections. We try to appreciate the feminine and masculine in every one of us. We work from the ecological understanding that any stressor we can lift off will make us more resilient. So any issue that any of us is working on that succeeds benefits us all.

We let go of the arrogance that keeps us from seeing how what harms the fish in the Potomac or the rats in the lab is also going to harm us. We try to really live with the Bioneers' idea that it's all connected, it's all alive. It's all intelligent. It's all relatives.

That was what Rachel Carson was trying to teach us and, my relatives, I am still trying to learn it. I could use your help. And I want to offer up mine.

I deeply want to offer up my thanks to all of you for your relationship to Commonweal. One of my favorite parts of the job of Executive Director is watching how the many diverse pieces of Commonweal—from Bar-tailed Godwits to juvenile justice—weave in and out of each other in a lovely fabric of service.

Let us hear from you and
Happy holidays,

Charlotte Brody
Executive Director

Arthur Okamura at The New School

by Michael Lerner

The New School at Commonweal is offering our first regularly scheduled class. Retiring Commonweal Board Member Arthur Okamura is now teaching a drawing class on Tuesdays from 9 to 12 at Commonweal.

Arthur was on the faculty at the California College of the Arts for 31 years, where he taught painting, drawing, and printmaking. He is an emeritus professor at the College. Arthur is a nationally recognized artist with paintings in the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Arthur writes: "This class focuses on one's abilities in creating drawings that are spontaneous, controlled, and fun, and engrossing, and graphically expressive. We will examine and practice ways of looking and seeing that will expand one's drawing abilities and paradigms; this relating to how our whole bodies can act and be expressed and seen in the drawing. Every mark says something."

Arthur has served on the Commonweal Board of Directors for thirteen years. He has been a close friend of the Commonweal community since its creation in 1975. We are honored that Arthur is teaching the first regularly scheduled class at The New School.

News from the Commonweal Garden and the Regenerative Design Institute

by Penny Livingston-Stark, James Stark, and Matt and Rachel Berry

Penny and Paula with the Garden's pears

It's been an exciting year of growth here at the Commonweal Garden. We now have 12 people living here on the farm including six work exchange helpers and two interns. We are looking forward to the newest and youngest community member arriving sometime at the end of October. Matt and Rachel Berry are having a baby Berry!

The plants and animals are thriving, and we are able to keep on top of the production and harvesting with all the loving hands and hearts on the land. The fruit set is the best yet. The pears, apples and strawberries are unbelievably delicious. We have been harvesting weekly for the Commonweal staff. If any community members are interested in participating, we harvest every Wednesday and deliver to the Commonweal office. We are continuing to provide food for the Cancer Help Program.

We now have three Churro sheep, a rare breed whose wool the Navajo use for weaving blankets. They are still very shy but can be tempted with apples. We plan on shearing them next spring and using the wool. Our bees are strong and healthy this year, and they have colonized all of our empty Kenyan top bar hives. Hopefully they will stay strong through the winter.

Our monthly open house and garden tours have been very well received and have brought increased awareness of current developments and our future visions of the farm. Open houses usually are held on the third Sunday of the month and are free.

Our monthly 4 Seasons permaculture classes are continuing to be well attended and very inspiring. We are creating a system for training new instructors in that program. Also, we are becoming a design resource for the Bay Area Community as students take on real projects for the class. For example, our Marin group is working on a master plan for Cedars of Marin, a residential home for children and adults with special needs.

In September we hosted our Art of Mentoring program to a sold out crowd. We were honored with the participation of indigenous elders who came to speak about the critical role for elders in the emerging global culture. Auntie Maheilani of Hawaii, Paul Rafael of the Odawa people in Michigan and Mala Spotted Eagle, a Shoshone elder, shared their wisdom and knowledge of culture and relationship to the natural world. Mala remembered coming to Bolinas as a child with his father Rolling Thunder. We have been developing relationships with Native American communities with the hope of creating collaborative youth programs in the future.

Matt's Wildcrafting series is becoming increasingly popular. The next couple of classes will focus on processing acorns and other wild foods. We also hosted the Coyote Tracks program, a family camp with the Children of the Earth Foundation which is coordinated by Matt's identical twin brother Rick. It's great seeing the two of them working together.

We are in the third year of our Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness program. Our second year students are really stepping up and taking strong leadership positions in the program and in their communities.

We feel so grateful for all the support we received and all successes we have enjoyed in 2007! Here is a glimpse of some of what we are planning for 2008:

• Our second Ecology of Leadership program will start in January. This program provides a unique opportunity for participants to deeply explore who they are, who they wish to become, and how they might contribute to their community. They discover what holds them back and develop new tools, routines, mindsets and skills to be more effective in manifesting the world in which they wish to live.
• Thanks to some recent donations and grants, we will begin building the infrastructure of the Commonweal Healing Sanctuary Garden this winter and spring. We will build a deer fence, start our propagation nursery, and begin purchasing and propagating plants for this special garden.
• James and Penny have been developing a relationship with Gaia University, and the Commonweal Garden will be functioning as a Northern California site to host orientations and programs for Gaia U in 2008. This will enable our advanced students to earn college credit through their participation in our programs, which will in turn increase access to our trainings.

Upon re-reading our original proposals and vision statements for the Commonweal Garden, we are happy to say we have already achieved many of our goals and we are excited about what the next year will bring. Our success is largely due to Commonweal and the support of Commonweal community and staff.

We are deeply grateful for your support and we hope to see you here at the Commonweal Garden in the near future.

Update on the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center

by Sharyle Patton and Davis Baltz

Irma Medellin, an El Quinto Sol leader, speaks on behalf of the Lindsay residents she organized to participate in the BioDrift project.

The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center (CBRC) has had a busy and productive year. Biomonitoring is the measurement of chemicals in the human body, detected in blood, urine, breastmilk, or other human "biospecimens." The resulting data, especially when they refer to synthetic chemicals known or suspected to be toxic, are often referred to as a "chemical body burden." While biomonitoring is a scientific public and environmental health tool, it highlights moral and ethical concerns that have deep resonance today.

Biomonitoring and pesticide drift in California's Central Valley

The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center has continued its collaboration with the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, El Quinto Sol, and Californians for Pesticide Reform, in a community-monitoring project in Tulare County in California's Central Valley. This innovative project has combined measuring the organophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos in human urine with air sampling using a tool developed by PANNA called the "drift catcher."

Results from the study show clearly that the body burden of chlorpyrifos measured in people correlates with the times of peak spraying in nearby fields. CBRC partners produced a series of profiles of community residents, mounted a successful press conference about the need for pesticide-free buffer zones around schools, homes and health clinics, and continue to work together to raise awareness about the issue of agricultural chemicals and health.

Support for community biomonitoring projects

CBRC director Sharyle Patton has served as co-leader of a multi-state working group on a biomonitoring project designed to raise public awareness and to support legislative initiatives. Working with co-chair Pam Miller from Alaska Communities Action on Toxics, Sharyle has coordinated the biomonitoring of a total of 35 individuals from Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York for a panel of chemicals of concern. Project participants, representing a cross-section of Americans, include fire fighters, state legislators, mothers, Native Americans, leaders from labor and the spiritual community, and others interested in discussing publicly the significance of personal chemical body burdens.

Biomonitoring of notable Americans

Following up on CBRC's biomonitoring study of prominent Californians ("Taking It All In: Documenting Chemical Pollution in Californians Through Biomonitoring"—online at http://www.commonweal.org/programs/brc/Taking_It_All_In.html), over the past year Commonweal has been carefully educating a new generation of influential individuals at the national level about biomonitoring. Drawn from conservation, high-tech and philanthropic circles, these newly-biomonitored opinion leaders are digesting their results and strategizing on appropriate responses with advice from Commonweal.

California's state biomonitoring program

California is now the first state in the country to have a biomonitoring program—the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program. The legislation, authored and championed by Senate pro Tempore Don Perata, was co-sponsored by Commonweal and the Breast Cancer Fund. It was signed by the Governor in September 2006.

In Lindsay, Margaret Reeves, Senior Scientist at PANNA, describes how air monitoring devices indicate exposures to chlorpyrifos.

In its first year, the program's immediate need has been to generate funding. The Governor initially asked for only $1.5 million for year one of the program, but thanks to Senator Perata's advocacy, the state budget for biomonitoring in fiscal year 2008 has been more than tripled and now contains $5.2 million for the first year of biomonitoring activities.

Meanwhile, a nine-member Scientific Guidance Panel has been named to advise the state on its biomonitoring program. The panel is comprised of eminent scientists and physicians, many of whom have deep experience with biomonitoring. We are confident the program will develop with a solid scientific foundation, and that the program's data will be of immense value to California's public and Commonweal Senior Policy Analyst Davis Baltz is taking the lead in tracking this program carefully to ensure it has a high profile both in Sacramento and among The program is an important milestone that will spur legislative initiatives in other states wanting to enact biomonitoring programs.

The New York Community Trust, the Merck Family Fund, and the San Francisco Foundation have provided funding for the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center.

Sacrifice Zones

by Steve Lerner

Before Alowie died of cancer, Pam Miller at Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) did a videotaped interview with her entitled, "I Will Fight Until I Melt." Her last words became a rallying point for other residents who have since been lobbying for an improved cleanup of the contaminated area.

Even Eskimos suffer from the widespread scourge of living near heavy industries and military bases that contaminate the environment and cause illness in adjacent "fenceline communities."

This summer I traveled to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, one of the most remote and western-most outposts of the United States in the ice-laden Bering Sea about 60 miles from the Russian/Siberian mainland. Here the Yupik Eskimo people have been making a living for the past 2,500 years by hunting and fishing whales, walruses, seals, reindeer and a wide variety of fish, wild greens and berries.

Life was difficult in this corner of Alaska, which is frozen in about nine months of the year. But it has become a lot harder since the U.S. military established radar bases on the island during the Second World War and Cold War only to abandon them. Instead of hauling out what they hauled in, the U.S. military dumped thousands of barrels of toxic chemicals, transformers and batteries, and tens of thousands of gallons of oil into the ground. This poisoned the wild food sources upon which the Yupik depend.

A Yupik midwife named Annie Alowie started to notice an increase in cancer and other diseases that were previously unknown on the island. Before Alowie died of cancer, Pam Miller at Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) did a videotaped interview with her entitled, "I Will Fight Until I Melt." Her last words became a rallying point for other residents who have since been lobbying for an improved cleanup of the contaminated area. Some residents are now demanding compensation for the loss of one of their best hunting and fishing grounds. Meanwhile, the toxic chemicals continue to circulate through the environment and food system doing their damage.

I have also been writing and researching chapters on Mount Dioxin in Pensacola, Florida, where residents were poisoned by contaminants from a wood-treatment plant; Tallevast, Florida, where groundwater was polluted by a Lockheed Martin weapons plant; and the mysterious pediatric leukemia cluster in the small oasis town of Fallon, Nevada, which some experts believe was caused by a combination of jet fuel pollution from a nearby naval air station, arsenic in the ground water, and heavy metals from a smelter and factory.

These and other stories will be gathered together and published as a book tentatively entitled, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Pollution in the United States. The chapters are appearing serially on the Collaborative on Health and the Environment website: www.healthandenvironment.org.

News from the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness

Rachel, at 27, as a faculty member at Stanford Medical School

Rachel Naomi Remen, MD Receives the Bravewell Pioneer Award

At the beginning of any movement, a small number of people will step forward, often risking their own careers and professional credibility, to articulate problems and define new ways of thinking and being. These pioneers are the forerunners—they are the first to question what is and what could be, the first to navigate uncharted waters, and the first to blueprint new paradigms. Commonweal is about pioneering and one of our own is being recognized this fall.

On Thursday November 8, 2007, Rachel Remen, MD, was one of six honorees to receive the "Pioneers of Integrative Medicine Award" from the Bravewell Collaborative for her work as one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body holistic health movement, and one of the first to recognize the role of the spirit in healing and the recovery from illness. Six of her long time colleagues and friends were honored along with her: Larry Dossey MD, James Gordon MD, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, Dean Ornish, MD and Andrew Weil, MD.

The Bravewell Collaborative is a group of visionary philanthropists dedicated to bringing about optimal health and healing for individuals and society through stimulating and supporting innovations that shift the practice and methodology of American healthcare towards integrative medicine.

The following is from the transcript of an interview that the Bravewell Collaborative did with each of these pioneers, asking them to talk about the personal

IN DR. REMEN'S OWN WORDS ...

Long before I became a physician I became a patient. When I was 15 years old I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and I have lived with this chronic illness for more than half a century. So early on, I became aware of aspects of illness that you can't learn from a textbook, things you can only know through direct experience.

At 15, my surgeons told me that my life as I had dreamed it was over. Because of this disease I would have many surgeries and become an invalid. I remember the next ten years as a blur of despair and loneliness and anger. Dark times. But gradually I became aware that my disease had not just changed me physically. Weak though I was, something was growing in me, something wordless that was vital and alive and determined and, yes, strong. Something that was a response to the very disease that had stolen my physical health.

These were early days when most people did not have much awareness or sophistication about the inner world. So there were no words to put to this experience and no one to talk to about it. Even so, I began to wonder about it, and I had lots of questions. Was something strong growing in other sick people too? Perhaps there was even some way to help it to grow. I began to hope that I could find a way to be whole even though I could not be well. Nothing my doctors told me had suggested this possibility. But when I tried to talk to them about this they looked at me with something close to pity. So I kept my ideas to myself, but I could not let them go.

At 20, against the advice of almost everyone, I began to study medicine and discovered that even here, among professional colleagues, no one talked about such things. As physicians we were focused on the physical body and our goal was cure. The patient's experience of their illness was irrelevant, even distracting. Anything that could not be expressed in numbers was seen as unreal and unimportant.

Back in those days if you were a real professional you did not respond emotionally to the suffering around you. Doctors did not cry, but patients did; and because I was usually the only woman on the medical team, my colleagues would often come to get me to deal with patients who became emotional. I went to offer comfort and discovered people were responding to their disease in ways as unique as their fingerprints. People with the same disease had very different stories. I became awed by these stories, by the many unsuspected strengths, the depths of love and devotion, the courage and heroism that disease evoked in the people we had labeled with only their diagnosis. There was something growing in people, strengths and capacities that we were not mobilizing or even supporting. We believed that if we could not cure people, we could not help them. We had sold ourselves and our patients far short.

There are words now for the sort of experience I had as an adolescent, and have discovered in so many others, words like "the will to live." Searching for ways to collaborate with this common experience has become a focus of my career. The will to live cannot be measured, which puts it beyond the reach of science. Science defines life in its own ways, but often life is larger than science. People are larger than science too. Many important things cannot be measured or even predicted but only experienced. So the Medicine of the future needs to be larger than its science as well.

The will to live changes our idea about our professional roles and what enables us to make a difference in people's lives. It enables us make a difference even when our expertise cannot cure people. It opens up the possibility that medicine is an art as well as a science, and heals as well as cures.

Medicine has grown and deepened in the 45 years since I became a physician. It is becoming humbler and wiser and far more effective in helping people who are sick. Healing is finding its rightful place in Medicine and the ways young people think about their roles as health professionals. Sixteen years ago at UCSF School of Medicine, I developed The Healer's Art, a course for first year medical students, which is now taught at 60 other medical schools. Every year more than a thousand students who take this course have an opportunity to write a personal mission statement and read it aloud to one another. Sometimes these young people write about learning the science of medicine and acquiring expertise, but most of the time they write about something else...something closer to their idea of Medicine and the reasons why they chose this work in the first place. This mission statement, dedicated to his future patients by a young man who hopes to become a surgeon, is rather typical.

May you find in me the Mother of the World.
May my hands be a mother's hands.
May my heart be a mother's heart.
May my response to your suffering
be a mother's response to your suffering.
May I sit with you in the dark
as a mother sits in the dark.
May you know through our relationship
that there is something in this world that can be trusted.

The ways in which we can strengthen the life in each other are simple and old and have great power. These young people are the sort of doctors that I had needed to find years ago when I first became ill. It has taken some time but they are here now.

Collaborative on Health and the Environment

by Michael Lerner and Eleni Sotos

Since its inception at a meeting at the San Francisco Medical Society five years ago, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) has grown into an international network that is playing a key role in the environmental health community.

CHE now has almost 3,000 partners in 48 states and 40 countries. CHE Partners include scientists, health professionals, patient group representatives, community and environmental health advocacy groups, and many other people and organizations interested in the connection between the environment and our health.

CHE's special focus is on "science and civility"—on constructive dialogue about how a revolution in environmental health science is changing the way we understand the etiology of most of the diseases of our time.

CHE's monthly Partnership calls focus on leading science issues. A recent Partnership call featured Sandra Steingraber, one of Rachel Carson's finest scientific and literary successors. Sandra is the author of two brilliant books: Living Downstream (about her own experience with an environmentally- related cancer), and Having Faith (about conceiving and breastfeeding her daughter in a polluted world). Sandra spoke with over 120 CHE Partners about her newest essay, "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," commissioned by the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco.

Some of the most vigorous science dialogues in CHE happen in our working groups on learning and developmental disabilities, fertility and pregnancy compromise, cancer, asthma, integrative health and electromagnetic fields (EMF). A partnership with a leading European network called HEAL is bringing CHE science and materials to many European colleagues—and bringing European science and policy expertise to CHE Partners everywhere.

One very significant CHE-related development this fall was the publication of a major report on electromagnetic field exposures (EMF) by CHE-EMF Working Group co-coordinator Cindy Sage. The report, available at BioInitiative.org and on the CHE website at www.healthandenvironment.org, played an important role in a recent announcement by the European Union that it is urging citizens to take precautionary steps to reduce cell phone and Wi-Fi network exposures.

A workshop this past summer co-sponsored by the Parkinson's Institute, Parkinson's Action Network and CHE laid the groundwork for a CHE consensus report on environmental contributors to Parkinson's disease (PD), now being prepared by CHE Science Working Group Coordinator Ted Schettler, M.D., and leading PD scientists. A lay companion to the report is expected to be published in the coming months.

Women's environmental health is a central interest of CHE. The CHE Fertility/Early Pregnancy Compromise Working Group has had extraordinary success stimulating the dialogue on the environment and reproductive health in scientific, biomedical and patient circles. In January, CHE will convene an international group of leading scientists at Commonweal to assess science linking environmental contaminant exposures to reproductive health outcomes in women and girls. Led by two eminent researchers in reproductive health, Dr. Linda Giudice of the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Louis Guillette of the University of Florida, the scientists will produce a scientific consensus paper and lay companion that address links between contaminants and selected diseases and disorders in women. Once completed, these documents will be available on the CHE website.

In a related effort, CHE has served as the convener for the Women's Health and Environment Initiative (WHEI), which aims to create a diverse network of leaders across the United States working collaboratively on women's health and the environment. The goal is to offer women a clear "road map" for engagement by offering options for what they can do at the individual and societal levels. WHEI has created a popular and comprehensive website and toolkit on women's environmental health; both can be accessed at www.womenshealthandevironment.org. For more information about WHEI, contact Susan Marmagas, CHE's Director of Health Programs, at .

This month on the homepage of the CHE website, we will be launching a portal for national resources on utilizing science and research in community-based work. The new portal will pool and categorize resources in a navigable web page for CHE community and environmental justice groups based on how they translate science into change. The goals for the portal are to provide an all-in-one, get-you-started resource for EJ/community participants on science and how it relates to community issues, and to serve as a resource for CHE Partners at large to get a sense of how EJ/community sectors process and use scientific information in their own work. CHE collaborated on this project with Christine Cordero of the Center for Environmental Health, an Oakland, California based organization that works to eliminate the threat that industrial chemicals pose to children, families and communities.

Steve Heilig, Ted Schettler and Charlotte Brody are working together to develop new materials for CHE on climate change and human health. The first document, "Climate Change and Children's Health: What Health Professionals Need to Know and What We Can Do About It" by Katherine M. Shea MD, MPH and Sophie J. Balk MD, is now posted on the CHE website, www.healthandenvironment.org.

Finally, Elise Miller, coordinator of the CHE Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative, is undertaking an important new project seeking to bring together representative voices from the leadership of the different disease communities represented in CHE. Our goal is to express the shared concerns of CHE Partners across many different disease groups regarding the need to reduce exposure to dangerous contaminants and to protect our health and the health of our communities.

Waz Thomas Teaches Last Yoga Classes in Cancer Help Program;
Kate Holcombe Will Be New CHP Coordinator

by Michael Lerner

After 22 years coordinating the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Commonweal General Manager Waz Thomas is rolling up his yoga mat and teaching the Cancer Help Program yoga classes for the last time in the December CHP Retreat. He will continue to coordinate the Cancer Help Program for another six months, through the June retreat.

As all of you who have known the man can attest, Waz is un-duplicable and irreplaceable. There is, and there will always be, only one Waz. Waz and I were born just a few days apart. I sometimes tell people we are twins, separated at birth.

I looked at Waz one evening during the September retreat and allowed my feelings about his departure to sink in. I walked over and put my arm around him. "I'm going to miss you," I said. Waz laughed as only Waz can. "I know. I'm crazy to leave this," he said. But leaving he is.

We may need to declare a day of mourning at Commonweal simply to honor the sadness so many of us—especially Cancer Help Program alumni and staff—feel at Waz's departure. Waz has been the heart of the Cancer Help Program for 22 years—and the heart of Commonweal for just as long. The Waz Era is coming to an end. None of the elders at Commonweal can really imagine what that will mean. But there is good news. Kate Holcombe, a longtime yoga teacher for Rachel Naomi Remen's Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, will succeed Waz as CHP Coordinator. Kate came to Commonweal ten years ago at the suggestion of her yoga teacher, T.K.V. Desikachar of Chennai, India, one of the great yoga teachers of our time.

Desikachar's yoga is a gentle yoga, and it is characteristically individualized. The teacher studies her individual students and prescribes individualized yoga practices according to their health and their capacities. Kate has been one of Desikachar's leading students in the United States for many years. Kate is delighted to be taking on the Cancer Help Program, and we are delighted to have found such a gifted yoga teacher and coordinator to succeed Waz. Kate will be sharing the yoga classes with Jnani Chapman, the senior massage practitioner in the Cancer Help Program. Jnani has been teaching yoga as well as doing massage on the retreats for many years.

One other reassuring piece of news is that Waz is not going far. He will continue to live in his house on the Commonweal site and is open to exploring a new and more flexible future relationship with the Commonweal community. What that will be, only Waz will know. And when he knows, and tells us, we will pass it on.

Major California Juvenile Justice Legislation Implements Commonweal Reforms Proposed 20 Years Ago

by David Steinhart

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed legislation that will cut the state's youth prison population roughly in half, moving all non-violent juvenile offenders from state to county programs and facilities. This is widely hailed as a historic reform of the juvenile justice system in California.

Commonweal Program Director David Steinhart played an integral role in the design and negotiation of this policy reform. He worked closely with legislators, state and county administrators and advocates to build the reform package that was finally considered to be acceptable to the affected stakeholders. Steinhart calls this "the most significant juvenile justice reform in recent California history. It solves a huge problem for the state, which as been unable to implement court-ordered changes over the whole state-incarcerated youth population, and it gives the counties the resources they need to build local programs and to improve outcomes for their own problem youth."

Those who have followed this story will recall that the California Youth Authority(CYA)—the state's network of youth prisons—has been assailed in recent years for severe deficiencies including high rates of institutional violence, inmate suicides, substandard conditions and high failure rates upon release. In 2003, the CYA was sued by the Prison Law Office, resulting in a set of court-ordered reforms that have proved painfully hard to implement. By 2007, the cost of running the CYA (by now renamed the Division of Juvenile Justice or "DJJ"), driven up by court mandates, had skyrocketed to more than $200,000 per youth per year. In his January 2007 budget proposal, the Governor looked at the cost, considered the black eye his youth system was getting every day in the press, and decided to cut his losses. In short, he proposed to downsize the system by shifting all non-violent juveniles to local control, with sizable state block grant funds for the development of local programs and facilities for the shifted caseload.

This proposal languished for many months, as state policymakers focused on overcrowding and court mandates for the massively troubled adult corrections system in California. But in May, the juvenile justice reform was revitalized as stakeholders convened a series of meetings to shape the Governor's raw proposal into a workable reform plan. County governments were worried (and still are) about the level of funding provided by the state to pay for the population shift. Eventually state and county officials agreed on a figure of $117,000 per youth per year that would be transferred from state to county governments to support the "realignment" mandate.

The reform plan is, for the most part, contained in SB 81, signed by the Governor on August 24, 2007. Here are some of the key elements of the reform package:

• Youth who are non-committable to DJJ: As of September 1, 2007, only juveniles who have committed an offense on the statutory list of serious and violent crimes that qualify for transfer to the adult system can be sent to the state Division of Juvenile Justice (this is the Welfare and Institutions Code "Section 707(b)" list). "Non-707(b)" youth can no longer be sent to the state—they must be retained in county programs or facilities. Non 707(b) youth (including parole violator returns) account for about 40% of the DJJ population. There is an exception of sex offenders—some may still be sent to DJJ even if they are for non-707(b) offenses.
• Currently institutionalized DJJ wards: Juvenile offenders currently in DJJ facilities with non 707(b) commitment offenses may be recalled by counties on an individual basis. Approximately 700 wards in the current population would be eligible for this recall option. Recalled wards become full county responsibility—no violation returns to DJJ.
• DJJ parolees: Current parolees ("non 707"s) will have their cases handled by counties for parole violations. The counties will also have full aftercare responsibility for non-violent wards who are released or recalled from state institutions.
• Payments to counties: Counties will get block grants from the state to fund local programs for the shifted caseload. The block grant will also provide $117,000 per year for each recalled ward. Another $15,000 per ward is provided to counties for parole supervision of realigned cases. The Department of Finance presently estimates that the total statewide block grant for the first year (FY 07-08) will be $24 million, rising to $92 million within two years when the caseload is fully shifted from state to county government. SB 81 also authorizes up to $100 million statewide in construction bond funds through the Corrections Standards Authority for the design and construction of new or renovated county facilities for youthful offenders.
• New state Juvenile Justice Commission: A new state Juvenile Justice Commission is created by the reform bill. The 12 member commission of designated stakeholders must produce a Juvenile Operations Master Plan by 1/1/09 including standardized risk/needs assessments, standard data collection elements and recommended evidence-based programs for youthful offenders.

For Commonweal, the passage of SB 81 is a huge if bittersweet victory. Sweet—because the downsizing plan mirrors the recommendations for juvenile justice reform made by Commonweal in a series of books on the CYA published between 1992 and 1998. Bitter—because it took more than twenty years to achieve.

There is little time to celebrate the reform. The focus now shifts to implementation. Beginning now, California counties can no longer send non-violent juveniles to state facilities. This means they must fund local dispositions instead. Many of the shifted youth, while not violent, have troubled and turbulent personal histories—with repeat placement failures and, in some cases, with daunting treatment needs, particularly in the area of mental health. Only about 30 of California's 58 counties have a county-run juvenile justice treatment facility—the others must search elsewhere for program and confinement space. By January 1, 2008, all counties must submit juvenile justice plans to the state, indicating their proposed expenditures of state block grant funds. Right now, counties are scrambling to identify program and placement options for caseload increases generated by realignment. Some skeptics have suggested that counties may be no better able to handle this difficult case-load than the state. They note that counties face critical financial challenges and that the enabling legislation does not impose tight criteria as to how the block grant funds may be spent.

The good news is that the caseload shift will occur gradually—and counties should have ample time in which to adapt to their new responsibilities under realignment. Moreover, the dollars provided by the state for juvenile justice realignment appear to be adequate to meet the task.

Commonweal will be working to facilitate implementation of the reform in a number of ways. Under grants from the JEHT, Haigh-Scatena, Gerbode and van Loben Sels Foundations, Commonweal will coordinate with state and local administrators to identify evidence-based programs that can be incorporated into their realignment plans. Commonweal will also tackle a number of emerging legal issues, e.g., prosecutor charging practices that may be altered to bypass the SB 81 ban on state commitments. In addition, Commonweal Program Director David Steinhart has been asked by the state Senate to serve on the new state Juvenile Justice Commission that will oversee specific features of the realignment reform. For additional details on SB 81, visit the summaries on the Commonweal website under the link for the Juvenile Justice Program.

Other Juvenile Justice Program News

• Commonweal has received new grants from the following foundations to continue its California juvenile justice reform work: the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and the van Loben Sels/RembeRock Foundation. We are deeply grateful to these foundations for their support.
• Commonweal continues to participate actively in the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Our role is to provide technical assistance to JDAI reform jurisdictions, which now number 80 sites in 20 states. We have provided on-site trainings this year on detention risk assessment to groups in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Orleans, Texas and California, while providing additional technical assistance to sites in another nine states.
• In November, Program Director David Steinhart is to be honored as attorney of the year by the combined Juvenile Public Defenders associations at their annual meeting in Los Angeles.

The Flight of the Bar-tailed Godwit

by Burr Heneman

Beginning this past summer, the Ocean Policy Program's seabird conservation work expanded significantly. As I reported in the last newsletter, Commonweal's Ocean Policy Program advised the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2006 and early 2007 on a two-year, $3 million initiative for seabird and shorebird conservation in the Pacific Basin. The Foundation asked us to help develop the strategies and recommend potential projects and grantees for the initiative.

This year the foundation also asked my old friend and colleague, Stan Senner of Audubon Alaska, and me to develop recommendations for expanding that effort into a 5-to-10-year marine bird conservation initiative. We presented the program to the foundation's board in June, and it has been approved. Commonweal has received a grant for us to continue to advise foundation staff. I will concentrate on developing seabird projects (no longer limited to the Pacific Ocean), and Stan will continue to advise on shorebird conservation opportunities.

This expanded Packard initiative has the potential to change the current realities of seabird conservation over the next decade. Seabirds are one of the most at-risk groups of animals in the world; close to 40% of all seabird species are officially listed as threatened. The greatest threat to most seabirds is from rats, goats, cats, and other animals that humans have introduced to islands where seabirds nest. For other species, the greatest threat is from being incidentally hooked and drowned in longline and trawl fishing gear (19 of the world's 22 species of albatrosses are threatened). Consequently, restoring seabird breeding islands and greatly reducing the incidental catch of seabirds by fishing gear are the Packard initiative's two highest priorities.

A note about a project that the Foundation supported last year: Most shorebird species suffer from loss and degradation of the habitats they depend on—that much is known. But it's hard to know which places are most urgent to protect if we don't know where the birds spend the winter or where they stop on their long fall and spring migrations. In a project supported by the Packard Foundation's initiative, PRBO-Conservation Science and the US Geological Survey (which, oddly, conducts a lot of biological research) equipped Bar-tailed Godwits—a large shorebird—with satellite transmitters.

One of the godwits, E7, made news last spring flying from her wintering grounds in New Zealand to her breeding grounds in Alaska. The first leg of the trip, from New Zealand to the Yellow Sea coast of China, was 6,300 miles, non-stop, in about 8 days—a record for known non-stop flights by birds. E7 went on to Alaska, bred successfully and, in late August, set off on her return flight to New Zealand following a different route from the one she took flying north. On the final leg of that flight, E7 broke her own record, flying 7,200 miles non-stop in about eight-and-a-half days.

Exciting as the news of E7's flights was to ornithologists and birders, it also contained a warning about the conservation of Bar-tailed Godwits and other shorebird species. E7 and other godwits in this research project spent weeks fattening up for the breeding season on the Chinese and South Korean coasts of the Yellow Sea. The largest of those wetlands in South Korea was just dyked off in what the South Koreans claim is the world's largest land reclamation project. There are proposals in the pipeline for similar projects at other Yellow Sea wetlands. If enough of those wetlands become fields and factories, it appears likely that entire shorebird populations will disappear.

You can get more of the details at: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1774

With Gratitude

We express our deep gratitude to the following organizations that have supported Commonweal this year:

We offer special thanks and gratitude to the following Commonweal Friends for their generous contributions during the last year:

Download the orignial PDF of the December 2007 newsletter »