WEI Featured in the Sept. 6, 2006 Women's Press

The Women’s Environmental Institute hopes to educate, mobilize &
affect change with pointed questions about toxins in our neighborhoods,
homes and food.

Follow a thin dirt road up a well-shaded hill. A dense undergrowth of
emerald ferns fans to the left and right. Look closely. Deer dot the
scene. Ahead, the road peaks, the trees fall away and the sun beckons.
Leave the woods behind and break into a clearing.

In the clearing, stooped and gnarled trees spread in rows. Red globes
the size of a woman's fist hang from the branches. It's almost
apple-picking season.

A two-story, red brick home overlooks the orchard. Inside, a braided
rug and a circle of rocking chairs sit before a sturdy fireplace.
Beyond the rockers, a spacious kitchen stands ready to prepare organic
treats with fruit plucked from the nearby trees and the veggie patch
out back. Up the stairs, three well-made beds wait for guests. Welcome
to the Women's Environmental Institute (WEI) Amador Hill campus.

Women are the priority here

Although an overnight visit to WEI's North Branch-area B&B is
guaranteed to relax and rejuvenate, the quiet surroundings are
deceptive. Lots is going on here. Not only does the Women's
Environmental Institute provide a restful country retreat, it is also a
certified-organic farm growing apples, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce,
onions, carrots, potatoes and more. Each week it delivers boxes of
freshly picked produce to its 70 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
(members.

While the B&B and CSA both play an important role in the mission of
the Women's Environmental Institute (WEI), this nonprofit organization
sponsors a number of programs related to its core purpose of women's
environmental justice. WEI is dedicated to exposing the unseen toxins
in our foods, homes and neighborhoods, educating the public about the
dangers of environmental pollutants, making it easier for farmers to
grow organic produce, and mobilizing citizens to affect social change.

"Part of what we do is research and education," explained Jacquelyn
Zita, Ph.D., WEI's director of education and operations. "We really
want to make sure that women aren't forgotten when it comes to
environmental policies. Putting "women" in our name, that's not meant
to exclude men, but to keep women in the foreground."

"We want to prioritize women," Zita said. "We want to make sure more
complicated questions are being asked about our environment, questions
that consider the effects of toxins on women and children."

For example, Zita explained, we've known for years that chemicals such
as lead, arsenic and asbestos are harmful to human health. In certain
amounts, these chemicals are even fatal. However, all of these
chemicals continue to exist in our environments, so how do we know how
much arsenic is safe to live with? Researchers have outlined safe and
unsafe levels, yet most of those standards, Zita said, are based on
what an adult, white male can handle. "Those value standards need to be
recalibrated for women's bodies, and for children's," Zita said.

Home, dangerous home

"WEI is interested in the use of synthetic hormones, too. We're
interested in women's breast milk and the burden of chemicals flowing
through breast milk," Zita explained. "There are indicators that
dangerous, foreign molecules are entering women's bodies, being
absorbed and, if they are nursing, affecting babies. Somebody needs to
be asking these questions. We'd like to ask it, we think it's an
important one to be asking.

"We want to collect information on the toxicity of common household
cleaning products," Zita explained. "A lot of the chemicals we buy and
use to take care of those we love are possibly dangerous to us.

"The workplace has OSHA, but who is regulating the chemicals entering
the American home?" Zita asked. "Women are doing something to keep
their house clean ... but we may be bringing something dangerous right
into the heart of our home.

"Homemakers have a right to know what's in the products they use," Zita
said. Once they know, she insisted, they will be spurred into action.
"We call it kitchen-table activism," she explained. "We want to educate
homemakers about how we can make our homes safer, and at the same time
create political action."

Organizational leadership

Zita, WEI's director of education, is a respected scholar and teacher.
The former chair of the University of Minnesota's Department of Women's
Studies (now known as the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality
Studies) and the former director of the university's Feminist Studies
Ph.D. program has a history of integrating environmental health issues
into her women's studies classes. Time and again, she said, her
students were " … astonished by this information. Just talking about
the levels of pesticides in foods is a profound revelation for many,"
Zita noted. "Once they learn a little bit about it, they are hungry,
hungry, hungry for more. It's about framing the information in a way
that people can understand, and then helping them see how they can move
forward to create change."

WEI's Executive Director Karen Clark is a logical leader when it comes
to creating new political policies to positively impact communities and
their health. Clark has been representing south-central Minneapolis in
the Minnesota House of Representatives since 1980. Before entering
politics, she was a public health nurse, first among migrant farm
worker populations in western Minnesota, and later in the Frogtown
neighborhood of St. Paul. Soon after gaining her elected seat, in 1983,
Clark authored the Minnesota Worker's Right-to-Know and Community
Right-to-Know Exposure to Toxic Substances law.

Zita and Clark both volunteer their time, as do most of the others
associated with the nonprofit (only a part-time office manager and a
few interns are paid). "We are graced with an abundance of talented
people who are willing to offer their energy and talents to WEI," Zita
noted. Among the most dedicated are Board Chair Sharon Day; Hillary
Sandall with the CSA project; lead farm intern Emily Scifers; office
manager Cindy Stimmler; scientist Dr. Fardin Oliaei, who specializes in
environmental contaminants, and sustainable environment expert Dr.
Cecelia Martinez.

Seventy-five percent of WEI's board of directors are people of color; the board includes men as well as women.

Environmental justice = human rights

Clark's work with Minnesota's rural migrant workers prompted her to
draft the legislation that requires that workers be informed about
their exposure to toxins on the job. While working as a nurse within
the migrant community, she met many migrant workers with horrible skin
rashes. "The doctor I was working with called it 'Young Mexican Man
Syndrome,'" she said. "But it clicked for me as problems with
pesticides. They wore no gloves, no masks, and there was no place to
wash their hands before eating lunch. Any chemicals they came in
contact with went directly into their bodies."

Another experience that spurred Clark's early interest in
environmentally caused health problems occurred in the 1970s, when she
met a number of children with learning disabilities and speech
impediments due to lead poisoning. "The families of these children were
really suffering," Clark said. "But there was no testing of their
environments, and no clean-up efforts, and no help."

"This seems like an old story," admitted Clark, "but at the time, it
was radical. And the same scenario is happening today. Then, the paint
and gas companies that were responsible for the lead in the environment
were fearful of liability, so they suppressed information. Today, other
companies are suppressing information," Clark said.

"This is a basic human rights issue," Clark said. "It's environmental
justice. People have the right to know if they are being exposed to
toxins. The suppression of information about these chemicals is really
a failure to care about the community."

Mapping toxins

Too many communities have been, and continue to be, unknowingly exposed
to toxins, Clark said. For this reason, WEI secured grants (from the
Bremer and Bush Foundations) for their environmental justice mapping
project. Project volunteers will measure levels of various toxins in a
neighborhood on a map. Volunteers will also go door-to-door, surveying
neighborhood residents about their health, their occupations, and the
length of time they have lived in the neighborhood. After compiling the
responses, researchers will compare the map of toxins to the health
responses of the community to see if unusual levels and groupings of
disease-such as cancer and asthma-exist.

The mapping project recently kicked off in Minneapolis' Phillips
neighborhood. WEI plans to map two East Side neighborhoods in St. Paul
and a tribal community as well. "We already know that there are health
disparities for people of color and low-income people," Clark said. "We
think these disparities exist when it comes to environmental justice
too, but we'll have to put it on the map and see."

"I've not been able to get an environmental justice mapping project
passed in the Legislature," Clark said. "There's been a lot of
resistance brought about by chemical manufacturers. They're not very
happy when we bring up a community's right to know, so it feels good to
be moving ahead on this with a nonprofit organization."

"We don't have to get cancer, heart disease, diabetes and lead
poising," Clark said. "We can prevent this and that's really what WEI
is about-prevention. We want to empower people.

If people know what's in their environment, and they understand how
it's affecting them, they are going to want their government to be
doing something."

Organic Farm School

WEI's education programs are an important part of the organization's
mission. And they're educating consumers, too. This spring and summer
WEI sponsored a ten-week "Organic Farm School" that consisted of both
theory (classes taught Wednesday nights at the Amazon Bookstore) and
practice (field trips to the Amador Hill campus). It was so successful
that WEI will repeat the class in the spring and summer of 2007.

Other endeavors include a new three-year project promoting organic
farming, linking local family farms to area co-ops, and the eventual
building of a processing facility for use by local growers.