Daily Score Blog

This week, the Washington Toxics Coalition released a study that should raise the ire of pregnant women like me. Their findings in a nutshell: developing fetuses spend their first nine months in an environment that exposes them to a range known toxic chemicals. That environment? Their mothers’ bodies. That means my body.

The first-of-its kind study analyzed blood and urine samples from nine women in Washington, Oregon, and California during their second trimester of pregnancy, to test for 23 chemicals from five chemical groups. Their bodies were found to be contaminated with 13 of the 23 chemicals. “These chemicals can cause reproductive problems and cancer, disrupt hormonal systems such as the thyroid, and can impair brain development,” the study states.

So, why is my response ire and not panic? I guess I’m over the panic. During my pregnancy, I’ve been reading a lot about the toxics in my body and their potential effects on the fetus (and I'll be writing a lot more about this stuff in this blog series). I realize it’s too late for panic. Contrary to popular belief, my womb is not entirely my own.

By one measure of "food security," the new USDA hunger data released this week puts Oregon right in the middle of the pack. Its rate of food insecurity, is higher than the rest of the Northwest states, but only a little higher than the national average. Yet a closer look at the numbers reveals a more worrisome story.

Oregon's rate of "very low food security" is the second highest in the nation -- only Mississippi does worse -- and is far beyond than anything else in the Northwest. Getting enough to eat is a serious problem for 6.6 percent of Oregon households -- that's roughly 1 in every 15. Here's the official definition of very low food security:

The defining characteristic of very low food security is that, at times during the year, the food intake of household members is reduced and their normal eating patterns are disrupted because the household lacks money and other resources for food.

It's a very troubling figure, though it's consistent with what I remember seeing when I looked at these figures a few years back. (By contrast, the national rate of very low food security is only 4.6 percent -- though it's the highest in the 14 years since we've had consistent measurements. The rest of the Northwest states are clustered below the national average: Montana (4.4), Alaska (4.4), Washington (4.3), and Idaho (3.9).) It's also broadly consistent with Oregon's dire employment situation: the most recent federal figures put the state's unemployment at 11.5 percent, 6th highest in the nation and much higher than anything else in the Northwest.

Let's hope these new figures are enough to put a permanent end to the use of the incredibly grating neologism "funemployment."  

Technical note: the margin of error for some states' hunger rates is fairly high. It's 1.14 for the rate of "very low food security" in Oregon, meaning there's a 90 percent chance that the real rate of hunger in Oregon is between 5.46 and 7.74.

I guess I’ve known all along that introducing a baby into the family meant introducing a whole slew of stuff into our lives—much of it bulky, expensive, and—often—plastic.

But I'm fighting all the media and social cues to go on a shopping spree at Babies R Us. Instead, my husband and I decided to buy only one or two essential items new, like a state-of-the-art super-safe car seat. But, for the most part we’ve managed to “go green” as we’ve outfitted ourselves for pregnancy and parenthood—from used maternity clothes to garage sale furniture and non-material shower gifts. Our goal has been to reduce, reuse, and recycle—and to save money while we’re at it.

Here are three tricks that have worked for us:

Early in my pregnancy I developed a bloodhound’s sense of smell: even the faintest of odors overwhelmed me. It’s a common phenomenon during the first trimester of pregnancy, yet my new nasal superpower took me by surprise—and forced me into an unwelcome awareness of the pollution that surrounds all of us. Car and truck exhaust, to my unusually acute nose, was pure poison. It made me recoil, hold my breath, gag, choke. My new super-nose could detect the smell all over the place—waiting at the bus stop in my quiet Seattle neighborhood, wafting through 5th floor downtown office windows, even at the park and in my own backyard. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that the air I breathe really stinks. 

And just as my pregnancy had heightened my sense of smell, it also intensified my concern about what was entering my body with every breath. The well being of a clump of tissue no bigger than a lima bean became my top priority—making me more concerned than ever about the purity of the food, water, and air that was nourishing both of us (or not).

Of course, the professional side of my brain had been thinking about the links between pollution and health for years. (Working at a sustainability think-tank will do that to you.) But pregnancy personalized the issues. It turned a hypothetical threat to the imagined families I held in my mind’s eye, into a very real one that affected my own life and my potential child’s future. My work at Sightline on climate and energy policy started to be more about my body and my family than simply about curbing climate change and stabilizing energy prices over the next decade. It's about the air I'm breathing—and breathing for two—right now!

Editor's Note: Alex Steffen, the editor and cofounder of Worldchanging-a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers--sat down with writer Emily Knudsen to discuss some of the topics he’ll be covering in his upcoming talks at Town Hall . The first part of the interview (below) discusses Worldchanging's role in the sustainability movement. The second discusses what Seattle can do to become a more sustainable city.

What inspired you to establish Worldchanging?

In the late 1990s, I was working as a consultant doing strategic communications work with environmental groups and other NGOs. One of the questions I would often ask the people I worked with was “What’s your win scenario? If you win, how is the world going to improve?” In essence, “What’s in it for me to believe in your change?” I was really amazed by how many people didn’t really have an answer to that.

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

So the sophomore who juggles schoolwork with two jobs moved to an apartment off campus – a much cheaper, though significantly less convenient, alternative to the dorms.

“There are some people taking out extra loans,” said Skaug, whose tuition bill will rise 30 percent over two years. “Some of my friends have gone to community college to save money.”

All six of the state’s four-year schools approved the 30 percent tuition increases. That’s left students and their families scrambling to cover the ballooning costs. The Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that applications for financial aid are up 23 percent at community colleges and universities. Twice as many students are applying for help at some schools than in the past.

And the students are arguably getting less while paying more: many institutions are cutting teachers, staff, and course offerings. WSU, for one, is eliminating entire liberal arts departments.

Government budgets hammered by the down economy are leading to across-the-board cuts in services for cities, counties, and the state. If Initiative 1033, the new measure from Tim Eyman, is approved, those reductions become the new baseline for future budgets, locking in recessionary spending levels indefinitely.

Editor's note: Want to experience Seattle's parks for yourself? Sign up for our daily or weekly emails before October 28, 2009 and be entered to win a two-night trip for two to Seattle. Sign up here.

It's only fitting that the Emerald City should be home to more than 400 parks. And that doesn't even count the nearly 150 "pocket parks" that are tucked into street ends, often giving a glimpse of the city's lakes or the Puget Sound. 

Seattle has parks and green spaces for all tastes. Moms with strollers seem magnetically drawn to the paved trail ringing Green Lake for its easy walk and great views. Parks including Seward and Discovery have miles of forested trails and some super tall trees that provide a verdant escape from the traffic and bustle of the city. Or check out the rainbow-hued rose garden at Woodland Park. Not only is it one of a handful of the American Rose Test Gardens (which basically means they try to grow fancy new varieties), but the whole place recently went pesticide free.   

Other favorites:

So much for the idea that information is the key to better choices: a recent study on New York City's fast-food labeling law found that providing calorie counts to fast food customers did nothing to improve diets.  From The Oregonian:

The study compared customer orders before and after New York City adopted its pioneering law on posting calories and found a disappointing surprise: People eating at four fast-food chains in poorer neighborhoods of New York where there are high rates of obesity ordered more calories after the labeling law went into effect.

The original journal article reveals an additional tidbit: 

We found that 27.7 percent who saw calorie labeling in New York said the information influenced their choices. However, we did not detect a change in calories purchased after the introduction of calorie labeling.

So over a quarter of the people said that the new calorie labels improved their food choices--yet the researchers found absolutely no evidence to back this up. 

I love it when the Interweb helps answer a persistent question like "how happy are we?"

It's a serious question -- evaluating the well-being of a place -- and one that Sightline has spilled a lot of cyber-ink on over the years. France may soon embark on the largest national measurement of what has been dubbed "gross national happiness." But now it turns out that the United States may already have a halfway decent measurement available -- and it's on Facebook of all places.

Check it out:

No kidding, Facebook really does have something like a daily trend line for American happiness. (Be sure to play around with some of the features, especially the x-axis.) It's far from a perfect measurement, to be sure, but it represents an aggregation of a huge amount of user-supplied data that must be the envy of social scientists everywhere.

And speaking of Facebook, you should get yourself over to Sightline's Facebook page. That's where all the cool kids are hanging out.

[Guest blogger Alan DeLaTorre is a PhD candidate at Portland State University who studies urban planning and aging.]

In 2011, the first Boomer will turn 65, an occasion that will herald an epochal demographic shift.  Just as babies boomed in the 1940s through 1960s, older adults will become North America’s – and much of the rest of the world's – fastest-growing demographic. This imminent population shift is beginning to force a long-overdue conversation about the unique housing, environmental, and health care needs of an aging population.

Unfortunately, it’s a conversation that many of us are ill-prepared to undertake. A recent AARP study, for example, found a massive disconnect between perceptions of aging and its reality. The vast majority of people surveyed expressed optimism that they would not only be in good physical health in their later years, but that they would always be able to drive.

Can you say, “denial”?

These issues came to life for me several years ago, when my father, a California school teacher, started looking for his future retirement home in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.  His criteria for the move, “I want to get away from the crowded [city] and find a place that is less hectic…somewhere I can grow things.”  At the time, I was co-teaching a class on housing and environments for older adults at Portland State University’s Institute on Aging. Every ounce of my professional training told me that his moving away from important services could become an issue for both of us. I also knew my father well: he had never grown anything in his life. So I suggested, as gently as I could, that he might want to reconsider moving away from services he’d need.

He didn’t buy it. 

Not having health insurance can kill you:  so says this study, slated for publication in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.  The authors found that, after controlling for obesity, exercise, gender, race, tobacco and alcohol use, and the like, deaths among uninsured Americans were 40 percent higher than among their counterparts with private health insurance.

That makes uninsurance a leading killer in the US, responsible for more deaths more than both kidney disease and traffic accidents.  (Traffic deaths, by the way, are on the decline:  increases in gas prices led to declines in driving and vehicle speed, which in turn lowered US traffic fatality rates by a whopping 17 percent between 2005 and 2008.)

Curiously, the estimated death rate from uninsurance has soared over the last couple of decades.  A 1993 study, using data from the 1970s and 1980s, found a much lower death rate from uninsurance.  And as recently as 2002, the National Institutes of Medicine reported that lack of health insurance was responsible for just 18,000 deaths per year in the US.  But this new study, using very similar methods as earlier efforts, pegs the figure 45,000 annual deaths -- suggesting that going without health insurance has become far riskier than it used to be. Whether the rising risk from uninsurance results from changes in the health care system -- say, that doctors and hospitals are now refusing care to the uninsured, or that medical care has gotten better at keeping us healthy -- remains unclear.

Regardless of the underlying dynamics, the study certainly gives ammunition to those who are fighting to improve access to medical insurance in the US -- and plenty of fodder for epidemiologists trying to figure out why US life expectancy remains among the lowest in the developed world.

I'm starting to think that French President Sarkozy is a Sightline fan. Last week it was a killer carbon tax proposal; now it's something else near and dear to our hearts: a national measure of happiness as a counterpoint to GDP.

Springboarding from a new report prepared by giants of the economics world, Sarkozy is calling for a more comprehensive view of economic well-being, one that puts human well-being in driver's seat.

And he's not alone:

Last week I wrote about the strange way we measure poverty in the United States. Canada doesn’t have a defined poverty level but instead uses a Low Income Cut Off or LICO. The LICO is a level of income below which a family ends up spending more of its income on necessities than an average family of the same size (this is a good rundown of poverty measures in Canada). 

The history of measuring poverty in the United States is not one that has inspired a great deal of confidence. There is a sense from advocates working on poverty issues that people above the established level are still poor, while others worry that setting the bar too high would incentivize poverty. Housing affordability measures have a similar story. A new way of looking at housing affordability called the residual income approach is one that offers a real alternative to the current method.

If we want to fight poverty, the first step is to measure it.  Otherwise, we can’t know the scope of the problem, or where to focus our energies. 

But measuring poverty is easier said than done, not only because the data on low-income families is spotty, but also because there are so many conflicting ideas about what it means to be poor.

Of course, there is an official US definition of poverty, based on federal guidelines first established in 1965 largely through the work of Mollie Orshansky (pictured here).  At that time, typical families spent about a third of their money on food--so federal researchers defined the poverty line as a rock-bottom monthly food budget, multiplied by three.  It was crude, but the best available measure at the time.