Last week we presented a video interview with Cheryl Osimo, co-founder of the Silent Spring Institute in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. That interview was conducted and assembled into its final video form by members of the JK blog community who had read of Ms. Osimo’s work in finding and fighting the environmental causes of breast cancer in “This Moment on Earth.”

This week JK and THK carried the recognition of Ms. Osimo’s exemplary efforts one step further by writing the following guest editorial for the Cape Cod Times, her hometown newspaper and that of the many Cape Cod residents whose lives have been improved by the extraordinary work of Ms. Osimo and her colleagues in the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition and the Silent Spring Institute.

OSIMO A ‘NEW ENVIRONMENTALIST’ By SEN. JOHN KERRY and TERESA HEINZ KERRY Cape Cod Times, May 04, 2007

For anyone who has ever dismissed environmentalists as “out-of-touch elitists,” it’s time to meet the “new environmentalists” — people like Cheryl Osimo of Cape Cod.

A former elementary school teacher with two children, Osimo helped create the Silent Spring Institute — an environmental organization that has made stunning discoveries about the links between toxic chemicals and cancer on Cape Cod.

Osimo became an environmentalist for a very personal reason: she was looking for answers after being diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40, despite having no family history of the disease and no known risk factors.

After her diagnosis, she had volunteered with the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition and met oncology social worker Ellen Parker. Osimo was grateful for her successful treatment, but determined to find out why she had gotten cancer so young.

The women founded the Silent Spring Institute, won research funding and found something remarkable: Between 1982 and 1992, breast-cancer incidence was 21 percent higher on Cape Cod than in the rest of Massachusetts. And women with greater exposure to pesticides suffered even higher rates.

It turned out that the presence of hormone-altering chemicals, known as endocrine disrupters, in the ground water were at least partly responsible for the higher rates. Soon, scientists found estrogen-mimicking chemicals in surface waters across the nation.

Industrial pollution may well be a factor behind a disturbing national trend in the number of women being diagnosed with breast cancer, especially young women. In the 1960s, one in 20 women nationally was diagnosed. By 1993, it was one in nine. Today it is closer to one in seven.

Some of this may be due to advances in detection, and a fraction is attributable to hormones prescribed to women, but the causes of most cases of breast cancer cannot be explained. According to the Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Association, fewer than 10 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer are born with no known genetic susceptibility to the disease, and as many as half have no known risk factors.

Why are so many women getting breast cancer? With news of breast-cancer clusters — places like Marin County in the Bay area of California and the Northeast corridor from Philadelphia to New York City, where rates are higher than the national average — shouldn’t we be asking whether environmental factors could be having an influence?

That is why the discoveries and activism of people like Cheryl Osimo and the Silent Spring Institute are so important. Just three years after sitting down over coffee to talk about tackling this problem, the women — none of whom were trained scientists — were now bringing about the earliest evidence to suggest that the environment could, in fact, play a role in a woman getting breast cancer.

These are the new environmentalists: A former school teacher and a social worker, acting out of concern for the health of their community, made a key discovery and struck a blow for the environmental movement by cementing the link between these toxic chemicals and cancer rates. <!-more-> Like Osimo, more Americans than ever before are getting involved locally — standing up and forcing our leaders to acknowledge that we face a crisis that links fishermen to ranchers, mothers and chemists, city planners and oncologists. Across the country, individuals are reclaiming the American environment. And they’re changing the face of the environmental movement in the process.

This is the face of the new environmentalism: it’s women on Cape Cod unsure of why so many have breast cancer at such a young age; it’s ranchers out West tired of watching their cows die; it’s CEOs urging mandatory carbon emissions caps because they’re good for the bottom line; it’s evangelicals who call it “creation care” — and it’s concerned parents worried about the water their kids drink.

They understand that, in the long run, we all face a common bottom line: Either we get this right together or we all suffer. No doubt, we in politics must work to solve these problems from 30,000 feet with bold national solutions. But this movement will only succeed if Americans continue to take the lead in protecting the ground beneath their own two feet.

Osimo’s story is a terrific lesson for Americans everywhere struggling for a cleaner, greener future. We believe America is listening — it’s time for our leaders to listen, too.