Since the first Earth Day 36 years ago when university campuses in Pittsburgh and around the country became the teaching ground for issues on the environment, women have been key to the growth of the movement and many of the successes that have come from it. There have been huge gains in research, sustainable development practices and regulatory protections.

		Teresa Heinz Kerry is chairman of The Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies. Jane Houlihan is vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C.

But fresh from marking yesterday's observance, we are more aware than ever of an added role for women as environmental nurturers and activists. We are now also dependent on the movement -- and whatever protections it can bring -- for the very quality of our lives.

Emerging research is telling us that a slew of new chemicals delivered to us in a range of products has left women particularly vulnerable to diseases and chronic health conditions that weren't significant threats even a decade ago.

For example, women, who account for most of the $32 billion-a-year cosmetics market in the United States, are applying these products even though most of them are untested. In the marketplace, there is not so much as a general health study required by government before products are allowed on store shelves. In the home, women and children are exposed to thousands of different industrial chemicals each day. As exposures like these increase, they continue to validate that the bodies of women and children respond to environmental exposures differently than men's.

In fact, concern about women-children vulnerability among medical researchers and environmental experts has grown so great that last year's National Conference on Women's Health in the Environment sponsored by the Heinz Family Philanthropies was devoted entirely to exploring answers to one alarming question:

Are women drowning in a chemical stew?

Each day the government approves an average of two new industrial chemicals for commercial use. Among these, 80 percent win approval within three weeks, with or without safety studies. One of the most comprehensive assessments of pollutants in homes conducted by the Silent Spring Institute in Massachusetts identified 27 different pesticides. Long-banned DDT showed up in two-thirds of tested households.

While everyone walks around with a surprising number of these synthetic chemicals in their bodies, a phenomenon known as "the body burden," women are uniquely sensitive to some of these substances, including environmental estrogens, which can affect hormonal activity across the lifespan. And toxic chemicals linked to birth defects are being found at alarming levels in women of childbearing age. We know that parallel to the chemical revolution, the incidence of some serious health problems has markedly increased -- from breast and prostate cancer to asthma to learning disabilities.

Unfortunately, despite evidence of women's unique vulnerability, researchers have long considered women's bodies to be the same as men's when it comes to the risks they face from exposures. Only recently have studies of environmental toxins isolated women's results and allowed us to observe the differing effects of chemicals on men's and women's bodies.

And while scientists, government officials and journalists are beginning to focus more on the particular vulnerabilities of women and children, it's increasingly clear that we women are going to have to take personal action, as well, to save ourselves. We must demand better information in order to be healthier consumers. We must challenge those in authority to establish safeguards to prevent further harm.

Women are beginning to take control. We have seen how hungry they are for information, as evidenced by the attendance of some 2,000 women at last year's national conference. Pittsburgh women, in fact, working in important arenas, are emerging as leaders in promising efforts to develop strategies that will make a difference.

The Susan B. Komen Pittsburgh Race for the Cure is partnering with the Collaborative on Health and Environment Pennsylvania to explore environmental links to breast cancer, an information dissemination project that affects 20 counties in Pennsylvania. Even rural community programs are bringing in average attendance figures of several hundred women.

Officials at Magee-Womens Hospital are developing cutting-edge environmental education programs for expectant mothers and pre-teens. They've also eliminated a class of harmful chemicals in the neo-natal intensive care unit. A successful project to rid the hospital of all products containing mercury won a national award.

And the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is conducting impressive research on the environmental causes of breast cancer in African-American women and also running aggressive community-education programs to reduce the environmental risk of all forms of cancers.

Partnerships like these are critical. The Heinz foundations are helping to fund many of these but others must get on board. Too many women are only just beginning to understand what is at stake.

In a New York Times Magazine story last year, Florence Williams wrote about her decision as a nursing mother to get breast milk tested, and the journey it put her on to learn more about the chemical toxins she and her baby were exposed to each day.

"Ultimately, though, the question for me as a mother is not at what threshold of exposure will I or my baby be harmed," she wrote, "but why are we manufacturing common products made with these toxins at all?"

Women are beginning to ask the hard questions, what they need now is more research, better consumer choices and greater public awareness to lift themselves out of the chemical stew.