Anniversaries and Issues

Abstract

This issue begins Environmental Health Perspective's fourth year as a monthly publication. Over the years EHP has changed or added various components including the subject of our covers, elements of design, and new sections and formats. What remains consistent throughout the journaTs evolution, however, is our commitment to communicating timely, accurate, and relevant information and to providing a forum for discussion of emerging and controversial environmental health issues. The recent release of World Wildlife Fund toxicologist Theo Colborn's book, Our Stolen Future, continues a debate that began with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring over the impact of environmen? tal chemicals on wildlife and humans. Carson's book, published in 1962, gave impetus to the burgeoning environmental movement in the United States and to the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In Silent Spring, Carson provid? ed evidence that exposure to pesticides and industrial chemicals was diminishing the reproductive capacity of wildlife and warned that unless these exposures were abated some species would become extinct. More than 30 years later, Colborn's book updates these findings with considerable toxicological evidence that envi? ronmental substances that mimic or block the actions of hormones are producing many of the widespread adverse effects on reproduc? tive capacity and development in wildlife that Carson predicted. Colborn's own research in this area is a remarkable accomplishment. In addition, though, Colborn amplifies the warning of Silent Spring to include concerns over effects on human reproduction, development, and behavior.