Lead is in many lipsticks. But is that okay?

Yesterday, the national Campaign for Safe Cosmetics highlighted an analysis of lead in lipsticks done for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The study found lead in all 400 lipsticks tested, with levels of up to 7.19 parts per billion.

Safe Cosmetics says this is more than twice the levels reported in a previous FDA study, and it has concerns. 

A press release issued by Safe Cosmetics quoted Mark Mitchell, M.D., MPH, policy advisor of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice and co-chair of the Environmental Health Task Force for the National Medical Association, who said, “Lead builds up in the body over time and lead-containing lipstick applied several times a day, every day, can add up to significant exposure levels.”

In addition, “lead is a proven neurotoxin that can cause learning, language and behavioral problems. Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure, because lead easily crosses the placenta and enters the fetal brain where it can interfere with normal development,” said Sean Palfrey, M.D., a professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University and the medical director of Boston's Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, as quoted in the press release.

The FDA maintains that "our results do not show levels of lead in lipstick that would pose a safety concern." However, the agency said on its website, "Although we do not believe that the lead content found in our recent lipstick analyses poses a safety concern, we are evaluating whether there may be a need to recommend an upper limit for lead in lipstick in order to further protect the health and welfare of consumers."

Click here for the FDA's Q&A page on lipstick and lead.

The data show that the brand in the study with the most lead was Maybelline Color Sensation by L’Oreal USA.  It contained more than 275 times the amount of lead found in the least contaminated, and least expensive, brand, Wet & Wild Mega Mixers Lip Balm, Safe Cosmetics pointed out.

Sophisticated tracking devices have transformed wildlife research. They've shown scientists where bluefin tuna swim, how red knots have backtracked to avoid major storms, and when species of all sorts start their migrations.

Now, National Audubon Society researchers have used the devices to get the first clues they need to solve a mystery that has intrigued them for years: Where do puffins go during the winter?

They know that in summer, the birds nest on the Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge, a 65-acre pile of rocks about 21 miles off the coast of Maine. They return each spring to the island, where females lays a single eggs in rock crevices. Once each chick hatches, the parents tends it for about six weeks, and then the chick flys out to sea. The parents follow a few weeks later, spending the next eight months at sea.

But where at sea has remained a mystery. Other than a few spottings, scientists knew little.

In 2009, Audubon researchers affixed tracking devices to the leg bands of eight puffins at the  refuge. Unlike devices for larger birds, which can have antennae that transmit information, these smaller devices didn't transmit directly. They had to be recovered from the birds before scientists could get access to the data. It's a tricky business, and scientists had to wait two years before they caught first one bird, then another.

That happened last June. The data from the devices showed that one of the puffins had gone far and wide, from the northern Labrador Sea to warmer waters near Bermuda. In one eight-month period, it flew about 4,800 miles.

“I’ve spent decades helping to restore puffins to their nesting colonies in Maine,” said Steve Kress, Audubon's vice president for bird conservation and one of the researchers. "It is an amazing moment for all of us who work with these birds to have a glimpse into where they go after they leave the islands.”

Kress and researcher Scott Hall presented their findings earlier today at the 39th annual meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group in Turtle Bay, Hawaii.

You can learn more about the project by clicking here.

I spotted "The Cloud Collector's Handbook" in a bin of shamelessly disregarded books near my editor's desk.

I snapped it up. "Mind if I take a look?" "Sure."

What a gem! So even though it's not new on the market -- I DO try to be current -- it's so delightful I had to give it book-of-the-week status.

Published last March, the handbook is a new way to look at clouds. The oh-so-fun gist is that you not only learn about clouds and look for them, but you give yourself points for spotting them.  The harder-to-find clouds get you more points.

Did you know there are nine different kinds of cirrus clouds?

And that cumulonimbus is considered the Godfather of clouds?

The author is Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a Brit who also is founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, an organization that says it fights "blue-sky thinking." The website is a treat: "We love clouds, we're not ashamed to say it, and we've had enough of people moaning about them." 

They have a cloud calendar, a cloud photo gallery, cloud tea towels, a cloud of the month photo feature -- you get the gist.

But back to the book.

The reviews on Amazon rave about it. One guy found it a way to connect with his 10-year-old grandson. "Enchanted," one woman said. "Keep looking up!" said another. Witty...concise.... And so on.

It's handily small -- for carrying into the field, of course -- but that means some of the photos are small, too. Might need a weather book with better pictures for some of the I.D.s.

But I've found weather books to be awfully dry.  For two years, I lived on a boat and was intensely interested in being able to look up into the sky, see what was going on up there, and project what kind of weather it mean I might run into soon.

Maybe I'm just cloud-challenged, but I could never master it.

Or maybe I just had the wrong book. Maybe now I have the right book.

Note: Book of the Week is a regular feature of the GreenSpace blog.  A caveat is that, with all my other reading, I haven't necessarily read the book that week in its entirety.  But I've sampled it enough to know whether it's intriguing enough to rate a mention.

For Monday's GreenSpace column, I wrote about programmable thermostats.

They were supposed to make saving energy -- and money -- so easy. You could set the thing to automatically reduce the temperature during certain hours, raise it at other times.

But ample evidence exists to show they aren't working so well because people can't figure them out. In interviews with people, they kept comparing some of these devices to old VCRs, notorious for their difficulty to program.

Wow, did that ever open up the floodgates. Many people have shared their tales of woe about programmable thermostats.

Others were horrified. "If you can't figure out how to use one, you shouldn't be driving an automobile," one caller grumped.

Here's another response:

"I am very lucky to be computer literate and involved not only in my home, but also the heating system in my office. I have been using programmable thermostats for over 10 years and love them.

"Recently I had an issue and ran into a problem I have seen too many times before. Working with a factory authorized technician, I supervised the installation of a very advanced heat pump system with a very advanced thermostat. When questions came up that I needed answered, I called the company (Carrier/Trane) consumer help line. I was told the help line does not talk to consumers. Their job was to tell the consumer to call their factory authorized technician who could call them for help. He was less successful than I was.

"While I was able to work out my problem, as long as the major heating/air conditioning equipment makers have so little consumer orientation, these thermostats don't have a chance. Quite a shame."

One question that comes up a lot: How low can you go in turning down the heat at night? Many people fear that it will take more energy to heat the house up in the morning than to just keep it warm all night. Here's Energy Star's answer:

"It is a common misconception that it takes more energy to heat up a cold house than it does to keep a house warm all the time. Turning down the thermostat will always save energy, as will turning up the air conditioner temperature setting. Heat moves from hot to cold, and the rate of heat transfer increases with greater temperature differences between inside and out. Smaller temperature differences between your house and outside generally means you’ll lose less heat (or air conditioning) from inside the house to the outside. Therefore, you will save energy by only heating or cooling as much as necessary, for the occupants and time of day."

Here's an Energy Star site with more information and tips on temperature settings.

For an Energy Star video showing how to use a programmable thermostat, click here.

Yesterday, I blogged about whether hunger was an environmental issue. I see a lot of reasons that it could be considered one -- waste of food that gets thrown out, waste of arable land, agricultural issues such as chemicals and genetically modified organisms.

Today, I heard from Gary Oppenheimer, founder of AmpleHarvest.org.

"The answer to your question is 'yes'.... and I can speak with some authority on it," he wrote in an email. 

"I’m a Rutgers Environmental Steward, TEDx speaker and a CNN Hero. I’m also the founder of AmpleHarvest.org – enabling millions of home gardeners nationwide to donate excess garden produce to local food pantries.... both to diminish hunger/malnutrition AND to improve the environment.

"This is not just my soapbox... the EPA considers wasted food an environmental hazard.... take a look at www.AmpleHarvest.org/epa," he wrote.

I loved how the EPA took up the liability issue of donating food, because I feel certain grocery stores would consider liability an obstacle. 

I looked at more than that, though. AmpleHarvest's website is wonderful.

One thing it has is a food pantry finder. I plugged in my zip code and in moments found that there were six within a 15-miles radius. I had known of one -- and had taken food there. But this wealth of opportunity -- and the dearth of produce it suggests -- already have me thinking about this year's garden. How much can I squeeze into it (and manage to keep maintained)? Once my freezer is full, I know where to take the rest.

I was probably a bit testy on the phone.

The person calling wanted to tell me about a hunger project in Bucks County, and since I’ve somehow landed on lists of reporters  who write about food — leading to all kinds of pitches that I have no interest in, such as what kind of Valentine candy to buy — I fear I cut the person off short.

But since then, I’ve been thinking about hunger, and I’ve realized it probably is an environmental issue. Or, at the very least, it dovetails with environmental issues.

For one, hunger relates to the idea of using our resources better.

In the Bucks County case, Delaware Valley College is partnering with the Hunger Nutrition Coalition of Bucks County to create a one-acre charitable garden on its main campus. DelVal students will plant, maintain, harvest and deliver the produce to the coalition, which says that “97 percent of its food pantry clients go without fresh fruits and vegetables if their local food pantry has none.”

If people are hungry, and there’s empty, arable, fertile land nearby, the thing that makes the most sense — never mind the public policies involved — is to dig it up and plant it.

Perhaps no one has showed this as compellingly as John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” which I re-read recently. I’m on a Steinbeck kick, loving every word.

I had forgotten how powerful “Grapes” was. The destitute Oklahoma farmers who had been kicked off their land and had come to California to find work harvesting the vast fruits and vegetables they had heard were there, were instead near starvation. At the same time, they saw vast stretches of beautiful land that remained untilled.

They couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed access to some of it. Give them a few acres, they reasoned, and they’d have food a plenty.

Are we so different today?

Likewise, hunger seems an environmental issue because of the questions over how food is grown. In general, agribusiness tells us massive amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals are necessary to feed the world’s growing population. The organic farming community responds that the best way to feed everyone is to go organic.

And what about genetically-modifed organisms? Again, the agricultural conglomerate tells us that this is the way forward. Others worry about “contamination” of non-GMO foods growing nearby and about the growing problem of “superweeds” that some blame on GMO practices.

These are all issues with environmental ramifications as well as food supply ones.

Finally, there’s food waste. Leftover food on plates is bad enough. But how much food do our grocery stores toss? My husband makes a point of asking the produce clerks what’s up whenever he sees one of them removing perfectly good food from the shelf. Once, one told him that the mushrooms are thrown out at the end of every day.

In other words, one minute they’re okay to sell. Five minutes later, they’re headed for the dumpster? Isn’t there room for anything in between? Like soup?

Which brings me back to Steinbeck and the most powerful portion of his book.

He’s talking about a valley in California coming into bloom. “All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight.”

He speaks of the “men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. “

But in the year that Steinbeck writes about, the profits aren’t being realized. Farmers say they can’t afford to harvest their fruits and vegetables.

So they let it rot.

“The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten,” Steinbeck says.

Is the food given to the thousands of starving farmers who came with their families on the false promise of better times? It is not.

Carloads of oranges are doused with kerosene and burned.

Potatoes are dumped into rivers, along which armed guards stand ready to repel any who would try to scoop the potatoes out.

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.” Steinbeck writes. “There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.”

Since this is Soapbox Monday, I’m hoping readers will sound off below. Is hunger an environmental concern? If so, what should we be doing that we’re not doing now?

It’s true that hotels, motels and inns have made efforts to lessen their impact.

Rare is the bathroom these days that doesn’t have a little sign telling guests to hang up their towels if they don’t want them replaced. The environmental cost of washing and drying all that terrycloth is huge. (Not to mention the cost to the hotel, which is probably why they're on board with this initiative.)

But I’m not seeing much else of significance.

I stayed in a Virginia hotel over the weekend that I was pretty sure was new. The place sure looked like it. And smelled like it. So one might think they had incorporated some of the latest thinking.

But on a cold night, the room was roasting. I finally wound up turning the heating/cooling unit to air conditioning and set the thermostat at 64. There wasn’t much improvement.

The room had a small refrigerator humming away. Nice convenience! But I had maybe two cans of juice and an extra sandwich to put in it. Someone ought to make smaller “motel” fridges that would be more efficient.

The room had no recycling containers.

The fixtures has CFL bulbs, to be sure. But my big beef is nightlights.

Consider: Hotel rooms are pretty dark. If you get up at night to use the bathroom, you don’t want to stub your toe in unfamiliar surroundings, so you need some small degree of illumination. I usually achieve this by opening the curtain a bit.

Looks like it’s a go for a tidal turbine system in New York City’s East River.

Earlier this week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the commercial license for the project — the first of its kind in the U.S.

Verdant Power will install perhaps 30 underwater turbines along a 21-acre stretch of the river, where strong tidal currents will generate power and send it to the grid.

More such projects are sure to be on the way.

Earlier this month, the Department of Energy released two nationwide assessments showing that tidal currents and coastal ocean waves could “contribute significantly to the country’s annual electricity production, further diversify the nation's energy portfolio, and provide clean, renewable energy to coastal cities and communities.”

It concluded that water power — which includes these newer technologies as well as conventional hydropower from dams — could provide as much as 15 percent of the nation’s electricity needs by 2030.

A Princeton company, Ocean Power Technologies, is one of the leaders in exploring the potential of power from waves.

It has deployed a “PowerBuoy” about 20 miles off the New Jersey coast as a demonstration project, and the company happily reported last fall that it withstood Hurricane Irene just fine — including wave heights of nearly 50 feet.

Electric vehicles keep charging ahead — maybe not as fast as some would like, but it seems as if every week I hear something new an interesting about electric vehicles.

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Senate passed Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf’s (R-Montgomery) bill that would allow people to operate low-speed electric vehicles on some roadways.

I had this vision of golf carts scooting down the road past my house, but that’s not quite it.

These things are also known as Neighborhood Electric Vehicles — NEVs — and the National Highway Safety Administration defines them as any four-wheeled electric vehicle whose top speed is between 20 and 25 miles an hour.

Pictured with this post is a four-passenger electric vehicle, the GEM e4, by Global Electric Motorcars. It has four-wheel braking, rack and pinion steering, three-point seat belts and a range of about 30 miles. They start at just over $10,000.