Pete Myers is a founder, CEO, and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit that increases public understanding of emerging scientific links between environmental contaminants and human health. Myers also is a co-author of Our Stolen Future, a groundbreaking book that sounded the alarm on the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals on health and development.

In the decade since the book’s publication, mounting scientific evidence has further supported the authors’ warnings that industrial chemicals interfere with key biological processes, leading to disease and disability. Myers spoke with Kim Ridley about current research, controversies, and reasons for hope.

Earlier this year, two of the leading minds in ecological medicine sat down for a conversation exploring the connections between human and ecological health. Michael Lerner is the founder of Commonweal, an environmental health and research institute in California and author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer. Ted Schettler is a physician, science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, and co-author of two books: Toxic Threats to Child Development and Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment. Here is an excerpt from their conversation, which was sponsored by the New School at Commonweal.

Tom Goldtooth is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which includes a vast network of indigenous communities in North America and increasingly, around the world. Based in Minnesota near the Canadian border, IEN was established in 1990 by grassroots indigenous communities and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues. IEN’s activities include building the capacities of indigenous communities and leaders to develop mechanisms to protect sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities. He talks about IEN’s work with Kim Ridley.