Hey everyone,

As you may or may not know, I wrote the letter to editor that appeared briefly on the homepage on April 26 & 27 regarding the need for a ban on toxic fragrances in public and commercial indoor spaces.  If you want to read it, enter "toxic fragrances" in the search box and you will find it.  It has had several hundred views and several comments so far. 

Who am I?  I teach and research American government and environmental policy and politics, generally for Colorado State University. I have been taking a several year break to recharge and complete an important project or two and luckily found a friend who wanted to move to Greater Telluride with me. I have an office in Telluride and a ranch property near Horsefly Peak.

With this blog, I intend to further discuss the ongoing effort to inform and encourage the Telluride community to go toxic fragrance free.  In my next few blogs I will report where the campaign is going, and I will try to explain the federal policies that have allowed toxic fragrances to have become almost everywhere around us and in so many of the products we use, as well as the countervailing laws now to curb their use.

For now I will leave you with this thought.  Childhood cancer has been increasing at an alarming rate in the last few decades.  While I can't claim that toxic fragrances are responsible for all childhood cancer, the toxic fragrance chemicals are known carcinogens, so how could you claim it doesn't have a causal correlation to some extent?