The house Rachel Carson was born in is a modest little white clapboard, a small 19th century green oasis sitting in the middle of equally modest modern one- and two-story brick homes in Springdale, about 10 miles northeast along the Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh.

I’m sitting in the sun at a small table in front of the Carson home, cooled by a very soft breeze from the west. All signs of the terrific northeaster that caused so much havoc a week ago are gone. In the distance, a diesel train running next to the river blows for a crossing, while cardinals, blue jays, and morning doves echo in the background, along with a robin so fat I thought it was a duck the first time it flew by.

I came to Pittsburgh to attend a one-day conference on "Women’s Health and the Environment: New Science, New Solutions,” put on by Teresa Heinz Kerry, The Heinz Endowments, and Magee-Womens Hospital. (Disclaimer: I was the blogmaster for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.) More than 2,000 people attended, and the speakers’ list included some of today’s Rachel Carson-like pioneers: men and women who have forced us to look at the effects of even the smallest amounts of the toxic industrial pesticides, herbicides and chemicals (one part per billion or even less) that can be found in the bodies of every person on the planet.

Walking in Rachel Carson’s footsteps can be a tough row to hoe. One conference speaker, Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a herpetologist at the University of California, Berkeley, got into trouble when his research began to indicate that the herbicide atrazine (which is the number one best selling product for the agri-chemical giant Syngenta) was a potent endocrine (hormone) disruptor that chemically castrates and feminizes exposed male frogs at very low levels. The company prevented Dr. Hayes from publishing his findings or presenting them at scientific meetings. He lost all of his industry funding, and has even had trouble getting funding from the federal government. Using independent funding, Hayes has gone on to show that atrazine produces effects in other animals, including prostate and breast cancer and decreased fertility in lab rats.

For those of you who have been reading my coverage of Congressional hearings on global warming, you will be familiar with how an industry used to operating without regulation reacts when one or more scientists appear with data that raise questions about the safety of that industry’s operations: the personal attacks, the appeals in the media to “both sides of the story,” the creation of fake scientific think tanks, the false advertising campaigns, the high-paid lobbyists, and the generous campaign contributions.

In her opening remarks, Teresa Heinz Kerry talked about what she had learned in co-authoring (with her husband) her new environmental book, This Moment on Earth. Both Kerrys have been committed environmentalists for decades; Kerry ran for office at Lieutenant Governor in 1982 on a pledge to stop the acid rain that was poisoning the state’s lakes and rivers. But the book isn’t about them, it’s the stories of men and women around the country who were leading otherwise ordinary lives and one day woke up and realized that something was really wrong in their local environment; too much asthma in children, fish you couldn’t eat any more, and on and on. Almost none of these people had been political activists or organizers of any sort. But something had changed inside them, and tentatively or boldly, they set out on a path that took them to places they never imagined they could go, setting up local grassroots groups, raising money, learning environmental law, lobbying elected representatives, holding meetings, and testifying before city councils and state legislatures.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has been doing a blog tour for the conference and today's stop is here, at the Post Carbon Institute. Tomorrow the blog tour will continue: click here Sunday for the next stop. Teresa remains undeterred in her efforts to bring the same kind of fierceness and clarity that Rachel Carson had to both loving the natural world and cleaning up the messes we have made.

What runs through all these stories, from Rachel Carson down to the local group who kept Wal-Mart out of their town, is the bravery to stand up and tell the world what you think is the problem, and what you want to do to solve that problem. In a world that appears to be spinning out of control on so many different axes, where too many of us despair of large institutions and multi-national corporations ever changing course, the place to look for hope is in these stories of individual people who decided to take a stand.