While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mulls over the 42,000 letters sent from Earthjustice supporters and others who expressed support for safety standards protecting rural kids from pesticides, it's important to remember that pesticides aren't just limited to the fields.

Every spring, pet owners slick the backs of their dogs and cats with over-the-counter treatments designed to keep fleas and ticks at bay. The problem is that these treatments, which are also found stocked on shelves of pet stores nationwide in the spray, collar and shampoo form, contain toxic pesticides. Think of it as your very own bottle-o-poison.

The EPA has been keeping a watchdog's eye on these so-called spot-on treatments due to an increase in incident reports where pets have experienced adverse reactions that range from mild to downright serious.

The microblogging site Twitter is poised to hit a major milestone: sometime in the next day or so one lucky Twitter user is expected to send out the ten billionth tweet (real-time counter is here).

Whether you love exchanging ideas in 140-character bursts, or if U H8 the resulting abbrevs, people will be paying very close attention to the string of words that mark Twitter's ascension into the big, big time.

So what will that 10 billionth tweet say? How about "Protect Rural Kids From Pesticides! Take action here:http://bit.ly/dyq39N"?

Adelaida Galvez and her daughter Genoveva, who has been exposed to pesticides, live across from an orange grove in Lindsay, CA.

Pesticides, by design, maim, incapacitate, or kill pests. But throughout this country, pesticides drift from the fields where they are sprayed to areas where children live, learn, and play, causing similar harm. Far too many children suffer acute nerve poisoning illnesses from pesticides and they risk debilitating long-term effects like cancer, reproductive impairments, and learning disabilities.

As its name suggests, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is charged with protecting children from pesticide-induced illnesses. In fact, in 1996, Congress unanimously passed the Food Quality Protection Act, giving EPA 10 years to ensure that children would not be harmed by their aggregate exposures to a pesticide.

To do this, EPA added up the exposures to children from a pesticide in food, drinking water, homes, and yards. Unfortunately, it failed to include what is often the biggest exposure for rural kids, kids living near fields or orchards, and farmworkers—pesticides moving through the air to envelop and permeate the homes, schools, parks, and playgrounds. This route of exposure, known as pesticide drift, occurs following pesticide application.

Some top stories from the last week at Earthjustice...

The Copenhagen conference started off with a bang of optimism when the EPA announced that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health. The cooperative spirit quickly fizzled after a draft agreement surfaced that apparently favors the interests of the U.S. and other wealthy nations. There’s more news by the hour: Be sure to check out our daily reports from Copenhagen, and analysis by two attending Earthjustice attorneys, Erika Rosenthal and Martin Wagner.

All the buzz from the conference nearly drowned out a disturbing, and related, piece of news: Shell Oil was granted conditional approval to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea. Earthjustice attorney Erik Grafe warned that the approvals outpace the science of what we know about Arctic waters.

On the same day that the EPA released its endangerment finding, Earthjustice challenged the agency on a toxin polluting the air in Appalachia, to the point where kids can’t play outside. It’s coal dust, and we think the coal plants that produce it should do something about it. 

Farm workers and their families will get some long-awaited help to deal with toxic pesticides poisoning the air around their homes and schools, thanks to a new EPA policy. Going forward, the EPA will assess the health risks posed by pesticide drift with the same standards by which pesticides in food are assessed. 

And finally, this week Earthjustice saved taxpayers $1.5 million!—and 4.3 million board-feet of old-growth forest in the Tongass to boot. This also means we kept a little C02 out of the atmosphere. Indeed, one of the least controversial ideas out of Copenhagen is also one of the simplest: don’t cut down trees.