It had been forty-one years ince Denver hosted the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition. The return was worth the wait. In May, AIHce 2010 brought thousands
of occupational and environmental
health and safety professionals to The
Mile High City for a week of training,
education, and networking. The attendance represented a 21 percent increase
over last year’s conference in Toronto.
The heart of the conference was the
hundreds of educational sessions on all
manner of topics related to industrial
hygiene and OEHS. There, in the meeting
rooms of the Colorado Convention Center, was where the AIHce 2010 theme,
“New Frontiers in Science and Practice,”
was put into force. The conference program featured traditional industrial hygiene content as well as new tracks in
green topics and H1N1. New symposia
provided in-depth explorations of the
latest research in noise, dermal hazards,
and cumulative exposure assessment.
And with more than 300 exhibiting
companies and new features such as the
Product Demo Theater and Soapbox
Talks, the Expo offered attendees plenty
of stimulation—as did a roster of speakers
featuring luminaries in OEHS, including
Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA
David Michaels and NIOSH Director
John Howard.
“Nature Is the Infrastructure of Our
Communities”
Ironically, a conference dedicated to exploring new frontiers opened with an
impassioned plea to preserve the most
trespassed frontier of all: nature. In his
keynote address at the Opening General
Session on Monday, May 24, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. called for extensive reform
of U.S. energy policy, advocating an end
to subsidies for coal and oil companies
and for investment in infrastructure to
support energy from solar and wind
power and natural gas sources.
Decrying the “false choice between
economic success and environmental
protection,” Kennedy’s address under-
scored the costs of decades of environ-
mental damage from mining and oil
drilling. Kennedy, a senior attorney for
the Natural Resources Defense Council,
characterized U.S. dependency on for-
eign oil as a national security issue and
said that it had “beggared a nation that,
when I was a little boy, owned half of
the wealth on the face of the planet.”
Kennedy also lamented the “hidden
costs of mining,” including practices
that contaminate freshwater streams
with mercury. “We’re living in a science
fiction nightmare in America where
children can’t participate in a seminal
activity of American youth—fishing with
their fathers and coming home to eat
the fish,” Kennedy said.
“We Need New Laws”
One day after Kennedy lamented the state
of environmental regulation, United Mine
Workers of America (UMWA) President
