FRONTLINE
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/

- This Week: "Poisoned Waters" (120 minutes),
April 21st at 9pm on PBS (Check local listings)

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For years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith has reported
from the corridors of power in Washington, on Wall Street, and overseas.
*But these days, he's worried about something that he's found much
closer to home -- something mysterious that's appeared in waters that he
knows well: *frogs with six legs, male amphibians with ovaries, "dead
zones" where nothing can live or grow.

What's causing the trouble? Smith suspects the answers might lie close
to home as well.

This Tuesday night, in a special two-hour FRONTLINE broadcast
--"Poisoned Waters"-- Smith takes a hard look at a new wave of pollution
that's imperiling the nation's waterways, focusing on two of our most
iconic: *the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. *He also examines three
decades of environmental regulation that are failing to meet this new
threat, and have yet to clean up the ongoing mess of PCBs, the
staggering waste from factory farms, and the fall-out from unchecked
suburban sprawl.

"The environment has slipped off our radar screen because it's not a hot
crisis like the financial meltdown, war, or terrorism," Smith says.
*"But pollution is a ticking time bomb. It's a chronic cancer that is
slowly eating away the natural resources that are vital to our very
lives."

Among the most worrisome of the new contaminants are "endocrine
disruptors," chemical compounds found in common household products that
mimic hormones in the human body and cause freakish mutations in frogs
and amphibians.

"There are five million people being exposed to endocrine disruptors
just in the Mid-Atlantic region," a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School
of Public Health tells Smith. *"And yet we don't know precisely how many
of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have
problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital
anomalies of the male genitalia that are happening at a broad low level
so that they don't raise the alarm in the general public."

Can new models of "smart growth" and regulation reverse decades of
damage? *Are the most real and lasting changes likely to come from the
top down, given an already overstretched Obama administration? *Or will
the greatest reasons for hope come from the bottom up, through the
action of a growing number of grassroots groups trying to effect
environmental change?

Join us for the broadcast this Tuesday night. *Online, you can watch
"Poisoned Waters" again, find out how safe your drinking water is, *and
*learn how you can get involved.

Ken Dornstein
Senior Editor

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Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support *of PBS viewers.
Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park
Foundation. Major funding for Poisoned Waters is provided by The Seattle
Foundation, The Russell Family Foundation, The Wallace Genetic
Foundation, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Keith
Campbell Foundation for the Environment, The Merrill Family Foundation,
The Abell Foundation, The Bullitt Foundation, the Park Foundation, and
The Rauch Foundation. *Additional funding is provided by The Town Creek
Foundation, The Clayton Baker Trust, The Lockhart Vaughan Foundation,
The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Chesapeake Bay Trust, Louisa
and Robert Duemling, Robert and Phyllis Hennigson, Robert Lundeen, The
Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, The Prince Charitable Trusts, Ron
and Kathy McDowell, Valerie and Bill Anders, Bruce and Marty Coffey, The
Foun!

dation for Puget Sound, Janet Ketcham, Win Rhodes, The Robert C. and
Nani S. Warren Foundation, Jim and Kathy Youngren, Vinton and Amelia
Sommerville and Laura Lundgren.

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