When I talk to parents of young children about my work, they often ask about mercury pollution. They know it's dangerous to pregnant women and children but are unsure how to keep their loved ones safe from harm.

Luckily, the job of protecting families from these hazards just got a lot easier. In December the Environmental Protection Agency announced the first-ever national standards to reduce mercury, lead, and other dangerous pollution from power plants. These safeguards could prove to be among the Obama administration's most significant environmental accomplishments. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that damages the developing brain in fetuses and children. Prenatal exposure to even low levels of mercury can have life-long effects on language skills, fine motor function, and the ability to pay attention.

Coal-fired power plants are the largest industrial source of mercury emissions. These end up in waterways, where they are converted into methylmercury and ingested by fish. When we eat these fish, we absorb traces of methylmercury into our own bloodstream. A National Research Council study found that when women consume large amounts of seafood during pregnancy, the exposure to mercury is likely to increase the number of children "who struggle to keep up in school and might require remedial classes or special education."

Every other major industrial sector in the United States has been subject to mercury standards for more than 10 years. Utilities resisted, but NRDC refused to let them off the hook. Together with the attorneys general of several Northeast states downwind from heavily polluting coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, we sued the federal government. In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the EPA must require deep cuts in mercury and other toxics from power plants. Under the leadership of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the agency has honored that ruling by issuing its new standards. This triumph is in part a testament to NRDC's staying power: we fight polluters until we win.

We are doing the same in our fight against the Keystone XL pipeline. Two years ago, we were told that the construction of a 1,700-mile-long pipeline to carry dirty tar-sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was a foregone conclusion. But we fought back -- in Washington, in communities that would have been directly threatened, and in the media. In January, President Obama rejected the pipeline. We will have to protect this victory from attacks in Congress, just as we have had to do with the Clean Air Act protections we recently won. But with your continued support and activism, we will continue the battle to keep our families safe from harm.