BCAM BLOGGER PAYS TRIBUTE TO DR. SANDRA STEINGRABER
Maychai Brown
Last summer BCAM board member Deborah Ostrovsky attended an environmental writing seminar at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop in Vermont, led by cancer activist and ecologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber. In the fall, Dr. Steingraber wrote to Deborah and the 12 other summer school students to explain why she was donating $100,000 U.S., recently awarded to her by the prestigious Heinz Awards for Environmental Solutions, to the fight against hydrofracking in New York State. Excerpts from Dr. Steingraber’s letter appear below. For the entire text see Deborah’s blog, “Paying it Forward: Congratulations Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Heinz Award Winner for 2011” (http://www.bcam.qc.ca/content/paying-it-forward-congratulations-dr-sandra-steingraber-heinz-award-winner-2011).
In her blog, Deborah explains: “Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the industrial technique used to create fractures in rock and coal formations in order to release trapped oil or shale gas underground. The chemicals used in this process are known to release carcinogens into surrounding air and water, and threaten local biodiversity.
“Here in Quebec, we should take notice: the current moratorium doesn’t guarantee that our battle against fracking in this province is over. And we shouldn’t forget that, despite our national borders, the bedrock found here runs underground from the lowlands of the St. Lawrence into New York State. Steingraber and her community are fighting a battle that is inextricably linked to our own....”
“Why I’m Donating My Heinz Award Money to the Fight Against Fracking” (excerpts)
Sandra Steingraber, September 15, 2011:
“As a bladder cancer survivor of 32 years, I’m intimately familiar with two kinds of uncertainty: the kind that comes while waiting for results from the pathology and radiology labs and the kind that is created by the medical insurance industry who decides whether or not to pay the pathology and radiology bills. Over the years, I’ve learned to analyze data and raise children while surrounded by medical and financial insecurities. It’s a high-wire act.
“But as an ecologist, I’m aware of a much larger insecurity: the one created by our nation’s ruinous dependency on fossil fuels in all their forms. When we light them on fire, we fill the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases that are destablizing the climate and acidifying the oceans (whose plankton stocks provide us half of the oxygen we breathe). When we use fossil fuels as feedstocks to make materials such as pesticides and solvents, we create toxic substances that trespass into our children’s bodies (where they raise risks for cancer, asthma, infertility, and learning disorders)
“Most ominously, through the process called fracking, we are shattering the very bedrock of our nation to get at the petrified bubbles of methane trapped inside. Fracking turns fresh water into poison. It fills our air with smog, our roadways with 18-wheelers hauling hazardous materials, and our fields and pastures with pipelines and toxic pits.
“I am therefore announcing my intent to devote my Heinz Award to the fight against hydrofracking in upstate New York, where I live with my husband and our two children. Some might look at my small house (with its mismatched furniture) or my small bank accounts (with their absence of a college fund or a retirement plan) and question my priorities. But the bodies of my children are the rearranged molecules of the air, water, and food streaming through them.
“As their mother, there is no more important investment that I could make right now than to support the fight for the integrity of the ecological system that makes their lives possible. As legal scholar Joseph Guth reminds us, a functioning biosphere is worth everything we have….”