Sandra is a celebrated scholar, a mother, a cancer victim of environmental toxins. She is teaching now at Ithaca College. She won a prestigious grant and has stated in her Testimony (see below) before the New York State Assembly on October 6, 2011 that she will "devote the prize money—$100,000—to the grassroots fight against the headlong rush to permit horizontal hydrofracturing of shale gas in New York state. " She also stated that she will leave NY State if hydrofracking is permitted because she wants to protect her child from all the toxins that will contaminate the land, air, water, food, etc. in the Ithaca area. She is a cancer survivor from environmental toxins she was exposed to as a child. All this and much much more in her excellent Testimony which is provided below following the list of Video documents of her talks.
Sandra Steingraber speech at Albany, NY rally to ban ...youtube.comMay 2, 2011 - 9 min - Uploaded by 7kittykats Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., ecologist, poet, mother, and activist gave an incredible speech during a rally in Albany .. |
- Also listen to NPR Fresh Air Terry Gross story
"The Trouble with Health Problems with Near Gas Fracking"
Sandra Steingraber on the Health Crisis Surrounding ...
vimeo.comMay 27, 2011 - 6 min
DemocracyNow.org - About 30 states allow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the natural gas drilling process that injects ...
4-Sandra Steingraber, Hammondsport 9-15-11
vimeo.comSep 28, 2011 - 42 min
'4-Sandra Steingraber is an acclaimed ecologist, cancer survivor, and author of Living Downsteam and Raising ...
Testimony before the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation
http://www.r-cause.net/uploads/8/0/2/5/8025484/steingrabertestimony10-6-11_to__nys_assemblycommittee.pdfPublic Hearing: Revised Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement governing natural gas drillingOctober 6, 2011Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.Distinguished Scholar in ResidenceDepartment of Environmental StudiesIthaca College Ithaca, New York 14850Good afternoon, Chairman Sweeney and distinguished members of the Assembly. Thank you for inviting me to testify today. My name is Sandra Steingraber. I am a Ph.D. biologist with graduate training from the University of Michigan. I currently serve as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Ithaca College, and for the past twenty years have been working in the field of environmental health. I am the author of three books on the topic, the most recent of which addresses the potential health effects of fracking.1 As part of my written testimony, I have brought a copy of this book with me today and will be submitting it to you.I am pleased to report that my research and writing in the field of environmental health have just been acknowledged by the Heinz Foundation. I am one of the lucky recipients of the 2011 Heinz Awards. Two weeks ago, I announced my intent to devote the prize money—$100,000—to the grassroots fight against the headlong rush to permit horizontal hydrofracturing of shale gas in New York state.I assure you that this cash gift far exceeds my current bank account. I hope that this gesture illustrates how seriously I view the health and environmental threats posed by this new, extreme, inherently dangerous method of fossil fuel extraction as it would be practiced under proposed state regulations and how deeply flawed a document I believe the revised Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) to be.Most New Yorkers will not read the more than one thousand pages that make up the revised SGEIS But because its conclusion is that horizontal hydrofracking can be practiced safely in New York and will contribute beneficially to the economy, most people might reasonably conclude that there exists evidence to demonstrate that fracking poses low risk to human health and will usher in no ruinous associated medical costs.But that is not the case. The SGEIS contains no human health assessment. When it comes to demonstrating safety to people’s health, the SGEIS emperor has no clothes.I am happy to answer any questions about the unaddressed threats to water and food. However, I’d like to focus my formal remarks today on air pollution. This was a topic the Assembly asked me to address at the hearings here last May, so I have come today with an update.Before I address the issue of air, I’d like to share with you some new observations from the field of geomicrobiology, which is a current research interest of mine. Deep geological strata, including shale formations, are living ecosystems. They house complex communities of relic organisms that biologists collectively call deep life. Researchers now believe that, by weight, more than half of all life on Earth likely lies within deep geological strata. Indeed, these microbes play an important role in the formation of rock itself and in the cycling of elements in the biosphere, including carbon. It is possible that deep life organisms thereby contribute to climate stability through pathways that we have not yet elucidated.2The presence of microbial life in deep geological strata means that the Marcellus Shale should be thought of a kind of underground coral reef. Blowing it apart and pumping it full of powerful biocides may have consequences for the biosphere—and for ourselves— which we cannot yet predict or quantify. There is much we do not know about the effects of fracking on subterranean life.By contrast, here on the Earth’s surface, we know some things with a high degree of certainty. One of these certainties is that gas drilling via hydrofracking generates air pollution in the form of diesel exhaust and ground-level ozone (smog). We also know quite a lot about the consequences to human health of these exposures. This kind of air pollution is lethal. It contains large amounts of ultrafine particles and the carcinogen benzo-a-pyrene. In adults, these pollutants are variously linked to bladder, breast, and lung cancers, stroke, diabetes, and premature death.3New research now also links exposure to traffic exhaust with cognitive impairment and memory problems in older men.4 [Laboratory studies of mice show how and why: airborne particulates released by diesel engines increase levels of inflammatory molecules in the brain, reduce the growth of neurons, and interfere with neurofunctioning.5] According to Harvard epidemiologist and lead author Melinda Power, “Cognitive decline and impairment in the elderly is a huge public health issue. Our study suggests that traffic-related air pollution, particularly diesel exhaust, may play a role.”6In children, as new research demonstrates, air pollution from diesel exhaust is also linked to cognitive impairment: in the form of lowered I.Q.7 It is also linked to preterm birth, asthma, and stunted lung development.8Health effects go beyond ambient regional pollution exposures. We now know that localized pollution sources can have disproportionate effects on community health, particularly among pregnant women and infants.9We also now understand that even a few hours of commuting on roads with heavy traffic can increase the risk of heart attack, and we know that this increased risk is quantifiable. New research published by The Lancet shows that air pollution triggers more heart attacks than cocaine use—and about the same number as shoveling snow. Improving air quality, the authors conclude, is a meaningful place to begin a program of heart attack prevention.10It is therefore reasonable to ask if the permitting of fracking in New York state will increase the incidence of all of the above—including in New York City itself, which is positioned downwind of the Marcellus Shale region.As a consequence of the industrialization of upstate New York that will come with gas drilling, rural upstate roadways will fill with heavy truck traffic: 1000 truck trips are required for each wellhead with more than 60,000 wells planned. It is reasonable to ask how many New Yorkers will be consigned to premature death as a result and how fracking will worsen chronic health problems such as asthma and heart complications.How will gas drilling contribute to school absenteeism? Employee sick days? Medicare and Medicaid costs? The need for special educational services in public schools? The cost for longterm care for cognitively impaired elders?Using the tools of quantitative risk assessment as part of a human health impact assessment, we could answer these questions.For example, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just this month, was based on this kind of analysis. The risk assessment demonstrated that a 73 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide and a 54 percent drop in nitrogen oxides would prevent, on a nationwide basis, 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 heart attacks, 19,000 cases of bronchitis, 400,000 cases of asthma, 1.8 million sick days, and save $280 billion in health care costs. These savings far exceed the costs of the capital investments required to make the improvements.11Ongoing debate about whether or not these rules should be implemented or scaled back still rage, but at least we know what the stakes are. We have projected numbers.We don’t know the human health costs from gas drilling in New York state because the SGEIS has not bothered to calculate them. Is the number of New Yorkers who will die prematurely or become hospitalized as a result of increased air pollution from gas extraction, gas processing, and its associated truck traffic greater or lesser than the number of people who will be employed by the industry?The SGEIS could have attempted to answer this question. It does not.Before the fields, wood, vineyards, and orchards of upstate New York are turned into smoggy, accident-prone industrial zones, we need to draw up a comprehensive list of projected costs and benefits. We can’t do that if the projected costs—of which the health effects caused by air pollution is just one—are not calculated, nor even acknowledged to be real.Yesterday a letter was sent to Governor Cuomo from more than 250 doctors, medical authorities, and members of the public health community. It warned that the revised SGEIS ignores health risks. It calls for an independent health impact assessment.12 The American Academy of Pediatrics is one signatory. I am another.In response, Department of Conservation spokesperson Emily De Santis said—as quoted in a Gannett news report this morning—“The draft analysis thoroughly reviews the causes of health impacts.”13But where in the analysis is a consideration of the health impacts? I could not find it. My endocrinologist colleague Adam Law, M.D. could not find it either. Dr. Law went one step further and conducted a careful word search of the entire 1,500-page document. As he reported at yesterday’s press conference, the words physician, nurse, and children do not appear anywhere in the SGEIS. Nor do the words endocrine disruptor or epidemiology. The word pregnancy appears only once, and yet pregnant women are among the subpopulation most vulnerable to toxic chemical exposures.I urge each of you to engage in this exercise for yourself. Try searching the revised SGEIS document for the words lung, breast, urine, blood, brain, asthma, cancer, carcinogen, miscarriage, hospital, health clinic, or toxicant. And then, while looking at the number of hits you receive, ask yourself if you believe that public health impacts have indeed been assessed by the revised SGEIS.And ask yourself if such an oversight does not represent a violation of former Governor Patterson’s Executive Order #41 (2010), which specifically directs the DEC to undertake further review of fracking and the impacts of horizontal drilling to “ensure that all environmental and public health impacts are mitigated or avoided.” [Emphasis mine.]The Gannett Albany Bureau is also reporting today the existence of an internal document from the Department of Health that calls for additional funding to address health impacts after drilling begins—to investigate spikes of illness near drilling sites, along with the “anticipated surge” of health-related complaints.14 I urge you to investigate this document as it appears to indicate that New York state is not pursuing a preventive approach to human health impacts in its rush to permit fracking but rather is preparing to conducted an uncontrolled human experiment using all of us as study subjects.I would like to close on a personal note. I do not only analyze data from cancer registries; I am also one data point in them. I grew up in a highly industrialized town in central Illinois—one in which the drinking water wells were contaminated with industrial chemicals. While in college, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. My adoptive mother is likewise a cancer survivor. Indeed, we were co-cancer patients together.As a mother myself, I am determined that my young children will not become pediatric data points in the statistical story of human cancer. Moreover, my son has a history of asthma. If New York state does not plan to protect me and my children from toxic exposures including air pollution—which is the inevitable result of fracking—then I will have to do it myself by leaving the state.In this, I am not alone. Just this week, I received a phone call from a Westchester mother who wanted to know how the fracking story was going to play out. If it is ultimately permitted, she said, her children will not be going to upstate New York colleges.
In France yesterday, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his nation’s ban on fracking will continue until there is proof that shale gas exploration will not harm the environment nor “massacre” the landscape:Development of hydrocarbon resources underground is strategic for ourcountry but not at any price....This won’t be done until it has been shown thattechnologies used for development respect the environment, the complextnature of soil and water networks.And with that logic, existing permits in France were cancelled.This is what I want to hear Governor Cuomo say to us:New York’s ban on fracking will continue until there is proof that shale gas exploration will not harm the environment, massacre the landscape, or harm the children of New York state.Right now, proof of safety does not exist. Thank you.Footnotes:1 S. Steingraber, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 2011).2 F. Reith, “Life in the Deep Subsurface,” Geology 39 (2011): 287-88. See also, K. Kohhauser, Introduction to Geomicrobiology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) and E.V. Pikuta et al., “Microbial Extremophiles at the Limits of Life,” Critical Reviews in Microbiology 33 (2007): 183-209.3 American Lung Association, “Health Effects of Ozone and Particle Pollution,” State of the Air, 2011; President’s Cancer Panel, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, 2008-2009 Annual Report (National Cancer Institute, May 2010).4 M.C. Power et al., “Traffic-related Air Pollution and Cognitive Function in a Cohort of Older Men,” Environmental Health Perspectives 119 (2011): 682-87.5 L.K. Fonken, et al., “Air Pollution Impairs Cognition, Provokes Depressive-like Behaviors and Alters Hippocampal Cytokine Expression and Morphology,” Molecular Psychiatry 16 (2011): epub July 5, 2011.6 Powers quoted in R. Gray, “Air Pollution from Traffic Impairs Brain,” The Telegraph, 9 Oct. 2011.7 C. Freire et al., “Association of Traffic-related Air Pollution with Cognitive Development in Children,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 64 (2010): 223-228.8 American Lung Association, Asthma and Children Fact Sheet, Feb. 2010; J.M. Perrin et al., “The Increase of Childhood Chronic Conditions in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association 297 (2007); U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Summary Health Statistics for U.S. Children: National Health Interview Survey, 2006 and “Premature Birth,” 2010.9 Beate Ritz, M.D., Ph.D., “The Geography of Air Polluton: Where Are Pregnant Women and their Children at Risk?” UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Oppenheim lecture, winter 2010.10 T.S. Nawrot et al., “Public Health Importance of Triggers of Myocardial Infarction: A Comparative Risk Assessment,” Lancet 377 (2011): 732-40.11 “U.S. EPA Curbs Air Pollution Blowing Across State Lines,” Environment News Service, July 7, 2011.12 A copy of the medical authorities’ letter to Governor Cuomo, along with supporting documentation, is available at www.psehealthyenergy.org.13 J. Campbell, “Health Department: More Funding Needed to Address Hydrofracking,” Ithaca Journal. 5 Oct. 2011. A copy of this article is available at www.catskillcitizens.org/news.cfm.14 T. Patel, “France to Keep Fracking Ban to Protect Environment, Sarkozy Says,” Bloomberg, 4 Oct. 2011. Article available at http://catskillcitizens.org/news.cfm.
http://www.outofboundsradioshow.com/
Sandra Steingraber, Ph. D 
WEOS: 9/08/11, WSKG: 9/11/11
Ecologist, author and cancer survivor
Steingraber is an internationally recognized authority on the environmental links to cancer and human health. In this very passionate and personal conversation Steingraber's focus is on her important new book Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.Steingraber?s highly acclaimed 1997 book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist?s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, was a topic of discussion in one of our earlier interviews. She was one of the first to present cancer as a human rights issue.
http://mayflytyer.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/air-pollution-from-gas-drilling-will-affect-everyone-from-the-catskills-to-the-hudson-valley-to-new-york-city/
AIR POLLUTION FROM GAS DRILLING WILL AFFECT EVERYONE - - FROM THE CATSKILLS, TO THE HUDSON VALLEY, TO NEW YORK CITY
If you think fracking will not affect you, think again. October 28, 2011
The Millennium, Iroquois and Tennessee pipelines will intersect with a proposed NYMarc connector in Orange County in and around the Town of Minisink. This map is a clear visual illustration of the pipeline. There is already an application for one compressor station and more are being considered.
Compressor stations are used to keep gas in a highly pressured state so that it can travel through gas pipelines. We now know that these compressor stations have negative impacts on the environment and people’s health, which can be as severe as those that are found at gas drilling well pads. They emit carcinogenic and neurotoxin compounds, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides that create ozone (smog) and many more toxins. People who live in areas with compressor stations have reported serious health symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, blackouts, muscle contractions and ruptured ear drums from the constant low frequency roar of the compressors. In parts of rural Texas where gas pipeline compressor stations are located, asthma rates for children have risen from a normal 7% to a very abnormal 25%.
Communities in close proximity to gas production facilities will feel the air contaminants the most. HOWEVER, BECAUSE AIR CONTAMINANTS TRAVEL VIA AIR CURRENTS THEY WILL ALSO AFFECT SURROUNDING AREAS - WHICH IN THIS CASE WOULD INCLUDE DUTCHESS, PUTNAM, ROCKLAND AND WESTCHESTER COUNTIES AND NEW YORK CITY.
Orange County, NY is the home of many 9-11 responders who are living with health issues as a result of their heroic service to all of us. In a letter protesting the compressor stations near his hometown, a NYC First Responder said, “There are approximately 10 NYC First Responders (that I am aware of) that live approximately within a half mile radius of the proposed Millennium gas compressor site.” He further said, “We know all-too-well the result these known carcinogens will have on our health. We do not want to have to move again.”
While it is a travesty to think of these 9-11 responders having their health further compromised by the proposed compressor stations, it is just as unconscionable to subject the entire population of Orange County to these same negative health impacts. These new emissions will be on top of existing problems Orange County currently faces with pollution from vehicle and industry emissions. According to EPA records from 1998 to 2008, the latest published, the air quality was considered less than good on over 21.5% of the days of the year and on 75% of those days ozone was the main pollutant.
These planned compressor stations are just the tip of the iceberg. In PA, there is now an average of almost one compressor station application per week. As things stand we can expect the same.
Calvin Tillman, the former mayor of Dish TX, where residents were sickened after 11 compressor stations were built said, “If you don't learn from what has happened here, by the time that the odor gets bad enough for you to not want it there, by the time that the noise gets loud enough that it's disturbing you, it's already too late.”
It is becoming late in the game in New York State. If we don’t take action now to stop fracking in New York, all of us from the Catskills and the Southern Tier down to the Hudson Valley and into New York City will pay a personal price.
