Executive Director's Note: Stories
By Carolyn Raffensperger
Stories.
In these rapidly evolving times, where climate change, pandemics, and anti-democratic forces threaten to upend our lives, I’ve been searching for stories to help make sense of the world. This has been a long habit. At the beginning of eighth grade, I had just moved to a new town and my jaw was wired shut because of major oral surgery. My little world was chaotic. The library in our town was an old brick, slate roofed mansion that smelled the way libraries should. I was just old enough to forage for myself in the adult section. The first book I chose was Mila 18 by Leon Uris, a novel about the Warsaw uprising of the Jewish community against the Nazis. I was riveted by the struggle of good and evil. I wanted to know what I would do if faced with Nazis, or any similar evil. That story changed my life. I decided I would do all in my power to fight evil.
This summer I searched for stories that would help make sense of the upheaval we are facing. I read three books that were wildly different, Lydia Yuknavitch’s novel Thrust, Sharon Heath’s novel, The Mysterious Composition of Tears, and Dick Sclove’s nonfiction book, Escaping Maya’s Palace—an analysis of the madness of modern civilization based on a close read of the Mahabharata. What they had in common was to take seriously what Ursula Le Guin calls the “carrier bag of fiction” (and I would add of nonfiction stories). Le Guin says, “I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” Nonfiction stories can also be carrier bags of essential medicines.
We offer two such stories in this issue of the Networker.
A prelude. When I worked for the Sierra Club in Illinois, we had a 17-year fight to get a single dollar in the Illinois state budget. We needed that dollar so we could get insurance for volunteers to work on a trail. Until they got that dollar, the trail was in a legal limbo.
I’ve thought about that story of 17 years and one dollar a thousand times because so many of the environmental struggles take a long, long time and often hinge on something simple and small like one dollar. The Keystone XL pipeline took more than 10 years to scuttle. Ben Franklin knew about the dangers of lead paint but the U.S. didn’t ban lead in paints until the 1970s. We need these stories to give us the endurance and courage necessary for the long haul.
Both stories in this issue go back at least 60 years. The first is Sandra Steingraber’s story of how Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring changed federal policy. The second is Carmi Orenstein’s report of a community’s struggle to clean up a toxic site called the Santa Susana Field Lab. We tell these two because they each have a unique angle on how community groups document emerging public health or environmental problems such as cancer or the silencing of the birds; how scientists confirm the community’s problems and then what government does about it.
In Rachel Carson’s case, a president took seriously her reports of the dangers of DDT and Congress acted. But in the case of Santa Susana, we see government officials cutting secret deals with the polluter, all but guaranteeing this fight will go on longer.
Sixty years seems like such a long time when we are in the immediate heat of pressing battles. Just today (Sept. 22, 2022), my colleagues are directly challenging awful legislation in Congress that would strip away the power of communities to block really bad fossil fuel projects. Sandra Steingraber authored a letter, signed by more than 400 scientists and health professionals to those same leaders explaining why this legislation—a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry—is a climate and public health travesty. At the very same moment the letter dropped, eleven of our friends, all executive directors of climate and environmental justice organizations, got arrested protesting that same legislation.
Someday, these very stories of arrests, and scientists banding together, of fossil fuel mayhem, will be told in both history books and taken up as models in fiction. It is already happening. I’ve been gratified to see history and fiction pick up events that happened in past decades.
For instance, Sharon Heath’s Mysterious Composition of Tears is a sci-fi/magical realism story set in the future that has physicists grappling with climate change. Heath incorporated SEHN’s work on the precautionary principle in this fictional setting by describing scientists taking seriously the possible negative consequences of extremely novel technologies. I wonder when some future scientist might read her novel and changer her approach to incorporate precaution. Medicine!
These stories, the histories, the current events, and the fiction all are gifts as we make our world through action and reflection. Perhaps you are a scientist dedicated to figuring out the mechanics of climate change to help prepare us to adapt or to guide good solutions. Perhaps you are a community activist who has spent countless hours trying to fend off another pipeline or industrial plant in your neighborhood. Perhaps you are a government official tasked with making impossible decisions about public health and environmental matters. This issue of the Networker is for you.