2022 September Networker: Anchoring Ourselves in Storied History

The Science and Environmental Health Network

September 2022 Networker: Anchoring Ourselves in Storied History

Volume 27 (7), September 2022

1. Executive Director’s Note
2. Happy 60th to Silent Spring
3. The Santa Susana Field Lab and 60+ Years of Bad Governance
4. SEHN In The News

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 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 change 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.

Happy 60th to Silent Spring

By Sandra Steingraber, PhD, Senior Scientist at SEHN

Rachel Carson’s book on the toxicological properties of 19 pesticides is almost as old as I am. Published sixty years ago, on September 27, 1962, Silent Spring immediately rocketed to the top of the best seller list and stayed there. I had just turned three. And yet I remember clearly, although I could not yet have deciphered the title, that this was the book all the grown-ups were carrying around that year.

Most notable among them was my adoptive father, a high school teacher, who used Silent Spring as a course text for his business class. Every afternoon, he walked home and emptied the contents of his briefcase on the coffee table, and there among the pages of student homework was the book with the bright green cover and the squiggly lines.

And Silent Spring was more than a topic of adult conversation. Because of it, my very conservative father put in a compost pile. He threw away his spray gun and began mail-ordering ladybugs for his garden. By the time I was seven, my sister and I were selling tomatoes, organic tomatoes, at a produce stand at the end of his driveway.

Meanwhile, not just backyard gardening practices were changed by the publication of this remarkable book. By the end of the decade, the pesticide DDT, which had received so much close attention by Carson, was outlawed for use in the United States. Soon after, a half dozen other highly toxic chemical pesticides featured in its chapters were likewise banned or heavily restricted.

And the reform that Silent Spring ushered in was systemic. It is the book that brought environmental concerns into the body politic, leading directly to the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. It also inspired major national environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973).

In short, Silent Spring became a founding force of modern American environmentalism, and it changed the way government worked. It’s almost as if its publication took place during a time when our government was more responsive to revelations of science—willing to write new laws, amend policies, and change course in the face of new scientific revelations—than it is now.

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Secrecy, Obfuscation, and Broken Promises: The Santa Susana Field Lab and 60+ Years of Bad Governance

By Carmi Orenstein, MPH, CHPNY Program Director and Networker Editor, SEHN

On August 11, 2022, in Valencia, California, I attended a nine-hour special meeting of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, one of several state Water Boards, tasked with making one decision relating to an epic problem: more than 60 years of radioactive and chemical contamination at the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL), with no comprehensive cleanup accomplished. Nine hours later, a solution was further away than ever.

For those of us who work in environmental health, the scene in Valencia was familiar. Representatives of the industry accused of contaminating a community arrived in suits and a black SUV with out-of-state plates. They huddled, during the breaks in the proceedings, with a dozen or so union workers identifiable by their t-shirts, an alignment presumably brought on by the promise of good jobs for their membership.

Filling the other seats were members of the impacted community who stood outside before the meeting began with signs that read “Protect Our Water” and “Protect Our Kids.” Most heartbreakingly, other posters had no words at all, just photographs of ill children, some in hospital beds. Most were signed up to testify for the few minutes allocated for public comment about the policy decision under consideration, however ignored their voices may have been by unresponsive regulators in years past. Hundreds more joined by Zoom, many having registered to give their permitted testimony remotely. The community members were organized by Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab, whose overall demands include attention to the possible pediatric cancer cluster surrounding SSFL, as well as the site’s comprehensive cleanup.

The Board members themselves were assembled up front, and the agenda that brought us all together for the special meeting was a proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Board and the Boeing Company, outlining a process by which Boeing would eventually be exempted from the stormwater pollutant permitting system that the Board oversees.

This MOU represented the final approval needed for a larger deal between the state and Boeing to take effect. That larger deal would allow Boeing to leave much of the contamination in place at SSFL. This Water Board meeting, focused on the MOU, was the only public hearing at which all of the concerns about the full Boeing deal could be aired.

As for me, I took my seat as a public health researcher and educator who helps provide and amplify good science to frontline communities, and also as a former resident of this community. I grew up in the shadow of SSFL, its constant rocket engine test booms part of the soundtrack of my childhood. More than 500,000 people currently live within ten miles of the site. I remain deeply concerned about the ongoing deprivation of this community’s right to a clean and healthy environment, which I wrote about here last year, and deeply committed to deciphering the connection of that deprivation to California’s apparent patterns of poor governance—and to defending and restoring that right. Processes and power relationships revealed in the last year, including at this special meeting, keep the alarm bells ringing for me.

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SEHN In The News

Op-Ed: California Wants More Ethanol And Carbon Capture. That Would Lock In Pollution For Decades
- An editorial by SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger, with our colleague Sheri Deal-Tyne of Physicians for Social Responsibility Iowa, “California wants more ethanol and carbon capture. That would lock in pollution for decades” ran in the Los Angeles Times. “Ethanol produced from corn and using carbon capture is not a climate solution. It causes a new set of problems. California’s new fuel standard should not be enabling it.”
Carbon Capture Pipelines Will Benefit From Federal Climate Legislation
- Carolyn was also quoted in an Iowa Public Radio story on the increasing federal subsidies for carbon capture pipelines. She said the legislation only empowers the fossil fuel industry, and that, “It is a bad economic deal for farmers, landowners, and it is certainly a bad economic deal for the public.”
Children Living Close To Fracking Sites Have Two To Three Times Higher Risk Of Leukemia
- SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber was interviewed by DeSmog’s Nick Cunningham for a piece on a new study documenting the increased risk of leukemia in children living close to fracking sites in Pennsylvania: “This new study connects a lot of dots… As such, this study is a kind of terrifying voila.”
Defiant Energy: How The American Electric Utility Industry Pushed Climate Denial, Doubt, And Delay.
- Sandra has also been working on a new assignment with Orion Magazine: editing a series entitled “Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine.” The first story appeared in September, “Defiant Energy,” by Leah C. Stokes.
‘Find The Courage’: 400+ Scientists, Health Providers Implore Schumer, Pelosi To Ditch Manchin Deal
- Sandra authored a letter to House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Schumer, in coordination with Food and Water Watch, signed by more than 400 scientists and health professionals, urging Congress to reject the energy permitting reform bill—the “dirty side deal” to the Inflation Reduction Act—released on September 21, 2022, by Senator Joe Manchin. Here is one of the stories covering the letter, quoting her.
One Last Dance With Plastic Bags
- SEHN Board member Rebecca Altman was quoted in a piece, “One Last Dance with Plastic Bags,” in Canada’s The Tyee: “As we adopt less harmful alternatives to carry our stuff, our experience of the city will be transformed, says sociologist Rebecca Altman, who is writing a book on the history of plastics. ‘Can you imagine the soundscape without that crinkle, crinkle, whispery sound… We didn’t have that sound, at some point, in our ears.’”
Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner: Proposed Plant A Dangerous Distraction
- "The site carboncapturefacts.org, sponsored by the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), breaks down the numerous ways CCUS is a threat to the lives, safety and health of communities in its path." Eric Engle, chairman of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, included mention of our web project in his Parkersburg News and Sentinel column, "Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner: Proposed plant a dangerous distraction."

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Mo BanksSeptember 29, 2022

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