Editor's Note from 2023 October Networker
Much to our horror, a new war now adds more flames to our already-sizzling world. Alongside our shock and revulsion at the violence and destruction, here in the United States we’re witnessing new rounds of division within fragile alliances, campus tension over free speech issues, dueling street demonstrations. Even if we were to try to keep our focus solely on science, environment, and health, we know that war—this war, every war—profoundly impacts each of those. Writing together in the New York Times, Somini Sengupta and Jim Tankersley say,
The next few weeks will be crucial. If the conflict spills across the Middle East, it would likely shatter hopes of mustering global agreement on anything else, including the shared crisis of climate….
The conflict has erupted at a time of many crises across a deeply divided world. It follows a global pandemic and comes amid a war in Ukraine that has pummeled economies, driven countries deeper into debt, raised food and fuel prices, and worsened hunger among some of the world’s poorest people.
Polycrisis. Entire seminars, articles, and workshops are devoted to the term. Our senior scientist Sandra Steingraber just returned from a gathering of Heinz Award recipients in Pittsburgh who met to discuss the systems thinking and collaborations required to engage with polycrises and the skills required to generate the kind of hope that is needed to sustain us along the way. As the historian often credited with defining the word, Adam Tooze says,
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality.
How to navigate such a situation? In a Fall 2023 letter that predates the immediate Middle East crisis, our colleague Michael Lerner of the Omega project at Commonweal, writes,
Our work is both to confront the reality of the darkness we have entered and to support the light of hope that we will find our way through these times to a better world. The struggle to realize that hope is as old as humanity. It has never ceased, and it never will.
The Omega initiative is serving as a “convergence hub” for experiments in polycrisis resilience. But importantly, Lerner also emphasizes that life goes on even in the face of interacting, multiplicative emergencies, and it remains the case that most environmental and social progress is made “sector by sector.”
Our own core work at SEHN aligns with Lerner’s insight. While we’ll have much more to say on the polycrisis in the days ahead, we continue to focus on the fossil fuel crisis, which drives both the climate crisis and the toxic pollution crisis and creates the context for many other crises, including war, violence, water scarcity, hunger, and dislocation.
SEHN director Carolyn Raffensperger was an early voice speaking out and building a coalition of grassroots groups, scientists, medical professionals, policymakers, and attorneys to oppose the massive carbon waste pipelines to be built by powerful corporations throughout the Upper Midwest and provide vetted science on the dangers of CO2 pipeline to communities on the frontlines. Fast forward: one of the big ones, the proposed Navigator carbon pipeline, was totally canceled last week and a second one, the Summit pipeline, has encountered significant permitting obstacles. The coalition will prosecute CO2 pipelines until these false climate solutions are out of business. We are currently gearing up to prevent their re-routing into national forests. Every pipeline thwarted is more hope generated.
Sandra Steingraber and I, with Concerned Health Professionals of New York—and now with our SEHN colleague Ted Schettler—have been steadfastly working to ensure the scientific data and the medical voice are central to deliberations about fracking. Our just-released ninth edition of the fracking science Compendium includes many updates on the risks and harms of liquefied natural gas (LNG)—the exportable form of fracked gas that profoundly shapes geostrategic policies of nation states around the world and represents a toxic threat to the environmental justice communities in the U.S. Gulf coast where a rapid build-out of LNG terminals is underway. We are heartened by the enthusiastic response of frontline communities who have awaited this new edition and let us know how this compilation of science helps them continue and sharpen the struggle against the oil and gas industry’s disregard for public health and climate. And there also lies hope.
Present day U.S. gas infrastructure has origins in decisions made during a very different wartime, seventy years ago. But rather than learning as we went along, we now confront (and try to prevent) horror stories linked to the current hundreds of thousands of miles of gas pipelines crisscrossing the country. Sandra tells this story in this month’s rePercussion Section.
On the topic of war, or any other aspect of the polycrisis, don't forget that, along with any other actions you may choose, you can write your senators… even daily, as I have done these past weeks.
With shared sorrow for the vast loss of life, and hopes for a more peaceful future.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN