Editor's Note from April 2023 Networker

I was a proud reader of the manuscript that became Sandra Steingraber’s 2011 book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. The final chapter, “Bicycles on Main Street (and High-Volume Slickwater Hydraulic Fracturing)” is nothing less than prescient as it imagines what might become of a small town situated over a massive “shale play,” if the gas industry has their way. Sandra was working with very little available data at the time and nevertheless efficiently outlines what we could know about fracking even then: “five sure things,” she called this information. (I’m tempted to go on, but if you haven’t read the book, you should!) 

(We successfully fought off fracking itself in New York State, though we need to dramatically accelerate the state’s transition off of piped-in gas, the largest share of which comes from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania.)

Fast-forward to today and those across the United States who live amid drilling and fracking activity—across otherwise dissimilar landscapes—will recognize the features of this industrialization that Sandra described in 2011. In the meantime, we now have no shortage of stomach-churning data on the public health, ecological, air, water, soil, and climate impacts of this frenzy that was allowed to unfold basically unregulated. In her column this month, Sandra traces how we ended up in the “lawless place” that this now-typical method of fossil gas extraction occupies.

Also in this issue, I was fortunate to interview Ranjana Bhandari, founder and executive director of the frontline organization Liveable Arlington, which works strategically to protect the community (within the Dallas-Fort Worth area) from that lawless place that is Texas’ captured oil and gas regulatory environment. Readers will be inspired by Ranjana’s extraordinary environmental and climate justice commitment and what the group has accomplished against overwhelming odds. For those who may have never seen what urban and suburban fracking look like, one look at her photos tells the story. 

This month we celebrate our colleague Martha Dina Argüello, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles. Martha and PSR-LA represent another powerful example of a leader and her organization’s steadfast and collaborative tackling of complex environmental health crises, including—but not only—urban drilling and the whole carbon economy. I’m also grateful to PSR-LA for their work advocating for nuclear weapons abolition and a complete cleanup of the radioactive and chemically contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, which we’ve written about in these pages. Back from a sabbatical, Martha wrote that she feels full of promise, and we hope you will, too after hearing from and about the phenomenal women in this issue of the Networker.

Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN