May 2023 Networker:
On What We Bury |
| Take off, take off your shoes
This place you're standing, it’s holy ground Perhaps more famously done by Wilco and Billy Bragg, the band the Klezmatics also mined Woody Guthrie’s archive of lyrics that he himself never recorded. As a Variety piece said in 2003, “each dip into the trove continues to unearth fascinating treasures.” This song, Holy Ground, on an album called Wonder Wheel, was born during Guthrie’s life on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, New York. Every spot it’s holy ground
Every little inch it’s holy ground
Every grain of dirt it’s holy ground
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground I used to spontaneously sing this song to myself when I was a runner, keeping to the ragged edges of the semi-rural roads where I live; edges that are often kind of... unsightly. (I had to look down a lot so I wouldn’t slip on ice or a rock or fall in a pothole; the view was otherwise lovely.) Broken pavement meeting gravel and dirt and occasionally trash, meeting dirty snow or whatever is brave enough to grow adjacent (fortunately blooming, with variations on that unique roadside palette, for at least half the year). Nevertheless it wasn’t once lost on me that this too, as Woody Guthrie wrote, is holy ground, and I was fortunate to have it under my feet. I’m confident that all three authors in this edition of the Networker would feel the same. SEHN is beyond excited and eager to share with you the first reprint of a 2014 essay by our esteemed Board member, Rebecca Altman. “On What We Bury,” originally published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, reflects, gorgeously and movingly, on our personal and collective relationships with what lies beneath our feet. We ask the Earth to take what we bury and to give us the solace that comes from cyclical transformation of dormancy and death into transformation or new life. And yet, we also open the Earth and bury what we’ve wasted, or what we want to hide, and then bury the thought of it. The piece is bookended by experiences Rebecca shared together with our executive director, Carolyn Raffensperger. They go back a long way. Fittingly, Carolyn has written a complementary essay on the occasion of this reprint. She thinks back to one of those shared experiences and links it to a Summit from which she just now returned, continuing the work of establishing and upholding the legal rights of nature and those of future generations. The title of her piece, “A Legacy of Places Not Destroyed,” hints at a phenomenal idea she presents. In her regular column, The rePercussion Section, SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber provides an assist with our maybe-forgotten high school chemistry (as well as some important and disturbing history) to trace a path we also need to understand, between fracking and… food. Thank you for reading and for joining us in our efforts to respect every inch of the ground we walk, as well as what is above and below. Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
| For CR and MS From my kitchen window near Boston, I can see a hill where I otherwise shouldn’t. It stands at the center of a park that also has a playground, two ball fields, and some skate ramps. Its scale always strikes me as disproportionate to the more gradual rise and fall of our eastern New England landscape. Nevertheless, in the winter, my sons march up one side and sled down the other. When they look back on their childhood, this “hill” will serve as landmark. It is the summer of 2012 and I am at this playground with my sons. The other parents complain about the odd weather. Hurricane Sandy hasn’t arrived yet to churn the conversation into something more gritty and real. She’ll come in the fall. So for now, the weather is a common topic of small talk. And to many parents here, the weather seems strange, but it’s my experience that these conversations never go anywhere, which is why playgrounds are the place I feel most estranged. Climate and environmental issues, as pressing as they are, are subterranean here, which, at this park, strikes me as especially ironic. This park, you see—the one visible from my house, the one on which my sons now play—was once the Reed Brook municipal landfill, which explains the “hill” as a mound of our forebears’ trash. I can remember other play-spaces reclaimed from wasteland. Take, for example, the public pool in the northern New Jersey suburb where I grew up. My mother wouldn’t let me run around barefoot. Too many glass shards had worked their way to the surface. But who talks about such things? We bury these, too, don’t we? Here’s another thought that surfaces at the park: Before it was a park, before it was a landfill, it was farmland. Prized celery was raised here. This is a place where human hands have planted and interred. I get to thinking how similar the acts of burial and planting are, and what they reflect about our relationship with the Earth and with each other. We open the Earth and place into it seed. We place into it our deceased beloved. We ask the Earth to take what we bury and to give us the solace that comes from cyclical conversion of dormancy and death into transformation or new life. And yet, we also open the Earth and bury what we’ve wasted, or what we want to hide, and then bury the thought of it. With our landfills, and our mines backfilled with tailings, our deep injection wells, our caverns of radioactive waste, our faith placed in underground reservoirs of sequestered carbon, we ask the Earth to hold our waste when the Earth isn’t static or fixed. It is flux and system and process. There are things that cannot be contained, like glass shards or radioactivity or grief. What I am grappling with here is how we came to believe that certain things we bury could remain outside the cycle of life, or that they would stay where we put them.
Continue Reading |
A Legacy of Places Not Destroyed |
| By Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director |
| The White Mountain Apache anchor their ethics, history, and cosmology to the land. I worked as an archaeologist, years ago, in their community and became apprenticed to them, intrigued by their worldview, particularly how the landscape shaped the way they tell their history and how they understand the dynamic relationships between the land and people. In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes how the Apache stories of how we treat the land and each other are encoded in place names. Environmental disasters like the nuclear disasters at Fukushima or Chernobyl similar encode wisdom, if we heed the warnings. Place names like Love Canal instantly convey a huge, complex history of corporate malfeasance, the heroism of Lois Gibbs and others, and ultimately vast changes in the law. In her remarkable essay, “On What We Bury,” Rebecca Altman offers a litany and lamentation for the costly damage to the land, our communities and our bodies from toxic and radioactive sites, all of which have names, all of which have histories, all of which will be with us for a long time. I often wonder if we are educable or if we will fail to learn the lessons these wounded places teach us. The weekend of May 12,, 2023, I participated in a Mississippi River Summit convened by the Great Plains Action Society to consider the rights of the Mississippi River. People from the entire length of the River gathered to talk about how the rights of that River and their communities had been undermined. Keshaun Pearson, board president of MCAP, Memphis Community Against Pollution spoke about their success in stopping the Byhalia Connection Pipeline and the ongoing work challenging a toxic ethylene oxide plant. Keshaun said that their community, which he identified by its zip code—38109—was tired of being a sacrifice zone. We have a choice now. Will we continue to make sacrifice zones or will we protect our homes and communities, recognizing that the land and communities hold rights together, that they are sacred and cannot be sacrificed on the altar of the economy? Continue Reading |
The rePercussion Section:
On Fracking and Food, Part 1 |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| This essay is the first of two on climate change and the fertilizer crisis. Next up: Green Hydrogen: Promise or Peril? Here is a column about how our food ended up riding a tandem bicycle with fracking. But first, breaking all the rules of popular science writing, I’m going to begin with a chemistry lesson. Let’s talk about nitrogen, which occupies box #7 in the periodic chart of elements. We all desperately need nitrogen to stay alive. Nitrogen atoms are core components of our genetic material (DNA and RNA) and they are also a key ingredient of amino acids, from which we make all the protein parts of ourselves (under the direction of DNA and RNA), and they also are needed for the synthesis of ATP, which provides us the calories to run all of the above. You somehow remember the Krebs cycle, right? Given all that, it might seem like good news to learn that nitrogen comprises almost 80 percent of the air that we breathe into our spongy lungs. More specifically, Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen (plus one percent other stuff, including hydrogen and carbon dioxide). Oxygen, of course, is nitrogen’s next-door neighbor, inhabiting box #8 in the periodic chart, and it’s snatched up immediately by the hemoglobin in our red blood cells as soon as it arrives in our lungs. Within a minute of its inhalation, oxygen enters the mitochondria of our cells where it’s put to work breaking apart carbon bonds and releasing energy. By contrast, we can use exactly none the nitrogen that we breathe in. It just gets exhaled right back out again. And that’s because airborne nitrogen atoms prefer to pair up with themselves, and those N2 molecules are notoriously unreactive, glued together by inflexible triple bonds. Continue Reading |
| SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber’s quotes and a video story were included in the Common Dreams article covering the CCS website launch of our ally, Food & Water Watch:
Sandra’s presentation for the Southern Cayuga Anne Frank Tree Project’s Difference Maker’s Night was previewed in the Finger Lakes Daily News:
An alarm-sounding study by over two dozen scientists including SEHN senior scientist Ted Schettler was covered in over a dozen news pieces including the Guardian. Journalist Tom Perkins said that his article about the study was the most-read article across all of the Guardian's websites (US, UK, and Australia). There was also coverage in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Polish and [Iranian] Farsi newspapers.
The 2020 piece in this newsletter by Joseph Guth, SEHN Fellow, is referenced in a new Eurasia Review op-ed:
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