A Seahorse Model of Social Change

Dear Friends,

Let me begin this fundraising appeal with some biology. Behold the seahorse.

Small and unsteady as swimmers, seahorses survive by forming lifelong attachments, a phenomenon biologists call faithful pair-bonding. To reproduce, the female injects her eggs into the brood pouch of the male who then, voilà!, gives birth in a fishy, gender-reverse way.

We at SEHN embrace a seahorse model of social change. We are small. We are buffeted by hostile political forces. We form abiding relationships with frontline communities in our work for the protection of future generations. And we’ve reversed the usual roles. Which is to say, communities harmed by toxic industries or targeted by oil and gas infrastructure projects are not the objects of our research. Instead, we arm these communities with scientific and legal tools for their campaigns. We invite them to collaborate with us and we uplift their efforts via educational programming for journalists, policymakers, elected officials, and members of the medical community. As a biologist on staff at SEHN, I work in service to justice for frontline communities, researching topics they want answers to.

Does that sound like something you’d like to support?

Let me continue this pitch with a meditation on the biodiversity of seahorses. Forty-seven species of seahorses are out there in the ocean, propelling among seagrasses and coral. All of them belong to the Syngnathidae family of fishes, so named because their jaws are fused into vacuum cleaner-like snouts, allowing them to hoover while they hover.

And the whole family is in trouble. CO2 from fossil fuel combustion both rises into the atmosphere and diffuses into the oceans. Up in the sky, CO2 traps heat. But below the waves, CO2 converts to carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is why anything with a shell is dissolving—including the stiff little bodies of seahorses, whose exoskeletons are in direct contact with the acidifying sea.

Back in the ocean: Science shows that acidification, more than warming per se, is an existential threat to seahorses. The lower the pH of the water, the more lethargically seahorses swim and the less able they are to escape danger. Okay, here’s my pivot:

When people inhale too much CO2—as, say, when nearby pipelines ferrying liquefied CO2 as part of carbon capture and storage operations breach—the result is also lethargy and inability to escape. Also: convulsions, unconsciousness, acidosis, and organ damage. I know this because my colleague Ted Schettler, MD, is authoring a report on the potential health harms of CO2 used in “enhanced oil recovery” operations. And CO2 pipelines themselves are especially prone to breeching precisely because CO2 + moisture = corrosion. When CO2 is injected underground as part of carbon capture and storage operations, one risk is groundwater acidification. I know this because a coalition of frontline groups in Pennsylvania asked me to brief their state legislators on this issue and because my colleagues at SEHN, led by Peter Montague and Carmi Orenstein, have compiled a website of vetted information about the risks and harms of carbon capture and storage.

SEHN has also convened a biweekly plenary on carbon capture and storage issues, and, out of this collective, a working group on water issues has formed that will, this fall, organize a conference on the governance issues arising from the threats of CO2 sequestration to drinking water and the patchwork of laws insufficiently protecting it.

No one’s ever done that. You could partner with us and support this work!

SEHN’s field of vision includes both knowledge of the past and a sightline to the future. To understand why carbon capture and storage is not a climate solution but a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry, for example, requires us to understand both how the fossil fuel industry has historically used CO2 to enhance oil production and how tax credits will incentivize future behaviors. (We have a briefing paper in the works about the false promise of CO2 enhanced oil recovery.) Similarly, predicting how CO2 fracking—an actual proposed idea for New York State—will imperil climate and public health requires applying what we know about past fracking operations that use water. And SEHN’s program, Concerned Health Professionals of New York, has compiled a fully referenced compendium of evidence on the risks and harms of hydraulic fracking that informs the public debate and empowers frontline communities in the Southern Tier to say no to CO2 fracking.

I have proudly served SEHN in two roles. Present at SEHN’s founding at the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998, I went on to serve as a board member, stepping down only to help lead New York’s anti-fracking movement in 2011. Since 2021, I have served on staff as a senior scientist. In both capacities I have witnessed SEHN’s deep commitment to foresee and forestall future harm through vigorous inquiry of past actions and their consequences.

Starting this month, I am taking on a new role additional to my work as a scientist: writer-in-residence at SEHN. This partially funded position will allow me to explore, in a book-length investigation, how the fossils we call oil, gas, and coal are architectural components of the deep life biosphere, a complex, subterranean ecosystem whose existence is just being discovered. It’s a way for me to tell the story of the climate crisis from deep inside the dark heart of our living planet.

We are all connected—seahorses propelling though acid water, deep-life organisms inhabiting the fractured shale, and communities of people raising kids near pipelines and oil wells. And we are all in this together. SEHN, in a line, serves as a voice of science for communities facing toxic assaults and for the larger climate justice movement. Please join us as we look in two directions at once.