Editor's Note from July 2024 Networker
We at SEHN are, like sentinels, watching the multiple, interacting crises that characterize these days. This past fall, SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger and I both referred to the polycrisis in missives to you, our readers and supporters. We quoted the historian credited with the term:
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.
It’s clear that those concerned with health, climate, peace, and justice are experiencing the polycrisis acutely, personally, and in our case, professionally. But rest assured we’re not losing our sense of reality. On the contrary, we’re engaged in a continuous, vigorous conversation that includes how our vision…
Fulfilling our responsibility to govern ourselves and our communities wisely, to create and sustain a just and healthy world now and for future generations
…is ready-made for the present crises. In fact, we are actively reflecting on, refining, and applying the methods by which SEHN long ago set out to accomplish our mission (“In service to communities, the Earth and future generations, the Science and Environmental Health Network forges law, ethics, and science into tools for action”):
Translating law and science for the public and decision-makers.
Providing the scientific and legal tools needed to protect and restore justice and ecological wholeness.
Serving environmental, public health and environmental justice coalitions and grassroots campaigns with legal and scientific expertise.
Lifting up women’s voices and leadership to address the challenges before us.
This month in our newsletter we have four articles that reverberate with these commitments, as they also reflect on—as our science director Dr. Ted Schettler says in the title of his piece—“the long, winding road” to success.
Part of that long, winding road toward accomplishing our mission are the processes that we at SEHN work to strengthen and improve. These processes aim to, for example: increase public involvement; enable the defense of human and ecological rights, democracy, science; and develop and expand fruitful collaboration and mutual empowerment. Our July articles showcase these pathways. We show how we and/or our allies find a myriad of ways of sharing data and tools with frontline communities and decision-makers, and working alongside them.
Ted Schettler traces the frustratingly slow route to a ban of one phthalate chemical, DEHP, about which Healthcare Without Harm, an organization in which he serves as science advisor, sounded the alarm decades ago. Real progress may finally be imminent. Nancy Piñeiro, English-Spanish technical and scientific translator with whom we have a longstanding partnership, lays out the need for language access and translation in our shared quest for socio-environmental justice. (Plus we feature a sneak preview of a forthcoming Spanish edition of our fracking science Compendium, being translated by Nancy’s feminist translation collective.) I describe an in-progress series of community-situated events around New York State focused on the harms of gas appliances presented alongside the action-steps individuals and communities can take to mitigate those harms. In her column, Sandra Steingraber tells the story of classes of chemicals we’ve come to call forever chemicals, for which policy has undeniably failed. She bears witness to the toxic legacies born of 1940s-era American industry. Chronicling these histories is essential for moving forward.
Though absolute “success” is not guaranteed, we are developing and strengthening various muscles for navigating the polycrisis. Thank you for sharing our commitment to making it through.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, editor