Sandra Steingraber Presents 'The Fracking of Rachel Carson' at UMBC

Join environmental activist Sandra Steingraber at UMBC for her talk "The Fracking of Rachel Carson: Silent Spring in an Age of Environmental Crisis," Monday, April 29 at 4:00 p.m. on the 7th floor of UMBC's Albin O. Kuhn Library.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber has written extensively on the intersection of the environment and public health. She will discuss what we have learned --and failed to learn-- in the 50 years since Rachel Carson’s eye-opening publication, Silent Spring, and will examine the threat to public health that fracking poses.

Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. A cancer survivor herself, Steingraber originally published Downstream in 1997; it was the first book to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries, and won praise from international media including the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, the Lancet, and the London Times.

Continuing the investigation begun in Living Downstream, Steingraber’s book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood. Both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology, Having Faith reveals the extent to which environmental hazards now threaten each stage of infant development. Library Journal selected Having Faith as a best book of 2001, and it was featured in a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers.

Called “a poet with a knife” by Sojourner magazine, Steingraber has received many honors for her work as a science writer.  She was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year and later received the Jenifer Altman Foundation’s first annual Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer.”  The Sierra Club has heralded Steingraber as “the new Rachel Carson,” and Carson’s own alma mater, Chatham College, selected Steingraber to receive its biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award. In 2006, Steingraber received a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund and the 2009 Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles.

This UMBC Humanities Forum will be Steingraber's first public appearance since her incarceration. She was recently sentenced to 15 days in jail for blocking access to a storage site for fracked gas, then refused to pay $375 in bail. She has been a leader of the fight in New York state to keep frackers at bay and her incarceration has been chronicled in several media outlets, including the “Wall Street Journal,” the “Ithaca Journal” and the blog “Grist.”

Learn more about this event at umbc.edu/arts.