Sandra Steingraber Calls Us Back to Albany-January 30 & February 4. An Urgent Call!

Invitation to Albany—a prose poem in twelve parts by Sandra Steingraber

You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result. —Mahatma Gandhi 

1.

I am writing you from an airport in Wisconsin. People here, and across the river in Minnesota, are trying desperately to halt the strip-mining of their communities for frack sand. Trucks are rolling. Silica dust is flying. Hill by hill, bluff by bluff: the land itself is shoveled into railcars and shipped off to the gas fields of America where grains of silica sand are shot into the cracks of fractured bedrock so methane can flow out of it.

What’s left behind in Wisconsin and Minnesota are moonscapes and ruined water.

Citizens write, testify, protest. Mothers contemplate civil disobedience. Some have done it.

2.

I’m calling you, again, to Albany.

Twice.

Once on Wednesday, January 30^th and a second time on Monday, February 4^th. And you are not allowed to feel depressed about it.

Okay, you can feel depressed all you want, but you have to show up anyway. And you may have to get up in the middle of the night because we all need to be there by 8:30 a.m.

Keep reading.

3.

Three weeks ago, New Yorkers created a chanting, drumming wall of opposition to fracking that stretched a quarter mile down the Empire State Plaza concourse. Every audience member en route to the governor’s speech was compelled to walk by the biggest demonstration on at any State of the State address in the history of New York.

Next we delivered 204,000 comments to the Department of Environmental Conservation, all of them arrows aimed at the arbitrary, incoherent draft regulations on fracking—cynically released by the DEC as a legal maneuver to avoid blowing their own deadline. Given just 30 days over the holidays to read 328 pages of regulations and compose our thoughts, we broke all records for number of public comments submitted on any DEC topic. Ever.

4.

Did you think that alone would be sufficient to stop the most powerful industry on earth from fracking New York State?

5.

The signs coming out of Albany do not say the answer is yes. Sorry.

6.

What should we do? Give up? Or act like the citizen uprising that we are?

7.

Here’s the plan:  First, sign The Pledge to Resist Fracking in New York State. Doing so is a solemn commitment to join with others in acts of peaceful, non-violent protest—“as my conscience leads me”—should Governor Cuomo approve fracking in New York State. Invite others to sign. Let’s build a formidable wall of signatures. As of today, 6,500 names are on it. Let’s build it higher.

Next, on Wednesday, January 30, come to the New York State Legislature budget hearing on health. Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Nirav Shah will testify at 9 a.m. Wear lab coats, scrubs, stethoscopes—anything that signifies medicine. Our friends at Frack Action will provide the tape to seal your mouth shut. (Facebook sign-up here.)

So silenced, we’ll protest the secret, hasty, improvisational nature of the state’s “health review” on fracking, which the DOH has prepared with no public input whatsoever, after rebuffing New York’s medical health professionals, and while subjecting the outside reviewers to gag orders. The message being: Halt the sGEIS. Show us the damn review.

Cameras will be rolling. Let’s pack Hearing Room B.

Even more important: Five days later, on Monday, February 4: DEC Commissioner Joe Martens testifies at 9 a.m. Wear blue. Bring signs. Bring jars of water. Be ready to hold jars of water aloft. (Facebook sign up here.)

Cameras will be rolling. Let’s pack Hearing Room B with an overflowing crowd that swirls like a river and astonishes everyone, from the Albany press corps to all the governor’s men.

After Martens’ testimony, the really loud rally—no sgeis! no regs! no fracking!—begins at noon in the Capitol’s elegant Million Dollar Staircase. You know the one—it’s the opening scene in the documentary film, “Dear Governor Cuomo.”

Which they loved, by the way, in Winona, Minnesota.

8.

What the gas industry has: money, political access, paid lobbyists.

What we have: science, love, unrelenting resolve.

9. 

What to live up to:

In his second inaugural address, President Obama named three places where human rights were born. Seneca Falls. Selma. Stonewall.

Two belong to us.

10.

What’s at stake:

Upstate New York’s homegrown resistance to high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. . .has continued to faceoff against the energy industry and state government in a way that may set the tone for the rest of the country in the decades ahead.  In small hamlets and tiny towns you’ve never heard of, grassroots activists are making a stand in what could be the beginning of a final showdown for Earth’s future.

—Ellen Cantarow, “Frack Fight”

11.

What to say to your friend when you ask her to come with you:

This is our moment. Perhaps you never thought you’d get a chance to play hero. Here it is.  

–Audrey Schulman, “How to Be a Climate Hero”

12.

I am writing to you from my own house. I need to find a babysitter. I need to cash a check. I need to shelve a work project. I need to cook ahead. I need to cancel music lessons. I need to find a ride.

I will be with you in Albany. This is not fun. This is not easy.

The water that flows from my kitchen tap is the blood of my children.

I will meet you in Albany, January 30^th and again, and even more urgently, on February 4^th. This is huge. This is it.

A Public Outcry Against Fracking In New York

On Wednesday, January 9, nearly 2,000 people rallied against fracking outside of Governor Cuomo's State of the State Address, in Albany, New York.

Folks  danced, chanted, shouted, drummed, and waved signs.  Pete Seeger sang, the Reverend Billy Talen shook and shouted halleluyah, Sandra Steingraber, Debra Winger, and Natalie Merchant spoke.  Voices of the thousands rang out loudly for hours.

Activists called for a permanent ban on fracking in the state of New York.

Geologists, chemists, biologists, and medical doctors argue that fracking is a threat to public health, will produce hazardous air and water pollution, and will endanger the state’s food supply.  It will contribute negatively to Climate Change, according to Phil Aroneanu, campaign director of 350.org.  Of additional concern to many, as reported by Treehugger and the New York Times, among others, is the release of dangerous radiaoactive materials into the ecosystem through the fracking process.  As of now, the gas industry has no means or plan to contain such radioactive waste.

The rally was inspired and led by those who are concerned, in particular, about the revised DEC's fracking regulations, issued at the end of November, 2012, and before the completion of health and science studies called for by Governor Cuomo, to determine the safety of hydraulic fracturing in New York.

Katherine Nadeau of the Environmental Advocates of New York points out:

“Issuing revised regulations before the science or health studies are in is a reversal by the Governor, who once pledged to let the science drive decision-making on fracking. We’re calling on the Governor to put the public over the gas industry’s profits—let the health and environmental reviews proceed without artificial deadlines, and let the science guide the process.”

Here Sandra Steingraber, with Pete Seeger, explains her position on Fracking at the rally:

The public comment period on these regulations began on December 12, and ended on January 11, 2013.  This gave the public a very short period of time to read and digest these complex regulations--during the holidays, and after Hurricane Sandy.  Regardless, fracktivists jumped quickly to action, with a call to all New Yorkers to participate in a massive letter writing campaign-- Thirty Days of Fracking Regulations--led by Sandra Steingraber and Grassroots Environmental Education.  Many other grassroots fracktavist groups followed suit with their own fracking regulation letter-writing campaigns.

In total, 204,000 individual letters critiquing the regulations were hand delivered to the office of the DEC on January 11, by Sandra Steingraber, Sean Lennon, Yoko Ono and others.

On January, 10, following the rally, a public hearing to address the concerns of scientists, physicans, economists, environmentalists, and other citizens regarding the DEC's revised fracking regulations took place in Albany, New York.   Politicians were sympathetic to the many concerns of those who spoke.

Here is the text of Sandra Steingraber's words at the hearing:

My name is Sandra Steingraber. I am Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Department of Environmental Studies at Ithaca College. My Ph.D. is in biology, and I have spent the last twenty years researching and writing in the field of environmental health. I have served as a science advisor at both the state and national level, working with the state of California on its research program to investigate the causes of breast cancer and with both the National Action Plan on Breast Cancer under the Clinton Administration and President’s Cancer Panel under George W. Bush.

I’m here to speak today as a founding member of Concerned Health Professionals of New York. This is a group of scientists, physicians, and nurses that came together last fall, in a spirit of shared alarm, when we learned that the DEC’s study of the health effects of fracking—which we had long asked for—was not going to be conducted using any normative protocols nor in an open manner, which is also normative for public health inquiries.

A normative protocol for a health study that attempts to forecast the public health risks of a polluting activity that has not yet been approved is called a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment. It was designed by our nation’s Centers for Disease Control and is endorsed by the World Health Organization. An HIA has, as one of its fundamental elements, democracy. It is scoped and carried out in a transparent manner and with the participation of the public at every stage. This participation takes the form of public hearings and periods of public commentary. It does so out of the recognition that when the public is being asked to endure possible risks to its health from a polluting industry, the public has the right to witness and participate in the study that will help determine the decision-making as to whether to permit or prohibit this industry.

In addition, when the lay public contributes its own local and historical knowledge to an environmental health study, the study design is better for it. Public participation makes for better science.

What is going on right now with the so-called health study underway at DEC and DOH is the very opposite of that public spiritedness. The DEC has, under the cover of secrecy, scoped and carried out a health review of some kind that no member of New York’s scientific community has seen. This review is itself being reviewed by DOH chief, Dr. Shah, and a team of three distinguished public health experts from out of state. We do not know what this team has been asked to review, but we do know that two of the three of them have signed contracts with non-disclosure agreements.

And we do know, from the introduction to the newly released regulations for hydraulic fracturing released by the DEC on November 29, that the decision whether or not to frack New York hangs on the results of these outside reviewers.

Thus does the health of 19.5 million New Yorkers depend on the results of a secret review of a secret review.

And thus, Concerned Health Professionals of New York came together. Not knowing what data the reviewers have been asked to comment on, we hastily created a website on which we uploaded all of the important reports and peer-review studies that we know of—from investigations of well casing failures to radioactivity in production brine (which is to be spread on our roadways). We also uploaded our many unanswered letters to DEC Commissioner Martens, DOC Commissioner Shah, and Governor Cuomo.

And I’d like to add here as an aside:  My 11-year-old son receives answers to his letters to the Governor. I never have. We share the same mailing address.

Concerned Health Professionals of New York also took the unusual step of creating an eight-minute video message to the three outside panelists in which we—doctors, nurses, and scientists—describe our long-standing, unaddressed concerns about fracking in New York State. We uploaded this as an embedded video. And then we emailed each of the reviewers to let them know that we had created this website repository of data for them, out of our concern that the document that they are reviewing—whatever it is—does not address itself to all the animating issues.

Can I just say how crazy this feels to us? These three outside experts are our colleagues. Two of the three are personal friends of mine. We have spoken together on panels and at conferences. They share data with me. I cite their research in my writings. And now a gag order prevents them from speaking to me about data that I as a New York scientist am not allowed to see.

The leak last week to the press of what looks to be an old draft of this health review turns our alarm into full-blown cynicism. This eight-page document contains no data. It is a series of assertions that seems to say that the health effects of fracking are unknown and unknowable by any future research. Therefore, regulations can mitigate them. Therefore, fracking is safe.

This is not sound scientific reasoning. The premises on which its logic rests cannot be evaluated because there are no citations or footnotes or references. Emerging evidence in the scientific literature flies in the face of its conclusions.

The DEC and DOH needs to be asked, “What is this document? Who wrote it? For what purpose? What are your sources?”

I’m aware that this Assembly has invited the DEC Commissioner to his hearing to explain himself—an invitation that he refused.  To justify the no-show, DEC spokesperson Emily DeSantis issued a statement pointing to the previous hearings attended by Commissioner Martens.

Concerned Health Professionals of New York condemns this statement. The refusal of the DEC to appear at this hearing and answer questions about the health review has not only broken Governor Cuomo’s promise of transparency, it has broken public trust itself.

Although New York citizens have been entirely cut out of the decision-making process on fracking, the public continues to have profound interest in participating in the inquiry and the decision-making process of fracking.

I know this because I designed a website to help people create comments on the revised draft regulations over the holidays. It’s called Thirty Days of Fracking Regs, and it takes an Advent calendar approach to public commentary. Each day, for the last 30 days, I have posted on this website one regulation, which I then translate into plainspoken English. I then provide some science relevant to that regulation. Because there is no final SGEIS to serve as the scientific basis for the regs, I did that research myself. I then invited the public to create a handcrafted comment about that regulation.

Tomorrow, I will be hand delivering all the comments that my readers and I created together. There are more than 20,000 of them. All are original and unique. As a metric of public commitment and concern, I would like to point out that 500 of them were written on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Day, more than 1000 comments came in. In addition, college students home on break devoted their free time to crafting comments as part of a group project called Homework Against Fracking.

These and other initiatives that have guided citizens through the comment-writing process means that we will hand-deliver to the DEC more than 200,000 comments tomorrow, January 11, which is the final day of comment delivery. We require a U-Haul to do so. And I understand that such a truck has already been rented.

I am asking you now to help ensure that each one of these comments is logged by the DEC, read, and considered.

Finally:  outside of Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address yesterday, more than 1,500 people protested against fracking. That event included a recitation of the Pledge to Resist Fracking in New York. The Pledge is a solemn commitment to engage in actions of non-violent protest and demonstration up to and including civil disobedience should the Governor greenlight fracking for New York under the undemocratic, fatally flawed decision-making process now underway. Prior to yesterday, more than 6,000 people had already signed this solemn pledge. I am one of them.

I dearly hope that we do not have to activate this pledge, that the signatures of thousands of New York citizens alone will have the power to move the Governor to the exit door.  But the very existence of the Pledge to Resist Fracking in New York is clear sign not only of loss of faith in the DEC but of loss of faith in government itself.

Governor Cuomo will make his decision regarding fracking in New York state in February, 2013.   New Yorkers hope he will do the right thing and put science, health and environmental safety before the economic profit of the gas industry.


Inspired by the many brave frackatvists in New York, I signed the Don't Frack New York pledge to "join with others to engage in non-violent acts of protest, including demonstrations and other non-violent actions, as my conscience leads me," if Governor Cuomo allows fracking to take place in the state.  As a mother, cancer survivor, and environmentalist, I pledge do my best to protect the land, water, air and food systems for the health and safety of present and future generations.

Pete Seeger Singing This Land Is Your Land at the Anti-Fracking Rally in Albany, New York

Here is Pete Seeger singing "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land," at Governor Cuomo's State of the State Address in Albany, New York, on January 9, 2013.  (Well, to be more accurate, not "at the address"--Pete was singing with the anti-fracking protesters right outside of where the Governor gave his speech).

Pete Seeger has spent his life working to save our water and earth.  He's 92 today, and still spreading his peaceful and environmental message.

Governor Cuomo, by contrast, forgot to talk about Fracking.  2,000 of us stood right outside where he gave his State of the State speech, with signs, songs, drums, and chants ablazing... We did not forget that our environment comes first.  Without clean water, soil, and air, even a good progressive agenda won't matter in the end. We cannot drink gas, or eat radioactive food, or survive global warming.   More to come in my next article on the full extent of this event and Fracking.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, Good night Irene.  It was a long day and it's time for bed.