Sandra Steingraber was born in 1959 in Tazewell County, Illinois, United States. She is a writer, biologist, a mother and cancer survivor. She is an advocate for many environmental problems, including ecology and climate change. Steingraber’s expertise is about the effects of nature and its relationship to human health.
She targets political activists and parents, to help stop pollution from air, water and reproductive of the human body. She wrote and gave lectures on environmental factors that contribute to reproductive health problems and environmental links to cancer.
The Childhood of Sandra Steingraber
Steingraber was adopted from infancy, grew and spent part of her childhood in Tazewell County, Illinois. Her mother is a microbiologist and her father is a professor in college. Her parents have instilled her interest in sustainable development and organic farming since childhood.
Steingraber has been a teaching staff at Cornell University and is a distinguished student in the field of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York. She made fellowship visits at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe / Harvard, and Northeastern University, and served in the National Action Plan for breast cancer when President Bill Clinton was still president.
Sandra Steingraber and her book: Living Downstream
In her 1997 book Living Downstream, she combined anecdotes and descriptions of industrial and agricultural pollution with data from the scientific and medical literature to assess the relationship between environmental factors and cancer. Steingraber criticized the imbalance between funding aimed at studies of genetic predispositions to cancer versus studies on environmental contributions.
This book claims that while we can do little to change our genetic heritage, much can be done to reduce human exposure to the environment. Her work Downstream Living: An Ecological Look at Cancer and the Environment, reflects the ideals that Rachel Carson stated in her book, Silent Spring. Carson discussed a woman with bladder cancer and investigated how and why cancer is linked to the environment. Steingraber emphasized the problem of how chemical pesticides find their way into the human body.
Sandra Steingraber and Heinz Award
In 2011, Steingraber received the Heinz Award. She then used this prize money to help the anti-fracking movement, and in 2012, co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking.
Fracking is a newly developed method in Indonesia. This technique was developed to take the energy source that is still left in the former hole to extract energy sources.
In addition, Sandra Steingraber is one of the founders of Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), an initiative to strengthen the voice of hundreds of health professionals in New York about fracking. On May 29, 2014, attended by 25 health and medical organizations and more than 200 health experts and individual scientists, they wrote that allowing fracking in New York would pose a significant threat to New York’s air, water, health, and safety.
Steingraber has been serving a prison sentence for her civil disobedience, during protests at Energy, a propane provider. She made this list mainly for her efforts in promoting issues related to pollution. Steingraber also makes people care about things that can make health risks, and add new perspectives to her experience with cancer. As a mother, Sandra Steingraber has taken a direct interest in the well-being of the environment in which her children grow and encourages others to do the same.
