"Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber,
Ph.D. is an internationally recognized authority on the environment links to cancer
and human health.

Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An
Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents
cancer as a human rights issue. Originally published in 1997, it was the first
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. 

Released as a second edition in 2010, Living Downstream has been
adapted for film by The People’s Picture Company of Toronto.  This
eloquent and cinematic documentary follows Steingraber during one pivotal year
as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer
and its environmental links. 

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.  In the eyes of an ecologist, the mother’s body is the first
environment for life. The 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, in 2009, the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for
Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. 

An enthusiastic and sought-after public speaker, Steingraber has
keynoted conferences on human health and the environment throughout the United
States and Canada and has been invited to lecture at many universities, medical
schools, and hospitals—including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and the
Woods Hole Research Center.  She is recognized for her ability to serve as
a two-way translator between scientists and activists.  She has testified
in the European Parliament, before the President’s Cancer Panel, and has participated
in briefings to Congress and before United Nations delegates in Geneva,
Switzerland.  Interviews with Steingraber have appeared in The Chicago
Tribune, USA Today, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on National Public Radio, “The
Today Show,” and “Good Morning America.” 

A columnist for Orion magazine, Sandra Steingraber is currently a
scholar in residence in Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. She is married to
the artist Jeff de Castro, and they live in a 1000-square-foot house with a
push mower, a clothesline, a vegetable garden, and two beloved children."

Want to learn more about her and the Fracking of Rachel Carson? Come to the Sixth Annual Korenman lecture April 29nd, 4pm in the Albin O. Kuhn Library 7th floor. Free and open to the public, reception to follow.