Steingraber, Sandra 1959–

PERSONAL: Born August 27, 1959, in Champaign, IL; daughter of Wilbur F. (a teacher) and Kathryn (a teacher; maiden name Maurer) Steingraber; married Brian Burt, May 21, 1982 (divorced, September, 1994); married Jeffrey de Castro (an artist), October 12, 1996; children: Faith Kathryn, Elijah Jeffrey. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Illinois Wesleyan University, B.A.; Illinois State University, M.A.; University of Michigan, Ph.D. Politics: Socialist. Hobbies and other interests: Hiking, camping.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Charlotte Sheedy, Sheedy Agency, 65 Bleeker St., 12th Fl., New York, NY 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Columbia College, Chicago, IL, professor of biology, 1990–93; Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, distinguished visiting scholar. Active with Women's Community Cancer Project, Cambridge, MA; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, appointed member of etiology working group, National Action Plan on Breast Cancer; conference presenter and public speaker on environmental health issues, including appearances at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, University of Vermont Hospital, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA; guest on television programs including Today Show, National Broadcasting Co., and on Cable News Network, Public Broadcasting Service, and National Public Radio.

AWARDS, HONORS: Poetry fellow, Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, 1993–94; named woman of the year, Ms. magazine, 1997; Altman Award, Jenifer Altman Foundation, 1998; fellow at University of Illinois and Northeastern University; Breast Cancer Fund Hero Award, 2006.

WRITINGS:

(With Jason Clay and Peter Niggli) Spoils of Famine: Ethiopian Famine Policy and Peasant Agriculture, Cultural Survival (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

Post-Diagnosis (poetry), Firebrand Books (Ithaca, NY), 1995.

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1997, published as Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, Vintage Books, (New York, NY), 1998.

Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, Perseus (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

Contributor to books, including Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, edited by Joel Tickner and Carolyn Raffensperger, Island Press (Washington, DC), 1999; and What We Do Now, edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, Melville House Press (Hoboken, NJ), 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including In These Times and Earth Island Journal, and contributing editor to Orion.

SIDELIGHTS: Sandra Steingraber is an ecologist and poet who holds degrees in biology and creative writing. She has conducted field work in Costa Rica, Africa, and the United States and also produced a volume of poetry, Post-Diagnosis. When Steingraber was twenty years old, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. There were several other family members with cancers, but Steingraber was adopted, which negated any suggestion that she had developed her cancer because it ran in her family. Although they did not share the same genes, she and her family did share the same environment. In an interview in the Corporate Crime Reporter, Steingraber noted that investigators found carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals in her hometown's drinking water. Steingraber is not sure if these chemicals caused her cancer, but she is personally and professionally interested in the connection between cancer and environmental conditions.

In her Corporate Crime Reporter interview, Steingraber said she wrote Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment because she could not find a book that provided "a close examination of all of the lines of evidence linking cancer and the environment." The first half of the book focuses on these links. Steingraber continues discussing these links in the book's second half, and also includes relevant information about Steingraber's childhood, family, and hometown of Pekin, Illinois. In the latter section, she relates how she used right-to-know laws to obtain information about the toxins being released into the environment by industry. According to Nation contributor Gayle Greene, these laws now allow anyone to "request from the Environmental Protection Agency a list of the reported toxic releases in his or her home county." Data Steingraber received as a result of filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that dry cleaning fluids were present in the water wells of Pekin, fluids that may be linked to bladder cancer.

In Living Downstream, Steingraber includes evidence of chemical contaminants found in air, food, and water, obtained through human and wildlife studies, epidemiological investigations, and research that includes animal and cell culture studies. She links cancers to heavy industry, dumps, chemical factories, pesticides, and polluted rivers, among other potential sources. Steingraber explains how chemicals interfere with cell division to initiate mutations, how cancer harms cell functions, and other processes in "the clearest explanations of these phenomena and processes I've found anywhere," according to Greene.

BioScience contributor Michael Kamrin wrote that one failing of Living Downstream "is that the author selectively chooses the evidence she presents, as is reflected in the citations, which largely reflect one point of view." Yet Kamrin also indicated that Living Downstream could be helpful to "the less technically trained reader" due to its "simplified explanations of a number of biological phenomena." Writing in the Library Journal, Susan Mart concluded that Steingraber's book "is a powerful addition to the literature on cancer's relationship to environmental exposure." Progressive contributor Erik Ness stated that Steingraber's "story is the more remarkable because she is not writing about Love Canal, Times Beach, or some other cesspool of renown. Pekin, Illinois, is Anytown, U.S.A." Ness concluded that "Living Downstream is a beautiful, terrifying, and inspiring argument for change."

In her interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter, Steingraber pointed out that "cancer genes play a role in maybe five to at most ten percent of most cancers." She maintained that while lifestyle choices could also cause cancer, potential cancer-causing environmental factors "are risks that we have not consented to" and that this environmental danger is a "human rights issue." She also noted that while a high-fat diet may put a person at risk for cancer, part of the risk is from the higher levels of the toxic chemical dioxin associated with fatty meats, milk, and eggs.

One of the chapters in Living Downstream describes cancer distribution across space. The highest American rates of bladder, colon, and breast cancer are in the northeastern part of the country and around the Great Lakes, areas high in industry. The highest mortality from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which has no known lifestyle or hereditary risk factors, occurs in the Midwest and Great Plains. This agriculturally intensive area uses large quantities of pesticides. The number of cases of non-Hodgkins lymphoma have tripled in frequency over the last fifty years. Steingraber cites studies that have shown that dogs whose owners have used certain pesticides are twice as likely to develop the disease as dogs whose owners have not used such chemicals. Elaborating on the non-Hodgkins disease discussion in Living Downstream, Steingraber told the Corporate Crime Reporter: "If you look by occupation who gets non-Hodgkins, you find that farmers, golf course supervisors and Vietnam veterans exposed to [the dioxin-based] Agent Orange have higher rates of non-Hodgkins than folks in the general population. Those are all occupations that have exposure to pesticides."

"Steingraber writes with the authority of a biologist—she has a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Michigan," said Gayle Greene in the Nation, "and the imagination of a poet—she has published a volume of poetry, Post-Diagnosis—weaving narrative and meditation together with compelling scientific explanations." Tikkun contributor Roger S. Gottlieb described Living Downstream as "riveting," and likened the work to ecologist Rachel Carson's influential Silent Spring, noting that "Steingraber is at home in the desperate poetics of dying as well as in the technical details of cell reproduction, injuries to DNA, and toxic industrial processes."

In her interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter Steingraber was asked if pollution prevention means shutting down cancer-causing industries. Steingraber said that she instead supported the use of "non-toxic alternatives for chemical carcinogens," and added: "I really do believe in human ingenuity and the ability to solve problems and change our ways. People are dying because others are putting chemicals into the environment in order to make a profit. We have a moral obligation to change that."

According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, industrialized countries have far more cases of cancer than countries with little industry. The organization's conclusion is that a minimum of eighty percent of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences. In Living Downstream Steingraber notes "the impossibility of tabulating an exact body count." Peter Montague wrote in Dollars and Sense that "we, being more blunt that Sandra Steingraber, draw from this that murder is murder even if the victim is anonymous." Montague called Steingraber "among the rarest of scientists—those who see the extraordinary among the ordinary and who can write so well that her readers are transported effortlessly through the complexities of an arcane topic like cancer cell biology." Booklist contributor William Beatty said that Living Downstream "contains much information not easily available elsewhere." Steingraber has written a "well-documented account," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. A reviewer in Kirkus Reviews concluded that Living Downstream "is a polished and powerful warning shot. It would be folly to ignore her."

When asked about writing, Steingraber told CA: "I was captivated by poetry before I could even read, probably thanks to Poems to Read to the Very Young (I recall that I wanted my mother to read to me, over and over again, the lines 'Who can see the wind? Neither you nor I …). And then I discovered Dylan Thomas and was hooked. But I also had a microscope by the time I was nine. My mother was a stay-at-home biologist in love with paramecium and fossils. So biology and poetry became my two passions. I went on to get a Ph.D. in biology and a master's degree in creative writing. To me, poetry and biology are both about the mystery of being alive. But whereas biology wants to solve the mystery, poetry says 'behold.'

"If I am writing poetry, the process starts with a phrase, an image, or an experience. Once, it was overhearing someone say 'for all intents and purposes.' Another time, it was watching a swimmer suddenly vanish under the lake's surface and then get rescued by a lifeguard. In all cases, there is some kind of resonance of sense of mystery that attracts me. The act of writing a poem becomes an act of exploration. If I am writing about science, the process begins with data analysis. I suspend all story-telling impulses and wishful thinking and just let the evidence speak. This is bloodless, tedious work. I can spend days pouring through birth defect registry data, for example or ovarian cancer time trends. I read really widely in the biological literature and talk to lots of lab bench researchers. Then I start to put the pieces together—each study is like a piece of a vast jigsaw puzzle—and I reach some conclusions about what the science shows. At that point, I try to find a human story to hang all the science on. My readers are willing to master a lot of organic chemistry, for example, if they need to know it in order to understand why something bad just happened to one of the main characters. I seduce my readers through a lot of heavy science through the creation of stories.

"Rachel Carson is my guiding spirit in all my work, both biological and literary. Carson created a language beautiful and lyrical enough to honor the loveliness of the natural world, and that is what I strive for as well—even if I'm writing about the ways in which methylmercury sabotages fetal brain development. My outrage over the destruction of the natural world—its bird song, its oxygen supply, its pollination systems, its jet streams—also moves me to write. I think that most people simply don't know just how serious our environmental situation is—and that they are afraid to know. I want my writing to be a corrective to unknowing despair."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Steingraber, Sandra, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, Perseus (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

PERIODICALS

BioScience, December, 1997, Michael Kamrin, review of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, pp. 801-802.

Booklist, June 1, 1997, William Beatty, review of Living Downstream.

Corporate Crime Reporter, January 26, 1998, interview with Steingraber.

Dollars and Sense, July-August, 1998, Peter Montague, review of Living Downstream, pp. 37-38; March-April, 2003, Laura Orlando, review of Having Faith, p. 44.

Herizons, summer, 2002, Liz Armstrong, review of Having Faith, p. 40.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1997, review of Living Downstream.

Library Journal, July, 1997, Susan Mart, review of Living Downstream, p. 121.

Mother Earth News, June-July, 2004, Claire Anderson, review of Having Faith, p. 22.

Nation, November 24, 1997, Gayle Greene, review of Living Downstream, pp. 28-31.

Progressive, August, 1997, Erik Ness, review of Living Downstream, pp. 43-44.

Publishers Weekly, May 19, 1997, review of Living Downstream, p. 61.

Tikkun, July-August, 1998, Roger S. Gottlieb, review of Living Downstream, pp. 73-74.